Special Topics in Comparative Literature

This course aims to re-consider Modern Greek poetry within the cultural life of Greece primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries. It has been stated by critics that modern Greek writers, and particularly poets, reconstruct a topos, “a place for Hellenism through their own national literature”(A. Leontis: Topographies of Hellenism, 1995.) However true some of these observations may be, they seem to have obscured frequently Greek poetry’s other dimensions and to have defined it primarily in terms of its historical relevance and its relationship to a historical past or a historically critical present. This course does not aim to sever Greek poetry’s relationship with history. To the contrary, history may provide the inspiration and frequently the context. However, by focusing primarily on the workings of emotion, intellect and imagination, this course aims to disengage Greek poetry from its already existing definitions as history’s handmaiden and Hellenism’s servant while still allowing it to be contextualized in historical and literary terms. Thus, from the oral tradition that springs naturally from worlds of trauma that mobilize the imagination, individually and collectively, to the self-consciousness of Modernism and the intricate subversions of Surrealism, this course aims selectively to present Greek poetry from an individual, artistic perspective and to isolate the broad and complex influences upon it.