Join us on May 30, 18.00-20.00 CET for a public lecture by Prof. Adrian Grima (Department of Maltese, University of Malta), titled ‘Towards the Sun and other Mediterranean Classics’.
Venue: Aula Magna, University of Malta, Valletta Campus, and live streamed online.
**Please email us on
cmV2aXNpdGluZ3RoZW1lZGl0ZXJyYW5lYW4gfCBnbWFpbCAhIGNvbQ== for the online link.**
This talk is being held as part of the Erasmus+ co-funded project ‘(Re-)Visiting the Mediterranean: Literature, Culture, Environment’. Visit our website to find out more about the project:
https://revisitingthemediterranean.eu
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Abstract:
The iconic Maltese bittersweet soft drink Kinnie invented in 1952 is marketed as “The Mediterranean Classic,” but the Mediterranean it refers to is a far more contested space than the amber-coloured carbonated beverage made from orange flavouring & aromatic herbs that it promotes. The Dictionnaire de la Meditérrannée (Actes Sud, 2016) invites us to untangle the often contradictory imaginaries of the Mediterranean by distinguishing between the clichés sold to us by adverts and popular cinema, ideological conceptions driven by political interests, and interpretative subtleties and scholarly analyses. But there is another “way of understanding the Mediterranean,” according to the Dictionnaire, “more structured and learned,” an imaginary world developed through a “wealth of literary works,” in which factual and fictional discourses are inextricably intertwined. This is the Mediterranean imaginary this lecture explores, taking its cue from a largely forgotten novel, Lejn ix-Xemx (Towards the Sun), finished three months before the untimely death of its author, Ġużè Bonnici, at the age of thirty three in 1940. At a time when both popular quasi-Gothic and sentimentalist novels and more high-brow Romantic adventure constructing the national mythology were all the rage, Bonnici wrote a historical novel that proposed a Mediterraneanist alternative to the nationalist narrative.
Prof. Adrian Grima teaches Maltese literature and literary representations of the Mediterranean in the Department of Maltese at the University of Malta and an introductory course on Maltese language and literature at Inalco in Paris. He has published academic works in Maltese, English and Italian, including the co-edited volume (with Simone Galea) 'The Teacher, Literature and the Mediterranean' (Sense, Rotterdam, 2014), book chapters on 'The Mediterranean Novel Defying Borders' (Legenda, 2017) and 'Elusive Mediterraneans: Reading Beyond Nation' (De Gruyter, 2023), critical introductions to literary works by contemporary Maltese writers, and research on the work of the Maltese author Juann Mamo (1886-1941). As coordinator of the Mediterranean cultural organization Inizjamed, set up in 1998, he was also the artistic director of the Malta Mediterranean Literature Festival between 2007 and 2018.
Also check out other Arts events in Valletta, Literary Art events in Valletta, Festivals in Valletta.
