„RELIGIJA TRAGANjA“: INTERTEKSTUALNI I INTERMEDIJALNI HORIZONT STRIPOVA O KORTU MALTEZEU

Abstract

Hugo Pratt’s opus can be considered as one of the crucial contributions of contemporary Italian art to global culture for the opening of an exhibition of his drawings in Grand Palais in Paris (1986) is identified as the initial point of institutional legitimization of the ninth art. Accordingly, it is important to mention how Umberto Eco recognized Pratt’s The Ballad of the Salty Sea as a pivotal cultural event, regarding it within the context of transcending not only the domain of popular culture but also traditional and conventional literary forms via fusing literary and comic discourse. In the light of the aforementioned, the paper aims to examine interme- dial adaptations of Pratt’s Corto Maltese comics, paying particular attention to how the graphic novels resonated through Serbian literature. Likewise, by analyzing stylistic, semiotic, narra- tive, and thematic particularities of the defined corpus, the paper would attempt to prove the hypothesis regarding the fundamental influence of English and American literary traditions on constituting Hugo Pratt’s poetics. Such an approach would facilitate the interpretation of Corto Maltese comics within the broader context of adventure fiction, which would raise the issue of ideological and ontological status of this literary genre. The paper aims to answer the following questions: is the imperative of „the useless quest” the impulse that initiates the creation of new worlds within the blank spaces between reality, hallucination, dreams, and imagination; sup- posing that the production of meaning of a literary text on the recipient horizon is essentially wandering, the unpredictable, risky and precarious endeavor without guaranteed success, is it justified to claim that every literary text is in fact a piece of adventure fiction; ultimately, is the permanent movement the ontological determinant of human identity.