This global core course introduces students to Modern Greek Studies by examining the kind of analytical frame a particular area (Greece, the Mediterranean, the Balkans, Europe, Greek-America) provides for interdisciplinary work. The focus is on how literature as a discipline works comparatively and how it borrows and differs from other disciplines in its forms of comparativism. Readings foreground moments when Greece’s position at the crossroads (between East and West, Ancient and Modern, the Balkans and Europe, Greece and America) become comparatively productive to particular fields (comparative literature, history, sociology, film, architecture, anthropology, ethnic, gender, and translation studies.
Authors include Makriyiannis, Cavafy, Ellery Queen, Xenakis, Kazan, Angelopoulos, Karapanou, Eleni Sikelianos, Seferis, Mazower, Walcott, Frampton, and Anghelaki-Rooke. The overall impetus for the course involves a prismatic inquiry of how conditions of modernity, postcoloniality, and globality fashion themselves in engagement with certain persistent imaginaries of Greece. The course can be taken with an extra-credit tutorial for students reading materials in the original.
