Pompey's Hideous Head, Soon in a Well-Appointed House Near You: Interdisciplinarity and Its Malcontents in Modern Greek (Literary) Studies

[…] μήτε ανώτερος—τι ανώτερος;—άνθρωπος θα αισθανθείς,όταν, στην Aλεξάνδρεια, ο Θεόδοτος σε φέρει,επάνω σε σινί αιματωμένο,του αθλίου Πομπηίου το κεφάλι.

Και μη επαναπαύεσαι που στην ζωή σουπεριωρισμένη, τακτοποιημένη, και πεζή,τέτοια θεαματικά και φοβερά δεν έχει.Ίσως αυτήν την ώρα εις κανενός γειτόνου σουτο νοικοκερεμένο σπίτι μπαίνει —αόρατος, άϋλος—ο Θεόδοτος,φέρνοντας τέτοιο ένα φρικτό κεφάλι.

C. P. Cavafy, "Ο Θεόδοτος" ("Theodotos")

The gracious invitation to Ohio poses some difficulties. Firstly, I have elsewhere registered my discomfort with an unrestrained tendency to pronounce on the shape of the field, and to do so in print regularly, and not solely in newspapers but also in periodicals and journals. My reluctance to encourage this tendency stems from a certain fatigue with programmatic comments made about directions of the field with a frequency that far outstrips the practical ability to produce the less glamorous scholarly work of remaking the tradition in the image of this metacriticism (Calotychos 2003:12).¹ I have always believed this disproportion to be a factor of the hyperprofessionalization that comes with working in a small and precarious field ever conscious of the need for reconstruction, if not downright survival. Perhaps too, as a Neohellenist teaching in programs of modern Greek for twenty years, the frequency with which I have been obliged "to make a case" for the field at all levels—from justifying a syllabus in the department to defending the program's work in a larger institutional review—might explain my battle fatigue. I realize, too, that my reticence might also derive from my undergraduate schooling in the United Kingdom where, until recently, such institutional justification of the field was rare (only slightly rarer than the same phenomenon in Greece). Historically, one finds instead a different form of self-reflexivity in the United Kingdom, focused chiefly on the terms of diachrony in the Hellenic tradition. This was often occasioned by the assumption of positions and chairs at prestigious universities.² When more disciplinary reflexes emerged, these were often exercised reactively and, arguably, only at the provocation of scholars in the United States. I will address this comparative reflection shortly. At this moment, however, I want to clarify that I accepted the invitation because I share this workshop's specific and timely concern with the place of literature in the evolving field of Modern Greek Studies in the United States. Not that the issue of literature's place has ever been far from the very forefront of discussions of our field. Precisely because Modern Greek Studies as a field in the Anglo-American context has largely been represented by scholars in the fields of language and literary studies, it is not surprising that issues related to language and literature have often driven the larger discussion over the interdisciplinary field and the academic programs that embody it. So it is at a moment in time when more programs in the United States have come into existence in the last few years, and the larger programs amongst them are looking to expand beyond these traditional areas and to incorporate more disciplines into their program offerings, that the anxiogenic issue of literature's place comes to the forefront once again.

"Pompey's hideous head"

I do not subscribe to the view that Modern Greek Studies are in crisis here in the United States. However, the same does not apply to many programs in Europe (Pimpilis 2010). And a notable crisis descended upon "the well-appointed house of one of our neighbors," to cite the Cavafy poem I began with. Our colleagues at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies at King's College, London, surely had the fright of their lives when their university administration recently threatened to disband the department, liquidate some positions, and distribute the survivors across various institutional entities. The events were a shock to everyone, especially to those who, like me, received their undergraduate degree in the United Kingdom. I always knew there to be four principal programs of undergraduate and graduate study in modern Greek in the United Kingdom—at Birmingham, Cambridge, King's, and Oxford. This was a comforting thought—short of any other appreciable growth nationwide—but now this status quo seemed shaken. The menacing clouds that long threatened modern Greek programs and departments in the United Kingdom were about to burst and wash away or severally alter the physiognomy of...