IDLENESS, WORK AND SLOWNESS IN MIDDLE-EUROPEAN LITERATURE.
A lecture by Claudio Magris
Claudio Magris, celebrated writer and expert of Middle-European literatures, was born in 1939 in Trieste, a town at the crossing of Italian, German and Slavic cultures. Always interested in the social and ethical function of literary writing, Magris is among the most eloquent advocate of the responsibility of literature. A literary work is something individual that shows itself to the whole world, and therefore, because it has a ethical content, enters the life, ideas and the feelings of the polis, the community. Literature is by definition a slow activity. In times when everything is accelerating towards ends increasingly hard to grasp, literature can be seen as a sort of civic resistance and a defense of those spaces of thought that make life meaningful.