1

THE SUCCESSFUL SELF-CO�CEALME�T OF CA�O�ICITY: CO�SCIOUS

A�D U�CO�SCIOUS OVERSIGHTS I� GREEK LITERARY

HISTORIOGRAPHY

ÁLVARO GARCÍA MARÍN*

Psychology has termed ‘self-concealment’ the ‘tendency to keep secrets that are perhaps

too painful to recall, too stressful to reveal, or even too frightening to describe’. My

point in this text is to suggest that such a process of self-concealment is centrally

involved, with a varying degree of consciousness, in the development of most Greek

literary historiography, including a great part of scholarship inside and outside Greece.

After analysing some of the causes and the concretizations of this phenomenon, I will

propose a new model for Greek literary history from the point of view of the

hermeneutic and foucaultian approach formulated by Mario Valdés under the name of

«effective literary history». Throughout the text, I will be using some concepts and

elaborations by Gregory Jusdanis (1991) and Vassilis Lambropoulos (1985, 1988),

perhaps well known by Anglo-Saxon scholarship, but mostly unknown, or at least

ignored, by their European colleagues, especially in Greece and Spain, where the

empiricist paradigm, in terms of Lambropoulos (see 1989), seems to still dominate.

The first question we have to pose, then, is: what is concealed in this self-

concealment? What is so stressful to reveal and so frightening to describe in Greek

literature or literary history? We should search for an answer to these questions in the

seemingly simple and self-explanatory notion of historicity. A notion with two main

* This work has been produced in the framework of the Research Project FFI2008-06919-C02-01,

belonging to the Instituto de Lenguas y Culturas del Mediterráneo y Oriente Próximo in the Centro de

Ciencias Humanas y Sociales of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spain).

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ramifications when applied to Greek literature: the problem of genealogy and the

problem of canonicity, both of them overdetermined in their turn by what Walter

Mignolo (2002) has called the «colonial difference». Following Vangelis Calotychos, I

would like to invoke here the term «self-colonization» (2003:52) to help explain the

ambiguous mechanisms whereby Greek literature has been constructed by and in its

criticism through the last two centuries in the general process of legitimization of the

still unconfident Greek nation. If it is true, as has been said, that every nation is founded

on similar amounts of memory and oblivion, we should seek in the latter the key to self-

concealment. Literary criticism and historiography have been operating in Greece with

the main aim of obliterating the colonial difference inscribed in the very inception of

their nation, completely unaware that by this reaction, triggered by the colonial trauma

itself, they were perpetuating the very coloniality they tried to efface. History has thus

substituted historicity in the study of literature, and a static and statist tradition the

dynamic and discontinuous processes of canonicity. The concealment of such notions,

of course, is not an exclusively Greek phenomenon1. The reification of literature and

literary history, as well as the ascription to a stable synchronic canon, have been

inherent to the project of Western modernity and imply themselves a great deal of self-

occultation. What distinguishes Greece in this respect not only from West Europe, but

also from conventional decolonized societies in Africa or America, is a singular

postcolonial condition. Such a postcolonial condition problematizes in a rather peculiar

1 In this respect, we cannot but link our reflections on (literary) history as a process of self-occultation of the nation’s constructive mechanisms ―which implies a high degree of unconscious repression― to the conclusions of Stathis Gourgouris about the narrative of the nation (in Homi Bhabha’s terms) as an occultation of its dream-work, which according to Gourgouris constitutes the source of its construction or, better, of its imagination. Thus, he considers that «the Nation’s fiction is narrative only partially and tentatively, and a nation is fictional only figuratively, which is to say, finally, that the Nation’s narrative, the form that its fiction takes, is none other than the self-occultation of its dream-work turned into a narrative» (1996: 30). Likewise, «national history itself, as a specific genre of writing, is the most elevated form of a national imaginary’s self-occultation» (1996: 41). He contends, finally, that national history arises from the very internal demands of the national dream, and it is a text «internal to the process of imaginary signification, speaking from within the dream-work as if it were not part of the dream work» (1996: 262-263).

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way the historical and discursive relationship of the national culture to its European

counterparts, to the extent that this dialogue can be claimed to be one of the central

features in the so far mostly unexplored genealogy and historicity of Greek literature.

The term self-colonization (formulated by Vangelis Calotychos but first

suggested by Chouliaras and Nanos Valaoritis) tries to account for the assumption by

the Greeks, already from the eighteenth century, of the colonial discourses constructed

for them by the West Europeans and conventionally gathered under the title of

Philhellenism. The continuous attempts to provide the incipient Greek nation with a

European genealogy while at the same time rejecting its present state as an oriental

people incapable of standing the comparison with their ideal Hellenic ancestors had as a

consequence a perpetual anxiety not only about tradition and cultural continuity, but

also about the necessity to become, or demonstrate to already be, a European nation. In

the heyday of romantic nationalism, and on the grounds of Philhellenism’s basic

concern with culture, literature had necessarily to play a crucial role in the construction

of Modern Greece. Moreover, to find or to construct a national literature and literary

tradition was a way to efface the colonial condition considered by the Greek elites,

themselves inside a deep colonialist logic because of their Western education, as

profoundly shameful, since literature, as the self-representation of a historical people,

could only be predicated of European nations, while non-European ones, as Said

pointed out in his Orientalism, were incapable of representing themselves. Therefore, I

contend here that, despite any other, plural, literary cultures operating in Greek soil by

this time, literature in the modern Western sense was introduced in Greece around this

period, as a constitutive part in the process of national configuration and

Europeanization. Of course, I am not trying to say that there was not a textual culture in

Greek before the end of the eighteenth century. I am just suggesting that the institution

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of literature, such as it was shaped along the eighteenth century in Europe, enters

Greece only by the time of its independence. And it tries to become legitimized by

granting itself a long tradition through the composition of literary histories such as the

Cours de littérature grecque moderne by Rizos-Neroulos in 1827. In that moment,

literature in the European sense was not only intended to buttress the right to existence

of the Greek nation as the outcome of its historical presence, but was also, and I would

dare to say above all, conceived as the means to prefigure an imaginary for the nation

and to confer it a cultural homogeneity previous, and necessary, to the political one.

That this homogenization in the textual discourse was made at the expense of

some previous polyphonic, hyperethnic literary cultures in Greek, which were displaced

in and by this inceptive moment, does not seem to have been acknowledged by most

literary historians and scholars even today2. Neither has been usually observed that

some of such literary cultures, in a mechanism of canonical reorganization that could

also be described as epistemic violence3, were turned into the mere prehistory of the

teleological lineality of Greek literature. Perhaps the best example of this is the folk

song, which, despite its continuous presence until well after the foundation of the

nation, was excluded from the historical phase of Greek literature (and displaced into an

atemporal, ontological previousness to Greek literacy, though essential to it as the

guarantee of continuity and connection with Ancient times), just because orality did not

fit the requirements of the new European concept of literature and literary history4.

2 Here lies one of the main concretizations of the «colonial difference», as Mignolo has put it: «The colonial difference and, therefore, the colonial model can be described as follows: Western categories of thought put non-Western categories (and the distinction I am making here is a result of the colonial difference) in a double bind. Either non-Western cultural practices are so different from Western ones that they could not be considered properly philosophy, literature, history, religion, science, or what have you. Or, on the contrary, in order to be recognized, they have to become similar and assimilated to Western conceptualizations of cultural practices and social organization» (2002: 160). 3 On the concept of epistemic violence applied to canon formation in general, see Spivak 1988: 154-155. 4 «The literalization of oral traditions subjects them to political reinterpretation in any situation of inequality. More than that, however, fiat by writing subordinates the imagery of the folk texts to a larger version of itself, making “oral literature” and “oral” or “folk poetry” a pre-historic (and ahistorical) pre-

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Likewise, the strife ―inextricably connected to the language question that marks the

whole process of Greek national construction until today― between a purist and a

demoticist literary canon (and therefore about the appropriateness of one or the other

linguistic register for writing (national) literature), carried out principally along the

second half of the nineteenth century and central to the very notion of Greek literature,

has passed unnoticed by most literary historians, generally engaged through the

concealment of the defeated option in the reinforcement of the official position: first the

purist one of the so called Athens School, and later the demoticist one, still today in

force. This adherence to purism or demoticism by literary historians, succeeding one

another in time, implies in its turn an adherence to dissociated concepts of the Greek

nation and of literature itself, and thus attempts to fix a reified, ahistorical image of such

notions, obliterating the excluded elements as inadequate (i.e., non-Greek or non-

literary) or even never existing5. In all these cases, a colonial logic is at work: whatever

the particular understanding of the ideal of nation or of literature can be in each

moment, it is always (at least it is thus perceived by the Greeks) a univocal and

European one, trying to impose itself on the oriental multiplicity of the autochthonous

traditions.

text for histories of national literature defined in strictly literary terms (e. g. Dimaras 1972). […] In all these formulae ―for academic incantations are as formulaic as any― the analysis of culture is exclusively calibrated to a model of literacy» (Herzfeld 1987: 39). 5 «In nineteenth-century Greece, for instance, official culture was designated for the most part by the ideology of purism. The use of extremely archaic syntactical forms or the appreciation of purist poetry enabled the educated elite to acquire and maintain high status. Through this exclusionary means it protected its privileged position from outsiders. But the consumption of purist texts cannot be understood as a type of cultural capital because the social conditions for its operation were absent. There was no culture industry, no proletariat, and no mass culture from which the refined sensibility could distinguish itself. Purism denounced the vernacular not only because of its law status but also because it offered a competing version of national identity. Though purism designated itself the official discourse of the state, it posited the differences between high (purism) and low (demoticism) in political rather than aesthetic terms. Purism had broader socio-political goals than the preservation of prestige and allocation of cultural resources. Its pedagogical mission envisioned katharevusa as the national language and purism the national culture. In practice, of course, these plans never materialized, because of popular resistance and opposition from demoticists. But like demoticism, purism strived to indoctrinate the nation into its values, its aim being the production of Greeks» (Judanis 1991: 66).

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Ignoring the historicity and the canonic struggle implied by these facts6 and,

above all, supporting consciously or unconsciously the colonial discourse entrenched

from the beginning in the project of national legitimization, literary historians and

scholars, both from Greece and abroad, have presumed from the nineteenth century the

existence of a universal and suprahistorical notion of literature as the only horizon

where Greek textual culture can be situated. This idealization, common to other scholars

in other countries, not only conceals the exclusively Western European pertinence of the

concept, but also its eighteenth-century genealogy. Thus, from the first attempts to

historicize Greek literature, such a modern concept was uncritically applied to medieval

or premodern stages with the only aim to confer Greece a full European lineage. But

even in the nineteenth century, like Gregory Jusdanis has revealed, it is impossible to

establish a perfect parallel in the literary development of Greece and Western Europe.

The colonial difference is also, or mainly, present here. For, despite the fact that Greece

‘imported’ from the West by this time the institution of literature, it had to adapt it to

the special necessities of the new nation. No claims to aesthetic autonomy, central then

to French, English or German literature, could be made in a state in need of political,

social and conceptual self-definition and configuration. In such a context, instead,

literature could not be but socially functional and supply national representations in

order to construct a collective imaginary whereby the masses of Greek-speaking

ottoman population were educated in the national dream. Like in every Third World

society, according to Fredric Jameson (1986: 69), we can discern here literature as an

identity production machine7, as the producer of basically national allegories even when

aesthetic pretensions get involved.

6 On the canon as inherently and interestingly linked to simultaneously self-definition, (self)identification and (self)occultation, see Lindenberger 1990:xiii, Jusdanis 1991:63, and Valdés 2002: 93-94. 7 «The case of Greece is significant because its history highlights the relationship between literature (and art in general) and politics which in modern times, although successfully suppressed, has been only

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That the emphasis is on the national and the functional dimension is also

demonstrated by the wide range of genres that historians of Greek literature include in

their accounts until well into the twentieth century. Unlike similar European attempts,

limited from Schlegel on just to aesthetic and fictional texts (see Behler 1991: 11-13),

literary histories of Greece tend to include, from Neroulos to Dimaras or even Knös as

late as 19628, everything written in Greek, either in the fields of history, philosophy,

theology, natural sciences, or philology. The main aim is thus to show that, even before

the very consciousness of Modern Greek identity was originated, there was already a

literary production in Modern Greek language that attests for a long previous existence,

if only under oriental rule, of a Greek people capable of expressing itself as occidentals,

that is, inside the boundaries of a Western epistemological realm. What is here at stake

is once more the colonial difference that, trying to conceal itself, reappears in an even

more acute way, becoming somehow ineffaceable. But it also demonstrates that in

nineteenth century Greece, to a certain extent, it is a premodern rather than a modern

concept of literature that is operating9.

superficially undone. Until recent decades Greek literature has existed as an appendage to other discourses and has not been conceived as an autonomous sphere. It was introduced to serve the needs of the state and continued to be discussed within the context of nation, language, and Greekness. Greek literature emerged in the dialogue between a European notion and the necessities of the Greek nation» (Jusdanis 1991: 24). 8 Of course, I am not trying to equate here all these Histories of Greek literature as belonging to a similar or unchanged epistemological and ideological model. They are also a part, and even a crucial part, of the historicity of Greek literature, as long as they usually initiate or sanction canonical shifts and reorganizations. A main focus of my proposal, as we shall see, is thus the analysis of all the Histories of Greek literature in their historicity. 9 According to Anders Pettersson, the notion of literature as every written production operates both in most non-European contexts and in Europe until the eighteenth century (Pettersson 2006: 8). Linda Hutcheon and Mario Valdés have pointed out the romantic and European genealogy of the modern concept of literature as just aesthetic writing, linking it to the national model: «For eighteenth-century historians, it would have included all culturally accepted writing ―from poetry to philosophy, from scientific discourse to dramatic works, from history to fiction. The idea that literature as a category really includes just imaginative writing can likely be traced back to the German romantic creation of a national literature with aesthetic value or interest» (Hutcheon and Valdés 2002: ix). Through the whole nineteenth century and a great part of the twentieth, there was in Greece an important hesitation around the concept of literature, to such an extent that at least four signifiers were used to refer to it: φιλολογία, γραµµατολογία, γραµµατεία, and λογοτεχνία. Literary historians alternate all of them until well into the twentieth century, when λογοτεχνία seems to impose itself in the wake of the acceptation of the European notion of literature as just imaginative writing. For an account of these terms, and the political and

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This is the context, therefore, where Greek literature was being produced and

consumed in a great part of the nineteenth century, in a profuse and complex dialogue

with, or maybe even dependence of, the also ideal or constructed notion of Europe,

either in terms of convergence or resistance. For all these reasons, it is rather naïve, in

my opinion, to analyse Greek romanticism, for example, in mere aesthetic terms and in

a European context, without taking into account the crucial fact that some of its main

representatives in Athens were at the same time politicians who had to deal with the

burden of providing Greece simultaneously with political institutions and with literary

monuments. Furthermore, the singular conditions of Athenian romanticism bring to the

foreground other interesting questions about the genealogy and conceptualization of

Greek literature, such as the privileging of a Hellenic concept of Greekness through the

utilization of katharevousa over demotic, or the difficulties its practitioners found to

incept a European literary culture in a place where no social or economical conditions

for its rise were found10.

However, we should not hypostasize in our turn this nineteenth-century Greek

literary culture. It is not static, totalizing or internally homogeneous, but simply one

stage in the historicity of Greek literature, soon readjusted as well by a canonical and

conceptual shift that privileged both a demotic linguistic register and a somehow more

aesthetic notion of literature. This change of paradigm, whose complexity I cannot

detail here, concluded successfully with the Generation of the 30s, whose program

seems to have imposed itself as the hegemonic framework for the study of Greek

literature until today (see Jusdanis 1991: 87). The colonial difference or the political and

national function of literature have not disappeared with it at all, however. But its

functional connotations implicit in every conceptualization of literature in Greek literary history, see Jusdanis 1991: 107-121. 10 For an account of these questions and the awareness of such difficulties in the works of Rangavis or Panagiotis Soutsos, see Güthenke 2008 : 140-190.

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claims for the cultural continuity and homogeneity of Hellenism have managed to

conceal previous stages, geographically or aesthetically alternative versions, and even

the very historicity of Greek literature. We can conclude then, following the logic of the

disemia postulated by Michael Herzfeld, that every imposition of a new, officialized,

literary paradigm, tends to erase or conceal the variability of social practices existing

before by trying to superimpose on their inherent historicity a reified history. It is not a

coincidence, in this sense, that after every canonical shift, a number of histories of

literature appear to sanction the change. This is how canons, as a part of the

epistemological project of European modernity to which also the disciplines of history

or literature in their modern sense belong, work. They cannot be abstracted from the

(post)colonial operation that leads Greece to assume and internalize a substantially

Western and univocal notion of textual culture at the expense of previous, decentred,

multilingual, plurinational and interclass textualities. By their very nature, such

premodern or non-European textualities do not admit or require canonicity ―not at

least in the same terms that modern Western Literature (capitalized) does.

In a time when literary history has been accused of thus bespeaking the

epistemic and ideological values that buttressed the European colonial project of

modernity, I want to propose a new kind of history of literature that, problematizing the

definitions of both history and literature from up-to-date methodological perspectives,

be able to account for the historicity, the genealogy, and the colonial difference of

Greek literature. Unfortunately, I cannot review here with detail previous histories of

Greek literature11. As far as I know, after Professor Kehagioglou’s article in 1980, no

systematic analysis of them has been attempted. However, in a general overview, we

can easily appreciate that, apart from a recent sample of what David Perkins has termed

11 Those used for the preparation of this work, however, can be found in the final bibliography.

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«encyclopaedic literary history»12 ―the Λεξικό Νεοελληνικής Λογοτεχνίας―, the most

works in this genre partake of a political aim to sustain hegemonic discourses on nation,

literature, the canon, the language, or history itself, in order to normalize them and make

them appear as natural. They usually advocate for an uninterrupted continuity of

Modern Greek literature from Ancient Greece, the Middle Ages or 1821, for a

teleological and organicist development of the Greek nation in its textual culture, for a

deterministic belief in the genius of the Greek people or language, and for an idealistic

and universal notion of literature. No clear methodological justifications are provided

for such choices that, notwithstanding, respond to a political agenda trying not to

describe but to delimit a field perceived as substantial to the yet unconfident identity of

the young nation. I want to make it clear that I am not referring here just to works as old

as Voutieridis’s or Dimaras’s, but even to texts as recent as 2009, when a History of

Modern Greek Literature based on the same outdated principles was published in Spain

(Villar 2009).

It has been mainly these works, whose conclusions have been assumed by most

Greek literary scholarship ―let alone the educational system―, that have promoted the

self-concealment I am talking here about. My proposal, on the contrary, starting from

the awareness that no such work can claim for a completely objective and unprejudiced

point of view, and that every literary history implies necessarily a certain ideological

agenda, will aim at revealing some of the processes concealed in the classic texts, and

thus at resituating Greek literature with respect to both Europe and their closest

neighbours. I agree partially with Roderick Beaton when he says that Greek literature is

neither minor, like Gregory Jusdanis claimed in a time when this term was in its heyday,

nor marginal, like some of Lambropoulos’s works seem to imply (Beaton 1994: 10-11).

12 For this notion, see Perkins 1992: 53-60.

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However, I think there is not better way to minorize or marginalize it that trying to

make it just a European one expected to have a perfectly parallel development to that of

France or England. That responds just to a model of failure or underdevelopment

inherent to the discourse of self-colonization. The notion of literary cultures I have been

using so far, instead, accounts for the different conceptions of textual culture around the

world and inside a single tradition, overcoming as long as it is possible the

hierarchization implicit in the colonial generalization of modern Western aesthetic

literature. In this sense, I contend Greek literature to be a set of literary cultures at the

same time independent and interconnected both mutually and to neighbouring ones. As

such, it is as central or as marginal as any other.

The concept of literary cultures, elaborated by Mario Valdés in the framework of

the hermeneutic and genealogic approach denominated by him «effective literary

history»13, allows us to overcome both the universalization of the term literature and the

national model14, especially inappropriate in my opinion to Greece. Literary cultures do

not respect the state boundaries since they are usually local or polyethnic, multilingual

and untotalizable. From this point of view, they would be able to account as much for

the diversity of literary conceptions, practices and contexts in the pre-revolutionary

Greek diaspora, as for the nineteenth and twentieth-century multinational and

13 The source of this term is not only Gadamer’s Wirkungsgeschichte, but also its reelaboration in Ricoeur’s effective history. 14 Many similar proposals have been recently made. John Frow, for example, writes that «it is no longer possible to think in terms of a pregiven field of the literary which would form its proper and unproblematically constituted object; and there is no consensual structure of value which would provide the ground for an assured practice of interpretation. At the same time, however, other possibilities become available: for an opening of the practice of textual history to new configurations drawn from the whole domain of writing; for an opening of the question of value to an analysis of the institutional formations through which literature, the literary event, and literary value are constructed. If the demand for a new literary history is the wrong one, there is still the chance to begin again with the writing of the multiple histories of textuality» (Frow 1991: 142). Linda Hutcheon, in her turn, proposes a new comparative or transnational literary history, polyphonic and untotalizable, in order to challenge the old national model (Hutcheon 2002: 26). In similar terms seems to work the proposal of Anders Pettersson for a «transcultural literary history», where different cultural and temporal notions of literature should be considered together (Pettersson 2006). For the importance of literary cultures in a literary history acknowledging the colonial difference, see also Mignolo 2002: 168.

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multilingual Greek colonies in North Africa or Anatolia, as well as for the modern

integration of Greek textuality in a world literature dominated by the global market.

Effective literary history as theorized by Mario Valdés and put into practice in

three recent major works: Literary Cultures of Latin America (Valdés and Kadir 2004),

History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (Cornis-Pope and Neubauer

2004-2005), and Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions from South Asia

(Pollock 2003), entails recognition of the colonial difference, awareness of the

genealogical and discursive implications in the institutionalization of literature, and a

hermeneutical approach that stresses historicity over teleological or positivistic

presentations. An effective literary history of Greece or the Greek language would have

then to emphasize not continuities but discontinuities in the conceptual, geographical,

discursive, institutional, or linguistic realms. But, unlike the proposals based just in

foucaultian premises, such as Lambropoulos’s (1985: 25)15, these discursive

discontinuities would not be conceived as moments of rupture and historical

refoundation in a chronological line, but as the disperse components that by their

juxtaposition might configure a complex and polyphonic image of Greek literature and

at the same time deconstruct its very possibility as an organic and epistemological

object.

As we can see from the examples, all of them focusing not on single traditions

but on geographic or geopolitical constellations of linguistic traditions, such an

approach attempts inherently to overcome the national model and context, trying to de-

emphasize the national myths and to highlight analogies and points of contact, as well

15 Gregory Jusdanis has also proposed a new kind of Greek literary history, one focusing especially on the minor condition of Greek literature with respect to European ones (Jusdanis 1990: 18-19). The main problem in this proposal, in my opinion, lies in the difficult definition of European or major literatures as opposed to marginal or minor ones. The concept of literary cultures I am proposing here dismantles this hierarchization by equating all textual traditions, not failing though to acknowledge the unequal colonial relationships implied in their construction, development and reception.

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as hybrid and marginal phenomena that traditional national histories have ignored or

deliberately suppressed. From this point of view, I consider that a history of literary

cultures of South-Eastern Europe or the Balkans, including Turkey, would be highly

relevant and would shed light on issues overlooked so far in Modern Greek Studies,

such as the polyethnic and multilingual condition of many Greek literary phenomena

during the last three centuries, or the interbalkan connections in the supposedly singular

or belated development of some literary trends and genres. On the other hand, a history

of the literary cultures of Hellenism, mostly language-oriented, would decentre the

current Helladism of critics and historians by including Greek textual production in

Asia Minor, Egypt, Russia, America or Australia, as well as examining its connection in

those places to non-Greek traditions. In either case, hypostasized distinctions between

high and low culture as for the genres, institutions, production or reception should be

challenged through the highlighting and analysis of the discursive mechanisms and

implications of such modern categories.

A study of literary cultures is not based in the works or the authors themselves.

It is not an inventory of texts or interpretations, but a presentation of the changing

conditions whereby literature is conceived, produced, and consumed in a given place

and time. Effective literary history works with texts not as immutable objects, but as

historical events of production and reception, and thus aims to inform, situate, and

contextualize the literature of the past in literary culture. It is about a re-reading of

readings and a reading of re-readings, both of works and of literary systems. That is

why it should include previous literary histories as moments in the historicity of the

conceptualization and institutionalization of literature, as well as the shifts in the canon

that determine the transition between successive or co-existing literary cultures. The

model of presentation should not be a chronological one, but lie on four points of

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interference or cultural nodes whereby literary change can somehow be explained:

temporal nodes, such as 1880 or 1922 could be for Greece; topographical ones, for

which the cities of Thessalonica, Esmirna or Alexandria might be proposed, institutional

nodes such as criticism or journals, and finally figurative nodes such as Greekness or

the image of the poet.

The proposal by Mario Valdés, philosophically and methodologically very

complex, would need further explication. This brief exposition must suffice, however,

to transmit the idea that we should and can supersede once and for all the

methodological laziness still sustaining the self-concealment of historicity visible in

most Greek literary historiography and criticism. Effective literary history, with its

focus on literary cultures and not on Literature as a transcendent, hypostasized realm of

(national) Culture, provides an opportunity we should be able to take advantage of.

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