Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie - Ungarische Literatur und Kultur

Since Antiquity, Westerners have been fascinated by islands and the promises, challenges, and mysteries they hold. As laboratories of sovereignty, islands offered sites for peripheral political, social, economic, and ecological phenomena, embodying a kind of resistance to the rationality of the Enlightenment. Therefore, the possibility of an island is always already the possibility of experimenting with ideas, concepts and scenarios. This also explains why island topoi are so popular in fiction. However, the figure of the island is historically situated, it has not remained unchanged since Antiquity.

My lecture will focus on the main shifts in the history of island figures, examining how literary islands have served as representations of the state of exception, while also reflecting on how such binary oppositions as those between center and periphery, continental and insular, whole and part, etc., are constructed, and how such dualities are disrupted by the new forms of interplay suggested by the figuration of the island. Using examples, I will argue that the use of island topoi in fiction can be divided into three interrelated types:: The Island as Metaphor (“Nights of Plague” by Orphan Pamuk, “When the Killing’s Done” by TC Boyle); The Island as Chronotope (“The Island of the Day Before” by Umberto Eco, “The Tempest” by William Shakespeare); and The Island as Thought Figure (“In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka, “The Beach of Falesá” by Robert Louis Stevenson).