Book chapters by Vassiliki Kolocotroni
Twenty years after his controversial involvement in the Greek political scene in the immediate af... more Twenty years after his controversial involvement in the Greek political scene in the immediate aftermath of the War of Independence as the new state’s first Public Prosecutor, and having resigned his posts in the Greek Supreme Court and the new Athens University to take up the Chair of New Testament and Ecclesiastical Greek at the General Assembly’s College in Belfast, the Aberdonian philhellene Edward Masson (1799-1873) continued to promote the Greek cause as ‘one of the most interesting social and Christian movements of modern times’. As editor of The Philhellenic Banner (1853-1854), The Anglo-Hellenic Witness (1862), Mnemon (1867-1872) and The Hellenic Recorder (1872), signing as ‘Εδουάρδος Μάσσων, Καληδόνιος’ (Edward Masson, Caledonian), he published views on the Eastern Question, reports on the ‘friendly intercourse between Protestants and the Oriental clergy’, as well as his own translations of Scottish and English poetry into the ‘living literary language of the Greeks’ and vice versa.
A devout Presbyterian, missionary and educator, Masson hoped to find in revolutionary and post-independence Greece fertile ground for the dissemination of a peculiarly Scottish vision of an enlightened, radical Christian polity. His wartime exploits and later ventures bear out that sense of engagement (or ‘the spirit of the Covenanters’ that Masson invoked in his own self-fashioning), but they also offer rich testimony to the vicissitudes of a philhellenic impetus that had to adapt to the fallout of the new nation’s formative struggles, while continuing to claim the position of the true witness. Focusing on some of the blind spots and insights that form Masson’s vision of Greece, this essay will propose this Caledonian interpreter of the fortunes of modern Greece as an exemplary figure of enterprise and commitment.
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Isabella Fyvie Mayo, born into a London-based Aberdonian family, was by the time she published he... more Isabella Fyvie Mayo, born into a London-based Aberdonian family, was by the time she published her Greek tale a prolific author of popular novels, poems and girls’ magazine articles, and an active speaker and campaigner for anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and women workers’ causes. An evangelical Christian socialist and Tolstoyan ethical anarchist by the mid-1890s, Mayo was a believer in “the force of the individual life,” and its exemplars in acts of conviction by those minor figures she described as “the salt of the earth.”
A Daughter of the Klephts, or a Girl of Modern Greece (1897) is a “salt of the earth” tale in the guise of a historical romance. It tells the story of Patience Hedges, a foundling raised in England, recognized and reclaimed by her Greek relatives, cousins of General Kolokotrones, while in London in 1815 raising funds for the Greek struggle. With her Greek name restored, and her participation in the war of independence and its aftermath, Stella/Patience settles in Athens to do her “own little share” in the construction of Greece’s “new beginning.” Yet, unlike other Victorian romances of the Greek Revolution, Mayo’s heroine is not an allegorical maiden, embodiment of a country in distress, saved by a male hero in thrall to an ideal; in fact, there is no male hero in the novel, but sympathetic facilitators of Patience’s assumption of her true identity and calling, such as Miss Lane, proto-feminist egalitarian teacher, a fellow foundling, or “salt of the earth” figure herself, and Mrs Fowler, proud Scot of Highlander stock, whose kindness and independence of mind and word are given pride of place in Mayo’s narrative. The tale’s correlation between the dissenting female figures and the natural empathy with the Greek girl speak to a joint recognition and awakening, the reformation of characters and readers through the conversion and exemplary commitment of a girl finding her place in two national communities, languages and cultures. In that sense, as this chapter will argue, A Daughter of the Klephts may be read as a transnational, but also translational tale. Fitting the mould of the period’s anxiety over the prospects of girlhood, Mayo’s didacticism is aimed equally at the edification of the young through adult concerns, such as freedom, personal and political self-determination and the transformative, if properly weaponised, potential of “small” beginnings in the pursuit of great ends.
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Two years after visiting James Joyce in Paris to discuss the prospect of filming an adaptation of... more Two years after visiting James Joyce in Paris to discuss the prospect of filming an adaptation of Ulysses, in 1931 Sergei Eisenstein traveled to Mexico to shoot the epic ¡Que viva México!, a major undertaking he was never to complete in his lifetime. Wandering around the halls and staircases of Mexico City’s Secretariat of Public Education marveling at the sprawling murals of Diego Rivera and their paratactic narrative of Mexican and world revolution, the Soviet filmmaker still thought of the Irish writer, seeing on the walls the blue colour on the cover of Joyce’s ‘persecuted chef d’oeuvre’ and the vigor and vitality of his sentences. Eisenstein’s cross-reading of Rivera’s ‘incessantly flowing’ indigenous forms with Joyce’s ‘no commas, no stops’, repurposing genre, language and continental situation into a purposeful vanguard synchronicity, points to a gaze that is both porous and partisan. Zooming in on two more episodes of mediation and cross-purposing of continental specificities, featuring Walter Benjamin and Asjā Lacis in Naples in 1925 and Isadora Duncan in Moscow in 1921, this chapter will trace the role of the porous and partisan gaze in threading geographical, political and cultural difference into vanguard visions, and argue for its usefulnss as a critical lens through which to reflect on the modernism-generating power of those visions as well as their blind spots.
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In: Nichols, B. and Taylor, N. (eds.) The End of the Church? Conversations with the Work of David Jasper. I, 2022
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Hotel Modernisms, 2023
This essay revisits the hotel as a site of trouble. Though central to the hotel experience in mod... more This essay revisits the hotel as a site of trouble. Though central to the hotel experience in modernism, the narrative of crisis and social mobility and transformation, achieved or thwarted, does not exhaust or fully account for the kinds of trouble I sample in this essay. Beyond the contingent features of the social anthropology of hotel types (Joseph Roth; Norman S. Hayner) and the inter-war “hotel consciousness” (Paul Fussell), lies a repertoire of tropes that turn the hotel into a site of cognitive and emotional dissonance, of memory and forgetting, of haunting, ruination and risk. These range from the game of lost and recovered love crystallized in the rooms and windows of Marcel Proust’s Grand Hotels, the vertiginous pursuit of the ghosts of history in hotels haunted by W. G. Sebald, to Benjaminian palimpsests of hotel ruins, and the mysterious, willful acts of self-effacement of such “hotel women”-cum-modernist Sphinxes as André Breton’s Nadja.
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1821: Mediation, Reception, Archive (Special Issue, Journal of Greek Media & Culture), 2021
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Historical Modernisms: Time, History and Modernist Aesthetics, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté and Angelki Spiropoulou (Bloomsbury) , 2021
As recurrent thematic motif and formal device, the ‘moment’ in modernist writing points us in the... more As recurrent thematic motif and formal device, the ‘moment’ in modernist writing points us in the direction of a concern and a question about a temporal mode perceived as urgent and potentially transformative. It is in that sense associated with crisis, both in terms of a personal and political history, but may also be seen as sharing effects with other concepts of relevance to the modernist critical repertoire and beyond, such as ‘objective chance’, ‘event’ and ‘kairos’. This essay briefly considers some of these conceptual analogues and focuses mainly on kairos, proposing it as a trope with particular resonances for the consideration of the modernist moment as the space of potentiality, or indeed its opposite. Theoretical coordinates are traced in the work of Alain Badiou, Martin Heidegger, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, and a suppressed short story by E. M. Forster, ‘The Life to Come’, is read as a test case for the critical relevance of the kairotic moment.
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Jean Rhys’s Paris-based work is a prime example of cross-channel modernism in cultural and biogra... more Jean Rhys’s Paris-based work is a prime example of cross-channel modernism in cultural and biographical terms, but it is also testament to the construction of a distinct style, which relies as much on testimony and the presumed authenticity of lived experience as on the wearing of literary masks. In The Left Bank, Quartet and Good Morning, Midnight, Rhys tries on a range of such masks, or literary poses crafted out of translated and transposed linguistic and literary material, much of which is still unrecognized by her critics. This essay traces the provenance of one of these masks in an episode from Balzac’s Comédie humaine and proposes it as emblematic of a distinctive Rhysian form akin to the literary idyll as defined by Lukács in his study of the early twentieth-century writer Charles-Louis Philippe.
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Ruins in the Anglo-American Literary and Cultural Imagination, ed. by Efterpi Mitsi, Anna Despotopoulou, Stamatina Dimakopoulou, and Emmanouil Aretoulakis (Palgrave Macmillan), 2019
Walter Benjaminʼs radio piece for children, “The Fall of Herculaneum and Pompeii,” part of a mini... more Walter Benjaminʼs radio piece for children, “The Fall of Herculaneum and Pompeii,” part of a mini-series on natural-historical disasters broadcast on Radio Berlin in 1931 and Bertolt Brechtʼs War Primer, a collection of “photo-epigrams” compiled between 1937 and 1944, bookend a period of displacement, personal and political catastrophe and intense reflection on the uses and abuses of mythical thought and the humanist paradigm. Specific to the moment of their production and deploying genres and registers that speak to projects of transformation of enemy practices and “defunct forms,” these writings may also be seen as staging dialectical negotiations of preservation and destruction, set in aftermath sites where ruin and critical recollection hold the line of defence against “dark times” and prepare the ground for radical edification in the future.
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Joyce famously listed forty languages on the final page of the Finnegans Wake manuscript, having ... more Joyce famously listed forty languages on the final page of the Finnegans Wake manuscript, having already picked an argument with the English tongue in his earlier work. His kaleidoscopic idiom is one of the marvels of the modernist repertoire, an event in the history of novelistic form, as well as a testament to the fascination with artificial international languages in the interwar years. Yet Joyce’s cosmopolitanism is not in direct opposition to the communitarianism he is usually seen to evade. Forged by associations with foreign nationals in diasporic communities, and fuelled by his political stance against imperialist wars, Joyce’s interest in minority languages was fundamental to his vision of a community of speakers of non-hegemonic languages in the world. This essay considers this communitarian vision in the light of two contrasted episodes in Joyce’s long involvement with world languages that bookmark the project of the Wake: his enthusiasm for Zurich-based Antonio Chalas’s 1919 pamphlet on the mystical foundations of the Greek alphabet dedicated to President Wilson (which Joyce recommended to his US publisher), and his agreement to a rendition of ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ into Basic English by C. K. Ogden in 1932. By juxtaposing the two episodes and their immediate contexts, Chalas’s championing of the project of a sustainable world peace effected by the protection of a minority language (which Joyce was taught by members of émigré communities in Trieste and Zurich), and Ogden’s campaign of world unity through standardisation of English as lingua franca for the majority, the essay will draw out the contradictory visions of the world and word for which Joyce’s views on language can be enlisted.
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A belated traveler to Greece, Derrida, like Heidegger before him, writes of the visit in terms of... more A belated traveler to Greece, Derrida, like Heidegger before him, writes of the visit in terms of uncanny anticipation, meditating on death and delay. This essay considers the account of his stay in Athens, Still Remains (1996), alongside Heidegger's ruminations on and in Greece and draws out the motifs through which he stages modernity's errancy and exemplary debt. Derrida's homage to Greece's 'luminous memory' dwells on what remains, as ruin and residence, while reflecting on the photographic still as a testimony of mourning and recollective thinking. Derrida catches glimpses of such thinking in the work of Socrates, Freud, Heidegger (and, as this essay argues, also Blanchot), and composes in his text a 'death sentence', which resonates with his relationship to language and philosophy's Greek debt.
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Orlando’s Greek pastoral idyll is a brief but crucial stage of her travails and travels homeward ... more Orlando’s Greek pastoral idyll is a brief but crucial stage of her travails and travels homeward and into the present day. In transit between identities and divested of her title and cultural position, she finds herself the guest of a nomadic tribe who tend but do not own the ancient land which accommodates them. Her passage through Northern Greece is significantly located: setting one of Orlando’s transformative epiphanies against the backdrop of Mount Athos, a site of gender exclusion, Woolf casts Orlando in the role of an unwitting interloper, trespassing on time and tradition, once again, and formatively, out of place. The episode hones Orlando’s poetic disposition but also homes in on the ambivalent effects of one of its tested tropes – on the Greek mountain, Orlando both embodies and deploys the allegorical mode. As a woman (hidden amongst the gypsies and under her ‘light burnous’), she is at once the emblem of an impossibility, a female creature on a sacred, forbidding all-male space, and the very possibility of trespassing that space, on her way home. At the same time, as a pastoral poet, exercising the license allegory affords, she claims her own patrimony in a vision of renewed ownership, transformed by the passing of time and gender privilege. This essay glosses the effect and provenance of this allegorical trope through a brief account of Woolf’s Harrisonian Hellenism and her own passage through the Greek landscape, considered here in the light of Denis E. Cosgrove’s foundational definition: ‘landscape represents a way of seeing – a way in which some Europeans have represented to themselves and to others the world about them and their relationships with it, and through which they have commented on social relations’
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As Marina Warner has argued in her panoramic study Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Fem... more As Marina Warner has argued in her panoramic study Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985), the presence and coded meaning of allegorical female figures still underpin broadly accepted human values, in both an ideological and imaginative sense. Taking its lead from this assertion, this essay considers the allegorical uses to which Greek form has been put by a selection of British women writers of the twentieth century. In their encounters with and constructions of Greece as a repository of ancient yet persistent and prescient forms (in the shape of maidens or monuments), the classicist Jane Ellen Harrison, novelists Virginia Woolf and Ann Quin and poet and travel writer Dorothy Una Ratcliffe create meaningful allegories for their literary, but also personal and political pursuits.
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As a young woman and aspiring writer, Woolf was particularly irked by her exclusion from formal t... more As a young woman and aspiring writer, Woolf was particularly irked by her exclusion from formal training in the classics, and especially Greek, a language and a literature in which, she would later argue, ‘the stable, the permanent, the original human being is to be found’. Yet Woolf¹s knowledge of classical Greek is remarkable. It features prominently amongst her earliest intellectual and emotional experiences and marks her writing as it develops into a coded, personal and political idiom. Informed by theories of ritual, honed by ambitious exercises in translation and inflected by an idiosyncratic blend of poetry and polemics, Woolf's classicism is pervasive, subtle and central to any rigorous analysis of her craft.
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Literature in Europe in the modernist period engages with issues of form
as a response to the new... more Literature in Europe in the modernist period engages with issues of form
as a response to the new and often traumatic realities of a turbulent
century. This essay provides a brief overview of some of the most urgent
concerns and aesthetic practices of writers aligning themselves with
vanguard movements or producing ground-breaking work in conditions of
intense isolation. While the essay begins by questioning the unifying
premise of a 'European' modernism, it draws out and contextualises some of
the motifs, landmark moments and recurrent preoccupations that mark the
literary achievements of that corner of the modernist world.
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Tziovas 1997b, 1997
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Book chapters by Vassiliki Kolocotroni
A devout Presbyterian, missionary and educator, Masson hoped to find in revolutionary and post-independence Greece fertile ground for the dissemination of a peculiarly Scottish vision of an enlightened, radical Christian polity. His wartime exploits and later ventures bear out that sense of engagement (or ‘the spirit of the Covenanters’ that Masson invoked in his own self-fashioning), but they also offer rich testimony to the vicissitudes of a philhellenic impetus that had to adapt to the fallout of the new nation’s formative struggles, while continuing to claim the position of the true witness. Focusing on some of the blind spots and insights that form Masson’s vision of Greece, this essay will propose this Caledonian interpreter of the fortunes of modern Greece as an exemplary figure of enterprise and commitment.
A Daughter of the Klephts, or a Girl of Modern Greece (1897) is a “salt of the earth” tale in the guise of a historical romance. It tells the story of Patience Hedges, a foundling raised in England, recognized and reclaimed by her Greek relatives, cousins of General Kolokotrones, while in London in 1815 raising funds for the Greek struggle. With her Greek name restored, and her participation in the war of independence and its aftermath, Stella/Patience settles in Athens to do her “own little share” in the construction of Greece’s “new beginning.” Yet, unlike other Victorian romances of the Greek Revolution, Mayo’s heroine is not an allegorical maiden, embodiment of a country in distress, saved by a male hero in thrall to an ideal; in fact, there is no male hero in the novel, but sympathetic facilitators of Patience’s assumption of her true identity and calling, such as Miss Lane, proto-feminist egalitarian teacher, a fellow foundling, or “salt of the earth” figure herself, and Mrs Fowler, proud Scot of Highlander stock, whose kindness and independence of mind and word are given pride of place in Mayo’s narrative. The tale’s correlation between the dissenting female figures and the natural empathy with the Greek girl speak to a joint recognition and awakening, the reformation of characters and readers through the conversion and exemplary commitment of a girl finding her place in two national communities, languages and cultures. In that sense, as this chapter will argue, A Daughter of the Klephts may be read as a transnational, but also translational tale. Fitting the mould of the period’s anxiety over the prospects of girlhood, Mayo’s didacticism is aimed equally at the edification of the young through adult concerns, such as freedom, personal and political self-determination and the transformative, if properly weaponised, potential of “small” beginnings in the pursuit of great ends.
as a response to the new and often traumatic realities of a turbulent
century. This essay provides a brief overview of some of the most urgent
concerns and aesthetic practices of writers aligning themselves with
vanguard movements or producing ground-breaking work in conditions of
intense isolation. While the essay begins by questioning the unifying
premise of a 'European' modernism, it draws out and contextualises some of
the motifs, landmark moments and recurrent preoccupations that mark the
literary achievements of that corner of the modernist world.
A devout Presbyterian, missionary and educator, Masson hoped to find in revolutionary and post-independence Greece fertile ground for the dissemination of a peculiarly Scottish vision of an enlightened, radical Christian polity. His wartime exploits and later ventures bear out that sense of engagement (or ‘the spirit of the Covenanters’ that Masson invoked in his own self-fashioning), but they also offer rich testimony to the vicissitudes of a philhellenic impetus that had to adapt to the fallout of the new nation’s formative struggles, while continuing to claim the position of the true witness. Focusing on some of the blind spots and insights that form Masson’s vision of Greece, this essay will propose this Caledonian interpreter of the fortunes of modern Greece as an exemplary figure of enterprise and commitment.
A Daughter of the Klephts, or a Girl of Modern Greece (1897) is a “salt of the earth” tale in the guise of a historical romance. It tells the story of Patience Hedges, a foundling raised in England, recognized and reclaimed by her Greek relatives, cousins of General Kolokotrones, while in London in 1815 raising funds for the Greek struggle. With her Greek name restored, and her participation in the war of independence and its aftermath, Stella/Patience settles in Athens to do her “own little share” in the construction of Greece’s “new beginning.” Yet, unlike other Victorian romances of the Greek Revolution, Mayo’s heroine is not an allegorical maiden, embodiment of a country in distress, saved by a male hero in thrall to an ideal; in fact, there is no male hero in the novel, but sympathetic facilitators of Patience’s assumption of her true identity and calling, such as Miss Lane, proto-feminist egalitarian teacher, a fellow foundling, or “salt of the earth” figure herself, and Mrs Fowler, proud Scot of Highlander stock, whose kindness and independence of mind and word are given pride of place in Mayo’s narrative. The tale’s correlation between the dissenting female figures and the natural empathy with the Greek girl speak to a joint recognition and awakening, the reformation of characters and readers through the conversion and exemplary commitment of a girl finding her place in two national communities, languages and cultures. In that sense, as this chapter will argue, A Daughter of the Klephts may be read as a transnational, but also translational tale. Fitting the mould of the period’s anxiety over the prospects of girlhood, Mayo’s didacticism is aimed equally at the edification of the young through adult concerns, such as freedom, personal and political self-determination and the transformative, if properly weaponised, potential of “small” beginnings in the pursuit of great ends.
as a response to the new and often traumatic realities of a turbulent
century. This essay provides a brief overview of some of the most urgent
concerns and aesthetic practices of writers aligning themselves with
vanguard movements or producing ground-breaking work in conditions of
intense isolation. While the essay begins by questioning the unifying
premise of a 'European' modernism, it draws out and contextualises some of
the motifs, landmark moments and recurrent preoccupations that mark the
literary achievements of that corner of the modernist world.
nineteenth century mounts a critique of the blindspots of enlightened
humanity. Though differently invested in the project of European
advancement and engaged in mapping and mining different fields, they
both confront in their work of the late 1890s the spectre of ‘great
human passions let loose’. In ‘The Aetiology of Hysteria’ (1896), The
Interpretation of Dreams (1899), and correspondence of that period, Freud
lays out some of the symbols and strategies on which his campaign of
mental emancipation will be grounded. Involving metaphors of archaeological
discovery and the poignant permanence of ruins, Freud’s writing
accounts for the persistence of memory in the vanguard of personal and
political struggles. Likewise, in a number of essays from the period,
letters and shorter pieces such as ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1896) as well
as the ground-breaking novella Heart of Darkness (1899), Conrad too harnesses
the haunting force of personal and collective memory in the creation
of cautionary and compelling tales of exploitation and ruin. For
both, humanity is its own agent, beset by secrets and incomplete repressions,
while maintaining through the groundwork of memory a constant
vigil over the prospect of past and present brutality.
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/intellect/jgmc/2018/00000004/00000002
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