Showing papers in "Journal of Modern Greek Studies in 2005"

Greek Cultural Characteristics and Academic Writing

Abstract: Cross-cultural research has shown that cultural values are discernible in the rhetoric of academic authors. Cultural characteristics—such as uncertainty avoidance, power distance, and individualism/collectivism (Hofstede 1980)— define relations of power and solidarity among individuals, their notions of politeness and appropriate social behavior, as well as their persuasive styles, affecting the ways authors express their claims and build up their arguments in academic texts. These factors (together with audience and purpose of genre and degree of an author’s socialization in the academic community) affect the writing style of Greek authors as it is revealed by the analysis of Research Articles (RAs) and samples of students’ writing (assignments, dissertations and theses) in the fields of Electronic, Electrical, and Chemical engineering. The analysis shows that the rhetorical behavior of Greek expert engineers and student engineers has both similarities and differences. Common points include the projection of an authoritative expert persona in their writing, the expression of great certainty and conviction in their claims, and references to the body of shared knowledge. These are shown to be the result of the high uncertainty avoidance, high power distance, collective values, and solidarity orientation that characterize Greek society. The differences are attributed to the conventions of the genre in which the authors are writing and their degree of enculturation in the academic community.

Toward a Greek Ecocriticism: Place Awareness and Cultural Identity in Pandelis Prevelakis's Οι δρόμοι της δημιουργίας

Abstract: The study of literature and environment ("ecocriticism") has done little to relate its interest in questions of place sense and place awareness to literary criticism's perennial concern with cultural identities. Pandelis Prevelakis's fictional trilogy, Οι δρόμοι της δημιουργίας advances a "literary theory" for doing just this. Prevelakis illustrates the inescapable and contradictory interrelatedness of place awareness and national identities in literary culture. He suggests that the unresolvable quality of their interrelatedness should inspire authors to engage in personal struggles resulting in literary output that negotiates ethical positions with their local fellow citizens in ways that take local traditions seriously, without entirely embracing them. Thus, he problematizes conventional notions of ithografia by foregrounding ethos not only as custom but in an ethical and rhetorical sense as well. This perspective can help literary critics explore and analyze the relationship between atomistic notions of place awareness and culturally mediated identities.

Forgotten Theater, Theater of the Forgotten: Classical Tragedy on Modern Greek Prison Islands

Abstract: From the late 1940s to the early 1950s, a little-known theater practice took root on the remote Greek prison islands of the Civil War. Classicizing productions and readings of ancient Greek tragedy were staged by the detainees of various internment camps—male and female, young or old, educated or illiterate, communist or not. These performances, seen in their sociopolitical context, voiced concerns about patriotism, victory, defeat, recognition and memory. Among other Greek and foreign plays, the inmates produced Sophocles's Philoctetes and Antigone and Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and Persians. These productions are eye-openers for anyone studying the theater of that period as well as wider issues of theatricality. The inmates generated performative and protest statements that, despite the constraints of censorship and constant surveillance, went well beyond the scripts, their staging and performance.

Spiridon Loues, the Modern Foustanela, and the Symbolic Power of Pallikaria at the 1896 Olympic Games

Abstract: Most who are familiar with the subject of modern Greek identity or the history of the modern Olympic Games are familiar with the character of Spiros Loues. The significance of his win in the marathon at the first modern Olympiad in1896 is thoroughly discussed in popular discourse as well as in academic publications. How and why he was elevated to such an exalted level, what cultural notions—such as pastoralism, παλλιχαρια (pallikaria), and φιλοτιμο (philotimo)—he was associated with, and how this powerful association has affected Greek people over the course of the past century, however, are questions that remain largely unanswered. A brief ethnographic analysis of the event—Loues's victory, his choice of clothing, as well as his behavior in the immediate aftermath of that victory—is worth undertaking in the context of the broader and important topic of Eλληυιχοτητα (Ellinikotita, Greekness). Loues's act was not only a significant one; it was also a thoroughly modern Greek act.

"Words that tell and hide": Revisiting C. P. Cavafy's Closets

Abstract: Critics have traditionally viewed C. P. Cavafy's work as moving from erotic secrecy to homosexual self-revelation. However, following Foucault, we should think of sexuality not as something repressed by control, but as a discourse inextricably linked with repression, power and knowledge. Seen in this way, Cavafy's strategies of "telling and hiding" form a constant dialectic running through the whole of his work, producing (not unveiling) the sexuality, identity, and eroticism at its centre. Reviewing the theorized figure of the closet as a central trope of Cavafy's writing, we witness how hiding can create a position from which to speak and a subversive set of discourses for the homosexual self. Cavafy puts desire, "semi-hidden," in the phrases of his poetry, fully exploiting the dissonance of silences and things unsaid. In key poems we can see how he translates the closeting of queer desire into a textual practice that produces identification and eroticism. Furthermore, we can trace the closet leaking across textual and sexual boundaries, defying social control and threatening the reader's certainties.

Cavafy, Sexual Sensibility, and Poetic Practice: Reading Cavafy through Mark Doty and Cathal O Searcaigh

Abstract: The way in which a poet expresses his world view is formed and colored by his sexual orientation. The critical neglect of Cavafy's eroticism and the sexual sensibility which it engenders therefore needs to be corrected. Recent critics have tried to do this by comparing Cavafy with his fin-de-siecle contemporaries, but a close examination of the poetic practice of homosexual poets on both sides of the English Channel shows that Cavafy's approach is completely different conceptually and stylistically: he does not share their predilection for coding, his poetry is not pederastic, he is not seeking to be provocative. If, on the other hand, we compare him with two late twentieth-century poets influenced by him, Mark Doty and Cathal O Searcaigh, his sensibility and his way of rendering it into poetry can be seen as "modern": Cavafy accepts the way in which the fragmentation inherent to gay experience can be reassembled into personal and group meanings, and he develops a mode of poetic composition where the "group meaning" of his poems derives from reading them in different sequences, arriving at different connections.

British Accounts of Residency in Greece, 1945-2004

Abstract: A number of British writers have produced accounts of their experiences as residents of Greece. These writings are used here to explore the portrayal of the Greek character and way of life by those who, in many cases, claimed to be "experts." The ways in which residents represented the practicalities of living in Greece, and the changes they described as occurring to the country and its people in the decades since the Second World War, are also analyzed. It is argued that the initial—and to some extent continued—representation of the Greeks as pastoral and non-developed was similar to the "exoticization" of southern Europe promoted by anthropologists working "in the field." This was part of a perceived power-differential between those from the "developed West" and the Balkans. Negative aspects of the Greek character—laziness, corruption, sexual predation—could be blamed on Turkish influence. In this way, even those who claimed to be insiders in Greece had recourse to an "Orientalist" discourse when encountering developments or attitudes that they found undesirable.

Kalokyris and Borges: A Study of their Syncretist Aesthetics

Abstract: Dimitris Kalokyris has been greatly influenced by the syncretist aesthetics of Jorge Luis Borges, whose work he essentially reads through the spectrum of Ancient Greek parody, Byzantine historiography, Surrealism as well as Roidian and Cavafian irony. Kalokyris employs the Borgesian notions of the verbal universe, the poet as maker ("hacedor"), and writing as a series of appropriations, falsifications, and distortions to construct a multifaceted and highly atypical (for Greek literature) syncretist discourse. In effect, Kalokyris's syncretist writing conveys the multitemporal heterogeneity of contemporary culture in the countries of the so-called "periphery" like Greece and Argentina, which geographically and culturally are situated on the crossroads of multiple and heterogeneous traditions and civilizations.

The Late Appearance of Modern Greek Naturalism: An Explanatory Hypothesis

Abstract: The late appearance of Greek naturalism has been widely noted but not satisfactorily explained. Greek naturalism took its first steps around 1890, almost a decade after its European counterpart had its heyday. A semiotically based comparative analysis of three cultural historical conditions—the advent of literary realism, the close link between scientific and literary discourse, and the reception of Zola and European naturalism—will show that Greek naturalism should have emerged around 1880; but it did not. To explain the belated appearance of Greek naturalism, the concept of "secondarization" is employed here to argue that the beginnings of Greek "ethography" was a transitional period in Greek literary output which used new formal elements, while continuing to fulfill the patriotic function of the historical novel prior to 1880. It was not until literary realism came into full swing that Greek authors were ready to produce their own brand of literary naturalism. The study of Greek naturalism is still in its infancy. Although this subject has been partially dealt with by several Greek literary historians, a systematic analysis of the Greek variant of this European literary movement from a comparative and theoretical point of view, is long overdue. 1 To date there is little unanimity among neohellenists about the facets of Greek naturalism, and some of them, while widely dis- cussed, remain unexplained. One of them is the belated appearance of Greek naturalism. Chevrel's seminal study marks the heyday of European naturalism between 1885 and 1888 and its decline after 1891 (1993:43-48). Greek novels, which are generally classified as "naturalist," were written nearly a decade after European naturalism peaked—novels like Andreas Kar- kavitsas's The Beggar (O zhtianow, 1896), Alexandros Papadiamandis's masterpiece The Murderess (H fOnissa, 1903), Constantinos Hatzopoulos's short story Love in the Village (Agaph sto xvriO, 1910), and Constantinos

The Life and Afterlife of Political Verse

Abstract: When and why did political verse lose its dominant place in Modern Greek poetry? Which Modern Greek poets improved on the appeal of political verse? How and to what extent was political verse transformed or destabilized? Which historical developments contributed to its permutation and weakening? What did these changes add to Modern Greek poetry? This paper answers these questions first by examining the long life of political verse, and then by looking at its "afterlife." It also discusses the contribution of two major poets, Kostis Palamas and Anghelos Sikelianos, in reshaping earlier forms of political verse. Political verse (politikos stichos) has been the dominant form for compos- ing Modern Greek poetry since the tenth century. 1 Most Greek poems have been written in political verse. It was the standard meter of most poems included in Iraklis Apostolidis's anthology of Modern Greek poetry that covered a period from 1708 to 1933. The majority of the poets in this anthology are represented by a poem written in political verse in its entirety or have political verses embedded in fixed metrical structures. According to literary historian Linos Politis, 1931 was a watershed year for political verse ((1946) 1977:82). Or, as Politis put it: "The political verses of 'ErvtikOw LOgow' were the last to be written with consistency in Modern Greek poetry" (Politis 1971:152; 1981:228). However, political verse did not cease to exist after 1931 despite Politis's pronouncement. In fact, political verse, in its "afterlife," continued to play an important role in Modern Greek poetry during the period of "free verse." Peter Mackridge noted that the formal rearrangements of political verse in the poems by some of the most notable twentieth-century Greek poets re-appropriated the content, and that versification with political verse contributed to the signification of the poems (Mackridge 1996:260). Decisive transformations that affect both the form and, as I will show, the content of twentieth-century Greek poems are intimately associated with

Defining the Female "I" in the Public Domain: The Narrators of Lilika Nakou's Παραστρατημένοι and Margarita Liberaki's Τα ψάθινα καπέλα

Abstract: Lilika Nakou's Gone Astray/Παραστρατημένοι (1935) and Margarita Liberaki's The Straw Hats/Τα ψάθινα καπέλα (1946) were written during periods of political turmoil. However, neither novel explicitly deals with political or national issues; instead, both of them focus on the personal experiences of their protagonists. This suggests that the female authors remain within the traditionally female private sphere in accordance with the male/female and public/private oppositions. Nonetheless, the two novels are narrated by a female character, placing the female "I" in the public domain. An interesting phenomenon occurs in both narratives when the "I" disappears. This shift in perspective is subversive and political because it reveals women's struggle to enter and establish an identity of the female "I" in the public domain.

The Politics of Elite Transformation: The Consolidation of Greek Democracy in Comparative Perspective, and: Parties, Politics, and Democracy in the New Southern Europe, and: The Social Psychology of Party Behaviour (review)

Abstract: residents’ active engagement with the land. Theodossopoulos takes care to credit the villagers with perceptivity about their position in the world. Quoted rural colloquialisms (often including regional folk speech) convey a realistic sense of how villagers discuss the natural and social world around them. As a bonus, we are treated to genuinely funny and telling remarks from the villagers, which ring true and belie the stereotype of rural people being less intelligent than their urban counterparts. For instance, a conversation during an olive harvest includes the following quote:

Troubles with Turtles: Cultural Understandings of the Environment on a Greek Island (review)

Abstract: modern Greeks are becoming more self-confident. This, of course, is to be applauded but it is not clear from the book where this newly acquired selfconfidence comes from. If anything, the book shows that cultural dependence on Europe and the West is as pronounced as ever. The last chapter on the work of the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk and the Greek novelist Rhea Galanaki suggests that the Turk and the Greek will not remain Turk and Greek to the last. But it also shows that to the extent they will not so remain, it is only because they conform to the exoticising standards of the “metropolitan reader” (280). Calotychos is understandably uncomfortable with this dependence, but the theoretical paradigm with which he works does not allow for an escape route: “It is perhaps time to acknowledge that there is no local or authentic site or home. There is no site for the “production of locality” outside the networks of globalisation or beyond its politics” (280). Not a cause for despair perhaps, but surely not a source of optimism either. Unless the Derridarian critique of “presence” and the poststructuralist paradigm in general is a metropolitan cultural phenomenon that will come to pass.

Greece and the Balkans: Identities, Perceptions and Cultural Encounters since the Enlightenment (review)

Abstract: between poetry and society.” Although Tziovas’s position here is controversial, it is, I think, on the mark. His critics may point to exceptions to his argument but he has identified a broad trend. When one looks at recent successful novels, say Amanta Michalopoulous’s Yiantes or Ersi Sotiropoulou’s Zig-Zag stis Nerantzies, one finds the predictable lost souls of the post-modern city, aimlessly floating through life. One has met them before in Paris, Berlin, or Toronto; the only difference now is that they speak Greek. Tziovas’s book will certainly invite debate. It will serve as a useful overview of Greek fiction, providing detailed readings of novels while also offering an expansive picture of its transition over the last two centuries.