Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Edited by Trine Stauning Willert and Gerasimus Katsan - Contributions by Georgia Aitaki; Maria Akritidou; Yiorgos Anagnostou; Patricia Felisa Barbeito; Vangelis Calotychos; Maria Chalkou; Karen Emmerich; Constantina Georgiadi; Vassiliki Kaisidou; Gerasimus Katsan; Sonia Liza Kenterman; Kostis Kornetis; Jessica Kourniakti; Charles Lock; Amanda Michalopoulou; Sophia Nikolaidou and Trine Stauning Willert

This book deals with historical consciousness and its artistic expressions in contemporary Greece since 1989 from the point of view that contemporary Greeks have been faced with the contradictions between on the one hand a glorious, world-famous yet distant past and, on the other, a traumatic contemporary history of wars, expulsions, civil strife and political and economic crises. Such clashes of imaginary identifications and collective traumas call for interpretations not only from historians but also from artists and storytellers. Therefore, the chapters in this volume explore the ways in which sensitive and creative perspectives of art approach and appropriate history in Greece.

Through a rich collection of analytical case studies and creative reflections on Greece’s past, present, and future this volume presents the reader with the ways a set of contemporary Greek storytellers in different genres have incorporated previously under-explored or little-known themes, events, and epochs in modern Greek history showing how the past, by being interpreted and represented in the present, can teach us a lot about contemporary Greek society. The themes that form the point of departure for the stories told or retold cover various significant components of Greek history and culture such as ancient myths, the Ottoman period, the Greek War of Independence and the Greek Civil War, but also less prominent or known aspects of Greek history such as the Greek Enlightenment, the long and tragic history of Greek Jewry, and migration to and from Greece.

Lexington Books

Pages: 290 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-6338-3 • Hardback • January 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-6339-0 • eBook • January 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / General, Social Science / Popular Culture, Literary Criticism / Modern / 21st Century

Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Hardback

eBook

Summary

This book deals with historical consciousness and its artistic expressions in contemporary Greece since 1989 from the point of view that contemporary Greeks have been faced with the contradictions between on the one hand a glorious, world-famous yet distant past and, on the other, a traumatic contemporary history of wars, expulsions, civil strife and political and economic crises. Such clashes of imaginary identifications and collective traumas call for interpretations not only from historians but also from artists and storytellers. Therefore, the chapters in this volume explore the ways in which sensitive and creative perspectives of art approach and appropriate history in Greece.

Through a rich collection of analytical case studies and creative reflections on Greece’s past, present, and future this volume presents the reader with the ways a set of contemporary Greek storytellers in different genres have incorporated previously under-explored or little-known themes, events, and epochs in modern Greek history showing how the past, by being interpreted and represented in the present, can teach us a lot about contemporary Greek society. The themes that form the point of departure for the stories told or retold cover various significant components of Greek history and culture such as ancient myths, the Ottoman period, the Greek War of Independence and the Greek Civil War, but also less prominent or known aspects of Greek history such as the Greek Enlightenment, the long and tragic history of Greek Jewry, and migration to and from Greece.

Details

Lexington Books

Pages: 290 • Trim: 6¼ x 9

978-1-4985-6338-3 • Hardback • January 2019 • $117.00 • (£90.00)

978-1-4985-6339-0 • eBook • January 2019 • $111.00 • (£85.00)

Subjects: Literary Criticism / European / General, Social Science / Popular Culture, Literary Criticism / Modern / 21st Century

Author

Gerasimus Katsan is associate professor and coordinator of the Modern Greek Program at Queens College, City University of New York.

Trine Stauning Willert is honorary research fellow at the Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies, University of Birmingham.

Table of Contents

Introduction: History in the Storyteller’s Toolbox

Trine Stauning Willert and Gerasimus Katsan

Part One

Popularizing Neglected Pasts

1.Getting Intimate with the Unwanted Past: New Approaches to the Ottoman Legacy in Greek Fiction

Trine Stauning Willert

2.Public History and the Revival of Repressed Sephardic Heritage in Thessaloniki

Kostis Kornetis

Constructing Past, Present, and Future in Migrant Fiction

3.Poetry Traversing History: Narrating Louis Tikas in David Mason’s Ludlow

Yiorgos Anagnostou

4.First-Person Past, Second-Person Present, and the Future of Now: Gazmend Kapllani’s Transnational, Interpersonal Timescapes

Karen Emmerich

Trauma, Sentimentality, and Crisis in Literature

5.To Remember and Forgive: The Afterlives of Queen Frederica’s Childtowns in Contemporary Greek Fiction

Vassiliki Kaisidou

6. Fashioning a European Past for the National Self: Nikos Themelis’ For Some Companionship

Maria Akritidou

7.The Anxieties of History: Greek Fiction in Crisis

Gerasimus Katsan

Satire and Nostalgia in Popular Culture

8.The Use of History for the Denunciation of the Present: Lena Kitsopoulou’s Athanasios Diakos - The Comeback

Constantina Georgiadi

9.Television Fiction as a Window into a Nation’s Past: The Arbitraries and the Concept of the Neohellene

Georgia Aitaki

10.Ancient Greek Mythology and the Culture of the Neohellene in Animated TV Satire

Jessica Kourniakti

11.Childhood Memories, Family Life, Nostalgia and Historical Trauma in Contemporary Greek Cinema

Maria Chalkou

Part Two

Preface

A Visual Journey Through the Lens

12.Witnesses for the Future: The Past Reflected in the Despair of the Present

Sonia Liza Kenterman

13.Still, Short, Cut: The Early Films of Sonia Liza Kenterman

Charles Lock

A Literary Echo of the Refugee Crisis

14.What Are They After, Our Souls, Off the Coast of Lesbos?: Reflections on Elias Venezis’ “The Isle of Lios” (1928)

Patricia Felisa Barbeito and Vangelis Calotychos

History from the Storyteller’s Viewpoint

15.“Four Hundred Pleats”

Amanda Michalopoulou

16.1948–2010: Before and After “Think Before You Learn”

Sophia Nikolaidou

Reviews

With contributions from scholars, fiction writers, and filmmakers, this is a rich volume exploring iconoclastic treatments of the past together with some neglected legacies. Focusing on post-classical Greece, it offers thought-provoking papers on a variety of genres (narratives, poems, films, and plays) and invites readers to engage critically with silences and traumatic memories. It analyzes the uses of history in different cultural forms and contexts after 1989, which serves as a key date, and offers a useful prism through which to view contemporary Greece.
— Dimitris Tziovas, University of Birmingham

Combining scholarly texts with practitioners’ reflections and literary translations, this eclectic collection focuses on the entanglements of history on Greece’s contemporary fiction making, offering a fascinating insight into the range, variety, and sophistication of creative work produced in, and in connection to, the country and its past. The contributions enlighten neglected histories, engage with migrant narratives, address crisis and trauma, and situate the popular at the heart of contemporary retellings of the past. The creative work sampled evidences the richness of the cultural output emanating from Greece and leaves the reader wishing for more.
— Lydia Papadimitriou, Liverpool John Moores University

Retelling the Past in Contemporary Greek Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

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