Maria Boletsi, Professor at the Film and Literary Studies Department of Leiden University, gave a speech entitled, The Barbarians’ Travels and Cavafy’s Centrifugal Greekness. The talk follows the travels of Cavafy’s well-known poem, Waiting for the barbarians, in contemporary art.
It explores the ways the poem converses with certain contemporary artworks that re-stage the poem, proposing their own solutions to the impasse of a civilization waiting in vain for its barbarians. The travels of Cavafy’s barbarians will also guide the reading of another poem by Cavafy, Return from Greece. Through this poem, Boletsi probes Cavafy’s version of Greekness: a centrifugal Greekness that invites us to seek Greek literature and culture in foreign places and in its dialogues with various “barbarians,” in a constant state of travel.
Boletsi is Assistant Professor at the Film and Literary Studies Department of Leiden University, The Netherlands, where she also received her Ph.D. She has published articles on post-colonial literature, Greek poetry, literary speech acts, barbarism, migratory aesthetics and cultural identity. She is particularly interested in the concept of barbarism, which includes her new book Barbarism and Its Discontents, Stanford University Press in January 2013.
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