Indeterminate “Greekness”: A Diasporic and Transnational Poetics

Abstract

As a critical concept, “Greekness” indeterminately characterizes ancient constructions and their contemporary reception histories, rendering it elusive to disciplinary definition. This dissertation reconceives of its indetermination as a means of approaching transnational Greek history throughout the past century. Drawing on a recent series of diasporic and transnational poets who are, themselves, positioned across shifting Anglo-Greek frames of language, culture, and geography, I argue that their comparisons hold interdisciplinary relevance for the fields of modern Greek studies, diasporic and transnational studies, and classical reception studies. The self-referential dramatizations of their lyric respectively reanimate ancient Greek khōras, ancient Greek fragments, and ancient Greek myths into juxtapositional encounters with contemporary identity constructions. Laying bare the presentist contrivances of dominant “Greekness” within the frames of nation, empire, institution, and bureaucracy, this revisionist poetics returns representation to liminal individuals, groups, and communities that have been excluded from such absolutist lines of descent. My focus on this aesthetic revisionism serves, then, to reorient scholarly approaches to marginalized belonging across shifting historical registers. As such, Indeterminate “Greekness” not only advances a comparative study of recent Greek and English language poetry but also introduces “Greekness” itself as a meta-critical apparatus by which to compare relevant interdisciplinary frameworks.