"W(h)ither the Neohellenic?"

The questions raised in this debate are indeed not exclusively "North American (and specifically Ohioan)" (Jusdanis 173),¹ but the way they have been formulated, along with many of the specific diagnoses and the kinds of solution proposed, most certainly are. The result is a series of contributions totaling more than a hundred pages in which timely (some would say long overdue) insight is matched about equally with revealing blindness.

Insight, first. It is true that the question, "Why Modern Greek?" (Jusdanis) is one that we are all called upon to answer as best we can. It is also true, as many of the contributors declare (and especially Mitropoulos, who has the most direct experience), that marketing Greek literature abroad has become extremely difficult. It is true, too (Leontis and others), that some of the old "pegs" on which literary translations, and literary and other studies of Greece, could once upon a time be reliably hung, have fallen off the wall. The junta, as a focus of liberal and/or left-wing protest, has gone; the prominent Greek intellectuals and artists driven into exile in those years have returned home. The harsh, exotic landscape of sun, sea, and rock patented by the self-styled Generation of the Thirties in literature has become a photographic cliché on tourist posters that have traveled the world; mass tourism and social and economic advances have caused the "real thing" to be displaced (inconveniently) to neighboring Turkey. Finally, in America (though I think only in America) the success of anthropological and social studies threatens to unbalance a field traditionally, and rightly, seen as interdisciplinary (Lambropoulos, cf. Ruprecht).

But, with the possible exception of the last, none of these developments can possibly be described as new. So why this amount of soul-searching now? Which brings me to my second theme: blindness.

It is only eight years since another debate in the same journal, launched by Vassilis Lambropoulos from the campus of The Ohio State University, proclaimed a new dawn in neohellenic studies and invoked the metaphor, from the natural sciences, of the "paradigm shift."² In the triumphalist rhetoric of those days, the new paradigm was baptized as "Skepticism." Those of us who, instead of being converted, clung to our old skeptical ways in the face of a totalizing and intolerant rhetoric, either protested and were publicly excommunicated,³ or kept silence. Now, after only eight years, here is Lambropoulos calling for yet another new paradigm (204). It is as though Newton had got bored with gravity after publishing the Principia Mathematica and had decided to go and look for the philosopher's stone instead. And the reason for stressing this metaphor is that, even supposing he had, the course of physics would have been quite unchanged. The next paradigm shift would still have had to wait two hundred years for Einstein (unless of course the philosopher's stone had turned up in the meantime).

But this is only an illustration of a blindness that is more pervasive. Every one of the contributors to the new debate, whose overall tone is markedly less intransigent this time, attributes the perceived "crisis" to external, unforeseeable factors. But why is there not the slightest recognition-not even a reflexive flicker of self-doubt-that the instigators of the last "paradigm shift" might themselves share part of the blame for the state of affairs they all now bewail? To take the case of literary studies, when was the last time, before the appearance of Karen Van Dyck's book (1998), and setting aside the continued presence of founding fathers of the MGSA such as Peter Bien and Edmund Keeley, that a scholarly book came out of a North American campus whose principal subject was the analysis, elucidation, critique, or aesthetic evaluation of one or more works of Modern Greek literature? The answer is not to be found in these pages.⁴ Those who are regularly cited (Jusdanis, Lambropoulos, Leontis), and others who have enthusiastically embraced the same "paradigm," have instead made a virtue of reconstituting literature as an instrument in the games of power by which other kinds of...