Spring 2021
Language Courses
Elementary Modern Greek II, Chrysanthe Filippardos
GRKM UN1102
M/W, 12:10pm-2:00pm
A continuation of UN1101, the students are expected to be able to read texts containing high frequency vocabulary and basic structures; understand basic conversations or understand the gist of more complex conversations on familiar topics; produce simple speech on familiar topics; communicate in simple tasks requiring a simple and direct exchange of information on familiar and routine matters; write short texts or letters on familiar subjects.
Intermediate Modern Greek II, Chrysanthe Filippardos
GRKM UN2101
M/W, 6:10pm-8:00pm
A continuation of UN2101, upon completion of the course, the students are able to read simple Greek newspaper articles, essays and short stories and to express their opinion on a number of familiar topics. In addition to these skills, students will be exposed to a number of authentic multimodal cultural material that will allow them to acquire knowledge and understanding of the vibrant cultural landscape of Greece today.
Literature, Culture & History
The Ottoman Past in the Greek Present, Dimitris Antoniou
CLGM UN3110
T, 2:10pm-4:00pm
Almost a century after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman past lives on in contemporary Greece, often in unexpected sites. In the built environment it appears as mosques, baths, covered markets, and fountains adorned with Arabic inscriptions. It also manifests itself in music, food, and language. Yet Ottoman legacies also shape the European present in less obvious ways and generate vehement debates about identity, nation-building, human rights, and interstate relations. In this course, we will be drawing on history, politics, anthropology, and comparative literature as well as a broad range of primary materials to view the Ottoman past through the lens of he Greek present. What understandings of nation-building emerge as more Ottoman archives became accessible to scholars? How does Islamic Family Law—still in effect in Greece—confront the European legal system? How are Ottoman administrative structures re-assessed in the context of acute socioeconomic crisis and migration? This course fulfills the global core requirement.
Greek Poets and their Interlocutors, Stathis Gourgouris
CLGM GU4550
T, 12:10pm-2:00pm
This course stages an imaginary dialogue between certain Greek poets, whose work spans the 20th century, and poets of the same era from other parts of the world, for whom Greek motifs are crucial to their poetic sensibility. These motifs may pertain to both ancient and modern figures of Hellenism, but even when the figures are recognizably ancient the assumption is that they extend themselves to an indisputable modernity. Indeed, by staging this dialogue, we will engage in interrogations of modernity and, moreover, the specific ways in which figures of modernity and figures of Hellenism are entwined. At the same time, we will pay close attention to different articulations of poiēsis, especially as they pertain to a certain politics. The literary historical sphere spans the range of early modernism to postmodernism and postcolonialism, as well as specific poetic-political sensibilities, whether aestheticist or Marxist, feminist or queer, etc. The methodological emphasis will be determined by reading the poems themselves, with just a few key essays on poetics as supplemental framework. Students who know Greek would be expected to discuss the Greek poems in the original. But also, students who come from language departments, whose literature may be represented in the selection, will be expected to work on the non-Greek poems in the original language as well.
Cross-listed courses
Nationalism in Theory and History, Konstantina Zanou
CLIA GU4024
TR, 12:00pm-2:00pm
Were nations always there? Are they real or imagined? Do they come before or after nationalism and the state? How did we pass from a world of empires, duchies, and city-states to a world of nation-states? Where does legitimacy reside if not in God and his endowed kings? Is the modern world really ‘disenchanted’? How did we come to understand time, space, language, religion, gender, race, and even our very selves in the era of nations? Are we done with this era, living already in post-national times? This course will combine older theories of nationalism (Gellner, Anderson, Hobsbawm, Smith) with recent approaches of the phenomenon after the ‘Imperial/Global/Transnational Turn’ (Bayly, Conrad, Innes, Isabella, Reill, Stein etc.) and late studies in Gender, Race, Culture and Nationalism, in order to offer new answers to old questions. We will talk about many places around the world, but the main stage where we will try out our questions is Italy and the Mediterranean.
Related Courses
The Hybrid Voice: Comparative Diasporas and Translation, Karen Van Dyck and Brent Edwards
CPLS GR6111/ CLGM 8 8111 001
TR, 2:10pm-4:00pm
This seminar will focus on the theory and practice of translation from the perspective of comparative diasporas and the hybrid voice. Students are encouraged to come to the seminar with a text from any language they wish to translate. We will read key essays on translation focusing on the issues of language and script in relation to migration, uprooting, and imagined community. Rather than foregrounding a single case study, the syllabus is organized around the proposition that any consideration of diaspora requires a consideration of comparative and overlapping diasporas, and as a consequence a confrontation with creolization and translation. We will look at a range of literary representations of language-crossing and -mixing, especially in terms of their lessons for the practice of translation (including Greek, Chinese, French, Latin, Italian, and Albanian). The final weeks of the course will be devoted to a practicum where students will get a chance to workshop their own translation projects.
Directed Readings, Independent and Senior Research Seminars
Directed Readings, Dimitris Antoniou
GRKM UN3997 02
Directed Readings, Karen Van Dyck
GRKM UN3997 03
Directed Readings, Stathis Gourgouris
GRKM UN3997 04
Directed Readings, Paraskevi Martzavou
GRKM UN3997 05
Supervised Independent Research, Dimitris Antoniou
GRKM GU4460 02
Supervised Independent Research, Karen Van Dyck
GRKM GU4460 03
Supervised Independent Research, Stathis Gourgouris
GRKM GU4460 04
Supervised Independent Research, Paraskevi Martzavou
GRKM GU4460 05