Dimitrios Yatromanolakis - Böcker

Investigating ritual in Greece from cross-disciplinary and transhistorical perspectives, Greek Ritual Poetics offers novel readings of the pivotal role of ritual in Greek traditions by exploring a broad spectrum of texts, art, and social practices. This collection of essays written by an international group of leading scholars in a number of disciplines presents a variety of methodological approaches to secular and religious rituals, and to the narrative and conceptual strategies of their reenactment and manipulation in literary, pictorial, and social discourses. Addressing understudied aspects of Greek ritual and societies, this book will prove significant for classicists, anthropologists, Byzantinists, art historians, neohellenists, and comparatists interested in the interaction between ritual, aesthetics, and cultural communicative systems.

This book offers the first interdisciplinary and in-depth study of the cultural practices and ideological paradigms that conditioned the politics of the "reading" of Sappho's songs in the early and most pivotal stages of her reception. In this wide-ranging synthesis, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis investigates visual representations and ancient texts in their synchronic and diachronic multilayeredness to trace the discursive nexuses that defined the making of "Sappho" in the late archaic, classical, and early Hellenistic periods. Offering a systematic analysis of the contextual cues provided by vase paintings and focusing on the sociocultural institution of the symposion, this book explores the intricate modes of the assimilation of Sappho's poetry into diverse social, aesthetic, and performative contexts. Drawing on a number of disciplines, including archaeology, papyrology, and anthropology, Sappho in the Making articulates a new methodological Problematik on the reception of archaic Greek socioaesthetic cultures.

C. P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis) is one of the most important Greek poets since antiquity. He was born, lived, and died in Alexandria (1863–1933), with brief periods spent in England, Constantinople, and Athens. Cavafy set in motion the most powerful modernism in early twentieth-century European poetry, exhibiting simple truths about eroticism, history, and philosophy—an inscrutable triumvirate that informs the Greek language and culture in all their diachrony. The Cavafy Canon plays with the complexities of ironic Socratic thought, suffused with the honesty of unadorned iambic verse.Based on a fifty-year continuous scholarly and literary interaction with Cavafy’s poetry and its Greek and western European intertexts, John Chioles has produced an authoritative and exceptionally nuanced translation of the complex linguistic registers of Cavafy’s Canon into English.

Music and Cultural Politics in Greek and Chinese Societies, Volume 1: Greek Antiquity is the first part of a three-volume set that focuses on the intriguing but often underexplored interaction between music and song-making, on the one hand, and practices of cultural politics, on the other. The scope of this three-volume set is comparative and transhistorical. Given the abundance of relevant evidence with regard to Greek antiquity, the first volume investigates major aspects of this intricate sociocultural phenomenon exclusively in ancient Greek societies, with a special emphasis on archaic and classical song-making, Attic vase-painting, Athenian drama, Platonic philosophy, and Hellenistic performance culture. A second volume will explore parallel manifestations of the interplay between music and cultural politics in medieval and early modern Greek and Chinese societies. A third volume will focus on comparative material from ancient, medieval, and modern Chinese and Greek societies across a transhistorical scope of investigation, drawing on a variety of musical and performative genres.

The hegemonization of European thought by Greek antiquity was famously questioned by major representatives of the avant-garde. However, this is only one ideological dimension of the extraordinarily intricate politics of the European avant-garde’s response to Greek antiquity—a dimension that has been overrated in current research on the subject. Greek Mythologies interrogates this one-sided methodological approach by exploring in a systematic and cross-disciplinary manner the complex, at times contradictory, responses to ancient Greece in Greek and broader Western European modernism. In this pioneering book, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis investigates the multilayered (often underexplored) ideological, literary, artistic, and epistemological channels through which ancient Greek mythology was received by the avant-garde as cultural capital and discursive paradigm conducive to a radical reassessment of established socioaesthetic structures. Exploring the dynamics of ruination and the reconfiguration of fundamental icons of ancient mythology (for example, Oedipus, Pasiphae, the Minotaur, the Danaids) in Greek surrealism, this book masterfully demonstrates that Greek antiquity, despite its theoretical devaluation by influential modernists, became an integral constituent of avant-garde myth-making. Focusing mainly on highly provocative dialogues between variants of ancient Greek mythoi and twentieth-century Greek and other European mechanisms of mythogenesis, the book navigates new territories in the field of reception studies.