Comparative Literature

In 2004 the visual artist Joan Jonas staged a video/installation/mixed media project of Helen in Egypt at the Tate Gallery. Almost sixty years since its composition, Jonas recasts H.D.’s long, neo-epic poem extending and exposing the possibilities of dramatic space and its dialogical connections with media that reinforce, undermine and raise questions about the interplay between dramatic space, poetry and narrativity. In her rendering of the Euripidean Helen , H.D. explores the ability of spatial transformation. She conceives Egypt as a locus of “spaceless limbo” or, to use Michel Foucault’s term, “Heterotopia,” a site “that can be found within the culture, simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.” Within the timeline of the Trojan cycle, H.D. provides a spatial reading of a civilization transfixed by war. In the heterotopic space of the Tate, Jonas in turn, interweaves through her video installation performance Lines in the Sand the originary mythic text with H.D.’s neo...

nuję czytelnikom opowieść o moich wyprawach” – pisał L. Strauss, wybitny młody antropolog i uczony, przypuszczalnie „najsłynniejszy akademik” swoich czasów, autor melancholijnego dziennika podróży z 1936 r. pt. Smutek tropików (Tristes Tropiques) (McSweeney, 2015). Kilka tysiącleci przed nim Hezjod – Grek, który jako pierwszy opowiedział o mitach, bogach i śmiertelnikach w swoich dziełach Narodziny bogów (gr. Theogonia) oraz Prace i dnie (gr. Érga káj heméraj) – również przyznawał, że nie znosi podróżowania i unika go, jak może, dodając jednak, że jest to czasem zło konieczne. Homer nie ujawniał swoich odczuć; wykreował natomiast archetyp człowieka-podróżnika – Odyseusza. Chociaż same podróże bohatera nie były najważniejszym elementem Iliady, było to jednak dzieło, dające początek topografii kulturowej, co widać w spisie floty greckiej u wejścia do portu w Aulis podczas trwającego 10 lat oblężenia Troi. Opowieści podróżnicze i zorganizowane podróże absolutnie nie są niczym nowym. Au...

Key aim of this paper is to provide an interdisciplinary look at tourism and its diachronic textual threads bequeathed to us by the "proto-tourist” texts of the Greek travel author Pausanias. Using the Periegetic, travel texts from his voluminous Descriptions of Greece (second century AD) as a springboard for our presentation, we intend to show how textual strategies employed by Pausanias have been received and adopted/ adapted by recent travel writing. First, we examine the first extensive series of travel guides by Karl Baedeker, a seminal author who “guided” several famous modernist authors on their tourist peregrinations at the turn of the previous century. Then, we illustrate how Pausanias’ writing was preserved, “translated,” and furthered not only by Baedeker and his contemporaries, but also in current travel and tourism distribution of information in vastly popular textual platforms such as the editions and media network of The Lonely Planet, and Trip Advisor, one of th...

Στη διδακτορική μου διατριβή εξετάζω την ισόβια σχέση της H.D. με τον τραγικό ποιητή Ευριπίδη και την συμβολή του στην μορφοποίηση και εξέλιξη της ποιητικής της. Ο πολυσχιδής διάλογός της με τον Ευριπίδη εκτυλίσσεται αρχικά στον στίβο της δημιουργικής μετάφρασης, ενός χώρου δηλαδή, o οποίος παίζει καθοριστικό ρόλο στην συνεχή ανανέωση και πορεία της ποιητικής της εν γένει. Η σχέση της με τον Ευριπίδη διαρκεί πάνω από σαράντα χρόνια και συνεισφέρει σημαντικά στην πρόσληψη των Κλασικών έργων, έναν από τους απαραίτητους πολιτισμικούς και καλλιτεχνικούς στόχους των Μοντερνιστών του πρώιμου εικοστού αιώνα. Η εργασία μου αποδεικνύει πως το ενδιαφέρον της H.D. για τα έργα του Ευριπίδη εκτείνεται πολύ πέρα από μια επιφανειακή περιέργεια για την κειμενική, αισθητική ή θεματολογική τους αξία. Μέσα από την έρευνα των μεταφράσεών της πάνω στο έργο του Έλληνα δραματουργού δείχνω πως η H.D. υφαίνει ένα πολύπλευρο υπόδειγμα (pattern) πάνω στο οποίο συγκροτείται ένα διακριτό σχήμα.Μέσα από την μελέ...

The key aim of this article is to provide an interdisciplinary look at tourism and its diachronic textual threads bequeathed by the ‘proto-tourist’ texts of the Greek travel author Pausanias. Using the periegetic, travel texts from his voluminous Description of Greece (2nd century CE) as a springboard for our presentation, we intend to show how the textual strategies employed by Pausanias have been received and still remain at the core of contemporary series of travel guides first authored by Karl Baedeker (in the 19th century). After Baedeker, Pausanias’ textual travel tropes, as we will show, still inform the epistemology of modern-day tourism; the interaction of travel texts with travel information and distribution channels produces generic hybrids, and the ancient Greek travel authors have paved the way for the construction of networks, digital storytelling and global tourist platforms.

This doctoral thesis seeks to unravel the breadth and depth of H.D.’s lifelong engagement with the plays of the Athenian dramatist Euripides. Though he is by no means the only classical Greek author H.D. studies and translates during her career, I argue that his dramatic oeuvre becomes an essential, multivalent source that helps her construct her own poetic platform. The classical Modernist tendency to return to the past and translate from the wide-ranging repertory of the classics, becomes a systematic and continuous practice for H.D. Through her translations of Euripides’ plays that cover the time span of 1915-1956, she produces highly experimental renderings of choral odes, fragments, and entire plays written by the Attic playwright. Simultaneously, she extends his plays beyond the given generic realms of lyric, drama, and epic, while functioning in similar ways the Greek Classical poets themselves worked within their own tradition. Thus, Euripides’ avant-gardism engenders and nu...