{"id":2508,"date":"2018-07-12T00:08:36","date_gmt":"2018-07-11T22:08:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/?p=2508"},"modified":"2018-07-12T17:24:25","modified_gmt":"2018-07-12T15:24:25","slug":"gynaikeia-grafi-stin-ellada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/genikou-endiaferontos\/gynaikeia-grafi-stin-ellada\/","title":{"rendered":"\u0393\u03c5\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9\u03ba\u03b5\u03af\u03b1 \u0393\u03c1\u03b1\u03c6\u03ae \u03c3\u03c4\u03b7\u03bd \u0395\u03bb\u03bb\u03ac\u03b4\u03b1"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\u0391\u03bd\u03b1\u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03c7\u03b7 \u03b1\u03bd\u03b1\u03ba\u03ac\u03bb\u03c5\u03c8\u03b7 \u03ba\u03b1\u03b9 \u03b3\u03b9\u03b1 \u03c4\u03b7\u03bd \u03af\u03b4\u03b9\u03b1 \u03c4\u03b7 \u03c3\u03c5\u03b3\u03b3\u03c1\u03b1\u03c6\u03ad\u03b1: \u0392\u03b9\u03b2\u03bb\u03b9\u03bf\u03ba\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 \u03c4\u03b7\u03c2 \u039c\u03b9\u03c7\u03b1\u03ad\u03bb\u03b1 \u03a0\u03c1\u03af\u03bd\u03c4\u03c3\u03b9\u03b3\u03ba\u03b5\u03c1 \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf \u03c0\u03b5\u03c1. \u00abComparative Literature\u00bb \u03c4\u03bf\u03bc. 53\/2, 2001, 189-192, KASSANDRA AND THE CENSORS. GREEK POETRY SINCE 1967. By Karen Van Dyck. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. xi, 305 p.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Talking about gender with Greek women writers is like walking across a battlefield under fire. The notions of \u201cfeminism\u201d and \u201cfeminist\u201d in connection with literary texts have for a distressingly long time been taboo in Greece. Most Greek women writers are cautious about associating their work with deliberate and conscious feminist positions in order to avoid compromising their credibility vis-a\u0300-vis the (mostly male) critical establishment. This hesitating stance is deeply rooted in the contexts of Modern Greek history and, subsequently, in Greek literary history and the values propagated there.<\/p>\n

Mechanisms for expelling and excluding feminine discourse from the Greek literary canon can be traced back\u2014as in some other national literatures\u2014to as early as the end of the nineteenth century. From then on, a conservative and minimizing definition of \u201cwomen\u2019s literature\u201d dominated literary criticism, until the 1970s and the 1980s, when a literary and extra-literary framework for a self-conscious Greek e\u0301criture fe\u0301minine<\/em> was conceived. During these decades Greek women writers had to come to terms with certain Anglo-American influences\u2014Beat literature, for instance\u2014and with critical dogmas that\u2014 in reaction to the years under military rule (1967-74)\u2014established the expectation that literary texts were supposed to serve as either a political comment on the regime or a critique of Greek society from an anti-establishment perspective.<\/p>\n

Karen Van Dyck\u2019s Kassandra and the Censors<\/em> represents a long-awaited and exhaustive contribution to feminist literary studies in Greek letters. In her book, Van Dyck sets the stage by outlining the social context of the junta and post-junta years. Her detailed readings of three poets\u2014Rhea Galanaki, Jenny Mastoraki, and Maria Laina\u2014are seductive, thought-provoking, and daring. Her book represents an exemplary expression of a recent trend in Modern Greek studies, one that started to bear fruit in the late 1970s and early 1980s in the form of articles by Greek women authors and literary critics. By the late 1980s, the trend had matured into academic elaborations of the phenomenon of \u201cwomen\u2019s literature\u201d in Greece, especially after World War II.<\/p>\n

Van Dyck offers original and refreshing readings of Greek poetry after 1967, drawing as much on Anglo-American feminism as on French theorists like Cixous, Irigaray, and Kristeva, and relying on her intimate knowledge of Modern Greek, as demonstrated in her sensitive translations of her chosen authors. Her book begins with the year of the colonels\u2019 rise to power in order to provide a context for the poetic strategies developed in response to the politically suffocating times. Indeed, censorship serves as a pivot around which the whole structure of her book turns. She traces the impact of Beat literature on Greek poets like Steriadis and Poulios and explores the widespread use of a new technique of visual narrative that undermined both the \u201cdisinterested\u201d poetics of the Laureates Seferis and Elytis and the openly ideologically \u201cengaged\u201d poetics of Anagnostakis and Patrikios. Widely acclaimed as the \u201cgeneration of the 70s,\u201d authors like Poulios and Steriades used everyday and even sexually charged language, commercial slogans, and comic strips. For these poets political and social censorship became a formative force.<\/p>\n

With the emergence of the \u201cgeneration of the 70s\u201d Greek women poets (Galanaki, Chatzidaki, Laina, Mastoraki, Pampoudi, and Papadaki) developed visual narrative strategies of evasion, ellipticism, hermeticism, and deferral, which for the reader posed problems of legibility and ambiguity or indeterminacy, or, as Van Dyck puts it, undecidability and undeliverability. The production of meaning on the part of the reader is delayed by the opacity of the poems. Meaning is lost, disfigured, or denied as a consequence of the intertwining of the private and the political. Van Dyck links the poets\u2019 reactions to the beginning of consumerism with the poetic survival strategies that were devised during the junta period and continued during the transition to democracy. Moreover, the women poets\u2019 critique of political oppression entered a new taboo zone: the censorship of feminine sexuality. In the last part of her study, Van Dyck offers her interpretation of three poetic collections: she explores Galanaki\u2019s The Cake<\/em> in terms of Freud\u2019s Beyond the Pleasure Principle<\/em>; Mastoraki\u2019s Tales of the Deep<\/em> in terms of Freud\u2019s The Interpretation of Dreams<\/em>; and Laina\u2019s Hers<\/em> as an outstanding example of a feminine narcissistic visual narrative.<\/p>\n

\"Frauenkleider\"<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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My critical remarks focus on Van Dyck\u2019s use of Irigaray\u2019s \u201csubversive mimesis,\u201d the choice of Galanaki\u2019s The Cake<\/em>, and the use of parody in Karapanou\u2019s novel Kassandra and the Wolf<\/em>, which serves as an allusive leitmotif in Van Dyck\u2019s book. Regarding Irigaray\u2019s critique of psychoanalysis, Mastoraki\u2019s abundance of references to other poetic works could be interpreted as a \u201csubversive mimesis\u201d of the poetical tradition, underscoring Bloom\u2019s oedipal \u201canxiety of influence\u201d by ironically overdoing the quotations. A more extensive comparative investigation into that device of feminine \u201cexaggeration\u201d\u2014for example, in Mastoraki\u2019s text Crown<\/em>\u2014would have deepened Van Dyck\u2019s account of the evolvement of feminine textuality. Another of Van Dyck\u2019s chosen poets, Rhea Galanaki, argues in a luminous essay on women\u2019s literature (1982) that women\u2019s writing is indebted to the principle of \u201cexaggeration\u201d (possibly with hysteria in mind), which transforms everything, even the most unimportant detail, into something unexpectedly meaningful\u2014meaningful, as she phrases it, in the woman writer\u2019s very own sense, according to her own remembrance and to her narcissistic desire for herself. Galanaki\u2019s use of the term remembrance points to Plato\u2019s and, subsequently, to Kristeva\u2019s chora, where all meanings, all traditions, all literary and visual texts are scrambled and intertwined. In Plato\u2019s Timaios, chora is described as an all-embracing and all-containing space, shapeless, invisible, hardly comprehensible, indeterminate, an empty receptacle, a female\u2014motherly and nursing\u2014ground. Chora brings being and form into existence; she stands for the matrix of the representation of ideas, i.e., the vast Platonic cave of Irigaray\u2019s spe\u0301cula(risa)tion, where copies are reproduced from the original. Simultaneously, chora is not accessible to rational thought, only to nothos logismos \u2014dreams, visions, fantasies. Kristeva\u2019s mimesis of Plato construes the \u201csemiotic chora\u201d as a huge feminine \u201cimaginary\u201d; she reinvents Pandora\u2019s box as a place where syntax and punctuation marks malfunction or may even be suspended.<\/p>\n

Even by the beginning of the 1970s, Poulios and Steriadis had thoroughly subverted the meaning of production and reproduction, original and copy, by using \u201cready-made\u201d language. This subversion of a provocative male tradition was driven further by the women poets, who recklessly exploited literary and visual traditions. However, whereas male writers have mostly reacted (like Poulios, featuring Palamas in \u201cAmerican Bar in Athens\u201d) by oedipally slaughtering their predecessors, women writers have subversively and ironically incorporated fragments of tradition into their own texts, as if appropriating this very tradition by nurturing it like an embryo in their own textual body and then re-birthing it in a clandestinely altered way. As Van Dyck points out, this \u201cstealing\u201d can be seen in Galanaki\u2019s The Cake<\/em>, in Where Does the Wolf Live?<\/em>, and in both of her subsequently published novels.<\/p>\n

However Where Does the Wolf Live?<\/em> goes further, representing an even more striking example of feminine\/feminist reaction to censorship and the junta years than The Cake<\/em>: the dedication is \u201cTo my friends between \u201967 and \u201974.\u201d Because Galanaki\u2019s essay Women\u2019s Writing and the Cursed Pandora<\/em>, together with The Cake<\/em> and Where Does the Wolf Live?<\/em> in fact form an entity, the exclusion of the latter text from a book on censorship and poetry cannot be justified by simply labeling it \u201cprose fiction.\u201d It is a text in which the boundaries between poetry and fiction are blurred. Moreover, the symbol of the wolf corresponds hauntingly to that of Karapanou\u2019s novel Kassandra and the Wolf<\/em>. (The cover design for Galanaki\u2019s text shows the figure of a wolf with a panting red tongue, half visible and half hidden in the inner part of the book\u2019s dust jacket. The cover of Karapanou\u2019s novel reproduces one of Gustave Dore\u0301\u2019s illustrations of Perrault\u2019s fairy-tales, displaying the little maiden\u2019s fearless gaze as the central focus, facing the huge wolf.) Galanaki\u2019s text is a comment on \u201cillegality\u201d\u2014both political (speaking as an ideological opponent of the junta) and private (speaking as a woman opposing sexual oppression)\u2014especially when read in connection with her essay The Language of Literature Is Always Illegal<\/em>, also published in 1982. At the same time, Where Does the Wolf Live?<\/em> displays a mother-daughter plot and a feminist rewriting of Little Red Riding Hood<\/em> (a rewriting based on Yvonne Verdier\u2019s studies on the repressed oral versions, published in the Greek feminist journal Skoupa<\/em> in 1981).<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Van Dyck claims that The Cake<\/em> is Galanaki\u2019s most openly feminist statement; however, Galanaki\u2019s feminist intentions are even more explicit in Where Does the Wolf Live?<\/em> and in her first collection of short stories, especially Olga\u2019s Story<\/em>. Likewise, regarding the problem of censorship, it would seem inevitable to take Where Does the Wolf Live?<\/em> into consideration. Karapanou\u2019s novel is not merely an explicit and obvious parody of the regime\u2019s ph\/fallacies, but can also be analyzed as a prime example of \u201csubversive mimesis.\u201d The author \u201cswallows\u201d whole pieces of other texts, such as Lewis Carroll\u2019s books on Alice, and Henry James\u2019s tale The Turn of the Screw<\/em>; even echoes of Nabokov\u2019s Lolita<\/em> can be heard. I suspect that Kassandra and the Wolf<\/em> was so broadly and positively received by the Greek critical establishment precisely because it was not read as feminist, but as a political critique, as a parody of the regime. Its publication in the U.S., before the Greek text was printed, points to another context. Karapanou\u2019s novel can be projected onto metafictional texts like Barthelme\u2019s Snow White<\/em>, Barth\u2019s Lost in the Funhouse<\/em> or Chimera<\/em>, Carter\u2019s The Bloody Chamber<\/em> and Coover\u2019s Pricksongs & Descants,<\/em> where myth and the disintegration of language play decisive roles. This tendency is enhanced by Karapanou\u2019s subsequent novels, The Sleepwalker<\/em> and Rien ne va plus<\/em>. It is especially interesting that The Sleepwalker<\/em> (which was highly praised in France) encountered a hostile reaction from the Greek literary press. This carnivalesque, apocalyptic intertext with strong homoerotic overtones is impossible to decipher as a comment on reality, which for Kassandra and the Wolf<\/em> was still possible. Kassandra and the Wolf<\/em> refers extensively to two texts\u2014Carroll\u2019s and James\u2019s\u2014of the nineteenth century, which had already disrupted the tradition of \u201cmimesis,\u201d or realism. In Karapanou\u2019s appropriation, the rejection of \u201cmimesis\u201d turns into a feminine \u201csubversive mimesis,\u201d into Irigaray\u2019s spe\u0301cula(risa)tion and inter-dit.<\/p>\n

Van Dyck points out that Christa Wolf (other names such as Irmtraut Morgner and Luise Kaschnitz could be added) also appropriates Greek myth to political and feminist ends. Indeed, there seems to be a curious parallel between Greek women writing after the fall of the junta and Eastern German women writing after the end of the German Democratic Republic in 1989. Kassandra and the Wolf (1980) was eagerly appropriated and exploited by Western German literary critics because it so beguilingly opposed the regime. Like Greek women writers, Wolf also launched a new mythological project a few years after 1989, this time in the name of Medea, to cope with the challenge of social-political transition and the women\u2019s and writers\u2019 role in it. There is another striking similarity between Wolf\u2019s and Galanaki\u2019s approach toward romanticism. In No Place on Earth<\/em> (1979), Wolf returned to the early German Romantic movement, specifically to the figures of Kleist and the mostly forgotten Karoline von G\u00fcnderrode, staging an encounter that never happened historically. Similarly, Galanaki re-introduces the historical figures of Andreas Rigopoulos and Ismail Ferik Pasha into her own fiction, thus re-assessing the past with a fresh gaze.<\/p>\n

In her essay A Striking Contradiction: The Woman Writer and the Question of Power<\/em> (1986), A. Frantzi comments on women\u2019s writing strategies during the junta years and their use of Greek mythological figures. The essay, which is as important as Galanaki\u2019s eminent essay Women\u2019s Writing and the Cursed Pandora<\/em>, introduces Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena as three mythological figures who in divergent ways keep struggling to gain Paris\u2019s prize, which symbolizes the (male) power of logos. Galanaki, Mastoraki, and Laina seem to side equally with Athena, the intellectual daughter, and with Aphrodite, who stands for erotic and subversive discourse. This means that both options can be combined: the self-denying daughter, imitating the father\u2019s discourse, and the sexually and intellectually challenging woman, who endangers the patriarchal system by killing the wolf and donning his skin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u0391\u03bd\u03b1\u03c0\u03ac\u03bd\u03c4\u03b5\u03c7\u03b7 \u03b1\u03bd\u03b1\u03ba\u03ac\u03bb\u03c5\u03c8\u03b7 \u03ba\u03b1\u03b9 \u03b3\u03b9\u03b1 \u03c4\u03b7\u03bd \u03af\u03b4\u03b9\u03b1 \u03c4\u03b7 \u03c3\u03c5\u03b3\u03b3\u03c1\u03b1\u03c6\u03ad\u03b1: \u0392\u03b9\u03b2\u03bb\u03b9\u03bf\u03ba\u03c1\u03b9\u03c3\u03af\u03b1 \u03c4\u03b7\u03c2 \u039c\u03b9\u03c7\u03b1\u03ad\u03bb\u03b1 \u03a0\u03c1\u03af\u03bd\u03c4\u03c3\u03b9\u03b3\u03ba\u03b5\u03c1 \u03c3\u03c4\u03bf \u03c0\u03b5\u03c1. \u00abComparative Literature\u00bb \u03c4\u03bf\u03bc. 53\/2, 2001, 189-192, KASSANDRA AND THE CENSORS. GREEK POETRY SINCE 1967. By Karen Van Dyck. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. xi, … \u03a3\u03c5\u03bd\u03b5\u03c7\u03af\u03c3\u03c4\u03b5 \u03c4\u03b7\u03bd \u03b1\u03bd\u03ac\u03b3\u03bd\u03c9\u03c3\u03b7 \u0393\u03c5\u03bd\u03b1\u03b9\u03ba\u03b5\u03af\u03b1 \u0393\u03c1\u03b1\u03c6\u03ae \u03c3\u03c4\u03b7\u03bd \u0395\u03bb\u03bb\u03ac\u03b4\u03b1<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2509,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,50],"tags":[1595,1596,1597,1601,1118,1119,118,1600],"class_list":["post-2508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-genikou-endiaferontos","category-logotechnia","tag-comparative-literature-el","tag-feminismus-el","tag-frauenliteratur-in-griechenland-el","tag-1601","tag-1118","tag-1119","tag-118","tag-1600"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2508"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2508\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaela-prinzinger.eu\/el\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}