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INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely afreet reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of the book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. University Microfilms International A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Order Number 0505162 The critique of Greekness and the formation of the Greek Avant-Garde Bosnakis, Panayiotis Constantinos, Ph.D. The Ohio State University, 1994 UMI 300 N. ZeebRd. Ann Arbor, MI 48106 THE CRITIQUE OF GREEKNESS AND THE FORMATION OF THE GREEK AVANT-GARDE 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 Panayiotis C. Bosnakis, B.A., M.A. The Ohio State University 1994 Dissertation Committee: Approved by V. Lambropoulos G. Jusdanis Adviser S. Constantinidis Interdisciplinary Program Copyright by Panayiotis C. Bosnakis 1994 To my family, my People "Here there is no death, no shortness of life, but its endless duration ..." C.P. Cavafy ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am grateful to the co-advisors of my dissertation, Professors Vassilis Lambropoulos and Gregory Jusdanis. I also want to thank Professor Stratos Constantinidis who helped me with the second chapter on Kazantzakis. Special thanks are also due to Professors Timothy Gregory and Marilyn Waldman for their precious co-operation and teaching in the fields of history and modernity respectively. I must especially thank my advisor Vassilis Lambropoulos for his long steadfast support during my graduate studies. I earned from him great lessons of academic erudition, integrity, and enlightenment. I am also indebted to Professor Fredrick Cadora, Chair of the Department of Near Eastern, Judaic and Hellenic Languages and Literatures, for his long financial support which made my study possible. The completion of this study was also subsidized by an Allumni Research Award, and two generous grants from the Office of International Education at the Ohio State University and the Helen Zeese Papanikolas Foundation. I thank all my friends and colleagues from the United States, England, Australia, and Greece, who in many different ways encouraged my work. I am grateful to Nanos Valaoritis for many discussions and comments on earlier drafts of my chapter on Cavafy and Kazantzakis. My dear friends Elizabeth Arseniou, Stathis Gourgouris, Artemis Leontis and Fritz Thenor taught me not to lose faith but to continue struggling. Finally, I received a great deal of courage from exiled and dissident writers and artists who have preserved their humanism producing their works under extremely unfavorable conditions. Nicolas Calas and lanni Xenakis, in their infinite wisdom, taught me that Hellenism in its protean humanism can be much larger than its nation. VITA May 2,1960 Born - Volos, Greece 1982..................................................... B.A., University of Athens, Greece 1987 .................................................... M.A., Ohio State University FIELDS OF STUDY Major Field: Interdisciplinary Studies Comparative Literature, Greek Studies PUBLICATIONS 1990 "Facing Fragments: C.P. Cavafy's Poetic Experimentations With the Iliad" in Mary Layoun (ed.) Modernism in Greece? Essays on the Critical and Literary Margins of a Movement New York: Pella, 161-179. 1992 "Greece and Modernity in N. Kazantzakis's Prometheus," Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora, 18:1 (Spring): 57-86. 1992 "Radicalizing Modernism: The Conception of an ethnic Avant-Garde in N. Valaoritis's My Afterlife Guaranteed," Journal of Modern Hellenism, 8 (Autumn): 15-26. 1992 "Nanos Valaoritis's My Afterlife Guaranteed,” Journal of Modern Greek Studies, 10, 1 (May): 149-150 [Book Review]. TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication .......................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements............................................................................ iii Vita ................................................................................................... v Table of Contents............................................................................... vi Introduction .........................................................................................1 Note on Translations..........................................................................15 I. CAVAFY'S EXPERIMENTATIONS WITH THE ILIAD AND HIS CRITIQUE OF NATIONAL LITERATURE.......................... 16 Palamas's Construct of National Literature ........................19 Cavafy's "The Reflections of an Old Artist". .......................24 Experimenting with and Revising Classical Tradition ...28 The Romantic Experiment...................................................... 30 The Aesthetic Experiment.................................................... 40 The Symbolist Experiment......................................................55 The Ithaka of Writing ...............................................................69 After Homer..................................................... 74 Notes.............................................................. !....................... 76 II. NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS AND HIS CRITIQUE OF GREEKNESS 81 The Odyssey...........................................................................83 The Promethean Trilogy......................................................... 97 Greekness and Contemporaneity........................................... 117 Notes......................................................................................132 III. THE AVANT-GARDE AND THE CRITIQUE OF GREEKNESS......136 Calas's Poems of 1933:Poetry as a Social Text.......... 137 Alternative Views of Hellenism .....................................147 Calas’s Critique of Greekness in Collection A' ............. 154 Calas's Critique of the National Literature .....................160 Valaoritis's Reaction to Tradition and Greekness ............. 164 The Civil War and the Degeneration of Greekness......... 175 From Greekness to Fascism.................................................. 180 The Absurdist Subject ............................................................ 183 Notes.......................................................................................187 EPILOGUE........................................................................................191 BIBLIOGRAPHY................ 196 vii INTRODUCTION This study is about the formation of the Avant-Garde in a national literature. It examines texts by various authors who oppose the idea of writing a national literature. It explores the possibility of aesthetic radicalism in a European periphery. My project, therefore, is to examine how certain authors practice criticism against the orthodoxy of national poetics. National poetics represents the evolving systematic thought of poets and critics that places the ideational framework of nation in the teleology of poetry. Although all literatures underwent a stage of identification with their nation, literatures of developing and Third-world countries, in particular, have experienced the entanglement of nation and literature in a rather complex way. In this study I want to explore a single aspect of this problematic, namely the question of the Avant-Garde in a national literature (1). But first let me explain some of the terms used in this study. By Avant-Garde I mean the "historical" Western European Avant-Garde, mainly French Surrealism, French and German Dadaism, German Expressionism, and Italian Futurism as well as their immediate derivative movements that claimed for 1 themselves an analogous orientation (i.e., Czech Poetism, Russian Imagism, Hungarian Activism, and the Greek Surrealists). By national or peripheral Avant-Gardes I mean the Avant-Gardes that respond to their national literatures or the ones that are located in peripheries, such as the Brazilian, Peruvian, Chinese, and Yiddish Avant-Gardes. By neo-Avant-Gardes I mean later post war neo-Avant-Gardist manifestations, such as neo-Surrealism, neo-Dadaism, or underground poetries in the 1960's (2). By cosmopolitanism I mean an expansion beyond the local and the provincial as well as an orientation towards the Other. According to Ulf Hannerz: A more genuine cosmopolitanism is first of all an orientation, a willingness to engage with the