PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
Program in Hellenic Studies

Maria Boletsi
Another “Kind of Solution”? C. P. Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians” and its Visual Restagings
C.P. Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (Perimenondas tous Varvarous, 1904) has been recontextualized in several literary works, from Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe (Il Deserto dei Tartari, 1938) to J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). Perhaps less known than its literary appropriations are its stagings in visual art. This paper will follow the travels of this literary topos, and will specifically focus on a comparative reading of Cavafy’s poem with two artworks: a) Argentinian artist Graciela Sacco’s billboard-type installation “Esperando a los Barbaros” (1995) and b) South African artist Kendell Geers’ labyrinthic installation “Waiting for the Barbarians” (2001). These installations visually translate and relocate the Cavafian topos in other cultural contexts.  This paper shows how these artworks try to give their own answers to the poem’s aporia – perhaps another “kind of solution” to the eternally deferred state of waiting. Geers’and Sacco’s works do not just visually illustrate Cavafy’s poem, but complicate, revise and even criticize it.

Ipek Celik
The Economy of Female Bodies in Papadiamantis’s The Murderess
How does a character such as Hadoula, a serial killer of five infant girls including her own granddaughter, find her way into the Modern Greek canon? Naturally, this is the result of Papadiamantis’s skillful depiction of her as a complex soul between a flaneur death angel, a traditional healer, and a sufferer of many financial difficulties due to her worthless dowry. Yet, Papadiamantis wrote this novel in 1903, at a time when many of his contemporaries adopted a messianic image of Greek women praised for their role in fortifying national viability, when the cult of motherhood became a significant means to preserve and transmit the ethnic identity within and beyond Greece. This paper suggests that Papadiamantis was aware of and responding to the objectification of women as proper national wives and mothers in the writing of his contemporaries. The paper explores The Murderess as a realist novel that reflects on the increasing commodification of marriage and how this obscures, augments and alters constructions of personhood and the social worth of female bodies.

Karen Emmerich
“Impossible Things”: Editing and Translating C. P. Cavafy’s Unfinished Poems
This paper explores some of the editorial and translatorial challenges presented by the 30 unfinished poems found among C. P. Cavafy’s papers after his death. These poems were first presented to the public in Renata Lavagnini’s 1994 edition of the Ateli Poiimata (1918-1932). In a lengthy introductory essay, Lavagnini discusses the editorial problems posed not just by the unfin­ished poems but by Cavafy’s idiosyncratic methods of non-commercial self-publication; she also outlines her approach to the poems contained in the volume, explaining in conscientious detail the methodology behind her diplomatic transcriptions of the manuscripts.  Yet despite Lavagnini’s insistence that “in the case of unfinished works the only acceptable edition is a diplomatic one,” her transcriptions of each poem are followed by a “final text,” which repre­sents “the last form it was given by the poet” — though always with at least slight, and at times not-so-slight, editorial interventions.  Until recently, neither Savvides nor Lavagnini would allow for translations of the unfinished poems to be published. In early April, however, Knopf will publish Daniel Mendelsohn’s trans­la­tions not only of Cavafy’s Collected Poems, but also, in a slim separate volume, of the Unfinished Poems. In his introduction to this volume, Mendelsohn mentions the “scholarly Greek edition” on which his translations are based—yet he presents it as “work meant for scholars and for Greek-speaking devotees of Cavafy,” and sees Lavagnini’s “final texts” as ultimately separable from the diplomatic transcriptions she has provided.  Using the contrast between Lavagnini’s editorial approach and Mendelsohn’s translato­rial one as a jumping-off point, this paper will explore the com­plex set of issues involved in reproducing these works, in Greek and in translation.

Eirini Kotsovili
Deconstructing the Notions of Identity and Gender in Galanaki’s Eleni, or Nobody
Eleni, or Nobody is a work of fictional biography about a Greek woman painter (Eleni Altamoura, 1821-1900), who conceals her identity and gender to pursue studies abroad, and about the outcomes of her life choices. In it, author Rhea Galanaki creates a compelling account on the mechanisms of self-constitution, situated in the first century of the modern Greek state. This paper argues that Galanaki’s novel, written and widely read in the 1990s, offers a multilayered critique of the politics of gender.  Juxtaposing the factual with the fictional, Galanaki offers a postmodern, post-feminist exploration of the notions and technologies of identity and gender, thus subverting grand narratives related to national and gender norms.  In this novel, the author challenges the notion of a unified self, replacing it with a multitude of complementary and contradictory subjectivities. Fragmentation and discontinuity become the central characteristics of the story at different levels, from the story line and the arrangement of the text to a number of micro-narrative strategies.  The paper supports the argument that gender exists in an interdependent relation with identity: Gender forms identity, and the identity of the social ultimately forms gender. While (or, because of being) similar in classification, the notions of gender and identity often collide. In Galanaki’s example of Eleni, or Nobody their fusion becomes the guide for re-defining oneself through life experiences and choices, eschewing pre-ordained social practices and structurally engendered roles.

Foteini Lika
When Epic Juan meets Donna Joan:  Byron, Roidis and the All-Encompassing Romantic Genre
Lord Byron was one of Emmanuel Roidis’ favourite writers and Don Juan was for him one of the most enjoyable readings of all time. Apart from the same satirical techniques the two of them shared, they had the same ambition to write a pleasant book not only for their readers, but mostly for themselves.  However, because of the existence of these and similar examples, the rapport between Byron and Roidis seemed highly suspicious to the latter’s contemporaries, and had intrigued them to such an extent that a few not so well-disposed critics accused Roidis of plagiarism. Nevertheless, Byron, in turn, was also keen to imitate other people’s work and in this sense was no different than Roidis. Finally, Roidis was close to Byron mostly due to his successful creation of an all-encompassing genre, since both Byron’s Don Juan and Roidis’ Pope Joan seem to defy any kind of generic pigeonholing and easy tagging. Therefore, in the same way that Pope Joan has been characterized by critics as a biography and a novel, a historical anti-novel and a metafiction, Don Juan was regarded as an epic, an anti-epic, and an unheroic poem, though not a mock epic. Consequently, for all these reasons, this paper examines which of Don Juan’s traits advocate its uneasy classification as an epic poem, and how and with what effect these same characteristics are assimilated in Pope Joan as well.

Stratos Myrogiannis
Naming the void: the Invention of Byzantium in the Greek Enlightenment
This paper traces the process of the theoretical assimilation of the idea of ‘Byzantium’ as a historical era into the Greek historical consciousness during the Greek Enlightenment. So far, the mainstream view on this subject is that ‘Byzantium’ became a distinctive part of Greek history thanks to the remarkable work of two of the most prominent scholars of Greek Romantic historiography, Spyridon Zampelios and Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos. This paper revises this widely accepted view by reviewing key writers through their specific historiographical works, Geographia Palaia kai Nea (Meletios Mitrou) and Neoteriki Geographia (Philippides and Konstantas). Furthermore, this paper focuses on Katartzis’s writings and Koraes’s works as well as his correspondence. Within the theoretical framework of the history of concepts and through a contextual analysis, this paper argues that during the eighteenth century Greek intellectuals, from Meletios to Koraes, styled the history of the Greeks as a secularised and uninterrupted sequence of eras. The main problem these scholars faced was integrating in their narrative the Greek Middle Ages; a period European historians and antiquarians had ignored. In contrast, this period was viewed by Greek scholars as a historical gap. In their attempt to bridge this gap, the answer they gradually came up with was the invention of what Koraes first named – earlier than it is traditionally considered – ‘Byzantine history’.

Maria Polychrona
Mirroring Hierarchies: Literary Representations of the Criminal Underworld
Toumpeki by Petros Pikros, first published in 1927, is perhaps the most widely read prison-novel of the Middle-war and its writer’s most reprinted book.  The structural cornerstone of the narrative is the argument that the world of the social margins can be read as a mirror image of the hierarchies of the “noble” society.  This paper proposes an analytical and theoretically grounded reading of this upside-down fictional construction of marginal society.  Initially, the paper explores the linguistic and literary devices used to represent the elaborate power and ethical hierarchies of the criminal underworld. These include the interplay between various sociolects, the succession of narrative modes, the construction of different types of literary characters and the use of paratextual elements.  Reading the hierarchies of Toumpeki on an intertextual level leads to a discussion of the antagonism between Marxist sociological discourse and the legacy of literary naturalism, a clash also presented in the novel as a constant conflict between the “old manners” and the emerging modernity. Finally, the vivid social discourse of the novel will be read in the light of Foucault’s work on the abnormal and the penal systems.

Eleonora Vratskidou
Fictional Representations of the Visual Artist:  The Emergence of a New Literary Genre in 19th - Century Greece
Among the mass of translated novels and short stories offered to the Greek readership in the 1850’s and 1860’s, a new genre appeared on the scene: narratives featuring art and artists. Translated mostly from the French and set in Western European contexts between the 17th and early 19th centuries, these narratives stimulated the production of some Greek counterparts that, in turn, drew essentially on antiquity and depicted artists of ancient Greece. This paper addresses certain aspects of the reception of this literary genre in the Greek context and explores the social implications of its emergence.  Celebrating the artist as fictional hero, this literary genre contributed to constructing the conception of the artist in the Greek social imaginary. The fascination for “art literature” coincided with the emergence of a distinct professional status for the ‘artist’, a category that had no equivalent in the Greek-speaking world of the Ottoman Empire. Founded in 1837, the School of Arts introduced art education in the newly established Greek state on the basis of Western European models. The practices and discourses associated with this academic education for the first time allowed artistic activity to be regarded as constituting a profession.  This paper argues that the fictional narratives in question provided for the gradual dissemination of an alternative set of representations concerning the artist, one largely indebted to the Romantic movement of the late 18th-century. These narratives convey a new representation of the artistic habitus according to which artistic activity is no longer conceived of as a profession but rather as a vocation, one in which the artist occupies a highly subjective relationship to his art, which defines his entire existence.

Last updated 4/29/09