Modern Greek Studies in the Age of Ethnography

The evolution of Modern Greek as a field of study in the English-speaking world over the last thirty years or so can be divided into two periods. The first, from the late 1960s until the end of the 1980s, was dominated by the study of literature—specifically, poetry and prose. During this period, the majority of the people who taught and translated Modern Greek, the majority of those who helped establish the Modern Greek Studies Association and the first Modern Greek programs, the majority of those who became internationally identified with the field so far as magazines, journals, publishing houses, fellow scholars, or the general public were concerned, focused on literature and especially on that of the twentieth century. Pioneer academic work took as its object the eminent authors C. P. Cavafy, Nikos Kazantzakis, George Seferis, Odysseus Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos. Literary methods were deployed for the artistic, intellectual, or cultural analysis of verse and fiction that people assumed possessed great and universal literary merit. Approaches varied, but the emphasis was normally on the importance of artistic complexity and on quality. Even history and political science adopted similar criteria, seeking to find processes of reconciliation and elements of synthesis in the Greek past and present. Simply put, at that time it was possible (indeed, customary) to structure the regular symposium of the Modern Greek Studies Association around a single unifying theme. This era, since it was mainly driven by artistic appreciation, may be called aesthetic (although the term needs to be understood in the broadest possible sense).

From an institutional perspective, the aesthetic era was overall a successful one in that it established a solid cultural, scholarly, and professional record. In the public sphere, it brought modern culture to the attention of a wide audience, even making some of it part of the Western canon. In research, it produced the first scholarly studies placed in good journals or published with university presses. Within the academy, it created the first courses and programs in Modern Greek, achieving credible enrollments and a respectable place within departments, centers, and the liberal arts curriculum.

These successes were partly undermined by certain serious limitations that made their legacy problematic. For example, the taste of the era was resolutely modernist (favoring the aesthetic criteria promoted by the High Modernism of the Joyce, Eliot, and Leavis generation), and it therefore lagged a few decades behind the postmodern trends of its time (Lambropoulos 1989:10). Accordingly, its research methods remained allied to Anglo-American variations of New Criticism, thus ignoring a host of more recent approaches, from hermeneutics to structuralism. In addition, the pioneers in the field did not manage to train a generation of immediate successors who would inherit and expand their work in all its dimensions, especially the institutional one (Lambropoulos 1989:16).

These limitations were criticized in the early 1980s by a second wave of scholars of the aesthetic era who launched a comprehensive effort to bring Modern Greek closer to contemporary cultural trends (postmodernism) and philosophical concerns (poststructuralism) while at the same time attending urgently to interdisciplinary work, graduate studies, and the training of young scholars. The field was dramatically broadened to incorporate new issues and domains of inquiry. In short, critical theory and cultural studies had arrived. The reception of this development, which I have described as “the paradigm shift from empiricism to skepticism” (1989), was not always friendly. Suspicions ran deep that the institutions of literature and criticism, together with eminent reputations, were under serious threat. The larger academy, however, welcomed and rewarded this initiative, which won critical acclaim from outside before gaining acceptance from within its home territory. But its progress was hindered, and is presently in danger of being neutralized, by another development.

Since the early 1990s, Modern Greek scholarly interests have taken a different direction. The number of literary monographs has diminished. So has the number of translations published by non-Greek presses. No new names or titles have entered the canon of important authors and books. Literary scholarship has been largely neglected by other disciplines even though it was the first to champion poststructuralist...