The old Stories are exhausted and the new ones await their author. What do the proceedings of a conference published by the University Press of Crete show

With 600 pages, 33 studies and a subject matter spanning a century, since the beginning of his decade 1920 until the first decade of the 21st century, the proceedings of the conference held in memory of the critic and historian of Greek literature Alexandros Argyriou (1921-2009) in May 2011 at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Crete in Rethymno and were printed in the volume For a history of Greek literature of the twentieth century. Reconstruction proposals, themes and currents (University Publications of Crete – Benaki Museum, 2012), are a document.

On the one hand, the volume captures the diaspora, the situation and dynamics of modern Greek studies at a critical moment in history in which modern Greek philological studies are shrinking not only with the gradual abolition of seats in famous universities abroad, but also with the upcoming changes of the "Athina" plan in the Greek area. On the other hand, it does not reflect the path and the searches of the historiography of modern Greek literature in the post-Argyrio era, in which post-political and modern Greek literature turns its historian.

Most of the contributors to the volume are in their sixties and fifties, members of the cream of modern Greek literature, represent the golden age of modern Greek studies (1970-2000), when foreign researchers were intently studying the modern Greek language (Peter McGridge), they were researching the history of Greek literature in vain (Mario Vitti) and were interested in making early texts of the Modern Greek tradition known and attractive to the non-speaking public (Roderick Beaton).

Parallel to the explosion of research on modern Greek literature abroad, scholars in Greece, coordinated with the new literary theories, develop lively research and interpretive activity as evidenced by the conference's theme of Argyriou and the range of approaches: The literature of the 20th century is observed through the lens of the language issue, classified in terms of species, interpreted on the basis of national expediencies and ideological conflicts, it is examined with the tools of gender discourse, its harmonization with European aesthetic currents is appreciated.

A series of stories of modern Greek literature written during this golden age – beginning with the History of Modern Greek literature (MED, 1978) of the University of Thessaloniki professor Linos Politis (1906-1982), who is considered to have contributed "to the formation of modern Greek philology into a real science" – contribute to the systematic development of the historiography of modern Greek literature.

Only in the last fifteen to twenty years, thanks to the Introduction to modern Greek literature (Cloud, 1996) by Roderick Beaton, in the ninth edition of the History of Modern Greek Literature (Knowledge, 2000) of K. Θ. Dimara, in the news, rewritten, History of modern Greek literature (Odysseus, 2003) by Mario Viti and in the eight-volume History of Greek literature and its reception (Kastaniotis, 2001-2007) of Alexandros Argyriou, the dialogue about the historical narrative of our literature and the conditions of its writing was in the topicality of the philological debates.

The constant recurring request to write a new one, multivolume and collective History of Modern Greek Literature – the outcome of these discussions – it is hidden in a wording in the preface of the volume at hand, signed by curators Angela Kastrinaki, Alexis Politis and Dimitris Tziovas. The studies of the volume, they write, "they form an alternative, multi-prismatic and historically oriented consideration of Modern Greek Literature of the 20th and early 21st centuries".

The question to which neither the curators nor the scholars who deal with issues of the historiography of Modern Greek Literature in the fourth part do not answer is how all these approaches will be composed in a new narrative, how from the sentences "for a History of Modern Greek Literature", as stated in the title of the volume, we will move on to the historiographical result.

The researchers who visited Alexandros Argyriou in his apartment in Plutarchou in Kolonaki either to consult him about factual information that was treasured in his bottomless memo book or to refer to some evidence of his huge library found him in the last decades of his life constantly busy with writing his History. As long as Argyriou was alive, we were certain that a History of Modern Greek Literature was being written. Until his last moments he was preparing the ninth volume of his History, with his critical appraisals of the voluminous material he had deposited in the earlier volumes. Today, four years later, we know that for now a new History of Modern Greek Literature is not being written.

Argyriou and the successors
Argyrio's successor should be sought in the field of Modern Greek Literature professors at universities, because the connection of the Histories of literature with university teaching is known, as Venetia Apostolidou argues in her detailed study in this volume. In the first half of the 20th century, the critic Alexandros Argyriou was an exception in a series of literary historians (K. Θ. Dimaras, Linos Politis, Mario Vitti, Roderick Beaton) who were university teachers.

The majority of the participants in the volume also belong to the field of university criticism – with the exception of literary critics Alexis Zira, Elisavet Kotzias and Vangelis Hatzivasiliou -, several of whom have publicly stated the direction that Modern Greek Literary Historiography should follow after Argyrio.

The new thing that Argyriou introduced into the historiography of Modern Greek Literature was the synchronic approach to the literary phenomenon. Leaving in the shadows the scholar who judges and evaluates in retrospect, recorded the reception of the works at the time they appeared and connected the literary work to its time and the social reality in which it was produced.

What the times demand
Broadening his perspective and making use of the rich heritage of the Argyrio Archive that has been donated to the Benaki Museum and the Argyrio electronic archive that he himself gave to the University of Crete, it has been formulated on various occasions recently and in the past – as in the round table on the Histories of Modern Greek Literature, who organized in Athens the 2004 the Greek Language Center, in the presence of Argyrio and Viti – that the historians of polytomy, collective and multi-collective History of Modern Greek Literature should now integrate the history of genres into the study and aesthetic evaluation of the literary product, of translations, of the press magazine, publishing houses and bookstores, of the taste of the reading public, of bestsellers, of literary awards, of literature in education.

Our time demands that the unexplored territories of literature as an institution be conquered, as a communicative phenomenon and as a commercial activity and to be factored into a narrative about the conditions of production and consumption of our literature, not only in the 20th century, but also in the previous eight centuries of its presence. If the conditions and ways of realizing such a History of Literature were discussed at the conference, this is not reflected in the minutes.

But we find allusions to the necessity of the undertaking: "The issues related to the readership and the buying public of the time, the edition, the circulation and marketing of the book, the registration of intellectual rights, etc. they remain almost terra incognita" he writes in his study of the criticism of his decade 1920 the X. L. Karaoglou. Titika Dimitroulia attempts first observations about the economy of poetry in her study and Elisavet Kotzia deals with the emergence of the best-selling novel in Greece after 1985.

The necessity of modern optics
"National crises always create the need for historical knowledge" notes Alexis Politis in his own study in the volume, leading to the thought that in the national crisis we have been experiencing in recent years in the field of the economy but also of culture and the book, the acquisition of historical knowledge is imperative. On the one hand because, according to the first observations, the new generation of writers reads mainly translated literature and is ignorant or has insufficient knowledge of modern Greek literature both from the distant and the very recent post-war past. On the other hand, because the lack of solid historical knowledge facilitates the spread of what Nasos Vagenas calls in his study in the volume "theoretical impressionism": the obfuscation by theory, which leads a portion of modern Greek criticism to interpretive extrapolations that obscure and distort the field that this criticism attempts to illuminate.

In the era of globalization in which the local and the global, the national and the foreign are redefined in new terms, Greek literature needs a History seen through a modern perspective. "The history of literature is like a continuous shuffling of the deck of cards, that is, permanent reconstructions, rearrangements and inventions of new perspectives and new questions" writes Dimitris Tziovas in the volume. The question now is: how long does it take in the post Argyri era for the new batch to start, to begin the realization of the expectation for a new narrative of modern Greek literature;

Source : tovima.gr