description
- Rarely have Modern Greek Studies taken into consideration any other than “serious” or mainstream works in order to establish a national “canon” and to analyze trends, worldviews or discursive strategies in Greek literature. Although disregarded by scholars and critique, there are some specific genres at the margins of official Greek literature that can reveal many things about national literature and related discursive strategies. The purpose of this project is to research one of the mentioned genres: Greek fantastic literature, which not only will demonstrate to be important by itself, but also to constitute an efficient departure for studying the processes of canon formation and literary censorship that exist within the institution of Greek literature and, at some extent, construct it. The project implies, first of all, a search for a corpus of fantastic works in Greek in the last two centuries. These works will need subsequently to be analyzed according to rigorous methodological tools (comparative literature, poststructuralist approaches, cultural studies). We will focus on some questions inherent in the existence of a Greek fantastic genre: the limits of national literature, the struggle between hegemonic and counterhegemonic discourses (in a historical, political, ontological or sexual sense), and the images of Greece and the Greeks supplied by these works. More specifically, the main goal of the project is to find out which are the strategies implied in the apparent censorship suffered by fantastic literature in the Greek canon, and their relationship with, on the one hand, the nationalist discourses that have often dominated and even determined Modern Greek culture, and, on the other, the role of literature as one of the most important institutions for the construction of a Modern Greek identity and nation. Modern Greek literature as a whole, and as a social function, will therefore be re-examined from the innovative point of view of a genre at the margins.