We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
Konstantinos Hadzopulos is one of the most famous representatives of the Greek symbolism. He is an author of poetry, prose, theater translation and literary criticism. His work is still almost unknown in Bulgaria. The poems presented here are translated by me from his collections „Songs of the Desert“, „Elegies and idylls“, „Simple ways“ and „Evening legends“.
More...
An interesting narrative about a revenant found in the first chapter of the “Mirabilia”, a collection of marvelous stories by Phlegon of Tralles (2nd century AD), has been examined and interpreted by many. Scholars usually discussed the narrative’s origin, composition, and style, and also the vague identity of the main character of the story, a girl by the name of Philinnion, and her affiliation with ghost-lore. No one of them, however, attempted to locate Philinnion within the category of the restless dead which she seems to belong to, namely, ἄωροι – the prematurely dead. This distinct type of the dead, as is inferred from numerous ancient literary and non-literary sources, was believed to be especially prone to interaction with the living. In this article I attempt to examine the figure of Philinnion in the context of beliefs in the prematurely dead by means of which I hope to better explain crucial problems encountered by modern readers by answering questions regarding Philinnion’s identity and her rationale for returning to the world of the living.
More...
The article shows how some of Greek authors from different epochs arranged the problem of the language communication among the Greeks and the non-Greeks. This question emerged gradually, however it appeared perspicuously but in the Hellenistic period, and in time of the Roman Empire. If sometimes this problem was ignored the reason could be that from the time of Alexander the Great the Greek language was a primary one on large areas of the ancient world. Nevertheless, the non-Greeks unknowing the Greek language appeared in Greek literature up to the end of antiquity, and the poets and writers solved the issue of language communication in a more or less probable way. One of them was introducing a professional interpreter particularly in the royal palaces.
More...
“Report to Greco” by Nikos Kazantzakisis completely out of the genre criteria. It is not a novel, memoir, diary, essay, itinerary,or autobiography, but it is all of them.Between the prologue and the epilogue,the narrataire disappears, the story is constantly transformed, the author uses all available “materials” (diaries, letters,feelings, memory) to create fictional,intellectual, spiritual, metaphysical, historical and philosophical autobiography, changing the subject, discourse and form and turning the book into an amorphous autobiography and a key for the interpretation of his other works.
More...
This article interprets Aristotle’s notions of tragedy, considering each in relation to the function of catharsis, which plays a purifying role for the public. The article begins with an example from a hypothetical performance of Oedipus the King, and concludes with a hypothesis that overturns the concept of catharsis in antiquity, using in particular Aeschylus’s tragedy The Persians. Between the preliminary examples and the final hypothesis, the article also addresses problems of imitation, genre and composition. Conceived as a terminological reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, the article is a meta-criticism of Ancient Greek tragedy.
More...
One of the founding postulates of postmodern poetry is intertextuality – the idea that every text communicates with pre-existing texts, and thus that at heart the author is in no way wholly innovative, but original merely in style, in the way in which they shape a particular work from its components. Bible lore offers a rich theological culture with thematic and characterological elements sufficiently fertile for the development of literature, and specifically what is termed second degree literature (intertext, hypertext, hypotext). Transformed by literary context, diverse parts of the Bible are instrumentalized to portray universal truths with mankind as transition through psychological and social dimensions. The Last Temptation by Kazantzakis is a work that, having as its template the biography of Jesus as told by the four Evangelists of the New Testament (The Gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), constructs a broad history of Jesus’ journey from youth to crucifixion as the Son of Man. Here the author demythologizes, rendering familiar, humane and twisted with vices and virtues a figure usually painted as untouchable – remaining suspended in the sublime details of churches and in the crevices of Christian souls. With fact and fiction interwoven, the work reveals a finely-drawn history of the Israelites, probing on the one hand religious identity, profaneness, class differences and the consequences of such distinctions, and on a broader psychological plane the conflict between dualist forces in mankind – good and evil, misanthropy and philanthropy, body and soul.
More...
This article discusses the relations between the most known Albanian novel, The General of the Dead Army, Greek myths, Homer’s Iliad, and especially Aeschylus’s tragedies, Agamemnon and The Persians. Here we analyze how Greek texts (myths, epic poems, tragedies) have served as models to the Albanian author Ismail Kadare to write his novel. Moreover, we discuss even a function of an alternative catharsis. Therefore, the Greek mythology and literature model as an architext in relation to Kadare’s hypertext is seen in several plans: theme, motive, idea, function, etc.
More...
In this paper, I show how Achilles’ faults work as a lens through which we more readily see the problematic nature of ideals that cast war – and especially an aggressive war of conquest – in a poeticized and desirable light. I argue that in Homer’s Iliad, idealized images of war, which promise super-human glory, in the end, serve to undo and waste human life. I do not mean to say that in this archetypal war epic we find an outright critique of war. However, I argue that the Iliad holds its poeticized images of war in tension with the gruesome, life-negating violence to which these idealized representations give way.
More...
The purpose of this article is a historical and philosophical reconstruction of the problem of negativity in "Theogony". It is shown that negativity is not limited only to the doctrine of Chaos, since in the text of Hesiod there are other mythological images that are endowed with their apophatic characteristics. These include Erebus, Night, Tartarus, as well as "limits and beginnings". At the same time, Chaos certainly has a special status. Chaos generates other negative images – Night, Erebus. Consequently, the three mythological images are in genus-species relations, which means they are different types of negativity from each other. The "beginnings and limits", which also have their apophatic characteristics, are that which contains Chaos in itself. Consequently, Hesiod's myth contains not only an apophatic problematic, but there is an implicit difference in the understanding of negativity.
More...
By presenting the literary oeuvre of Amanda Michalopoulou over the past thirty years, we focus on the Greek-German relations in her fiction and autofiction, and more precisely the Greek self-positioning in Europe since EU accession in 1981. Her more than twenty novels and short story collections describe the political history of Greece since the 1970s and tell us the biographies of her westernized and highly mobile generation that had to process the worsening of Greek-German and Greek-European relations with the financial crisis and austerity in the 2010s. Michalopoulou avoids anti-Western and occidentalist narratives that became dominant in Greek society during the crisis and prefers to choose an inner exile in her latest novels “Baroque” and “Her Metamorphosis” by retreating from real time and space and performing formalist or surrealist experiments. This way, Michalopoulou is producing “glocalized” literature addressing key topics of modernity such as identity, gender issues or fiction vs. reality – while keeping a recognizable Greek cultural grounding of her plots.
More...
Review of: Bruno Currie, Herodotus as Homeric Critic, HISTOS Supplement 13, Oxford, HISTOS, 2021, 109 p., ISSN (Online): 2046-5963; (Print):2046-5955
More...
The paraenesis written by Deacon Agapetus, around 530 A.D., along with other specific works of Byzantine Literature, is part of a larger historical and cultural process. This sort of writing that belongs to advice literature, is liable to different ways of interpretation. The sea, a vital element in ancient Greek culture, generated a sea imagery. Classical images are transmitted in Byzantine culture, so it is not surprising that marine and maritime elements such as "sea", "storm", "rudder", "port", "ship", etc. are stylistically revalued in Byzantine didactic and ecclesiastical texts. In this paper, we propose an analysis of the marine and maritime images existing in the Ecthesis Deacon Agapetus, "the heir of a past that created literary models, to which he must adhere in the most loyal and ingenious way."
More...
Identity, often conceptualized as a continuum of the ego, lies at the conflux of both individual and collective interpretations of reality. The constructions of reality and identity are, however, far from being a purely cognitive trait; both are constructed through interaction with others, to the point where faulty interactions can lead to a lack of individuation, and the echo chambers of the Manosphere can skew a subject’s interpretation of reality. The postmodern turn of cinema after the 1980s, acknowledging this relativism, presented deeply pathological characters in a more nuanced way, giving way to ambiguity. Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman is a pathological character who is described as having pathological traits but who has nonetheless been adopted by the Manosphere as an idealized role model. This article aims to comment on the mythical subversion of the myth of Narcissus in the narrative, the identity problem that Patrick Bateman suffers from, and to disentangle the processes whereby the Manosphere is misappropriating classical myths, mythologizing narrative characters to phenomenologically construct a different perception of reality, and how these problems are linked with an unrealized identity.
More...
In this paper, I discuss two passages of Book 8 of the "Odyssey" in which Demodocus the rhapsode performs songs on the Trojan war at the Phaeacian court in the presence of Odysseus, who is instantly featured in Demodocus’ songs as a character and who comments on these songs at the same time. Having scrutinized the narrative structure of these scenes, I argue that they have been designed in such a way so as to invest Odysseus, an in-story character, with control both over the intra-diegetic narratees at Alcinous’ court and the extra-diegetic Homeric narratees. By praising Demodocus’ song and establishing his authority as a singer inspired by the Muse, Odysseus in fact enhances his own authority prior to taking on the role of the narrator in Books 9–12, where he tells the story of his return from Troy.
More...
This paper traces the reception of two towering figures of Ancient Greek literature, namely Homer and Sappho. Although both are viewed as epitomes of poetic talent, the fact that Sappho is a woman makes her stand out in the literary tradition and as a female poet she is perceived as an extraordinary phenomenon. The analysis of the reception of Sappho in antiquity, especially in Hellenistic and early Imperial epigrams in which her gender is often underlined, aims to show that while both Homer and Sappho are authority figures for subsequent generations of poets, they are not regarded in the same way. At the same time, Sappho’s unique position as a woman in the literary world results in a double effect: on the one hand, she is confined to the realm of poetry written by women, which almost amounts to a distinct category of literature, but on the other hand, the position makes it possible for her to become the fundamental literary figure and inspiration that she has been for women writers, artists, and activists for centuries, and even millennia, afterwards.
More...
The paper discusses the landscapes of Apollo, Hermes, Pan, and Demeter in the Homeric hymns, analysing how particular landscape representations articulate the gods’ functions and identities, their relationship to humanity and the structure of the Olympic cosmos. It is argued that an in-depth examination of the representation of landscape in Ancient literature reveals patterns of representation that contribute to a deeper understanding of the religious worldview of the ancient Greeks.
More...
This article uses ancient Greek epic poetry, tragedy, and lyrics to describe how the Greeks treated the Pelasgians in the Archaic and Classical periods and provides a glimpse into the role assigned to them by the Hellenic authors. The evolution of the ancient Greeks’ ideas about the Pelasgians in the Archaic and Classical periods is traced. The place of the ethnonym of the Pelasgians in ancient Greek culture is outlined. The references to the Pelasgians in epic literature are examined. The image of the Pelasgians in tragedy and lyrics is reconstructed. The method of comparative analysis was employed: a thorough review of epic poetry, tragedy, and lyrics allowed for a comparison of the specifics of how the Pelasgians were portrayed. Hypotheses are proposed for the differences in the portrayal of the Pelasgians. Homer’s influence on subsequent works is not evident. The study’s findings provide new perspectives on historiography and resolve the longstanding disputes surrounding the study of the Pelasgians.
More...
Fan Noli, this Albanian eminent personality in the field of politics, literature and religion tells us in his Autobiography that when was still a student at the Adrianopolis Greek high school, during the summer holidays in his village Ibrik - Tepe, read two of the most precious books recommended by '"uncle Tassi": The New Testament translated by Kristoforidhi and a history of Scanderbeg, written and published in Greek. The biography of the Albanian hero in Greek impressed him so much, that the personality of Gjergj Kastrioti would continuously lead him throughout his life.
More...
The essay Symploke as a figure of mimesis in Plato’s philosophy is an attempt to reconstruct two different models of mimesis in Plato’s thought. The first model (Repulic) is ontological and based on the notion of truth as manifestation of real being (eidos or physis). Here, a copy or imitation is but a non-being, an appearance, or „a weak being” that participates in the true being only to a very small extent. The second model (The Sophist) is epistemological and based on the notion of truth as resemblance between an object and a copy. Here, an image is good if it is perfectly similar to the object it represents. Both models of mimesis cannot be treated separately. Their subtle interpenetration can be seen in the Platonic figure of symploke (a „plexus”) from The Sophist, in which being and non-being, truthfulness and falsity unexpectedly show their paradoxical unity.
More...
