Self-Fashioning in C. P. Cavafy‟s “Going back Home from Greece” and “Philhellene”

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Published: May 1, 2013
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.17430
Keywords:
Cavafy Foucault Victorian monologue hellenism Greek identity
Evgenia Sifaki
University of Thessaly
Abstract
C. P. Cavafy‟s dramatic monologues “Going Back Home from Greece” and “Philhellene” are approached by way of their form: the genre of the dramatic monologue that the Greek poet adopted and adapted from Victorian sources, which delimits and historicises the poetic utterance by staging it in a dramatic frame. Drawing on a theory of Michel Foucault, the two texts‟ discursive context of Hellenism is construed as part of their speakers‟ binding situation, the social and historical environment (i.e. the literary representation of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods) that is shown to both condition and enable their respective utterances. Furthermore, it will be argued that the speakers‟ attempts to assert and/or construct their identities involves a complex, tense process of subjection and simultaneous resistance to restraining definitions inherent to the discourse of Hellenism that have persisted throughout the latter‟s long history, such as its self- constitutive, inexorable, division between Greek and barbarian.
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Author Biography
Evgenia Sifaki, University of Thessaly
Evgenia Sifaki studied English Literature and Culture at the Universities of Thessaloniki and King’s College London. She teaches Literary Theory and Criticism at the University of Thessaly (Department of Education). Her research interests include Romantic, Victorian and early twentieth-century literature, poetry and travel writing, areas on which she has contributed several essays to collective volumes as well as academic journals. Her most recent research project involves a comparative study of the dramatic monologue in Victorian poets (mainly Browning and Tennyson) and C. P. Cavafy. In 2013 she was the Stanley J. Seeger Visiting Research Fellow, Hellenic Studies, at Princeton University.
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