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

Masculinity is an unstable category. What does it mean to be a man? How do forms of masculinity respond to changing historical circumstances? We will delve deeply into films, novels, and poems to understand how they reflect on the shifting conditions of masculinity during the tumultuous twentieth- and twenty-first centuries in Greece. From the heroic masculinity achieved in war to men on the social margins of Greece, there is a struggle to articulate selfhood in relation to a larger social category. To disentangle frameworks of masculinity, we must understand how they emerge. Turning to ethnographic, feminist, historical, and psychoanalytic theories, we will grapple with the competing meanings of masculinity. The novels and films that we will engage all reflect on historical violence in Greece throughout the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, including the Balkan Wars, World War I, the Greco-Turkish War, the Population Exchange, the lasting effects of the National Schism, the Occupation of Greece during WWII, the Greek Civil War, and dictatorship. What is the relationship between masculinity and various forms of violence, including violence against women, the violence involved in nation-building, and the violence of borders, migration, economic crisis, and sexuality? If masculinity has been defined as a social performance, how do literature and film explore alternative possibilities for masculinity that are not mere reproductions of violence? We will read recent criticism on masculinity to consider what is at stake in asking this question now. In this class we will try to understand how masculinity generates questions and anxieties that we can neither answer nor turn away from.

This class satisfies the Comparative Literature major/minor "historical period" requirement.

Repeat Rules

Requirements class fulfills