The Case for a Contemporary Kazantzakis

In recent years, the place of literature in the curriculum and in academic publishing has been steadily eroding. This has been true of the academy as a whole; it has also been true for Modern Greek Studies. From the mid-1960s through the 1980s, literature was the growth sector for our field. Today, new tenure-track positions are concentrated in history and other social sciences. Against this backdrop, we have the publication of two books on Nikos Kazantzakis by scholars who came of age during the heyday of literature in Modern Greek Studies: The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis (Princeton, 2011), translated and edited by Peter Bien, and The Terrestrial Gospel of Nikos Kazantzakis: Will Humans Be the Saviors of the Earth, translated and edited by Thanasis Maskaleris. Their appearance at this juncture in time begs the question: are these books a requiem for a passing era or, perhaps, the herald of a new one?

The reasons for this shift away from literature are multiple and complex: they are generational, institutional, and cultural. Though a full discussion of the crisis is beyond the scope of this review and would also be largely redundant given the publication of a special section on this topic in the May 2011 Journal of Modern Greek Studies, I want to highlight, for the purposes of this essay, a perspective that I believe has been largely neglected in this discussion: that of the student. For starters, there has been a general, culture-wide turn away from print-based media to visual, acoustic, and electronic media.¹ Our students reflect this transition. They come to college literate in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Twilight; Mad Men; and rap music. They are largely ignorant, however, about Wollstonecraft Shelley, Shakespeare, and Ellison. Not surprisingly, Film and Media Studies have been flourishing within this environment, and Comparative Literature Studies has been contracting.

Additionally, the rise of critical theory in literary studies has not been without consequences for our students.² Theory has provided many important critical insights, vigorous debates, and ample opportunities to publish, something that was of crucial importance during an era where tenure and retention decisions were being made increasingly in terms of concrete metrics. Theory, however, has also presented challenges to classroom instruction. At its best, it stimulated conversation and provided new vantage points for thinking about traditional texts. At its worst, it created layers of empty abstraction and emphasized micro-political battles that distanced and even alienated large numbers of students from the literary texts they encountered.

Perhaps the most important of the reasons for the shift away from literature, however, is the one that Gregory Jusdanis identifies in Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature: the failure to provide a compelling, contemporary justification for the study of literature.

While we have deconstructed inherent justifications of literature, we have neither been willing nor able to offer others in their place at any level of education, from elementary school to university.

(2010:2)

We have failed, in other words, to justify the study of literature not only to administrators and other decision makers, but to students as well. Literary humanism has been roundly criticized and rejected. It frequently remains, however, the de facto justification for the profession. It certainly hasn't been replaced in the minds of our students. They still come to the classroom hoping for enlightenment through encounters with superior minds. Too often they leave disappointed and jaded.

Jusdanis proposes a corrective for this state of affairs: that we locate the justification for literature in its parabatic potential, the sharpening of analytic skills that occurs as we move from the fictional realm of the text to the concrete social realm of its production and consumption (2010:3). The movement between literature as autonomous art and social contexts in which it is...