The aim of this project is an edited volume Re-Imagining the Past: Antiquity and Modern Greek Culture. The volume is primarily aimed at investigating the various ways the ancient past has been used, performed, politicized and imagined in Greece and elsewhere.
It also aspires to explore how certain periods or aspects of the ancient past have been canonized or appropriated in the modern period or how Roman poets have been read by modern Greek poets. The volume is the first of its kind and truly multidisciplinary, including contributions from historians, archaeologists, classicists, drama, literature and translation specialists. Its scope goes beyond Greece since it includes a number of papers with a comparative perspective examining, for example, the role of Greek antiquaries in early modern Venice, discussing Nobel laureates such as George Seferis, Seamus Heaney and Derek Walcott, comparing translations of Antigoni or looking at attitudes to antiquity in other countries. A number of papers also engage with recent developments in critical theory such as post colonialism and queer theory or the attitude of Marxism towards antiquity. My contribution in this volume is to re-assess ‘Philoctetes’ (1963-65), one of the most important dramatic monologues of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos’ poetic collection The Fourth Dimension (1972), in the context of the western reception of Sophocles’ hero. My analysis of Ritsos’ poem aspires to demonstrate how ‘minor’ literatures can enrich the worldwide reception of classical myths.
For more information please contact Dimitris Tziovas