Toward a Greek Ecocriticism: Place Awareness and Cultural Identity in Pandelis Prevelakis's Οι δρόμοι της δημιουργίας

The study of literature and environment ("ecocriticism") has done little to relate its interest in questions of place sense and place awareness to literary criticism's perennial concern with cultural identities. Pandelis Prevelakis's fictional trilogy, Οι δρόμοι της δημιουργίας advances a "literary theory" for doing just this. Prevelakis illustrates the inescapable and contradictory interrelatedness of place awareness and national identities in literary culture. He suggests that the unresolvable quality of their interrelatedness should inspire authors to engage in personal struggles resulting in literary output that negotiates ethical positions with their local fellow citizens in ways that take local traditions seriously, without entirely embracing them. Thus, he problematizes conventional notions of ithografia by foregrounding ethos not only as custom but in an ethical and rhetorical sense as well. This perspective can help literary critics explore and analyze the relationship between atomistic notions of place awareness and culturally mediated identities.