Modern Greek Literature and Culture

2014
Verso una poetica rituale
Yatromanolakis, D., and P. Roilos. 2014. Verso una poetica rituale. Lecce, Italia: Argo. Abstract

Il modello teorico di una poetica rituale proposta da D. Yatromanolakis e O. Roilos fonda una nuova problematica che si basa sulla inscrizione di forme rituali in più vasti sistemi d'espressione culturali e sociopolitici all'interno di varie tradizioni del mondo greco.
Il "caso greco", col suo materiale sterminato, contrassegnato da svariate continuità e discontinuità, spesso pieno di rimaneggiamenti ideologicamente ispirati nell'arco di tre millenni, offre un terreno certamente impegnativo ma fecondo per indagini comparative.
L'ipotesi è verificata in tre precisi ambiti di ricerca: Saffo e la lirica greca arcaica, il romanzo bizantino del XII secolo e l'opera poetica di Odysseas Elytis.

Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium
Roilos, Panagiotis, ed. 2014. Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Publisher's Version Abstract

Written by eminent scholars in the field of Byzantine studies, the majority of the chapters included in Medieval Greek Storytelling: Fictionality and Narrative in Byzantium are revised versions of the papers that were presented at an international conference that Panagiotis Roilos organized at Harvard University in December 2009. The topics explored in the book cover an extensive chronological range of postclassical Greek culture(s) and literature, from early Christianity to early modern Greek literature, with a pronounced focus on the Byzantine period, as well as a variety of genres: hagiography, historiography, chronicles, “patriographic literature,” the novel, the epic, and philological commentary. One of the main aims of the book is to shift the focus of current scholarship on fictionality from those genres that are traditionally identified as “fictional,” such as the novel and the epic, to other literary discourses that lay claim to historical objectivity and veracity. By doing so, this volume as a whole sheds new light on the interpenetration of different, often apparently antithetical discursive categories and strategies and on the ensuing problematization of established demarcations between “historicity” and fictionality, as well as “objectivity” and imaginary arbitrariness, in diverse Byzantine literary and broader cultural contexts.

2010
Imagination and Logos: Essays on C. P. Cavafy
Roilos, Panagiotis, ed. 2010. Imagination and Logos: Essays on C. P. Cavafy. Cambridge, MA: Department of the Classics, Harvard University. Publisher's Version Abstract

This book explores diverse but complementary cross-disciplinary approaches to the poetics, intertexts, and impact of the work of C. P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis), one of the most influential twentieth-century European poets. Written by leading international scholars from a number of disciplines (critical theory, gender studies, comparative literature, English studies, Greek studies, anthropology, classics), the essays of this volume situate Cavafy’s poetry within the broader contexts of modernism and aestheticism, and investigate its complex and innovative responses to European literary traditions (from Greek antiquity to modernity) as well as the multifaceted impact of Cavafy and his writings on other major figures of world literature. 

Contributors: Eve Sedgwick, Helen Vendler, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Albert Henrichs, Richard Dellamora, Kathleen Coleman, Mark Doty, James Faubion, Diana Haas. 

Jacket image: The Smoker by Ioannis Roilos, reproduced by permission of the painter.

2009
C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy
Roilos, Panagiotis. 2009. C. P. Cavafy: The Economics of Metonymy. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Publisher's Version Abstract

Konstantinos P. Kavafis--known to the English-reading world as C. P. Cavafy--has been internationally recognized as an important poet and attracted the admiration of eminent literary figures such as E. M. Forster, F. T. Marinetti, W. H. Auden, George Seferis, and James Merrill. Cavafy's idiosyncratic poetry remains one of the most influential and perplexing voices of European modernism.

 

Focusing on Cavafy's intriguing work, this book navigates new territories in critical theory and offers an interdisciplinary study of the construction of (homo)erotic desire in poetry in terms of metonymic discourse and anti-economic libidinal modalities. Panagiotis Roilos shows that problematizations of art production, market economy, and trafficability of erôs in diverse late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European sociocultural and political contexts were re-articulated in Cavafy's poetry in new subversive ways that promoted an "unorthodox" discursive and libidinal anti-economy of jouissance.

2005
Προς μία τελετουργική ποιητική
Roilos, Panagiotis, and Dimitrios Yatromanolakis. 2005. Προς μία τελετουργική ποιητική. Athens: Ekdoseis Alexandreia. Publisher's Version Abstract

Greek edition of Towards a Ritual Poetics, translated by Emmanuel Skouras, and including a Preface by Marcel Detienne.

2003
Towards a Ritual Poetics
Yatromanolakis, Dimitrios, and Panagiotis Roilos. 2003. Towards a Ritual Poetics. Athens: Foundation of the Hellenic World. Publisher's Version Abstract

The book Towards a Ritual Poetics by Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at John Hopkins University, and Panagiotis Roilos, Assistant Professor of Modern Greek Studies at Harvard University, is an interdisciplinary study regarding the incorporation of the rituals in cultural expression at different moments of Hellenic history. Three representative and slightly researched cases are examined, in a wide time framework, through which a methodological model is proposed, the notion of ritual poetics, aiming at comparing different aspects between rituals and socio-political expression.