Where the Line is Drawn: Trauma and Narrative in the Histories of Agathias (original) (raw)

2023, The Independent Scholar

This paper proposes a radical departure from previous studies of Agathias, an under-studied Late Antique author who offers us a unique perspective of the 6th century when we consider the milieu in which he wrote his Histories. Agathias, this paper argues, exhibited signs of trauma from the news of constant warfare in Italy and the Caucasus and the barbarian raids on Constantinople, all of which he tried to process and resolve by creating a narrative, which was filled with inconsistencies and moralizing tangents. Agathias’ Histories is more than his impartial and accurate retelling of events; it is his attempt to make sense of his trauma with the written word

"Narrative re-appropriations and the modality of the “Ottoman past” in Modern Greek fiction" [abstract, Workshop: Hi/Stories in Contemporary Greek Culture: The Entanglements of History and the Arts since 1989]

A workshop generously funded by the Sophia Scopetéa Fund to promote the study of Modern Greek at the University of Copenhagen. My paper is title "Narrative re-appropriations and the modality of the “Ottoman past” in Modern Greek fiction". For the purpose of answering the question of how the past is (re)imagined in contemporary literature, I bring to bear Hayden White’s conceit of plot as the meta-historical element of historiographic narration, a conceit that –taking into account recent reworkings and critisism– proves useful when employed in the analysis of fictional works that attempt to reconfigure the past / a “practical past” for the symbolic economy of the present. For the purposes of the workshop, I plan to focus on three works dealing more specifically with Enlightenment and its legacy: in the novels by Athina Kakouri (Tēs tychēis to machairi, 1989), Nikos Themelis (Gia mia syntrofia anamesa mas, 2005), and Thomas Skassis (To roloi tēs skias, 2004) the past / national history is emploted as a family novel and/or a bildungsroman· it is exactly this “ideology of form” that the paper will question.

(Re)discovering Love Stories: Byzantine Mentality and the Greek Novel from the Ninth to the Fifteenth Century CE, The Journal of Greco-Roman Studies 57 (2018) 123-144

The Journal of Greco-Roman Studies, 2018

The present paper is an overview and discussion of Byzantine literary criticism concerning the ancient Greek novel from the ninth to the fifteenth century CE. More specifically, I focus here on the opinions and judgments of some of the most prominent Byzantine scholars as regards two fully extant Greek novels: Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon and Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Tale. I review in some detail various aspects of the ‘evaluation practice’ of Patriarch Photios I (ninth century CE) and Michael Psellos (eleventh century CE), and I also – though more briefly – go over the corresponding theories and ideas of (Philip-)Philagathus of Cerami (twelfth century CE) and Ioannis Eugenikos (fifteenth century CE). The main question I attempt to address in this study is how similarly or differently (even idiosyncratically) the Byzantines read and discussed the Greek novels over the centuries.

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