tzanidaki writes, "Οι εργασίες εκπονήθηκαν από 2ετείς του τμήματος Κλασσικής Φιλολογίας υπό την επίβλεψή μου στο παν/μιο του Reading

Introduction to Modern Greek Literature
Lecturer: Dr Dimitra Tzanidaki-Kreps
Department of Classics, Reading University"

13 Απριλίου 2008

Course essay topics:

1. Examine the formal and thematic constituents of Seferis’ poetry with particular reference to his ‘mythical’ and ‘allusive’ method.
2. Discuss the concept of ‘Greek Hellenism’, a term coined by Seferis, and its application to his poetry, as opposed to European Hellenism or ‘Greekness’, a concept popular with the 1930’s generation of Greek intellectuals.
3. Examine Elutis’s poetry in relation to Greek and European Surrealism.
4. Discuss how Elutis restored the image of Greece as a synthesis and ceaseless assimilation of archaic, Byzantine and folk linguistic and cultural elements centred on the Aegean for thousands of years, thus departing from the image imposed by Western scholars brought up in the Renaissance-based classical perception of Greece.
5. Discuss how Cavafy subverts historical validity shedding his own poetic light on history and its events.
6. Theatricality, didacticism, prosaic verse, use of persons as symbols, contemplative mood, analepses (flashbacks) are some of Cavafy’s recurring ‘tropes’. Discuss.
7. The form of Dramatic Monologue as perfected by Ritsos’ poetry.
8. In Ritsos’ Moonlight Sonata what sentiments does the woman’s confession provoke/inspire to you and how these compare to the ones felt by the young man who remains silent throughout her long monologue.
8. Discuss the use of the so-called ‘narrated monologue’ or ‘free indirect speech’ - first used by the French novelists Flaubert and especially Zola and Maupassant - employed for the first time ever in Greek fiction by Vizuinos.
9. Vizuinos’ ‘The only journey of his life’ has been characterized as a ‘death study’ and an ‘elegy’ to the unfulfilled life. Discuss.
10. A confessional personal tone often dominates Ioannou’s short narratives also characterized by an irony that seems to draw on the example of Cavafy. Would you agree?
11. Ioannou’s work exudes a stark feeling of life lost in a modern yet age-old city. Comment.
12. In Tachtsis novel ‘The third wedding’ a male author has strikingly succeeded in writing a book in which all narrators are women. Elaborate.
13. “You will learn more about Greece reading Tachtsis ‘The third wedding’ than from a dozen of histories on Greece.” (The Times literary supplement). Explain why.