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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 TERRITORIES OF HELLENISM: NEOHELLENIC MODERNISM, NATIONALISM, RND THE CLASSICAL TRADITION DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Artemis Sophia Leontis, B.A., M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 1991 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Marilyn R. Waldman Eugene W. Holland 7? Adviser Gregory Jusdanis One-of-a-Kind Program For Vassilis ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am deeply indebted to the many people who have supported me through the long years of graduate education. To my dear parents, Thomas E. and Anna Leontis, I am grateful for their insistence on a bilingual education and love of letters, and to my brother, Neocles Leontis, for sharing dilemmas of assimilation. To numerous friends and colleagues I owe many thanks: to Julian Anderson for advice on language and style; to Susan Ritchie for running commentary on the vagueries of theory; to Brenda Hosey for her cartography of the University bureacracy; to Stephanie Winder for endless conversations about Hellenism; and to Panayotis Bosnakis, Vangelis Calotychos, Van Gegas, Stathis Gourgouris, Martha Klironomos, Eva Konstantellou, Tracy Lord, Nenny Panourgia, Maria Papacostaki, and Charles Stewart—the next wave of Neohellenists—for their willingness to share with me their vast stores of knowledge. Nanos Valaoritis advised me on the specificity of the terms Hellenism and Neohellenism and offered great critical insight into the project of his contemporaries. I also thank Professors Margaret Alexiou, Peter Bien, John Chioles, Michael Herzfeld, and Gregory Nagy for their advice, encouragement, and confidence; Charles L. Babcock, Frederic J. Cadora, and Dean Micheal Riley gave me administrative backing for inter-departmental work and financial backing for my studies in theory. To Stephen V. Tracy I owe some difficult but immensely useful lessons in both the breadth and limits of a Classical education. I have benefited greatly from the attention and attentive readings of three excellent supervisors: Marilyn R. Waldman, who also supported me at a critical time, assisted in the passage of my interdisciplinary proposal for graduate studies, and pointed out at every turn the global implications of my research on Neohellenism; Eugene W. Holland, always a generous, immensely intelligent, and critical teacher and reader; and Gregory Jusdanis, who successfully cultivated an interpretive community of Neohellenic scholars and invested it with his own integrity and intellectual generosity. Finally, I am indebted to Vassilis Lambropoulos, who gently and persuasively pointed out what routes of inquiry there are for thinking and being. This project was supported by a Presidential Fellowship from the Graduate School of the Ohio State University. Some parts of the dissertation were previously published in earlier versions: chapter II in the J o u rn a l o f Modern Greek Studies (May 1990) and chapter IV in The Journal of Modern Greek Studies (May 1991). I would like to thank the editor Ernestine Friedl for her kind attention to my work. Portions of chapter III were delivered at Harvard University in March 1991, chapter IV at the Modern Greek Studies Symposium in October 1989 in Minneapolis, and chapter V at the O.S.U. graduate student conference, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies: The Next Wa w in October 1990. The College of Humanities, Department of Classics, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, Division of Comparative Studies, and Graduate School partially covered travel costs for some of these conferences. iv UlTfl March 13, 1957 ......................................... Born - Midland, Michigan 1979 ........................................................... B.A., Oberlin College, with Majors in Religion and Art 1980-1982 ..................................................... University of Salonica, Department of Philology, Post-graduate research fellow in Ancient, Byzantine, and Modern Greek Literature, Salonica, Greece 1984 ........................................................... M.A. in Greek, Department of Classics, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio Thesis Title: “ Thrush'. The Sign of an Absent Teiresias” 1984-1986 ..................................................... Graduate Teaching Associate in Modern Greek, Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Languages and Literatures, OSU 1986-198 7 ..................................................... Graduate Teaching Associate, Ancient Greek and Latin, Department of Classics, OSU 1987-199 0 ..................................................... Graduate Administrative and Teaching Associate, Division of Comparative Studies, OSU 1990-1991..................................................... Graduate Teaching and Research Associate in Modern Greek, Department of JaNELL, OSU v PUBLICATIONS 1983 “K.n. Kapd^T) « a t t o X € ( tt€ i v o 8 € 6 s a v t (j6v i o v » : Mia o k t ^v o 0 € t i k ^ [C.P. Cavafy’s “The God Abandons Antony”: Stage Directions], QlA&oyoS' 33 (Salonica):218-222. 1984 110111011 OTT)V€T!OXilTTiSiirixaviKi)savaTTapaYWY')S” [Greek Poetry in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction], X dpT rjgil (Athens): 100-111. 1987 “The Lost Center and the Promised Land of Greek Criticism, ” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 5:2 (October): 175-190. 1990 “Modernist Criticism: Greek and American Defenses of the Autonomous Literary Text in the 1930s, ” in Greek in Modernism ? Essays on the Critical and Literary Margins of a Movement, edited by Mary N. Layoun, pp. 21-57 (New York: Pella). 1990 “Minor Field, Major Territories: Dilemmas in Modernizing Hellenism,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies 8 (May): 35-63. 1990 “Surrealist Poetics of Identity and Andreas Embeirikos’s Defense of Man, ” Modern Greek Studies Yearbook 6:315-329. FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: One-of-a-Kind Program Fields of Concentration and General Examination: Contemporary Critical Theory (Eugene W. Holland and Gregory Jusdanis) Modernity and Modernism (Marilyn R. Waldman and Eugene W. Holland) Classical and Byzantine Greek (Stephen V. Tracy and Timothy Gregory) Modern Greek, 18th-20th century (Timothy Gregory and Gregory Jusdanis) vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS................................................................................................. iii VITA.............................................................................................................................. v PREFACE.................................................................................................................... viii NOTE ON TRANSLITERATIONS, REFERENCES, AND TRANSLATIONS.................. xii CHAPTER I. Introduction ................................................................................................... 1 II. Topos\ From Revenant Nation to Transcendental Territory Post-War Consolidations ....................................................................... 29 A Genealogy of Topos.............................................................................40 The Transcendence of “Greekness” ....................................................61 III. N ostos\ The Crisis of Tradition and Hellenism’s Suspended Homecoming The Crisis of Tradition .........................................................................77 “Native” Complaints: Modernity’s Limitless Hotel ........................ 85 Inter textual Horizons: T h ru sh and the O d y sse y .............. 91 Signs of Homecoming.............................................................................98 Declarations of Ignorance, Modernist Ellipsis, and the Return to Light ......................................................................107 Salvaging the Post-War Shipwreck...................................................117 IV. C osm os: Grounding the Poetic Word in the