Original scientific paper
A book of insular marvels: Korčula's The Million by Marco Polo in Snežana Bukal's Biofiction
Tatjana Peruško
; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb
Abstract
The Million, a Book by Marco Polo by Snežana Bukal, a text compiled from Polo's memoires and didactic “epistles” to his grandson Florian in the first part of the book (“Libar”), and from journal notes composed during his childhood in Korčula in the second part („Milion“), is an alternative biographic history, recognized by recent literary-historical and genological studies as “biofiction”. Among the familiar transpositions of biographic material related to the historical Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant, traveller and a (co)-author of a famous booklet known under several different names, of which Il Milione is the most widespread in the Italian tradition, Bukal's The Million stands out for its transgeneric complexity and for its project of systematic alienation of the familiar, in the text merely referenced geographical, cultural, religious and other aspects of Polo's life and times. Consequently, the narrative focus of Korčula's Milione-Libro shifts from an exotic semiosphere of the Other to a cultural, linguistic, religious and political layered and hybrid Mediterranean semiosphere, represented by a synecdoche of the insular microcosm. Constructing in his memorialist-didactic monologue a network of intertextual and intersemiotic reminiscences (of which pride of place belongs to the cognitive function of the medieval cartography), the protagonist of the Korčula biofiction calls for a sustained reexamination of commonplace notions, cultural, historical and ideological stereotypes.
Keywords
Marco Polo; Snežana Bukal; biofiction; transgeneric; domestication of alterity; Mediterranean semiosphere
Hrčak ID:
238163
URI
Publication date:
21.5.2020.
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