The Nationism of the Demoticisis and Its Impact on Their Literary Theory (1888–1930) (review)

Reviews 275 tionships, Sofer-Abraham and Abraham-God. As for the number of words per line, it is useful to know, for instance, that the author employs no variety to characterize the different speakers. More attention has been paid to rhyme in this book than has been focussed on any other modern Greek text; as for metre, Philippides announces that this is to be the subject of a forthcoming full study of hers. Apart from stating this intention, Philippides suggests many other possible avenues of study that could be followed on the basis of her findings. The reader is thankful that she has not simply published her tables without advice on how they can be used, as is the usual practice. The text of the Thysia is of a comparatively manageable length. What is needed now is for other scholars to follow Philippides' lead by proceeding to the processing of other Cretan texts (particularly the Erotocritos) as well as other important works of modern Greek literature . Meanwhile the aficionados of Cretan literature eagerly await the publication of Rosemary Bancroft's critical edition of the complete plays of Chortatsis and the book on Cretan literature and its context edited by David Holton. But I should not close this review without congratulating Ermis editions on a very well produced and easily readable volume which they have offered to neohellenists without hope of financial gain. Peter Mackridge University of Oxford Dimitrios Tzióvas, The Nationism of the Demoticists and Its Impact on Their Literary Theory (1888-1930). Amsterdam: Hakkert. 1986. Pp. ii + 492. Judging from the work of Herzfeld, Beaton, Lambrópoulos, Koliópoulos, and now Tzióvas' excellent Birmingham Ph.D. dissertation supervised by ChrÃ-stos AlexÃ-ou, Greek scholarship has entered the fourth and last of Vico's historical ages, the ricorso whose characteristic mode is irony. Folklore, the Klephts, Solomos, and Dimarás' history have been exposed and reevaluated in this mode; now it is demoticism's turn. Since this book is "not concerned with the nature of a literary text" (15), it is not an exercise in literary criticism; nor is it a traditional history of literature. Rather, it is a "new direction in history" in the ironic mode à la Ralph Cohen, one in which the supposedly objective " 'thingness' of the text is dissolved and its openness to in- 276 Reviews terpretation is highlighted" (13). With Paul de Man, Tzióvas assumes that " 'what we usually call literary history has little or nothing to do with literature and that what we call literary interpretation ... is in fact literary history' " (14). His new direction in history convincingly exposes as the controlling force behind demoticism's theory and practice an overwhelming ethnocentrism or ethnismós that he translates as "nationism" to distinguish it from ethnikismos or "nationalism." Tzióvas is careful to define all his terms against the background of their development. Thus we follow the emergence in Europe of the contemporary meaning of "nation" after the French Revolution together with the simultaneous emergence of the term "literature," and see how these innovations were reflected in Greece in (1) the choice, after 1866, of logotechnia to replace philologia, (2) the assumption that truth resides in the nation, and (3) the further assumption that the "national soul" is best projected in a national literature—all of which was summarized by Palamas in 1898 in his equation "ethnikó = alithés = oraÃ-o" (347). What happened between 1888 and 1929 according to Tzióvas— i.e. between the publication of Psiháris' To taksidi mu and of Theotokás' Eléfthero pnévma, the former setting the nationistic program in motion and the latter condemning its ethnocentric excesses —was the demoticists' creation, by virtue of criteria many of which were "determined by extra-literary . . . necessities" (283), of a "great tradition" consisting of demotic songs, Digenis Akritas, Cretan literature, and Heptanesian poetry: a canon that "reproduced . . . their own cultural image" (218-219). Underlying this creation was the demoticists' valuation of speech above writing since "speech, in contrast to writing, assumes a community of people . . . and presupposes the a priori fixed meaning of concepts, . . . precluding] any differentiation . . . between the signifier and the signified ..." (102). The first...