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2. Who has been Reading Masterpieces on Our Behalf? George Seferis, Makriyannis, and the Literary Canon

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Literature as National Institution
This chapter is in the book Literature as National Institution
•2· Who has been Reading Masterpieces on Our Behalf? George Seferis, Makriyannis, and the Literary Canon WE SAW IN THE FIRST CHAPTER that literary histories aim to institutionalize a national tradition of native master-pieces. As is usually the case, this new tradition has already been tentatively formed and outlined in a critical discourse which countered and opposed a prevailing orthodoxy by offering a number of strong revisionary approaches and readings. The work of the historian, in its turn, follows as an attempt to consolidate gains made, unify them in a comprehensive totality, and claim institutional status. If successful, his history becomes the epitome of a new orthodoxy and canon and provides the legitimate eval-uative measures of aesthetic appreciation. It would be interesting now to turn our attention to those revisionary readings which pave the way for rewriting literary history by changing the estab-lished rules of reading and appropriating texts on behalf of an emerging new discourse. I have chosen an unusual case where a work, in order to be successfully appropriated, had not just to be reread but actually invented and classified as a literary document because I want to highlight the complexity of the task and the possible range of the strategies employed. The case is not unique, in the sense that many national canons have included a few writers of nonimaginative prose: Gibbon and Carlyle in English literature, Emerson and Thoreau in American, Rousseau and • 44 ·

•2· Who has been Reading Masterpieces on Our Behalf? George Seferis, Makriyannis, and the Literary Canon WE SAW IN THE FIRST CHAPTER that literary histories aim to institutionalize a national tradition of native master-pieces. As is usually the case, this new tradition has already been tentatively formed and outlined in a critical discourse which countered and opposed a prevailing orthodoxy by offering a number of strong revisionary approaches and readings. The work of the historian, in its turn, follows as an attempt to consolidate gains made, unify them in a comprehensive totality, and claim institutional status. If successful, his history becomes the epitome of a new orthodoxy and canon and provides the legitimate eval-uative measures of aesthetic appreciation. It would be interesting now to turn our attention to those revisionary readings which pave the way for rewriting literary history by changing the estab-lished rules of reading and appropriating texts on behalf of an emerging new discourse. I have chosen an unusual case where a work, in order to be successfully appropriated, had not just to be reread but actually invented and classified as a literary document because I want to highlight the complexity of the task and the possible range of the strategies employed. The case is not unique, in the sense that many national canons have included a few writers of nonimaginative prose: Gibbon and Carlyle in English literature, Emerson and Thoreau in American, Rousseau and • 44 ·

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Acknowledgments ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. 1. Toward a Genealogy of “Literature”: The Institutionalization of Tradition in C. Th. Dimaras’s A History of Modern Greek Literature 23
  6. 2. Who has been Reading Masterpieces on Our Behalf? George Seferis, Makriyannis, and the Literary Canon 44
  7. 3. The Fictions of Criticism: The “Prolegomena” of Iakovos Polylas as Künstlerroman 66
  8. 4. Incompleteness as Damnation: The Poetics of the Romantic Fragment in Dionysios Solomos’s The Free Besieged 85
  9. 5. The Hermeneutics of Openness in the Novel: The Unsettling Modernism of Yannis Beratis’s Whirlwind 100
  10. 6. Writing Greek as the Only Language: The Impossible Postmodernism of Renos Apostolidis’s “The John of my Life” 127
  11. 7. What Makes Good Literature Good and Literature: The Politics of Evaluation Surrounding the Work of Yannis Ritsos 157
  12. 8. The Violent Power of Knowledge: The Struggle of Critical Discourses for Domination over Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Young Men of Sidon, A.D. 400” 182
  13. 9. Encountering the Poststructuralist Challenge, or Beyond Humanism: The Paradigms of Contemporary Greek Criticism and the Languages of Theory 209
  14. Postscript: Peri Hermeneias 236
  15. Bibliography 251
  16. Index 257
  17. Backmatter 261
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400859351.44

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. Contents vii
  3. Acknowledgments ix
  4. Introduction 1
  5. 1. Toward a Genealogy of “Literature”: The Institutionalization of Tradition in C. Th. Dimaras’s A History of Modern Greek Literature 23
  6. 2. Who has been Reading Masterpieces on Our Behalf? George Seferis, Makriyannis, and the Literary Canon 44
  7. 3. The Fictions of Criticism: The “Prolegomena” of Iakovos Polylas as Künstlerroman 66
  8. 4. Incompleteness as Damnation: The Poetics of the Romantic Fragment in Dionysios Solomos’s The Free Besieged 85
  9. 5. The Hermeneutics of Openness in the Novel: The Unsettling Modernism of Yannis Beratis’s Whirlwind 100
  10. 6. Writing Greek as the Only Language: The Impossible Postmodernism of Renos Apostolidis’s “The John of my Life” 127
  11. 7. What Makes Good Literature Good and Literature: The Politics of Evaluation Surrounding the Work of Yannis Ritsos 157
  12. 8. The Violent Power of Knowledge: The Struggle of Critical Discourses for Domination over Constantine P. Cavafy’s “Young Men of Sidon, A.D. 400” 182
  13. 9. Encountering the Poststructuralist Challenge, or Beyond Humanism: The Paradigms of Contemporary Greek Criticism and the Languages of Theory 209
  14. Postscript: Peri Hermeneias 236
  15. Bibliography 251
  16. Index 257
  17. Backmatter 261
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