Commentary
- Review of George Thaniel, Seferis and Friends
Upon reading my review of George Thaniel’s Seferis and Friends: Some of George Seferis’ Friends of the English-Speaking World (JMGS 13:371–373), I noticed that editorial changes and omissions had inadvertently altered the meaning of my original version. The last sentence of the third paragraph on p. 371 should read as follows: “More recent sources employing a theoretical approach are absent.” The last paragraph of the review suggests that I cast doubts over whether the genre of biography has the capacity to serve as an interpretive tool. My original version, however, argues quite the opposite. It should read as follows:
My reservations over Thaniel’s approach do not exclude the potential of “biography” to serve as an interpretive tool. Data alone are not enough; more important is the value a given culture ascribes to them. Since the mid-nineteenth century, biography has been privileged in modern Greek criticism as a most legitimate approach to understanding a writer’s work. Biographical narratives (e.g., Polylas’s Prolegomena to Solomos’s poetry) and autobiographical accounts (e.g., Seferis’s political and personal diaries) are valuable because they document the b¼oq, or the life, of the person in question. But the term b¼oq, Dimitris Tziovas has argued (“Residual Orality and Belated Textuality in Greek Literature and Culture,” JMGS 7 [1989]:323) also referred to “culture” and to the Greeks’ unique codes and behavior. When the question of “truth” arose, it was posed in terms of truthfulness to life ( b¼oq ) and to experience (b¼vma ). Inquiry into the b¼oq of a Greek writer should result not just in a narration of the person’s activities, as it does in Thaniel’s book; nor should it examine “the individual” primarily as an “autonomous subject,” as it has tended to do in Western cultural discourse. Rather, a “bio-graphical” approach should ask why the individual’s b¼oq and b¼vma are seen as representative of the nation’s. Thaniel would have done better to investigate Seferis along the lines that the poet himself encouraged in his own discussion of Makriyannis, whose b¼oq represented to him “a great part of the life of Hellenism”
(Dokimªq, vol. 1, p. 341).
The editor responds:
My apologies to Martha Klironomos. In this journal, as in others, exigencies of space sometimes overrule editorial judgment, which is a shame. [End Page 193]
- Education in Greece Today: Contributions to the Perennial Debate
Judging from the subject-matter of most of the articles under the heading “Education in Greece Today: Contributions to the Perennial Debate” (JMGS 13:169–249), one might surmise that the debate over education in Greece centers primarily on economic issues. In his introduction to the selection, George Psacharopoulos proclaims, “Today, two issues dominate the educational debate in Greece. One is how education should be financed; the other is what type of schools at the secondary and tertiary levels, and what type of curriculum, will best promote the country’s economic development” (170). These are repeatedly referred to as the “real issues” confronting Greek education. Why are these issues more real than others, such as, for example, the sociopolitical dimensions of curriculum and instructional reform, the role of education in structuring a national identity, or the role of education in promoting a democratic polity? Of course, it all depends on who asks the question and why. Clearly, the question of how education will best contribute to Greece’s economic development is one asked primarily by government officials, their economic advisors, technocrats, and scholars in education whose work is informed by an economistic, functionalist-structuralist paradigm. It is within this paradigm that the work presented in the JMGS, particularly the articles on privatization by Patrinos and Dimarogonas and Psacharopoulos’s introductory essay, should be situated. These articles are informed by the functionalist-instrumentalist model of neoliberalism, the roots of which can be traced to the “human capital theory” of the 1950s, and which today is espoused by neoliberal economists who advocate a free market economy, deregulation, the weakening or elimination of the welfare state, and the like...
