A Metanational Modernism: Yannis Ritsos, Tradition, and the Poetics of Return

Abstract

My dissertation explores the uses of Greek indigenous culture in the poetry of one of Greece’s most prolific modernists Yannis Ritsos (1909–90). My focus on his rehandling of the return theme offers a much-needed systematic reappraisal of the still widely held view that Greek modernism constituted a Hellenocentric movement distinct from an assumed cosmopolitan modernist standard in the West. Challenging this outdated and problematic distinction, I show that while Ritsos drew on substantially local and living traditions, his modulation of global meaning undermines claims for his “Generation’s” Hellenocentrism. Defining Ritsos’s approach to Greek culture in terms of a metanational modernism, I argue that his reinvention of the return theme not only contributed to a synchronic and synthesizing conceptualization of twentieth century Hellenicity but concurrently reinscribed the formal, ritual, and symbolic structures of his indigenous sources into viable modes for negotiating a dialogic interaction between Greekness and the larger discursive paradigms of literary modernism regarding history, modernity, and the poet’s universal significance within these socio-cultural matrices. This study’s diachronic as well as synchronic discussion of Ritsos’s poetics of return represents one of the relatively few book-length explorations of his poetry, as well as the only one of its kind in the English language to undertake a close examination of his poetic engagement with tradition. Such a study is especially warranted in the wake of more recent shifts in the scholarly dialogue in which modernism is being explored as a transnational phenomenon with greater attention being devoted to the negotiation of cultural indigeneity and globality in American, European and many other underrepresented modernisms beyond this orbit. Ritsos’s metanational poetics of return is not only important for how it extends to a more wholistic assessment of Greek modernism but also for how such an approach to the Greek case may contribute to this ongoing reassessment of global modernism. Grounded in the methodological frameworks of ritual poetics and mythogenesis, I approach Ritsos’s rehandling of the return theme primarily by his manipulation of the cultural and ritual deep structures of his indigenous sources, while also devoting comparative attention to a number of his modernist peers in Greece and abroad. I focus my discussion on three main categories that arguably represent Ritsos’s most recurrent frameworks of a poetics of return, and which represent major areas of interest to numerous other contemporaries: Christian journeys, the mourning process, and the dramatic and ritual underpinnings of Ritsos’s approach to classical mythology.