The dead hand of Philology and the archaeologies of reading in Greece

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Revisiting contemporary Greek film cultures: Weird Wave and beyond

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Strange homelands: encountering the migrant on the contemporary Greek stage

This article examines three examples from recent Greek theatre which stage experiences of migrants and refugees against the backdrop of Greece’s growing internationalism and multiculturalism. In allowing migrants to author their own narratives of border-crossing and encountering their new “homeland”, those theatrical endeavours, I argue, attempt to break the monologism of Greek theatre and monolithic understandings of national identity thus opening up spaces for encountering diverse voices. In acknowledging the risks and tensions underpinning the migrant’s presence on stage, the article also applies pressure to questions of encounter, authenticity, representation and self-expression of migratory subjects and interrogates some ways in which they navigate their precarious space of belonging and author themselves in the context of contemporary Greek theatre

Writing Wrongs, (Re)Righting (Hi)story?: "Orthotita" and "Ortho-graphia" in Thanassis Valtinos's Orthokosta

The debates over postmodernism have prompted some historians to condemn the way in which literary and cultural critics flirt with facts (or “facts”, to be more precise). It is rarely the case that literary critics turn on historians for shortcomings in their reading literature; even when, haughtiness aside, this approach might prove constructive. One such instance might be in undertaking a critical  appreciation of the response of leftist historians to the Greek novelist Thanassis Valtinos's Orthokosta of 1994. The novel, which considers events related to the Greek Civil War, provoked the most heated cultural debate in Greece, in the summer after its publication. This article focuses on the relation of Valtinos's challenging novel, and the ensuing debate, to the ongoing textual and ideological confrontation with that war. It places the issue in the equally anxiogenic field of historiography and literature, and considers how one reads and writes correctly about matters that defy such ambitions. The article maintains that a close reading of the novel's paratexts will show how the debate over these issues had already been staged, and theorized, in the book itself