Contents

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