Necessary Fictions: National Identity and Postmodern Critique in Gouroyiannis's [To Asemochorto Anthizei]

As an aesthetic movement, postmodernism is selectively adopted and adapted by writers outside the mainstream of the West. In the case of Greece, due to the prevalence of the nationalist Modernism of the Generation of the Thirties, postmodernists have maintained a fascination with the notion of national identity. These authors have used postmodernist techniques to reexamine the meaning of Greekness and to critique the modernist ideology of national identity while reflecting more general postmodernist aesthetic issues. Because of the persistence of national identity in these writings, postmodern texts in Greece can be seen as "national allegories." This paper conducts a reading of Gouroyiannis's novel as a postmodernist attempt to reevaluate national identity as well as modernist poetics.