Topics in Modern Greek Literature

And to the thinking soul the *phantasms are like sensations (aesthemata)..This is why the soul never thinks without phantasm (Aristotle, De Anima, 3, 7) In the English translation of Aristotle's text, the word “phantasma” is frequently rendered as “image” but in fact these phantasms (phantasmata) are connections of the individual mind with the sensory object and the sensory experience, that is, after the sensory object is gone and it is no longer there. These phantoms of experience belong to a kind of imagination (phantasia) which is a movement that happens in the soul under the energy of the sensory experience. In the thought of the Greek philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, and in Castoriadis' words, after Aristotle,”Phantasia is therefore the condition for thought insofar as it alone can present to thought the object as apprehended by the senses but without matter”(Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Discovery of the Imagination”, in World in Fragments, p.231).

An Egyptian general haunted by a suppressed language, a girl pursued by dream images of an ancient, unknown to her, past, an economist who is obsessed with the wrong turn of Western Civilization, a mother unwilling to give up her guilt for the accidental death of her daughter, a proclaimed Messiah unable to come to terms with his divided self and sense of failure: The fiction with which we will work this semester belongs to different decades from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth. It reflects different literary currents, different historical and political contexts, and engages the reader's emotions and literary imagination in different ways. And yet, there is a common element that binds all these works together, their intertextuality. The meaning of all these texts rests on an interrelationship to other, outside texts. It is, in fact, shaped by their relationship to these other texts. Their intertextuality exercises the practice of Juxtaposition, or of the blending together heterogeneous temporal and spatial elements. Moreover, in all these novels, the chronotope, (proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin in the 1930s as the unit of analysis of temporal and spatial categories) is fractured. This fracture, which defines these narratives of modernist and post-modernist Greek fiction, allows for the phantasia of the reader to penetrate the text. In a strange way, these novels act more like phantasms, their meaning resonating closely, or to a lesser extend, with echoes of texts no longer present. An expansion of literary phantasia?And why not? For Aristotle, the soul contains everything, contents of perception through the senses (aesthemata), contents of activities of the mind (noemata), and in Castoriadis' words “The phantasm .... is support for all thought, including the thought of abstracts, relatives, intelligibles, indivisible forms.” (p.236) Besides the works of fiction and the history, which always contextualizes the readings for this class, we will address parts of book 3 of De Anima, as well as the essay of Cornelius Castoriadis “The Discovery of the Imagination” in World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the imagination. 

All literary texts are also available in English translation. History and theory are in English. Films are with English subtitles.

* I am following Castoriadis rendition of Aristotle's “phantasma” as “phantasm”.  In contemporary Greek, the word "phantasma" means phantom or ghost.