Affiliation:
1. 0000000121550800National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Abstract
In Greece’s most well-known thesaurus of neologisms from the late nineteenth century, two compelling terms are detected: syllogomania (‘collection frenzy’) and bibliomania (‘book frenzy’). Both very vividly illustrate the cultural landscape
of fin-de-siècle Greece. The institutionalization of archives and the consolidation of the book culture were important aspects of the new-born state’s cultural politics and poetics. It is in this context that instances of literary discourse thematizing archival destruction
appeared, taking the form of symbolic resistance against the canonization and institutionalization of memory. In the two texts discussed in the article, ‘Kostakis’s Manuscripts’ by Alexandra Papadopoulou (1896) and ‘Old Papers’ by Mikhail Mitsakis (1884), the
laws of order, accumulation and preservation are opposed by a desire for disorder and dispersion. In the former, the manuscripts of a dead author are burnt to ashes by his girlfriend, who wishes to save them from being published. In the latter, a man scatters his writings in the wind, as a
way of reactivating his memory. Both texts enact the cultural ambivalences of fin-de-siècle modernity by narrating the constant tension between, on one hand, canon and archive; and, on the other, waste and destruction. Through the destruction of fictional archives, the possibility
of a counter-memory is claimed. Papadopoulou’s and Mitsakis’s claim of an overturning of the dynamics between cultural memory and oblivion can be considered as a call for questioning the laws that govern cultural memory’s circulation and for repositioning their auctorial
figures in the history of Modern Greek literature.
Subject
Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous),Communication,Cultural Studies
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