| My dissertation analyzes the political unconscious of the metaphors of sea and land in works that range from Hesiod to Carl Schmitt, it is a study of how these metaphors, singly and in the interplay between them, are scattered through a wide variety of discourses. It examines the influence that cultural contexts exert on the allegorization of sea and land from ancient Greeks and Romans (Alcaeus, Virgil, Horace, first chapter) to the Italian Renaissance epic (Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata, second chapter), and in the "Mediterranean question." While the third chapter analyzes how nomos---a notion that concerns lawmaking authority and land-appropriation---defines "order and orientation" of the earth in Schmitt's world order and philosophy, the last chapter underlines how spatial categories continue to shape Mediterranean imaginary and thinking today. An expression of hegemonic discursive power, the nomos entails a scenario in which metaphors of sea and land embody a rhetoric of conflict throughout Western culture. |
