Gregory Jusdanis – författare

A long-awaited and much-anticipated biography of one of the great modern poets.In 1933, on his seventieth birthday, the poet Constantine Cavafy died in an Alexandrian hospital, surrounded by friends. He left behind a small, curated oeuvre of 154 poems, along with fragments and drafts of incomplete works. Throughout his life, Constantine had kept a tight grip on the distribution of his poetry, but after his death his reputation grew and Constantine became the august C. P. Cavafy, a writer known not only as a great composer of Hellenic verse—the man whose poems reshaped the Greek language—but also as a global poet whose writing transcends its geographic origins and is to this day widely loved and translated. This long-awaited study captures the complexities of Constantine Cavafy’s life and work, showing him to have been a troubled, brilliant poet who sacrificed love for his art. In rich detail, Gregory Jusdanis and Peter Jeffreys chronicle the young poet’s life with his family, the vicissitudes of their fortunes, and their eventual poverty after they left Egypt and moved successively to Liverpool, London, and Istanbul. The biography then centers on Constantine’s adulthood in his beloved Alexandria, the city that nourished his imagination and became for him a metaphor for modern life. Deep archival research uncovers the poet’s relationships with his teenage companions, his friends of middle age, and the individuals whom in later life he enlisted in his steadfast pursuit of fame. Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography looks closely at Cavafy’s artistic journey, from his early poetic experiments to his startling reinvention in middle age, when he renounced much of what he had written and developed a new poetics. Erotic, philosophical, and linguistically suggestive, this widely imitated yet singular style is now recognized and revered as Cavafian.

In this controversial look at nationalism, Gregory Jusdanis offers a sweeping defense of the nation as a protector of cultural difference and a catalyst for modernization. Since the end of the Cold War, the nation-state has undergone intense scrutiny among critics in the media and the academy. Many believe that civic nationalism may be fruitful but that cultural nationalism fosters xenophobia and backward thinking. Jusdanis, however, emphasizes the positive collaboration between nation-building and culture. Through a series of critical readings of multicultural, postcolonial, and globalization theories, the author reveals how nationalism enables people to defend their distinctive ways of life, to fight colonial oppression, and to build an independent society of citizens. He explains why people over the last two hundred years have politicized their ethnic identities and have sought a union of culture and power within an autonomous nation-state. While seeking to defend nationalism, Jusdanis also examines its potential to unleash extraordinary violence into the world. He thus proposes federalism as a political solution to the challenges posed by nationalism and globalization. Jusdanis applies the tools of disciplines ranging from anthropology to philosophy, as he explores the nation-building projects of numerous and diverse countries around the world. What emerges is a fresh perspective on the subjects of national culture, identity, political nations, globalization, postcolonialism, and diaspora.