This Round Table focuses on specific moments and forms in which the Byzantine corpus (or rather: the representation of the Byzantine corpus from time to time) has been studied and evaluated. Approximate totalising assessments, negative or positive, are avoided. Since the culture of so-called decadentism has already been largely explored, three different moments are explored. Their common feature is a renewed influx of texts in the European cultural consciousness: the Humanistic age, which calls into question the relationship between the perception of ‘Byzantine’ as such versus ancient and even late Greek; the Romantic age, when the concept of Weltliteratur is formed, which, however, has to contend with the literary production of a reality (Greece) that had never been a ‘modern nation’ so far; the twentieth century, in the light of a greater availability of texts on the one hand, the unravelling of the ‘classical’ canon, with new critical tendencies and their impact on the evaluation of Byzantium, on the other. This RT also analyses the fortunes, beyond Byzantium, of two literary genres that express a Byzantine literary specificity, in the dynamic recontextualization – aimed at spiritual and Christian edification – of pre-existing literary forms, namely hagiography (with its characterisation of the protagonist that prefigures and even inspires some aspects of the modern novel: Dosto’evskij) and ekphrasis, also aimed not only at describing the artistic artefact but also at exploring its spiritual impact on the observer (up to Butor).
Traditionally, the hero of the novel is, in terms of Northrop Frye, “superior neither to other men nor to his environment;” he is “one of us.” Unlike the mythic hero’s, his narrative world is comparable to that of a historical or potentially historic audience. The hagiographic hero, on the other hand, is “superior in degree…
This paper explores how the Byzantine tradition of ekphrasis—the rhetorical art of vivid description and simulation of the visual—travels into, transforms, and is resemanticized within the modern Greek literary imagination, taking Nikos Kazantzakis as its central case study. Drawing on insights from Peter Bien’s Kazantzakis: Politics of the Spirit (1989), it examines the writer’s sustained…
Byzantine literature – though the very concept of literature will need to be better defined and limited – entered Western culture starting from the 15th century, when Byzantine teachers presented to their Western students not only the classical texts they wished to know, but also more or less “modern” texts. What were the paths of…
I più recenti studi di comparatistica letteraria (World Literature) si riconoscono debitori della nozione di Weltliteratur elaborata da Goethe (ca. 1820). Essa costituisce un imprescindibile codice della letteratura mondiale, caratterizzato da questi fondamenti: (1) il “conflitto creativo” tra elementi locali ed elementi globali; (2) l’attenzione all’ “universalmente umano”; (3) l’elemento di “comunità” (ibridazione tra le…
In the decades around World War II, Byzantium and Byzantine culture attracted the attention of a few Anglophone modernist poets, both major (W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound) and less illustrious ones (Wyndham Lewis, Charles Williams, Louis MacNeice). In this paper, the images of Byzantium constructed by those writers will be explored and compared, with particular…