Mar, identidad y literatura

Abstract

The sea is more than water and remote horizons. Since the beginning of literatures, the sea has sent waves of challenges to human existence through numerous stories and poems and continues to do so in all media. Everywhere the sea marks the limits of collective and individual human identity both on a social level as a question of survival, on an anthropological level as a non-human space we are bound to and on an ontological level as the boundary between life and death. The role of the sea in literature reaches far beyond maritime novels and heroic epics feeding on adventures at sea. In constantly changing cultural contexts it releases the basic question of human identity in all its complexity across time and space.