Modernism in Greece?: Essays on the Critical and Literary Margins of a Movement (review)

314 Reviews the members of Greek "theocratic" governments, and he assures the reader that the monks of Mount Athos will not involve themselves in the actual governance of Greece. The debate between Westernization and modernization, on the one hand, and the rejection of materialism and the return to the lost values of an earlier era that will erase the alienation created by modern technological society, on the other, has contributed to the revival of fundamentalism in the American Bible Belt and in Islamic societies, and has given rise to movements such as those of Khomeini, and of other extremist cults and sects in the U.S. and around the world. The quest for attaining political, social, and cultural purity through Orthodoxy as practiced on Mount Athos assumes the infallibility of a particular version of Orthodoxy, as well as the uniformity of opinion on the Holy Mountain. It also rejects the social, cultural, religious, and political diversity of Greece. Implicit in Kitsikis's Orthodox paradise is his intolerance of diversity. The search for ideological purity in order to restore values subverted by Westernization has proved destructive in the past, and will be destructive in the future, regardless of whether the new guardians of this ideological purity are monks from the Holy Mountain rather than political zealots from Berlin or religious zealots from Teheran. Kitsikis's views have had no impact on Greek society or politics. They represent the views of a small and- European, neo-fundamentalist Orthodox minority that hopes to increase its ranks because of the economic costs of integration into the European Community, and the alienation that is pervasive in all modern societies. Kitsikis is able to advocate these views because he happens to live in a Western society that values religious, political, social, and cultural diversity. It would be interesting to speculate how he would fare outside such an environment. Van Coufouoakis Indiana University-Purdue University, Fort Wayne Mary N. Layoun, editor, Modernism in Greece"?: Essays on the Critical and Literary Margins of a Movement. New York: Pella. 1990. Pp. 234. $12.00. Introduced by Mary Layoun, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, this very interesting and provocative collection of essays by various university teachers and graduate students on issues in Greek literature and criticism has a highly revisionist orientation, following the lead of Vassilis Lambropoulos, Gregory Jusdanis, and Artemis Leontis, from The Ohio State University. I cannot account for all the ways in which these essays radically depart from usually sacrosanct subjects and personalities in Modern Greek letters, but I will try to isolate a few. One of the issues dealt with is the bitterly debated question of ελληνι- Reviews 315 κότητα (Greekness), as distinguished from Ελληνισμός and ελληνικός. Another is the dominant critical and methodological approach to Greek studies by the present establishment, which, according to Lambropoulos, is Symbolist Formalism (see his Literature as National Institution: Studies in the Politics of Modern Greek Criticism [Princeton University Press, 1988]). Briefly, this is said to involve a New Critical approach with a certain hellenocentric bias, following classical rules of philology and criticism. Another significant departure from current views on Greek poetry and prose is the assertion that, with few exceptions, Greece lacked a Modernist movement both in theory and in practice—the non-organized Surrealist trend in Greece and the Anglo-Saxon Modernist trend both allegedly showing signs of hellenocentric conservatism. The targets of these essays are conservative (Modernist?) critics such as George Seferis, Zissimos Lorenzatos, Linos Politis, Odysseas Elytis, and Andreas Embirikos. The only ones left out are Nicolas Calas, whose radical criticism of the 1930s attacked the Palamas-Seferis establishment, and three poets—Nikos Engonopoulos, Nikos Gatsos, and Miltos Sachtouris—all of whom display, in spite of their daring poetics, signs of "hellenocentricism." Poets are the subject of two essays in this collection—one by Vangelis Calotychos on Seferis and Eliot, another by Kostas Demelis on Ritsos and Karyotakis. Drawing upon Seferis's "politics" and Ritsos's "communist stance," they show these poets resisting radical Modernism of the futuro-dadaist and Surrealist kind, and also resisting that preeminent characteristic of Modernist texts in general, self-reflexivity, i.e., the questioning of Modernism's own practices of...