O Μιχαήλ Μητσάκης (1863;-1916) υπήρξε τακτικός συνεργάτης των αθηναϊκών εφημερίδων κατά την περίο... more O Μιχαήλ Μητσάκης (1863;-1916) υπήρξε τακτικός συνεργάτης των αθηναϊκών εφημερίδων κατά την περίοδο της μεγαλύτερης ακμής τους. Οι δημοφιλέστατες στήλες του, με υπότιτλο «Ταξιδιωτικαί Σημειώσεις» και «Αθηναϊκαί Σελίδες», μαρτυρούν πως σημαντικό μέρος της κειμενικής του παραγωγής συστήνεται ως περιδιάβαση στον χώρο. Στις «Αθηναϊκές Σελίδες» ως «επιστήμων-flâneur» μεταφέρει στα φύλλα της εφημερίδας στιγμιότυπα από το αστικό νεωτερικό τοπίο, ενώ στις «Ταξιδιωτικές Σημειώσεις» ως εφημεριδικός ανταποκριτής διατρέχει την ελληνική επαρχία και καταγράφει «όσας [εντυπώσεις] επρόφθασε ν’ αρπάση ταχύ το βλέμμα, ενώ ο σιδηρόδρομος επέρα σπεύδων». Ο Μητσάκης ήταν από τους πιο πολυταξιδεμένους συγγραφείς της «ομαδικής εξόρμησης» εφημεριδικών ανταποκριτών που πραγματοποιήθηκε στην Ελλάδα περί τα τέλη του 19ου αιώνα. Αυτοχαρακτηριζόμενος «δημοσιογραφικός βοημός», «νομάς» και «αθίγγανος της δημοσιογραφίας», αισθανόταν πάντοτε ξένος εντός της συγγραφικής του ταυτότητας, με «διακρίνοντα χαρακτηριστικά του […] την κίνησι[ν], την περιπλάνησι[ν], την αδιάκοπον μετάστασι[ν] από τόπου εις τόπον». Κείμενα από την τελευταία δημοσιογραφική αποστολή του, με υπότιτλο «Ταξιδιωτικαί Σημειώσεις: Εικόνες και Σκηναί», δημοσιεύτηκαν στη δημοφιλέστατη αθηναϊκή εφημερίδα Ακρόπολις από τις 2 έως τις 13 Ιανουαρίου 1895. Ο ίδιος ο Βλάσης Γαβριηλίδης, εκδότης της Ακροπόλεως, συνόδευσε τη δημοσίευση των «Ταξιδιωτικών Σημειώσεων» με ένα εγκωμιαστικό σχόλιο, στο οποίο εξήρε την «πρωτοτυπίαν της γλώσσης και του ύφους» του «καινολόγου» και «νεωτεριστού» συγγραφέα, χαρακτηρίζοντάς τον ως «ζωντανόν κινητοσκόπιον». Στο αμέσως επόμενο φύλλο δημοσιεύτηκε ίσως το πιο διαβασμένο κείμενο της ταξιδιωτικής σειράς, ο Αυτόχειρ. Η ανάγνωση του Αυτόχειρος επικυρώνει την κρίση του Γαβριηλίδη για τις «Ταξιδιωτικές Σημειώσεις» του Μητσάκη: Στο αφήγημα, που ξεκινά και καταλήγει σ’ ένα πατραϊκό ξενοδοχείο, ο νεωτεριστής συγγραφέας, σαν μια μοντέρνα μηχανή καταγραφής της κίνησης, συμπλέκει την εμπειρία της άσκοπης περιπλάνησης με τη γραφή.
In Greece’s most well-known thesaurus of neologisms from the late nineteenth century, two compell... more In Greece’s most well-known thesaurus of neologisms from the late nineteenth century, two compelling terms are detected: syllogomania (‘collection frenzy’) and bibliomania (‘book frenzy’). Both very vividly illustrate the cultural landscape of fin-de-siècle Greece. The institutionalization of archives and the consolidation of the book culture were important aspects of the new-born state’s cultural politics and poetics. It is in this context that instances of literary discourse thematizing archival destruction appeared, taking the form of symbolic resistance against the canonization and institutionalization of memory. In the two texts discussed in the article, ‘Kostakis’s Manuscripts’ by Alexandra Papadopoulou (1896) and ‘Old Papers’ by Mikhail Mitsakis (1884), the laws of order, accumulation and preservation are opposed by a desire for disorder and dispersion. In the former, the manuscripts of a dead author are burnt to ashes by his girlfriend, who wishes to save them from being published. In the latter, a man scatters his writings in the wind, as a way of reactivating his memory. Both texts enact the cultural ambivalences of fin-de-siècle modernity by narrating the constant tension between, on one hand, canon and archive; and, on the other, waste and destruction. Through the destruction of fictional archives, the possibility of a counter-memory is claimed. Papadopoulou’s and Mitsakis’s claim of an overturning of the dynamics between cultural memory and oblivion can be considered as a call for questioning the laws that govern cultural memory’s circulation and for repositioning their auctorial figures in the history of Modern Greek literature.
Τhe idea of destroying the iconic national symbol of the Parthenon is scandalous—or even inconcei... more Τhe idea of destroying the iconic national symbol of the Parthenon is scandalous—or even inconceivable. The Parthenon was monumentalized in the nineteenth century and, ever since, it has borne the traces of the acts that discursively and institutionally constructed it or destroyed it. Literature, as an agent of institutionalization and resistance, has both contributed to, and resisted, the cultural practice of monumentalization. The Parthenon Bomber (1996/2010), a novella by Christos Chrissopoulos, is inscribed in a lineage of Modern Greek literary texts resisting monumentalization. Chrissopoulos's novella, originally published in 1996 and revised in 2010, asks the question Can literature be explosive? and challenges literature's relationship to historicity and contingency. At a moment when Greece's connection to its classical past is being reconfigured under the impact of the Greek crisis and of national and international responses to it, the novella's significance in the present deserves renewed attention. By blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, The Parthenon Bomber performs an act of resistance to monumentalization in real life and introduces the possibility of a New Parthenon.
The discourses of criticism are being transformed at the same time that our writing mechanisms ar... more The discourses of criticism are being transformed at the same time that our writing mechanisms are undergoing a major change. Reflecting on the relationship between our writing tools and our perceptions and taking programmability and interactivity as the main characteristics of new writing media, this essay attempts an approach to how that which is new in scriptural techniques, that is to say, programmability and interactivity, are undoing our perception of such notions as the archive and embodiment. The two works which are here commented contain the conditions of un-writing their written trace; the interactor who makes the text appear paradoxically also causes its disappearance by acts of destruction or dispersion. In the case of AGRIPPA (A Book of The Dead), William Gibson reserves for the reader the role of the destructor of the text through an extreme gesture of interaction which destines the work to erasure and calls for the retrieval of a text that contains the conditions of its own death. In the case of Garry Hill‘s Writing Corpora, the body‘s acts are created of, create and are turned against writing, they embody and disperse the writing traces, while the body experiences the shift from inscription to embodiment.
Les Antiquités multiples de la Modernité grecque (XIXe-XXIe siècles) The Multiple Antiquities of Greek Modernity (19th - 21st centuries) Colloque international / International Conference, 2020
As soon as the Modern Greek state and its institutions were founded, the Acropolis was monumental... more As soon as the Modern Greek state and its institutions were founded, the Acropolis was monumentalized to stand on the unstable grounds between idealization and history, incredulity and reality. Monumentalization enveloped the Acropolis with a sense of unreality echoed in reports by famous European writers of the time, which were translated in nineteenth century Greek periodicals and dominated the discourse about the “sacred hill”. While Modern Greek romantic poetry idealized the Acropolis, popular nineteenth century writers, such as George Souris and Michel Mitsakis, published poems and chronicles satirizing the Acropolis’s monumentalization. Thus, the monument’s idealization had its counterpart in a lineage of Modern Greek literary texts where the Acropolis appears as a dubious construct, or else, as one of the possible Acropolises. A genealogy of such Modern Greek literary texts, reflecting the monument’s discursive and material reconstructions and deconstructions, includes early modern Andreas Karkavitsas’s attack against archeology (The Archeologist, 1903), Nicolaos Calas’s dismantling of the monument in his poem “Acropolis” (1932), Yorgis Makris’s explicit call to destroy the Parthenon (“Proclamation no 1”, 1944) and the recent (2010) novella by Christos Chrissopoulos The Parthenon Bomber. The literary attacks against the Acropolis uncover the nineteenth century mechanisms that conceptualized it as a modern monument. In doing so, they challenge literature’s relationship with historicity and contingency and perform a political act of resistance to monumentalization. The Acropolis’s fictitious destruction unsettles convictions about the monument itself as a construct of modernity.
Conference: A Corpus in Fever. Archival Impulses in Theory, Literature, and the Arts, 2018
A compelling metaphor is detected at the political speech saluting the foundation of the Greek na... more A compelling metaphor is detected at the political speech saluting the foundation of the Greek national library (1830): “book collections are “packages” of memory or memory apparatuses”. A few years later, the cultural practice of “frenetically” collecting manuscripts and books, of founding libraries and collections is reflected in a coinage documented in the most well-known thesaurus of the late 19th century. The coinage is syllogomania, that is to say, the mania of collecting, and it reflects a cultural practice which, especially in the new-born Greek state, responded to the urgent need of constituting a common national memory. These portmanteau terms allow a glimpse to 19th century’s historical conditions under which modern civilization, its practices, but also its discontents, emerged. The 19th century was to become the era of syllogomania and mnemonic apparatuses, but as soon as these cultural practices were consolidated, traces of resistance to the processes perceived as memory packaging appeared from within the realm of memory-recording media. In literature, the destruction of the archive took the form of an ambiguous device: In a 1884 text entitled Old papers, by Michel Mitsakis, the narrator reactivates his memory while destroying his manuscripts –not without remorse. In the 1896 short story Kostakis’ manuscripts by Alexandra Papadopoulou, the wife of a young writer, who just died, burns his manuscripts to save them from the publishers. At the end of the short story, she ends up interned in a mental hospital, full of doubts whether she has respected their writer’s intention or not. While memory becomes an institution, these texts become monuments of the moment of destruction or even “memories of death”. How should these gestures that save the traces of destruction be perceived, especially in their historical context? Is the act that threatens the archive the one that constitutes it? Based on the cultural history of the 19th century, the paper here proposed will approach these questions, following the line of thought leading from Freud’s Civilization and its discontents to Derrida’s Archive Fever and Boris Groys’s phenomenology of media.
O Μιχαήλ Μητσάκης (1863;-1916) υπήρξε τακτικός συνεργάτης των αθηναϊκών εφημερίδων κατά την περίο... more O Μιχαήλ Μητσάκης (1863;-1916) υπήρξε τακτικός συνεργάτης των αθηναϊκών εφημερίδων κατά την περίοδο της μεγαλύτερης ακμής τους. Οι δημοφιλέστατες στήλες του, με υπότιτλο «Ταξιδιωτικαί Σημειώσεις» και «Αθηναϊκαί Σελίδες», μαρτυρούν πως σημαντικό μέρος της κειμενικής του παραγωγής συστήνεται ως περιδιάβαση στον χώρο. Στις «Αθηναϊκές Σελίδες» ως «επιστήμων-flâneur» μεταφέρει στα φύλλα της εφημερίδας στιγμιότυπα από το αστικό νεωτερικό τοπίο, ενώ στις «Ταξιδιωτικές Σημειώσεις» ως εφημεριδικός ανταποκριτής διατρέχει την ελληνική επαρχία και καταγράφει «όσας [εντυπώσεις] επρόφθασε ν’ αρπάση ταχύ το βλέμμα, ενώ ο σιδηρόδρομος επέρα σπεύδων». Ο Μητσάκης ήταν από τους πιο πολυταξιδεμένους συγγραφείς της «ομαδικής εξόρμησης» εφημεριδικών ανταποκριτών που πραγματοποιήθηκε στην Ελλάδα περί τα τέλη του 19ου αιώνα. Αυτοχαρακτηριζόμενος «δημοσιογραφικός βοημός», «νομάς» και «αθίγγανος της δημοσιογραφίας», αισθανόταν πάντοτε ξένος εντός της συγγραφικής του ταυτότητας, με «διακρίνοντα χαρακτηριστικά του […] την κίνησι[ν], την περιπλάνησι[ν], την αδιάκοπον μετάστασι[ν] από τόπου εις τόπον». Κείμενα από την τελευταία δημοσιογραφική αποστολή του, με υπότιτλο «Ταξιδιωτικαί Σημειώσεις: Εικόνες και Σκηναί», δημοσιεύτηκαν στη δημοφιλέστατη αθηναϊκή εφημερίδα Ακρόπολις από τις 2 έως τις 13 Ιανουαρίου 1895. Ο ίδιος ο Βλάσης Γαβριηλίδης, εκδότης της Ακροπόλεως, συνόδευσε τη δημοσίευση των «Ταξιδιωτικών Σημειώσεων» με ένα εγκωμιαστικό σχόλιο, στο οποίο εξήρε την «πρωτοτυπίαν της γλώσσης και του ύφους» του «καινολόγου» και «νεωτεριστού» συγγραφέα, χαρακτηρίζοντάς τον ως «ζωντανόν κινητοσκόπιον». Στο αμέσως επόμενο φύλλο δημοσιεύτηκε ίσως το πιο διαβασμένο κείμενο της ταξιδιωτικής σειράς, ο Αυτόχειρ. Η ανάγνωση του Αυτόχειρος επικυρώνει την κρίση του Γαβριηλίδη για τις «Ταξιδιωτικές Σημειώσεις» του Μητσάκη: Στο αφήγημα, που ξεκινά και καταλήγει σ’ ένα πατραϊκό ξενοδοχείο, ο νεωτεριστής συγγραφέας, σαν μια μοντέρνα μηχανή καταγραφής της κίνησης, συμπλέκει την εμπειρία της άσκοπης περιπλάνησης με τη γραφή.
In Greece’s most well-known thesaurus of neologisms from the late nineteenth century, two compell... more In Greece’s most well-known thesaurus of neologisms from the late nineteenth century, two compelling terms are detected: syllogomania (‘collection frenzy’) and bibliomania (‘book frenzy’). Both very vividly illustrate the cultural landscape of fin-de-siècle Greece. The institutionalization of archives and the consolidation of the book culture were important aspects of the new-born state’s cultural politics and poetics. It is in this context that instances of literary discourse thematizing archival destruction appeared, taking the form of symbolic resistance against the canonization and institutionalization of memory. In the two texts discussed in the article, ‘Kostakis’s Manuscripts’ by Alexandra Papadopoulou (1896) and ‘Old Papers’ by Mikhail Mitsakis (1884), the laws of order, accumulation and preservation are opposed by a desire for disorder and dispersion. In the former, the manuscripts of a dead author are burnt to ashes by his girlfriend, who wishes to save them from being published. In the latter, a man scatters his writings in the wind, as a way of reactivating his memory. Both texts enact the cultural ambivalences of fin-de-siècle modernity by narrating the constant tension between, on one hand, canon and archive; and, on the other, waste and destruction. Through the destruction of fictional archives, the possibility of a counter-memory is claimed. Papadopoulou’s and Mitsakis’s claim of an overturning of the dynamics between cultural memory and oblivion can be considered as a call for questioning the laws that govern cultural memory’s circulation and for repositioning their auctorial figures in the history of Modern Greek literature.
Τhe idea of destroying the iconic national symbol of the Parthenon is scandalous—or even inconcei... more Τhe idea of destroying the iconic national symbol of the Parthenon is scandalous—or even inconceivable. The Parthenon was monumentalized in the nineteenth century and, ever since, it has borne the traces of the acts that discursively and institutionally constructed it or destroyed it. Literature, as an agent of institutionalization and resistance, has both contributed to, and resisted, the cultural practice of monumentalization. The Parthenon Bomber (1996/2010), a novella by Christos Chrissopoulos, is inscribed in a lineage of Modern Greek literary texts resisting monumentalization. Chrissopoulos's novella, originally published in 1996 and revised in 2010, asks the question Can literature be explosive? and challenges literature's relationship to historicity and contingency. At a moment when Greece's connection to its classical past is being reconfigured under the impact of the Greek crisis and of national and international responses to it, the novella's significance in the present deserves renewed attention. By blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, The Parthenon Bomber performs an act of resistance to monumentalization in real life and introduces the possibility of a New Parthenon.
The discourses of criticism are being transformed at the same time that our writing mechanisms ar... more The discourses of criticism are being transformed at the same time that our writing mechanisms are undergoing a major change. Reflecting on the relationship between our writing tools and our perceptions and taking programmability and interactivity as the main characteristics of new writing media, this essay attempts an approach to how that which is new in scriptural techniques, that is to say, programmability and interactivity, are undoing our perception of such notions as the archive and embodiment. The two works which are here commented contain the conditions of un-writing their written trace; the interactor who makes the text appear paradoxically also causes its disappearance by acts of destruction or dispersion. In the case of AGRIPPA (A Book of The Dead), William Gibson reserves for the reader the role of the destructor of the text through an extreme gesture of interaction which destines the work to erasure and calls for the retrieval of a text that contains the conditions of its own death. In the case of Garry Hill‘s Writing Corpora, the body‘s acts are created of, create and are turned against writing, they embody and disperse the writing traces, while the body experiences the shift from inscription to embodiment.
Les Antiquités multiples de la Modernité grecque (XIXe-XXIe siècles) The Multiple Antiquities of Greek Modernity (19th - 21st centuries) Colloque international / International Conference, 2020
As soon as the Modern Greek state and its institutions were founded, the Acropolis was monumental... more As soon as the Modern Greek state and its institutions were founded, the Acropolis was monumentalized to stand on the unstable grounds between idealization and history, incredulity and reality. Monumentalization enveloped the Acropolis with a sense of unreality echoed in reports by famous European writers of the time, which were translated in nineteenth century Greek periodicals and dominated the discourse about the “sacred hill”. While Modern Greek romantic poetry idealized the Acropolis, popular nineteenth century writers, such as George Souris and Michel Mitsakis, published poems and chronicles satirizing the Acropolis’s monumentalization. Thus, the monument’s idealization had its counterpart in a lineage of Modern Greek literary texts where the Acropolis appears as a dubious construct, or else, as one of the possible Acropolises. A genealogy of such Modern Greek literary texts, reflecting the monument’s discursive and material reconstructions and deconstructions, includes early modern Andreas Karkavitsas’s attack against archeology (The Archeologist, 1903), Nicolaos Calas’s dismantling of the monument in his poem “Acropolis” (1932), Yorgis Makris’s explicit call to destroy the Parthenon (“Proclamation no 1”, 1944) and the recent (2010) novella by Christos Chrissopoulos The Parthenon Bomber. The literary attacks against the Acropolis uncover the nineteenth century mechanisms that conceptualized it as a modern monument. In doing so, they challenge literature’s relationship with historicity and contingency and perform a political act of resistance to monumentalization. The Acropolis’s fictitious destruction unsettles convictions about the monument itself as a construct of modernity.
Conference: A Corpus in Fever. Archival Impulses in Theory, Literature, and the Arts, 2018
A compelling metaphor is detected at the political speech saluting the foundation of the Greek na... more A compelling metaphor is detected at the political speech saluting the foundation of the Greek national library (1830): “book collections are “packages” of memory or memory apparatuses”. A few years later, the cultural practice of “frenetically” collecting manuscripts and books, of founding libraries and collections is reflected in a coinage documented in the most well-known thesaurus of the late 19th century. The coinage is syllogomania, that is to say, the mania of collecting, and it reflects a cultural practice which, especially in the new-born Greek state, responded to the urgent need of constituting a common national memory. These portmanteau terms allow a glimpse to 19th century’s historical conditions under which modern civilization, its practices, but also its discontents, emerged. The 19th century was to become the era of syllogomania and mnemonic apparatuses, but as soon as these cultural practices were consolidated, traces of resistance to the processes perceived as memory packaging appeared from within the realm of memory-recording media. In literature, the destruction of the archive took the form of an ambiguous device: In a 1884 text entitled Old papers, by Michel Mitsakis, the narrator reactivates his memory while destroying his manuscripts –not without remorse. In the 1896 short story Kostakis’ manuscripts by Alexandra Papadopoulou, the wife of a young writer, who just died, burns his manuscripts to save them from the publishers. At the end of the short story, she ends up interned in a mental hospital, full of doubts whether she has respected their writer’s intention or not. While memory becomes an institution, these texts become monuments of the moment of destruction or even “memories of death”. How should these gestures that save the traces of destruction be perceived, especially in their historical context? Is the act that threatens the archive the one that constitutes it? Based on the cultural history of the 19th century, the paper here proposed will approach these questions, following the line of thought leading from Freud’s Civilization and its discontents to Derrida’s Archive Fever and Boris Groys’s phenomenology of media.
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Κείμενα από την τελευταία δημοσιογραφική αποστολή του, με υπότιτλο «Ταξιδιωτικαί Σημειώσεις: Εικόνες και Σκηναί», δημοσιεύτηκαν στη δημοφιλέστατη αθηναϊκή εφημερίδα Ακρόπολις από τις 2 έως τις 13 Ιανουαρίου 1895. Ο ίδιος ο Βλάσης Γαβριηλίδης, εκδότης της Ακροπόλεως, συνόδευσε τη δημοσίευση των «Ταξιδιωτικών Σημειώσεων» με ένα εγκωμιαστικό σχόλιο, στο οποίο εξήρε την «πρωτοτυπίαν της γλώσσης και του ύφους» του «καινολόγου» και «νεωτεριστού» συγγραφέα, χαρακτηρίζοντάς τον ως «ζωντανόν κινητοσκόπιον». Στο αμέσως επόμενο φύλλο δημοσιεύτηκε ίσως το πιο διαβασμένο κείμενο της ταξιδιωτικής σειράς, ο Αυτόχειρ. Η ανάγνωση του Αυτόχειρος επικυρώνει την κρίση του Γαβριηλίδη για τις «Ταξιδιωτικές Σημειώσεις» του Μητσάκη: Στο αφήγημα, που ξεκινά και καταλήγει σ’ ένα πατραϊκό ξενοδοχείο, ο νεωτεριστής συγγραφέας, σαν μια μοντέρνα μηχανή καταγραφής της κίνησης, συμπλέκει την εμπειρία της άσκοπης περιπλάνησης με τη γραφή.
A genealogy of such Modern Greek literary texts, reflecting the monument’s discursive and material reconstructions and deconstructions, includes early modern Andreas Karkavitsas’s attack against archeology (The Archeologist, 1903), Nicolaos Calas’s dismantling of the monument in his poem “Acropolis” (1932), Yorgis Makris’s explicit call to destroy the Parthenon (“Proclamation no 1”, 1944) and the recent (2010) novella by Christos Chrissopoulos The Parthenon Bomber.
The literary attacks against the Acropolis uncover the nineteenth century mechanisms that conceptualized it as a modern monument. In doing so, they challenge literature’s relationship with historicity and contingency and perform a political act of resistance to monumentalization. The Acropolis’s fictitious destruction unsettles convictions about the monument itself as a construct of modernity.
The 19th century was to become the era of syllogomania and mnemonic apparatuses, but as soon as these cultural practices were consolidated, traces of resistance to the processes perceived as memory packaging appeared from within the realm of memory-recording media. In literature, the destruction of the archive took the form of an ambiguous device: In a 1884 text entitled Old papers, by Michel Mitsakis, the narrator reactivates his memory while destroying his manuscripts –not without remorse. In the 1896 short story Kostakis’ manuscripts by Alexandra Papadopoulou, the wife of a young writer, who just died, burns his manuscripts to save them from the publishers. At the end of the short story, she ends up interned in a mental hospital, full of doubts whether she has respected their writer’s intention or not. While memory becomes an institution, these texts become monuments of the moment of destruction or even “memories of death”.
How should these gestures that save the traces of destruction be perceived, especially in their historical context? Is the act that threatens the archive the one that constitutes it? Based on the cultural history of the 19th century, the paper here proposed will approach these questions, following the line of thought leading from Freud’s Civilization and its discontents to Derrida’s Archive Fever and Boris Groys’s phenomenology of media.
Κείμενα από την τελευταία δημοσιογραφική αποστολή του, με υπότιτλο «Ταξιδιωτικαί Σημειώσεις: Εικόνες και Σκηναί», δημοσιεύτηκαν στη δημοφιλέστατη αθηναϊκή εφημερίδα Ακρόπολις από τις 2 έως τις 13 Ιανουαρίου 1895. Ο ίδιος ο Βλάσης Γαβριηλίδης, εκδότης της Ακροπόλεως, συνόδευσε τη δημοσίευση των «Ταξιδιωτικών Σημειώσεων» με ένα εγκωμιαστικό σχόλιο, στο οποίο εξήρε την «πρωτοτυπίαν της γλώσσης και του ύφους» του «καινολόγου» και «νεωτεριστού» συγγραφέα, χαρακτηρίζοντάς τον ως «ζωντανόν κινητοσκόπιον». Στο αμέσως επόμενο φύλλο δημοσιεύτηκε ίσως το πιο διαβασμένο κείμενο της ταξιδιωτικής σειράς, ο Αυτόχειρ. Η ανάγνωση του Αυτόχειρος επικυρώνει την κρίση του Γαβριηλίδη για τις «Ταξιδιωτικές Σημειώσεις» του Μητσάκη: Στο αφήγημα, που ξεκινά και καταλήγει σ’ ένα πατραϊκό ξενοδοχείο, ο νεωτεριστής συγγραφέας, σαν μια μοντέρνα μηχανή καταγραφής της κίνησης, συμπλέκει την εμπειρία της άσκοπης περιπλάνησης με τη γραφή.
A genealogy of such Modern Greek literary texts, reflecting the monument’s discursive and material reconstructions and deconstructions, includes early modern Andreas Karkavitsas’s attack against archeology (The Archeologist, 1903), Nicolaos Calas’s dismantling of the monument in his poem “Acropolis” (1932), Yorgis Makris’s explicit call to destroy the Parthenon (“Proclamation no 1”, 1944) and the recent (2010) novella by Christos Chrissopoulos The Parthenon Bomber.
The literary attacks against the Acropolis uncover the nineteenth century mechanisms that conceptualized it as a modern monument. In doing so, they challenge literature’s relationship with historicity and contingency and perform a political act of resistance to monumentalization. The Acropolis’s fictitious destruction unsettles convictions about the monument itself as a construct of modernity.
The 19th century was to become the era of syllogomania and mnemonic apparatuses, but as soon as these cultural practices were consolidated, traces of resistance to the processes perceived as memory packaging appeared from within the realm of memory-recording media. In literature, the destruction of the archive took the form of an ambiguous device: In a 1884 text entitled Old papers, by Michel Mitsakis, the narrator reactivates his memory while destroying his manuscripts –not without remorse. In the 1896 short story Kostakis’ manuscripts by Alexandra Papadopoulou, the wife of a young writer, who just died, burns his manuscripts to save them from the publishers. At the end of the short story, she ends up interned in a mental hospital, full of doubts whether she has respected their writer’s intention or not. While memory becomes an institution, these texts become monuments of the moment of destruction or even “memories of death”.
How should these gestures that save the traces of destruction be perceived, especially in their historical context? Is the act that threatens the archive the one that constitutes it? Based on the cultural history of the 19th century, the paper here proposed will approach these questions, following the line of thought leading from Freud’s Civilization and its discontents to Derrida’s Archive Fever and Boris Groys’s phenomenology of media.