[MGSA-L] Princeton Hellenic Studies Workshop: February 17, 2017

[Dimitri H. Gondicas]

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies



Workshop



‘Poems of Peace and War’:

Apollinaire, Seferis and the World Wars

Lilia Diamantopoulou
ld7 at princeton.edu<mailto:ld7 at princeton.edu>
University of Vienna
Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow, Hellenic Studies



Respondent: Effie Rentzou, French and Italian



Guillaume Apollinaire’s poetic anthology Calligrammes (Paris, 1918) has the subtitle “Poems of Peace and War, 1913-1916.” Most of the poems were written on postcards sent to friends from the battle front. Apollinaire’s poetry gives us a glimpse to the war outbreak, its ethic and aesthetic impact on literary production. George Seferis gets acquainted with the work of Apollinaire in 1918 when residing in Paris as a law student. Almost twenty years later, and after the Nazi invasion in Greece, Seferis recalls his days in Paris, on the deck of the ship that will lead him as an exile from the port of Souda in Crete to Port Said in Egypt. He records in his Diary: “I remember all the time my trip to France in 1918, at the end of the last war. I have the impression that nothing occurred since then; that we still have the same war […]. Νo interruption; we are travelling to the same unknown.” The current war situation and the predominant aesthetics of war bring men and women of letters in a confrontation with similar conditions and questions that occupied writers during WWI:  What should be the stance of intellectuals and academics, what literary genre is appropriate, and how should academia and intellectuals tackle the issue of engaged literature? These and other questions are going to be presented and discussed in this talk.



Lilia Diamantopoulou received her Ph.D. in Comparative and Modern Greek Studies from the University of Munich and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies of the University of Vienna. She was a member of LMU Excellence and a Visiting Professor at the Masaryk University in Brno and the University of Patras. In 2011 she was awarded the Panagiotis Moullas prize of the National Bank of Greece Cultural Foundation (MIET) for a study on a visual poem of Neofytos Doukas for King Otto I. Her recent publications include a monograph Greek Visual Poetry. From Antiquity to the Present (Griechische Visuelle Poesie. Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, Peter Lang, 2016) and a collective volume Science deceived. Konstantinos Simonides (Die getäuschte Wissenschaft. Konstantinos Simonides, Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017).



Friday, February 17, 2017

1:30 p.m.

Scheide Caldwell House, Room 103




Supported by The Christos G. and Rhoda Papaioannou Modern Greek Studies Fund
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