Abstracts
YIANNIS PAPATHEODOROU
Mediterranean Negotiations: Cavafy's "Hellenism' at the Crossroads
Debates about Cavafy constantly emphasize the emblematic representation of the Greek past in his work. Hence, in constrast to stereotypical approaches, Cavafy's poetry and its uses since the 1930s, juxtapose state-crafted images of history with a notion of the "stateless nation” and of the "mediterranean hellenism”. In this vein, Cavafy's "hellenism” becomes a major rhetorical device for a hybridized narrative of national, historical and cultural identification, which includes mediterranean negotiations, cosmopolitan mythologies, de-territorialized diasporas and fluid borders. This alternative interpretation of the past is appropriated by modernist and postmodernist criticism, as a supplementary choice to the repertoire of national images of the past, and is also associated with contemporary debates concerning rearrangements of the imaginary relationship between Greece and the West. In this respect, the national past is reframed within the context of mediterranean cultural politics, their ambivalent connotations and metonymic temporalities. In my paper, I will focus on the variety of discourses which address Cavafy's fictional worlds and historical prosaics. My analysis emphasizes the complex strategies that fuse history and literature and construct conflictual representations of the Mediterranean which challenge and are challenged by the concept of "hellenism".
