Dimitris Kargiotis
Visiting Fellow, Spring 2024
- AffiliationUniversity of Strasbourg - University of IoanninaResearch Project:Forms of the Occasional in Modern Greek Poetry (19th -21st Centuries)
Dimitris Kargiotis is a comparatist, Maître de conférences in Hellenic Studies at the University of Strasbourg and Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Ioannina. He received his BA from Aristotle University (1991), and his MA (1995) and PhD (1999) from Princeton. His teaching and research interests lie in Modern European Literature and Philosophy (18th-20th centuries), Medieval and Renaissance Vernacular Literature, especially in Romance languages (11th-17th centuries), the Classical Tradition, Cultural Contacts and Transfers including Translation Studies, History of Ideas, as well as Cultural Interpretation.
Professor Kargiotis is the author of Geographies of Translation: Spaces, Canons, Ideologies, Athens, K Publishing 2017 [in Greek]; Critical Essays on Modern Greek Literature, Patras, Opportuna 2018 [in Greek]; Occasional Poetry: An Essay on the Origins of a Category, Athens, Gutenberg, 2021 [in Greek; translated into French as Poésie de circonstance. Essai sur l’émergence d’une catégorie, Paris, Hermann, in print]; Des voisins lointains : études sur la constitution des espaces littéraires, critiques et géographiques, de la Grèce aux Balkans (forthcoming). He has created a Database of the French Translations of Modern Greek Literature, Thessaloniki, Center for the Greek Language 2012. He is the guest editor of Narrative and Authenticity, NALANS (Narrative and Language Studies) 2018, the editor and co-author of History of European Literature, vol. 2: From the Beginning of the 18th Century to the 20th Century, Patras, The Hellenic Open University 22008 [in Greek], as well as the author of over fifty articles.
About the Research Project
Forms of the Occasional in Modern Greek Poetry (19th -21st Centuries)
During the last years I have been exploring the ways in which the Western literary tradition came to distinguish between occasional and non-occasional poetry, tracing the emergence of occasional poetry as a descriptive as well as an evaluative literary category. My published book on the topic followed significant moments of this trajectory from the Antiquity until the end of the Middle Ages; in my new project I track its evolution from the Renaissance to the present. During my residence at Princeton I focused on material pertaining to the Modern Greek tradition. I studied literary debates that took place in the 1950s and considered the ways that the Modern Greek literary field was constituted with reference to the “circumstances:” the historical, political, financial, or cultural context, to which writers were implicitly or explicitly called to respond, or felt they had to. My residence gave me the opportunity to revisit an important moment of Greek literary history and to develop new approaches that shed new light on the period.