In the Shadow of Diachrony: Ancient Greek Language in the Contemporary Greek Gymnásio* by Christodoulos Zekas

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

In the Shadow of Diachrony: Ancient Greek Language in the Contemporary Greek Gymnásio* by Christodoulos Zekas In the Shadow of Diachrony: Ancient Greek Language in the Contemporary Greek Gymnásio* by Christodoulos Zekas Modern Greek state in 1830.1 This is Abstract especially remarkable in that, as regards Ancient Greek and the Language its position in the first three grades of Question In this article, I examine features of secondary education, the subject has the current methodology employed in the enjoyed an astonishing continuity down The precedence of classical over teaching of Ancient Greek in compulsory to the present, with a comparatively brief modern Greek culture is furthermore education in Greece. After considering interval of sixteen years (1977-92). The signified by the creation and imposition the historical dimensions of the subject reason for the endurance of the course in of an official national language that as well as its association with the modern the Greek curriculum may well be traced was based upon and resembled classical Greek language question, I highlight one principally to one element: the strong Greek. This led to the so-called important aspect of the current teaching admiration for the classical era harboured language question and the emergence of practice as revealed by the textbook of and promoted by the modern state in modern Greek diglossia. This archaistic the first grade of the junior high school the attempt of the latter to construct a ‘exemplary’ language, called katharévousa (gymnásio), namely, the diachronic strategy, common national identity for its citizens, (‘purifying’), was conceived by the which focuses on the study of the Greek both distinct from that of other nations in intellectual elite, following primarily language through time. I argue that the the Balkans and potentially respected by (though not always faithfully) the ideas of principle of diachrony is superficially 2 western European countries. The policy Adamantios Korais (1748-1833), and was intermingled with the ‘modern’ technique of the admiration of antiquity was first used as the official language of the state of the ‘genre approach’ in parallel with put into practice by the Bavarian Otto for almost a century and a half (1834- a traditional method, which I discuss (1815-67), the first king of Greece, who 1976).4 Katharévousa aimed at eradicating under the term Altertumswissenschaft. This inter alia formed an educational system ‘foreign’ elements that had managed to compound methodology results in a according to the standards of German permeate Greek during a four- to five- training philosophy that not only seems Hellenism, which idealized the classical hundred-year occupation by other peoples ineffective but also reflects the uncertainty language and culture and included a heavy (principally, the Ottomans but also the surrounding the teaching of the ancient 3 load of teaching of Ancient Greek; and Italians and the French). However, since language. second, by the Greek elite, who came this hybrid idiom was never spoken from various places within the Ottoman actually by its contemporaries, it had to Introduction empire, but mainly from the Fanari be learned at school, and the best means area in Constantinople (Istanbul), and to achieve competence in this ‘laboratory- progressively immigrated in the liberated The Ancient Greek language born’ linguistic form was an intensive part of Greece mainland after the War of training in Ancient Greek. Therefore the has played a central role in the school Independence in 1821-28. syllabus since the establishment of the subject was initially taught in place of 22 In the Shadow of Diachrony: Ancient Greek Language in the Contemporary Greek Gymnásio* the vernacular (‘demotikí’), and for many and syntax.8 All in all, the common principle as regards the texts chosen and years undermined – and possibly still does denominator in this reform and its tends towards a more moderate grammar- – school training in Standard Modern overall argumentation was the necessity translation method, which principally Greek (SMG)5 (in terms of the hours of (and hope) for the improvement of the focuses on classical Greek. teaching per week and the emphasis given linguistic education of a much larger by the curriculum). Naturally, this decision number of pupils than ever before, but Ancient Greek Language and kept up with an educational system that still falling short of eradicating ancient lacked practical orientation, did not Greek culture from the last stage of Current Methodology regularly address the needs of the people, compulsory education.9 and often served the dominant ideology The tendency to employ the of the elite.6 Re-introducing Ancient Greek into diachrony principle was further explored The next significant stage in the in the next series, commissioned by the history of the subject would go once the Gymnásio Greek Ministry of Education in 2006. again hand in hand with the evolution On the one hand, the principal feature of the language question. With the In the 1980s, however, concerns were of these textbooks is that they make educational reform of 1976 / 77 the raised about the removal of the ancient extensive use of the diachronic strategy first democratically elected Hellenic language from the junior high school - that is, the study of Greek language government after a seven-year military curriculum, because it was thought that through time - but with a particular dictatorship (1967-74) abolished the the new generation of young Greeks were emphasis on etymology and the formation training in the ancient language from the becoming linguistically impoverished. of ancient words. On the other hand, the junior high school (gymnásio), thus marking These concerns, which took the form of teaching of grammar and syntax, which the end to the uninterrupted presence of a campaign led by Georgios Babiniotis, I do not examine in this article, ought to the course in the first grades of secondary professor of linguistics at Athens be conducted – despite the statements of education for one hundred and forty University, resulted in a revision of the the official guidelines – according to the years (1836-1976). This act was not seen original planning,10 and, in the school year traditional classical or grammar-translation as any kind of regression at the time; in 1993-94, the subject was re-introduced. method. These principles are superficially fact, it came as a result of the since long The teaching philosophy now took a intermingled with the genre approach in expressed and much debated proposition different direction in that the newly order to present a methodology, which of progressive parts of the intellectuals to written school-books (entitled The Greek seemingly conforms to current norms replace katharévousa with demotic as the Language through Ancient, Byzantine, and of (language) instruction, but essentially official language of the state.7 According Learned Texts) focused on a linguistic results in a mixture of practices which, as to the new reform ancient Greek literature training in all periods of Greek. It may I maintain below, seems awkward as well was now studied solely in translation in be argued that the combination of as unsuccessful. the gymnásio, and since katharévousa was texts from very different eras of Greek It becomes obvious that one major abolished, there was no longer any need literature was innovative at the time, but problem in dealing with this issue is to learn the ancient language at this stage the perception of the proposal could that there is no reliable data available (which was actually the concluding one be regarded as unfortunate, chiefly to underpin any robust argumentation. of compulsory education). Thus, the because the comprehension of so great Thus, the views expressed here rely on teaching of the Attic dialect would be a linguistic and textual variety required personal experience from everyday school confined to the first and second grades a basic knowledge of the Attic dialect, practice and theoretical research. The of the senior high school (lýkeio) with an which ought to have been acquired at lack of official evidence is admittedly additional year of instruction for pupils an earlier stage in education. Therefore, no coincidence, and seems to reflect the studying humanities. The arguments it is not surprising that the application uneasiness of the education bureaucrats brought forward in support of this major of the diachronic method was heavily to touch on this delicate issue. It is change focused on the following factors: criticized by teachers and pedagogues striking that the Pedagogical Institute first, the cognitive development of the alike for its superficial engagement with (now Institute of Educational Policy), average pupil in the gymnásio was thought language and the confusion it caused to which is the government organisation as inadequate for the proper learning learners.11 As an outcome of the 1997 responsible for curricula and subjects, of classical Greek. Second, the teaching / 98 educational reform, which aimed has been refusing any survey that could hours saved from this reorganisation of to modernize and Europeanize the reveal the place of Ancient Greek in the curriculum could instead be devoted curriculum,12 the ‘diachronic’ textbooks schools, the evaluation of the textbooks to further training in SMG. Third, the were replaced in 2000-01 with a more and the teaching practices they sustain.14 practice of approaching literature in ancient-Greek-centred series bearing the Other than the study of the views translation was deemed to be of higher title “Ancient
Recommended publications
  • Achilles Tzartzanos and His Contribution to the Greek Language Question
    GRAECO-LATINA BRUNENSIA 20, 2015, 2 KRISTÝNA KNAPKOVÁ (MASARYK UNIVERSITY, BRNO) ACHILLES TZARTZANOS AND HIS CONTRIBUTION TO THE GREEK LANGUAGE QUESTION Although in the twenties the Greek language question had already shifted from the streets to the university halls, Greek society was still dealing with the never ending language story. Achilles Tzartzanos, a significant philologist and well-known educator, has remained some- what left out in the history of the Greek language dispute. This paper describes the solitary struggle in which he was caught while trying to push through his own vision of the Greek language. Key words: Achilles Tzartzanos; Greek language question; dimotiki; katharevousa Tzartzanos and his time In Greece, the 1930’s was culturally considered a period of educational demoticism. It was a movement that aimed to apply the elements of culti- vated demotic (further in text as dimotiki), a popular variant of the Greek language, to education and to do it in a (if possible) realistic and, above all, conciliatory way.1 Achilles Tzartzanos was actively involved in the field of philology and linguistics at just this time when Greek intellectual society was not divided solely into adherents of the conservative katharevousa and followers of the opposing dimotiki. The period was actually finely divided with differences of opinion even within groups of supporters of the one or the other language variant. Fortunately, the dispute was no longer taking place in the crowds on the streets, but rather in university halls. Tzartzanos, as a teacher, also became involved in the project promoting a restrained establishment of an 1 Φραγκουδάκη (2001: pp.
    [Show full text]
  • Relativism in Language Ideology 173
    Relativism in Language Ideology 173 Relativism in Language Ideology: On Greece’s Latest Language Issues Spiros A. Moschonas Abstract Language relativism can be associated with two major conceptions: that “each language has or is a particular spirit” and that “each language has or is a— real or imagined—territory.” Spirituality and territoriality combined give rise to the ideology of a language as a realm. This ideology of Modern Greek as a regime language has become dominant after the official establishment of a standard norm (demotic) and the resolution of the perennial “Greek Language Question.” As it is evidenced by a host of “language issues” raised in the Greek newspapers since 1976, relativism has determined what counted as a “language issue” that was worth publishing, which language issues were eligible for public debates, and the extent to which language issues were allowed to penetrate “public opinion.” Introduction One of the strongest versions of the postulation that “language deter- mines thought” associates each language with a distinct “thought world” or “worldview”—to use B. L. Whorf’s favorite popularizing terms (1956: 147, 221). Such a worldview, it is often said, can only partially and incompletely be rendered into another language. Under the “relativity hypothesis” (Werner 1997, Lucy 1992a, Rossi-Landi 1973), worldviews are indeed incommensurable. A thought world, obviously, is considered to be too big an entity to be jammed between two different languages, but small enough to be contained in a single one. Introductory books in linguistics (e.g., Lyons 1968:433) readily reject such a strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis as untenable, and for good reasons—translatability between languages being an obvious one.
    [Show full text]
  • 93323765-Mack-Ridge-Language-And
    Language and National Identity in Greece 1766–1976 This page intentionally left blank Language and National Identity in Greece 1766–1976 PETER MACKRIDGE 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Peter Mackridge 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mackridge, Peter.
    [Show full text]
  • The Heritages of the Modern Greeks
    The heritages of the modern Greeks PROFESSOR PETER MACKRIDGE Introduction poetry from the Mycenaeans, because they could make a fresh start with a clean slate. He presents the heritages of the What makes the heritages of the modern Greeks unique? modern Greeks as a burden – and in some cases even an They stand between East and West in the sense that they incubus – since their legacies from ancient Greece and belong neither to the Catholic and Protestant West nor to Byzantium continually threaten to dominate and the Muslim East; their Roman heritage is more eastern than overshadow them. western; yet they have been dominated by Catholic as well as Ottoman occupiers. Although I am against the concept of Greek (or any other) exceptionalism, I believe that when The nationalisation of the past foreigners deal with modern Greece they need to be sensitive The Greeks of the last 200 years have possessed ample to cultural differences, which are the result of specific historical material with which to form their national historical experiences. Especially in times of crisis such as identity. Compare the Germans, who for their ancient past the one the Greeks are going through today, the world – and have only Tacitus’ Germania, a brief and impressionistic especially Europe – needs to show sympathy and solidarity ethnography written by an outsider who warned that his with their plight. Nevertheless, this shouldn’t inhibit us aim was to comment on the Romans of his time as much as from looking critically at what Greeks – and I mean chiefly on the Germans. Tacitus left the modern Germans a great Greek intellectual and political elites – have made of their deal of leeway to invent and imagine their own antiquity.
    [Show full text]
  • Modern!Greek:! Dialectological!Issues!
    Dialectologia.!Special-issue,-IV-(2013),!25*48.!! ISSN:!2013*2247! Received!15!May!2013.! Accepted!3!July!2013.! ! ! ! ! THE!HISTORICAL!DICTIONARY!OF!MODERN!GREEK:! DIALECTOLOGICAL!ISSUES! Christina#BASSEA0BEZANTAKOU#&#Io#MANOLESSOU! Academy#of#Athens# [email protected]#/#[email protected]# # # Abstract## This# paper# aims# to# give# a# general# presentation# of# the# Historical! Dictionary! of! Modern! Greek# (ILNE):# aims,# history,# and# recent# innovations,# with# focus# on# specific# proBlems# deriving# from# the# updating#of#its#corpus#and#methodology.#Emphasis#is#given#to#the#issue#of#the#source#language,#which,# in#contrast#to#most#historical#dictionary#projects#world0wide,#is#not#only#the#modern#standard#language# but#also#the#dialects.#The#necessity#of#inclusion#of#dialectal#data#in#a#historical#dictionary#of#the#standard# language#is#discussed#and#illustrated#at#length,#while#other#issues#involving#the#treatment#of#dialectal# data,#such#as#dating#and#phonetic#transcription,#are#also#touched#upon.# # Keywords# historical#lexicography,#dialect#lexicography,#Greek,#diglossia,#phonetic#transcription# # # EL!DICCIONARIO!HISTÓRICO!DEL!GRIEGO!MODERNO:!CUESTIONES!DIALECTALES# Resumen! El# propósito# principal# de# este# artículo# es# ofrecer# una# presentación# general# del# “Diccionario# Histórico#del#Griego#Moderno”#(ILNE):#sus#objetivos,#su#historia#y#sus#innovaciones#recientes,#dedicando# una# especial#atención#a#los#proBlemas#específicos#derivados#de#la#actualiZación#de#su#corpus#y# de#la# metodología.#Se#hace#hincapié#en#la#cuestión#de#la#lengua#de#origen,#la#cual,#a#diferencia#de#la#mayoría#
    [Show full text]
  • Greek Language Questions
    Journal of Greek Linguistics 11 (2011) 249–257 brill.nl/jgl Review Article Doing without the Fez: Greek Language Questions Christopher Gerard Brown Th e Ohio State University [email protected] Abstract Th is defi nitive history of the Greek Language Controversy shows how Greek’s status as a prestige language galvanized a national movement attracting various ethnicities of the Millet-i rum . Th e status of classical Greek resonant in Adamantios Korais’s katharévousa helped consolidate the Greek state. An alternate demoticist programme, anticipated by Katartzis, developed in the Ionian Islands, and formulated by Psycharis, took hold through the eff orts of the Educational Demoticists. Standard Modern Greek is a synthesis of the two programmes—neither the phono- logically puristic Romaika of Psycharis nor an archaizing Schriftsprache, it retains elements of both. Keywords Diglossia , katharévousa , purism , Korais , Psycharis , sociolinguistics , Language Question , Language Controversy Peter Mackridge. Language and National Identity in Greece , 1766–1976 . Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2009. Since 1976 the Language Question that agitated the Greek-speaking world for some two hundred years is history, and in Peter Mackridge it has found its historian. Th e Language Controversy, as Mackridge translates the Greek το γλωσσικό ζήτημα, was a debate about nature of the Greek language, its historicity and perennity. Both sides wanted a standard national language to symbolize the continuity of Hellenism, a patent of succession to the prestige and authority of classical antiquity. Partisans of the puristic Schriftsprache sought to teach and improve a fallen people, to restore lost continuity and make them worthy of their heritage.
    [Show full text]
  • GREEK Characters
    Study of the issues present in the registration of IDN TLDs in GREEK characters By the Greek Case Study Team For the ICANN Variant Issues Project Greek Case Study Team Members: 1. Vaggelis Segredakis (Coordinator) 2. Asimina Giannopoulou 3. Catherine Tsapikidou 4. Evangelos Melagrakis 5. Fotia Panayiotou 6. George Papapavlou 7. Giannis Papaioannou 8. Panagiotis Papaspiliopoulos ICANN Variant Issues Project Greek Case Study Team Table of Contents 1. Introduction ‐ Disclaimer ..............................................................................................1 2. Definitions .......................................................................................................................2 3. Useful key points regarding the Greek Language.....................................................4 3.1. The Greek Language Question ......................................................................................... 4 3.2. The Greek Orthography..................................................................................................... 5 4. Proposed Characters for Registrations.......................................................................5 5. The sigma and final sigma ............................................................................................6 6. The IDNA approach of translating Greek words into domain names...................6 7. Homographs....................................................................................................................7 8. Homophones...................................................................................................................8
    [Show full text]
  • 14 the Language Question and the Diaspora*
    14 The Language Question and the Diaspora* Karen Van Dyck The national perspective on the language question The issue of language has a privileged place in Greek intellectual discourse. In America the race question has been at the forefront of political discussions over the past century and a half; Italy has its Southern Question; in Greece it is the Language Question (to glossiko zitima), that has generated an analogous amount of pages and debate. Since the eighteenth century, well before independence, Greek intellectuals, school teachers, and priests have fought over which variety of the Greek language should be the official one: demotic, the language ‘of the people’, or katharevousa, a purist language that reintroduced elements of ancient Greek in order to ‘clean up’, or ‘purify’, spoken Greek, a language supposedly contaminated by centuries of Roman, Frankish, and Turkish rule. Which register of Greek a Greek spoke – and, even more importantly, wrote – was central to what it meant to be Greek. As scholars have amply shown, the language question and the particular problem of diglossia – in the Greek case the existence of two competing varieties of the language – have been enmeshed with the major developments and cultural struggles in modern Greek history from the nation’s inception to the present, as has been discussed by Peter Mackridge in chapter 13.1 Here I propose to shift the focus from the national to a diasporic perspective on the Language Question. I begin by rehearsing the familiar story of language reform * I am grateful to Roderick Beaton, Stathis Gourgouris, Nelson Moe, David Ricks, Dorothea von Mücke, and Clair Wills for their helpful comments, and especially to Peter Mackridge without whose knowledge and generosity this chapter would not have been written.
    [Show full text]
  • Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts Schriften Des Historischen Kollegs
    Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Herausgegeben von Lothar Gall Kolloquien 82 R. Oldenbourg Verlag München 2011 Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts Herausgegeben von Lothar Gall und Dietmar Willoweit R. Oldenbourg Verlag München 2011 Schriften des Historischen Kollegs herausgegeben von Lothar Gall in Verbindung mit Johannes Fried, Hans-Werner Hahn, Manfred Hildermeier, Martin Jehne, Claudia Märtl, Helmut Neuhaus, Friedrich Wilhelm Rothenpieler, Luise Schorn-Schütte, Dietmar Willoweit und Andreas Wirsching Das Historische Kolleg fördert im Bereich der historisch orientierten Wissenschaften Ge- lehrte, die sich durch herausragende Leistungen in Forschung und Lehre ausgewiesen haben. Es vergibt zu diesem Zweck jährlich bis zu drei Forschungsstipendien und zwei Fördersti- pendien sowie alle drei Jahre den „Preis des Historischen Kollegs“. Darüber hinaus führt das Historische Kolleg in Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Institutionen auch internationale Konfe- renzen und Kolloquien durch. Das Historische Kolleg wird seit dem Kollegjahr 2000/2001 – im Sinne einer „public private partnership“ – in seiner Grundausstattung vom Freistaat Bayern finanziert; die Mittel für die Stipendien stellen gegenwärtig die Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, der Stiftungsfonds Deutsche Bank, die Gerda Henkel Stiftung und der Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft zur Verfü- gung. Träger des Historischen Kollegs, das vom Stiftungsfonds Deutsche Bank und vom Stif- terverband errichtet und zunächst allein finanziert wurde, ist die „Stiftung zur Förderung der Historischen Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und des Histo- rischen Kollegs“. In diesem Band werden die Ergebnisse der internationalen Konferenz „Judaism, Christia- nity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts“ veröffentlicht, die vom 16.
    [Show full text]
  • Palatalization, Fortition and Deletion in the High Vowels of Arcadian Greek
    Palatalization, fortition and deletion in the high vowels of Arcadian Greek Photini Coutsougera University of Toronto The present study discusses the status of the high vowels /i/ and (secondarily) /u/ in Arcadian Peloponnesian, an entirely unstudied variety of Greek. The high vowels of Arcadian Greek undergo different processes or are altogether deleted in an unstressed environment. In particular, unstressed [i] palatalizes or undergoes fortition (depending on the trigger consonant) or gets deleted. Kochetov (2016) argues that palatalization and fortition work in parallel as repair strategies in languages affecting different target consonants, so that marked C+palatal sequences are avoided. This seems to be the motivation behind the widely attested palatalization and fortition in nonstandard Greek varieties more generally, which may need to be unified under one pandialectal study in the future. Until now, high vowel deletion has been thought to be restricted to northern dialects of Greek and has constituted a defining criterion for the classification of Greek dialects in the literature. 1 Peloponnesian Greek: historical background The present study focuses on the high vowels and their status in the Modern Greek dialect of Arcadian Peloponnesian, spoken in the area of Arcadia, right in the heart of the Peloponnese peninsula. The phonology of Arcadian Peloponnesian is entirely unstudied. Generally, linguistic studies on the individual Peloponnesian varieties of Greek are few and far between. The prevailing view that Standard Modern Greek (hereafter SMG) is predominantly based on Peloponnesian varieties (amongst others, Newton 1972; Babiniotis 1979, 1998; Kontossopoulos 2001/1994; Browning 1995; Tonnet 1995; Horrocks 2010) seems to have led or at least contributed to the opinion that Peloponnesian varieties are too similar to SMG and therefore not interesting enough to be studied.
    [Show full text]
  • Semantic Indexing of 19Th-Century Greek Literature Using 21St-Century Linguistic Resources
    sustainability Article Semantic Indexing of 19th-Century Greek Literature Using 21st-Century Linguistic Resources Dimitris Dimitriadis 1,* , Sofia Zapounidou 2 and Grigorios Tsoumakas 1 1 School of Informatics, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece; [email protected] 2 Library and Information Centre, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 54124 Thessaloniki, Greece; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: Manual classification of works of literature with genre/form concepts is a time-consuming task requiring domain expertise. Building automated systems based on language understanding can help humans to achieve this work faster and more consistently. Towards this direction, we present a case study on automatic classification of Greek literature books of the 19th century. The main challenges in this problem are the limited number of literature books and resources of that age and the quality of the source text. We propose an automated classification system based on the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) model trained on books from the 20th and 21st century. We also dealt with BERT’s constraint on the maximum sequence length of the input, leveraging the TextRank algorithm to construct representative sentences or phrases from each book. The results show that BERT trained on recent literature books correctly classifies most of the books of the 19th century despite the disparity between the two collections. Additionally, the TextRank algorithm improves the performance of BERT. Citation: Dimitriadis, D.; Keywords: semantic indexing; text classification; Greek literature; TextRank; BERT Zapounidou, S.; Tsoumakas, G. Semantic Indexing of 19th-Century Greek Literature Using 21st-Century Linguistic Resources. Sustainability 1.
    [Show full text]
  • REFLECTIONS of a NATION Antigone on the Modern Greek Stage
    REFLECTIONS OF A NATION Antigone on the Modern Greek Stage Andria Michael Royal Holloway, University of London Thesis Submitted for the Degree of PhD in Classics 2015 2 Declaration of Authorship I, Andria Michael, hereby declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Andria Michael 18 December 2015 3 Abstract This thesis is a study of performances of Sophocles’ Antigone on the modern Greek stage, their political and social resonances, their cultural contexts and their role in the formation and presentation of modern Greek national identity. It is the result of research concerning the revival of ancient Greek drama, in accordance with modern Greek theatre history as well as with the broader history of the modern Greek nation. As a play political in its essence, Antigone has been widely used as a political statement in the Greek revivals from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. To attempt an examination and analysis of such performances covering this long period of time means to simultaneously examine the key events of the country: the liberation from Ottoman Rule, the early process of formation of the new state, the hotly disputed conflict of the Language Question, the modernist Generation of the 1930s, the Greek Civil War, the Dictatorship of 1967-1974, as well as many other significant events and movements of modern Greek history. The approach of the work is qualitative rather than quantitative. The aim is to choose the specific moments when theatre and politics cross paths, to examine the connections between artistic choices and political incentives, and to highlight the moments which eventually reveal that Antigone has been repeatedly used as a platform for political or politically charged issues, conflicts and agendas.
    [Show full text]