HISTORIOGRAPHY ÁLVARO GARCÍA MARÍN
Transcript of HISTORIOGRAPHY ÁLVARO GARCÍA MARÍN
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THE SUCCESSFUL SELF-CO�CEALME�T OF CA�O�ICITY: CO�SCIOUS
A�D U�CO�SCIOUS OVERSIGHTS I� GREEK LITERARY
HISTORIOGRAPHY
ÁLVARO GARCÍA MARÍN*
Psychology has termed ‘self-concealment’ the ‘tendency to keep secrets that are perhaps
too painful to recall, too stressful to reveal, or even too frightening to describe’. My
point in this text is to suggest that such a process of self-concealment is centrally
involved, with a varying degree of consciousness, in the development of most Greek
literary historiography, including a great part of scholarship inside and outside Greece.
After analysing some of the causes and the concretizations of this phenomenon, I will
propose a new model for Greek literary history from the point of view of the
hermeneutic and foucaultian approach formulated by Mario Valdés under the name of
«effective literary history». Throughout the text, I will be using some concepts and
elaborations by Gregory Jusdanis (1991) and Vassilis Lambropoulos (1985, 1988),
perhaps well known by Anglo-Saxon scholarship, but mostly unknown, or at least
ignored, by their European colleagues, especially in Greece and Spain, where the
empiricist paradigm, in terms of Lambropoulos (see 1989), seems to still dominate.
The first question we have to pose, then, is: what is concealed in this self-
concealment? What is so stressful to reveal and so frightening to describe in Greek
literature or literary history? We should search for an answer to these questions in the
seemingly simple and self-explanatory notion of historicity. A notion with two main
* This work has been produced in the framework of the Research Project FFI2008-06919-C02-01,
belonging to the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo in the Centro de
Ciencias Humanas y Sociales of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spain).
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ramifications when applied to Greek literature: the problem of genealogy and the
problem of canonicity, both of them overdetermined in their turn by what Walter
Mignolo (2002) has called the «colonial difference». Following Vangelis Calotychos, I
would like to invoke here the term «self-colonization» (2003:52) to help explain the
ambiguous mechanisms whereby Greek literature has been constructed by and in its
criticism through the last two centuries in the general process of legitimization of the
still unconfident Greek nation. If it is true, as has been said, that every nation is founded
on similar amounts of memory and oblivion, we should seek in the latter the key to self-
concealment. Literary criticism and historiography have been operating in Greece with
the main aim of obliterating the colonial difference inscribed in the very inception of
their nation, completely unaware that by this reaction, triggered by the colonial trauma
itself, they were perpetuating the very coloniality they tried to efface. History has thus
substituted historicity in the study of literature, and a static and statist tradition the
dynamic and discontinuous processes of canonicity. The concealment of such notions,
of course, is not an exclusively Greek phenomenon1. The reification of literature and
literary history, as well as the ascription to a stable synchronic canon, have been
inherent to the project of Western modernity and imply themselves a great deal of self-
occultation. What distinguishes Greece in this respect not only from West Europe, but
also from conventional decolonized societies in Africa or America, is a singular
postcolonial condition. Such a postcolonial condition problematizes in a rather peculiar
1 In this respect, we cannot but link our reflections on (literary) history as a process of self-occultation of the nation’s constructive mechanisms ―which implies a high degree of unconscious repression― to the conclusions of Stathis Gourgouris about the narrative of the nation (in Homi Bhabha’s terms) as an occultation of its dream-work, which according to Gourgouris constitutes the source of its construction or, better, of its imagination. Thus, he considers that «the Nation’s fiction is narrative only partially and tentatively, and a nation is fictional only figuratively, which is to say, finally, that the Nation’s narrative, the form that its fiction takes, is none other than the self-occultation of its dream-work turned into a narrative» (1996: 30). Likewise, «national history itself, as a specific genre of writing, is the most elevated form of a national imaginary’s self-occultation» (1996: 41). He contends, finally, that national history arises from the very internal demands of the national dream, and it is a text «internal to the process of imaginary signification, speaking from within the dream-work as if it were not part of the dream work» (1996: 262-263).
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way the historical and discursive relationship of the national culture to its European
counterparts, to the extent that this dialogue can be claimed to be one of the central
features in the so far mostly unexplored genealogy and historicity of Greek literature.
The term self-colonization (formulated by Vangelis Calotychos but first
suggested by Chouliaras and Nanos Valaoritis) tries to account for the assumption by
the Greeks, already from the eighteenth century, of the colonial discourses constructed
for them by the West Europeans and conventionally gathered under the title of
Philhellenism. The continuous attempts to provide the incipient Greek nation with a
European genealogy while at the same time rejecting its present state as an oriental
people incapable of standing the comparison with their ideal Hellenic ancestors had as a
consequence a perpetual anxiety not only about tradition and cultural continuity, but
also about the necessity to become, or demonstrate to already be, a European nation. In
the heyday of romantic nationalism, and on the grounds of Philhellenism’s basic
concern with culture, literature had necessarily to play a crucial role in the construction
of Modern Greece. Moreover, to find or to construct a national literature and literary
tradition was a way to efface the colonial condition considered by the Greek elites,
themselves inside a deep colonialist logic because of their Western education, as
profoundly shameful, since literature, as the self-representation of a historical people,
could only be predicated of European nations, while non-European ones, as Said
pointed out in his Orientalism, were incapable of representing themselves. Therefore, I
contend here that, despite any other, plural, literary cultures operating in Greek soil by
this time, literature in the modern Western sense was introduced in Greece around this
period, as a constitutive part in the process of national configuration and
Europeanization. Of course, I am not trying to say that there was not a textual culture in
Greek before the end of the eighteenth century. I am just suggesting that the institution
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of literature, such as it was shaped along the eighteenth century in Europe, enters
Greece only by the time of its independence. And it tries to become legitimized by
granting itself a long tradition through the composition of literary histories such as the
Cours de littérature grecque moderne by Rizos-Neroulos in 1827. In that moment,
literature in the European sense was not only intended to buttress the right to existence
of the Greek nation as the outcome of its historical presence, but was also, and I would
dare to say above all, conceived as the means to prefigure an imaginary for the nation
and to confer it a cultural homogeneity previous, and necessary, to the political one.
That this homogenization in the textual discourse was made at the expense of
some previous polyphonic, hyperethnic literary cultures in Greek, which were displaced
in and by this inceptive moment, does not seem to have been acknowledged by most
literary historians and scholars even today2. Neither has been usually observed that
some of such literary cultures, in a mechanism of canonical reorganization that could
also be described as epistemic violence3, were turned into the mere prehistory of the
teleological lineality of Greek literature. Perhaps the best example of this is the folk
song, which, despite its continuous presence until well after the foundation of the
nation, was excluded from the historical phase of Greek literature (and displaced into an
atemporal, ontological previousness to Greek literacy, though essential to it as the
guarantee of continuity and connection with Ancient times), just because orality did not
fit the requirements of the new European concept of literature and literary history4.
2 Here lies one of the main concretizations of the «colonial difference», as Mignolo has put it: «The colonial difference and, therefore, the colonial model can be described as follows: Western categories of thought put non-Western categories (and the distinction I am making here is a result of the colonial difference) in a double bind. Either non-Western cultural practices are so different from Western ones that they could not be considered properly philosophy, literature, history, religion, science, or what have you. Or, on the contrary, in order to be recognized, they have to become similar and assimilated to Western conceptualizations of cultural practices and social organization» (2002: 160). 3 On the concept of epistemic violence applied to canon formation in general, see Spivak 1988: 154-155. 4 «The literalization of oral traditions subjects them to political reinterpretation in any situation of inequality. More than that, however, fiat by writing subordinates the imagery of the folk texts to a larger version of itself, making “oral literature” and “oral” or “folk poetry” a pre-historic (and ahistorical) pre-
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Likewise, the strife ―inextricably connected to the language question that marks the
whole process of Greek national construction until today― between a purist and a
demoticist literary canon (and therefore about the appropriateness of one or the other
linguistic register for writing (national) literature), carried out principally along the
second half of the nineteenth century and central to the very notion of Greek literature,
has passed unnoticed by most literary historians, generally engaged through the
concealment of the defeated option in the reinforcement of the official position: first the
purist one of the so called Athens School, and later the demoticist one, still today in
force. This adherence to purism or demoticism by literary historians, succeeding one
another in time, implies in its turn an adherence to dissociated concepts of the Greek
nation and of literature itself, and thus attempts to fix a reified, ahistorical image of such
notions, obliterating the excluded elements as inadequate (i.e., non-Greek or non-
literary) or even never existing5. In all these cases, a colonial logic is at work: whatever
the particular understanding of the ideal of nation or of literature can be in each
moment, it is always (at least it is thus perceived by the Greeks) a univocal and
European one, trying to impose itself on the oriental multiplicity of the autochthonous
traditions.
text for histories of national literature defined in strictly literary terms (e. g. Dimaras 1972). […] In all these formulae ―for academic incantations are as formulaic as any― the analysis of culture is exclusively calibrated to a model of literacy» (Herzfeld 1987: 39). 5 «In nineteenth-century Greece, for instance, official culture was designated for the most part by the ideology of purism. The use of extremely archaic syntactical forms or the appreciation of purist poetry enabled the educated elite to acquire and maintain high status. Through this exclusionary means it protected its privileged position from outsiders. But the consumption of purist texts cannot be understood as a type of cultural capital because the social conditions for its operation were absent. There was no culture industry, no proletariat, and no mass culture from which the refined sensibility could distinguish itself. Purism denounced the vernacular not only because of its law status but also because it offered a competing version of national identity. Though purism designated itself the official discourse of the state, it posited the differences between high (purism) and low (demoticism) in political rather than aesthetic terms. Purism had broader socio-political goals than the preservation of prestige and allocation of cultural resources. Its pedagogical mission envisioned katharevusa as the national language and purism the national culture. In practice, of course, these plans never materialized, because of popular resistance and opposition from demoticists. But like demoticism, purism strived to indoctrinate the nation into its values, its aim being the production of Greeks» (Judanis 1991: 66).
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Ignoring the historicity and the canonic struggle implied by these facts6 and,
above all, supporting consciously or unconsciously the colonial discourse entrenched
from the beginning in the project of national legitimization, literary historians and
scholars, both from Greece and abroad, have presumed from the nineteenth century the
existence of a universal and suprahistorical notion of literature as the only horizon
where Greek textual culture can be situated. This idealization, common to other scholars
in other countries, not only conceals the exclusively Western European pertinence of the
concept, but also its eighteenth-century genealogy. Thus, from the first attempts to
historicize Greek literature, such a modern concept was uncritically applied to medieval
or premodern stages with the only aim to confer Greece a full European lineage. But
even in the nineteenth century, like Gregory Jusdanis has revealed, it is impossible to
establish a perfect parallel in the literary development of Greece and Western Europe.
The colonial difference is also, or mainly, present here. For, despite the fact that Greece
‘imported’ from the West by this time the institution of literature, it had to adapt it to
the special necessities of the new nation. No claims to aesthetic autonomy, central then
to French, English or German literature, could be made in a state in need of political,
social and conceptual self-definition and configuration. In such a context, instead,
literature could not be but socially functional and supply national representations in
order to construct a collective imaginary whereby the masses of Greek-speaking
ottoman population were educated in the national dream. Like in every Third World
society, according to Fredric Jameson (1986: 69), we can discern here literature as an
identity production machine7, as the producer of basically national allegories even when
aesthetic pretensions get involved.
6 On the canon as inherently and interestingly linked to simultaneously self-definition, (self)identification and (self)occultation, see Lindenberger 1990:xiii, Jusdanis 1991:63, and Valdés 2002: 93-94. 7 «The case of Greece is significant because its history highlights the relationship between literature (and art in general) and politics which in modern times, although successfully suppressed, has been only
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That the emphasis is on the national and the functional dimension is also
demonstrated by the wide range of genres that historians of Greek literature include in
their accounts until well into the twentieth century. Unlike similar European attempts,
limited from Schlegel on just to aesthetic and fictional texts (see Behler 1991: 11-13),
literary histories of Greece tend to include, from Neroulos to Dimaras or even Knös as
late as 19628, everything written in Greek, either in the fields of history, philosophy,
theology, natural sciences, or philology. The main aim is thus to show that, even before
the very consciousness of Modern Greek identity was originated, there was already a
literary production in Modern Greek language that attests for a long previous existence,
if only under oriental rule, of a Greek people capable of expressing itself as occidentals,
that is, inside the boundaries of a Western epistemological realm. What is here at stake
is once more the colonial difference that, trying to conceal itself, reappears in an even
more acute way, becoming somehow ineffaceable. But it also demonstrates that in
nineteenth century Greece, to a certain extent, it is a premodern rather than a modern
concept of literature that is operating9.
superficially undone. Until recent decades Greek literature has existed as an appendage to other discourses and has not been conceived as an autonomous sphere. It was introduced to serve the needs of the state and continued to be discussed within the context of nation, language, and Greekness. Greek literature emerged in the dialogue between a European notion and the necessities of the Greek nation» (Jusdanis 1991: 24). 8 Of course, I am not trying to equate here all these Histories of Greek literature as belonging to a similar or unchanged epistemological and ideological model. They are also a part, and even a crucial part, of the historicity of Greek literature, as long as they usually initiate or sanction canonical shifts and reorganizations. A main focus of my proposal, as we shall see, is thus the analysis of all the Histories of Greek literature in their historicity. 9 According to Anders Pettersson, the notion of literature as every written production operates both in most non-European contexts and in Europe until the eighteenth century (Pettersson 2006: 8). Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valdés have pointed out the romantic and European genealogy of the modern concept of literature as just aesthetic writing, linking it to the national model: «For eighteenth-century historians, it would have included all culturally accepted writing ―from poetry to philosophy, from scientific discourse to dramatic works, from history to fiction. The idea that literature as a category really includes just imaginative writing can likely be traced back to the German romantic creation of a national literature with aesthetic value or interest» (Hutcheon and Valdés 2002: ix). Through the whole nineteenth century and a great part of the twentieth, there was in Greece an important hesitation around the concept of literature, to such an extent that at least four signifiers were used to refer to it: φιλολογία, γραµµατολογία, γραµµατεία, and λογοτεχνία. Literary historians alternate all of them until well into the twentieth century, when λογοτεχνία seems to impose itself in the wake of the acceptation of the European notion of literature as just imaginative writing. For an account of these terms, and the political and
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This is the context, therefore, where Greek literature was being produced and
consumed in a great part of the nineteenth century, in a profuse and complex dialogue
with, or maybe even dependence of, the also ideal or constructed notion of Europe,
either in terms of convergence or resistance. For all these reasons, it is rather naïve, in
my opinion, to analyse Greek romanticism, for example, in mere aesthetic terms and in
a European context, without taking into account the crucial fact that some of its main
representatives in Athens were at the same time politicians who had to deal with the
burden of providing Greece simultaneously with political institutions and with literary
monuments. Furthermore, the singular conditions of Athenian romanticism bring to the
foreground other interesting questions about the genealogy and conceptualization of
Greek literature, such as the privileging of a Hellenic concept of Greekness through the
utilization of katharevousa over demotic, or the difficulties its practitioners found to
incept a European literary culture in a place where no social or economical conditions
for its rise were found10.
However, we should not hypostasize in our turn this nineteenth-century Greek
literary culture. It is not static, totalizing or internally homogeneous, but simply one
stage in the historicity of Greek literature, soon readjusted as well by a canonical and
conceptual shift that privileged both a demotic linguistic register and a somehow more
aesthetic notion of literature. This change of paradigm, whose complexity I cannot
detail here, concluded successfully with the Generation of the 30s, whose program
seems to have imposed itself as the hegemonic framework for the study of Greek
literature until today (see Jusdanis 1991: 87). The colonial difference or the political and
national function of literature have not disappeared with it at all, however. But its
functional connotations implicit in every conceptualization of literature in Greek literary history, see Jusdanis 1991: 107-121. 10 For an account of these questions and the awareness of such difficulties in the works of Rangavis or Panagiotis Soutsos, see Güthenke 2008 : 140-190.
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claims for the cultural continuity and homogeneity of Hellenism have managed to
conceal previous stages, geographically or aesthetically alternative versions, and even
the very historicity of Greek literature. We can conclude then, following the logic of the
disemia postulated by Michael Herzfeld, that every imposition of a new, officialized,
literary paradigm, tends to erase or conceal the variability of social practices existing
before by trying to superimpose on their inherent historicity a reified history. It is not a
coincidence, in this sense, that after every canonical shift, a number of histories of
literature appear to sanction the change. This is how canons, as a part of the
epistemological project of European modernity to which also the disciplines of history
or literature in their modern sense belong, work. They cannot be abstracted from the
(post)colonial operation that leads Greece to assume and internalize a substantially
Western and univocal notion of textual culture at the expense of previous, decentred,
multilingual, plurinational and interclass textualities. By their very nature, such
premodern or non-European textualities do not admit or require canonicity ―not at
least in the same terms that modern Western Literature (capitalized) does.
In a time when literary history has been accused of thus bespeaking the
epistemic and ideological values that buttressed the European colonial project of
modernity, I want to propose a new kind of history of literature that, problematizing the
definitions of both history and literature from up-to-date methodological perspectives,
be able to account for the historicity, the genealogy, and the colonial difference of
Greek literature. Unfortunately, I cannot review here with detail previous histories of
Greek literature11. As far as I know, after Professor Kehagioglou’s article in 1980, no
systematic analysis of them has been attempted. However, in a general overview, we
can easily appreciate that, apart from a recent sample of what David Perkins has termed
11 Those used for the preparation of this work, however, can be found in the final bibliography.
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«encyclopaedic literary history»12 ―the Λεξικό Νεοελληνικής Λογοτεχνίας―, the most
works in this genre partake of a political aim to sustain hegemonic discourses on nation,
literature, the canon, the language, or history itself, in order to normalize them and make
them appear as natural. They usually advocate for an uninterrupted continuity of
Modern Greek literature from Ancient Greece, the Middle Ages or 1821, for a
teleological and organicist development of the Greek nation in its textual culture, for a
deterministic belief in the genius of the Greek people or language, and for an idealistic
and universal notion of literature. No clear methodological justifications are provided
for such choices that, notwithstanding, respond to a political agenda trying not to
describe but to delimit a field perceived as substantial to the yet unconfident identity of
the young nation. I want to make it clear that I am not referring here just to works as old
as Voutieridis’s or Dimaras’s, but even to texts as recent as 2009, when a History of
Modern Greek Literature based on the same outdated principles was published in Spain
(Villar 2009).
It has been mainly these works, whose conclusions have been assumed by most
Greek literary scholarship ―let alone the educational system―, that have promoted the
self-concealment I am talking here about. My proposal, on the contrary, starting from
the awareness that no such work can claim for a completely objective and unprejudiced
point of view, and that every literary history implies necessarily a certain ideological
agenda, will aim at revealing some of the processes concealed in the classic texts, and
thus at resituating Greek literature with respect to both Europe and their closest
neighbours. I agree partially with Roderick Beaton when he says that Greek literature is
neither minor, like Gregory Jusdanis claimed in a time when this term was in its heyday,
nor marginal, like some of Lambropoulos’s works seem to imply (Beaton 1994: 10-11).
12 For this notion, see Perkins 1992: 53-60.
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However, I think there is not better way to minorize or marginalize it that trying to
make it just a European one expected to have a perfectly parallel development to that of
France or England. That responds just to a model of failure or underdevelopment
inherent to the discourse of self-colonization. The notion of literary cultures I have been
using so far, instead, accounts for the different conceptions of textual culture around the
world and inside a single tradition, overcoming as long as it is possible the
hierarchization implicit in the colonial generalization of modern Western aesthetic
literature. In this sense, I contend Greek literature to be a set of literary cultures at the
same time independent and interconnected both mutually and to neighbouring ones. As
such, it is as central or as marginal as any other.
The concept of literary cultures, elaborated by Mario Valdés in the framework of
the hermeneutic and genealogic approach denominated by him «effective literary
history»13, allows us to overcome both the universalization of the term literature and the
national model14, especially inappropriate in my opinion to Greece. Literary cultures do
not respect the state boundaries since they are usually local or polyethnic, multilingual
and untotalizable. From this point of view, they would be able to account as much for
the diversity of literary conceptions, practices and contexts in the pre-revolutionary
Greek diaspora, as for the nineteenth and twentieth-century multinational and
13 The source of this term is not only Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte, but also its reelaboration in Ricoeur’s effective history. 14 Many similar proposals have been recently made. John Frow, for example, writes that «it is no longer possible to think in terms of a pregiven field of the literary which would form its proper and unproblematically constituted object; and there is no consensual structure of value which would provide the ground for an assured practice of interpretation. At the same time, however, other possibilities become available: for an opening of the practice of textual history to new configurations drawn from the whole domain of writing; for an opening of the question of value to an analysis of the institutional formations through which literature, the literary event, and literary value are constructed. If the demand for a new literary history is the wrong one, there is still the chance to begin again with the writing of the multiple histories of textuality» (Frow 1991: 142). Linda Hutcheon, in her turn, proposes a new comparative or transnational literary history, polyphonic and untotalizable, in order to challenge the old national model (Hutcheon 2002: 26). In similar terms seems to work the proposal of Anders Pettersson for a «transcultural literary history», where different cultural and temporal notions of literature should be considered together (Pettersson 2006). For the importance of literary cultures in a literary history acknowledging the colonial difference, see also Mignolo 2002: 168.
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multilingual Greek colonies in North Africa or Anatolia, as well as for the modern
integration of Greek textuality in a world literature dominated by the global market.
Effective literary history as theorized by Mario Valdés and put into practice in
three recent major works: Literary Cultures of Latin America (Valdés and Kadir 2004),
History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer
2004-2005), and Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia
(Pollock 2003), entails recognition of the colonial difference, awareness of the
genealogical and discursive implications in the institutionalization of literature, and a
hermeneutical approach that stresses historicity over teleological or positivistic
presentations. An effective literary history of Greece or the Greek language would have
then to emphasize not continuities but discontinuities in the conceptual, geographical,
discursive, institutional, or linguistic realms. But, unlike the proposals based just in
foucaultian premises, such as Lambropoulos’s (1985: 25)15, these discursive
discontinuities would not be conceived as moments of rupture and historical
refoundation in a chronological line, but as the disperse components that by their
juxtaposition might configure a complex and polyphonic image of Greek literature and
at the same time deconstruct its very possibility as an organic and epistemological
object.
As we can see from the examples, all of them focusing not on single traditions
but on geographic or geopolitical constellations of linguistic traditions, such an
approach attempts inherently to overcome the national model and context, trying to de-
emphasize the national myths and to highlight analogies and points of contact, as well
15 Gregory Jusdanis has also proposed a new kind of Greek literary history, one focusing especially on the minor condition of Greek literature with respect to European ones (Jusdanis 1990: 18-19). The main problem in this proposal, in my opinion, lies in the difficult definition of European or major literatures as opposed to marginal or minor ones. The concept of literary cultures I am proposing here dismantles this hierarchization by equating all textual traditions, not failing though to acknowledge the unequal colonial relationships implied in their construction, development and reception.
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as hybrid and marginal phenomena that traditional national histories have ignored or
deliberately suppressed. From this point of view, I consider that a history of literary
cultures of South-Eastern Europe or the Balkans, including Turkey, would be highly
relevant and would shed light on issues overlooked so far in Modern Greek Studies,
such as the polyethnic and multilingual condition of many Greek literary phenomena
during the last three centuries, or the interbalkan connections in the supposedly singular
or belated development of some literary trends and genres. On the other hand, a history
of the literary cultures of Hellenism, mostly language-oriented, would decentre the
current Helladism of critics and historians by including Greek textual production in
Asia Minor, Egypt, Russia, America or Australia, as well as examining its connection in
those places to non-Greek traditions. In either case, hypostasized distinctions between
high and low culture as for the genres, institutions, production or reception should be
challenged through the highlighting and analysis of the discursive mechanisms and
implications of such modern categories.
A study of literary cultures is not based in the works or the authors themselves.
It is not an inventory of texts or interpretations, but a presentation of the changing
conditions whereby literature is conceived, produced, and consumed in a given place
and time. Effective literary history works with texts not as immutable objects, but as
historical events of production and reception, and thus aims to inform, situate, and
contextualize the literature of the past in literary culture. It is about a re-reading of
readings and a reading of re-readings, both of works and of literary systems. That is
why it should include previous literary histories as moments in the historicity of the
conceptualization and institutionalization of literature, as well as the shifts in the canon
that determine the transition between successive or co-existing literary cultures. The
model of presentation should not be a chronological one, but lie on four points of
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interference or cultural nodes whereby literary change can somehow be explained:
temporal nodes, such as 1880 or 1922 could be for Greece; topographical ones, for
which the cities of Thessalonica, Esmirna or Alexandria might be proposed, institutional
nodes such as criticism or journals, and finally figurative nodes such as Greekness or
the image of the poet.
The proposal by Mario Valdés, philosophically and methodologically very
complex, would need further explication. This brief exposition must suffice, however,
to transmit the idea that we should and can supersede once and for all the
methodological laziness still sustaining the self-concealment of historicity visible in
most Greek literary historiography and criticism. Effective literary history, with its
focus on literary cultures and not on Literature as a transcendent, hypostasized realm of
(national) Culture, provides an opportunity we should be able to take advantage of.
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