Cultural Politics, Socioaesthetics, Beginnings – serie

This book explores diverse but complementary interdisciplinary approaches to the poetics, intertexts, and influence of the work of C. P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Kavafis), one of the most important twentieth-century European poets. Written by leading international scholars in a number of disciplines (critical theory, gender studies, comparative literature, English studies, Greek studies, anthropology, classics), the essays of this volume situate Cavafy’s poetry within the broader contexts of modernism and aestheticism and investigate its complex and innovative responses to European literary traditions (from Greek antiquity to modernity) as well as its multifaceted impact on major figures of world literature—from North America to South Africa.Contributors include Eve Sedgwick, Helen Vendler, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Richard Dellamora, Mark Doty, James Faubion, Diana Haas, John Chioles, Albert Henrichs, Kathleen Coleman, Michael Paschalis, Peter Jeffreys, and Panagiotis Roilos.

This book focuses on the return of the diasporic Greek second generation to Greece, primarily in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and their evolving, often ambivalent, senses of belonging and conceptualizations of “home.” Drawing from a large-scale research project employing a multi-sited and multi-method comparative approach, Counter-Diaspora is a narrative ethnographic account of the lives and identities of second-generation Greek-Americans and Greek-Germans. Through an interdisciplinary gender and generational lens, the study examines lived migration experiences at three diasporic moments: growing up within the Greek diasporic setting in the United States and Germany; motivations for the counter-diasporic return; and experiences in the “homeland” of Greece. Research documents and analyzes a range of feelings and experiences associated with this “counter-diasporic” return to the ancestral homeland.Images and imaginations of the “homeland” are discussed and deconstructed, along with notions of “Greekness” mediated through diasporic encounters. Using extensive extracts from interviews, the authors explore the roles of, among other things, family solidarity, kinship, food, language, and religion, as well as the impact of “home-coming” visits on the decision to return to the ancestral “homeland.” The book also contributes to a reconceptualization of diaspora and a problematization of the notion of “second generation.”

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.