Seminars

Modern Greek

  • Founded
    2005
  • Seminar Number
    703

The seminar’s title emphasizes the language—modern Greek—over the metropolitan nation-state, modern Greece. By so doing, the seminar uses the enduring and versatile nature of the language as a symbol for broader themes that, both diachronically and synchronically, depict the tension between sameness and difference, between the continuities and discontinuities that comprise the Hellenic world. The seminar does not limit its focus to Modern Greece, even though it remains its foremost concern, instead it seeks to provide a forum for original interdisciplinary perspectives on Byzantine, Ottoman, and Modern Greece and the Greek diaspora. Seminar participants from a wide variety of fields consider all aspects of the post-classical Greek world as well as the reception and creative appropriation of the classical Greek tradition both in Greece and abroad. The seminar examines Greek relations with Western Europe, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus and the Middle East, tracing also the cultural presence of historic Greek communities in these areas as well as in more recent diasporas, in the United States and Australia. The seminar also examines the presence of diverse communities within Greece.

Website

Past Meetings

Co-Chairs
Dimitrios Antoniou
da2500@columbia.edu

Nikolas P. Kakkoufa
nikolas.kakkoufa@columbia.edu

Rapporteur
Dimitra Loumiotis
dl3543@columbia.edu

Meeting Schedule

09/29/2023 Zoom
12:30 PM
Screening of “Hussies” (Tsoulakia, 2022, dir. Despina Mavridou) and discussion with the creators
,
Abstract

Abstract

Tsoulakia (Hussies) is a coming-of-age story about two sisters living opposite lives, who need to make important decisions in a single night. In a frantic attempt to secure money, they come up against visions of both a traumatic past and a disturbing reality, while realizing how difficult it is for a family to make ends meet.

In collaboration with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) and the Program in Hellenic Studies
10/06/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
12:30 PM
“I lose my screams”: Unmourned bodies and performances of the lamenting voice from Latin America to Greece
Marios Chatziprokopiou, University of Thessaly
Abstract

Abstract

In the prologue of her Antigonick, Anne Carson harks back to Ingeborg Bachmann’s verse ‘I lose my screams’, and states: ‘Dear Antigone,/ I take it as the task of the translator/ to forbid you should ever lose your screams’. Inspired by Bachmann’s verse and Carson’s statement, my talk investigates recent re-inscriptions of Antigone in Latin American dramaturgy and performance, in close connection to the process of translating these Antígonas into Modern Greek, but also in relation to contemporary Greek performances. If ‘all reading is translation’ (Spivak), and ‘all translation is adaptation’ (Athanasiou), I look at once at the performativity of texts, bodies, voices, and silences, in order to ask questions such as: how and in which particular contexts does Antigone’s lament get reinvented? How and to what extent can such reinventions mourn disappeared bodies? Which lives are in each case considered to be grievable, and which ones are displaced from the official sphere of memorability? And further, in which ways can we look at these laments -and at their multiform translations- as embodied acts of resistance?

In collaboration with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) and the Program in Hellenic Studies


Respondent: Emma Ianni , Columbia University



11/14/2023 Faculty House, Columbia University / Zoom
12:30 PM
Greek Literature on Shifting Ground: Nationalism, Migration, and Belonging in the Modern Greek LIterary Sphere
Karen Emmerich, Princeton University
Abstract

Abstract

This talk will give the outlines of a book in the making, which investigates the ways in which a number of individuals writing in Greek from the time of the revolution onward have been either coopted into or excluded from conversations regarding “Greekness,” and likewise included in or excluded from the shifting category of Greek legal citizen. By placing recent mass migrations to and through Greece along a broader historical arc—an arc that includes a number of other migrations that involved individuals, including “Pontic Greeks” and “Asia Minor Greeks'' collectively conceived of as “returning” to their “proper” homeland—we can begin to de-naturalize distinctions between recent and less recent arrivals, and consider more fully the ways in which notions of national belonging have always actively embraced some while pointedly excluding others. Case studies include Dionysios Solomos, C. P. Cavafy, Mimika Kranaki, Ilias Venezis, and others.

In collaboration with the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Public Humanities Initiative (SNFPHI) and the Program in Hellenic Studies