This course frames methodologically selected topics in Modern Greek Literature and places them in their historical, social or cultural context.

How can artistic practices facilitate the cure of an illness or affliction? When psychic pain (including grief, trauma, compulsive repetition, and psychopathological states) and somatic symptoms resist medical intervention, how do aesthetic experiences offer relief from suffering? When historical violence fractures lives, how does art remember what memory cannot in order to make survival possible? This course will be constellated around the experimental cinema and writings of Gregory Markopoulos, who theorized the curative potential of images during a time of “media pollution” through reference to Greek tradition. In the later part of his career, he worked on the monumental film Eniaios and established The Temenos, “a place set apart or a sacred precinct,” in Greece as a ritualistic space for the New Cinema Spectator. In order to approach the singular work of Markopoulos, we will consider it in relation to Greek traditions of healing and medicine, ranging across ancient, Byzantine, and modern contexts. To this end, we will draw on readings from other disciplines, including art history, Byzantine history, classics, critical theory, ethnography, film studies, literature, and psychoanalysis. Authors may include: Elizabeth A. Davis; Sándor Ferenczi; Michel Foucault; Sigmund Freud; Jacques Lacan; Claude Lévi-Strauss; Gregory Markopoulos; Ernesto De Martino; Maria Mavroudi; Marion Milner; Stefania Pandolfo; Sophocles; Charles Stewart; Aby Warburg; selected passages from Ancient Greek tragedy Films may include work by: Gregory Markopoulos; Robert Beavers; Maya Deren; Pier Paolo Pasolini; Theo Angelopoulos; Michael Cacoyannis; Menelaos Karamaghiolis

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills