Jocasta Classical Reception Greece – Workshop on Tragedy and World War II

Jocasta Classical Reception Greece (http://jocasta.upatras.gr/) is pleased to organise an interdisciplinary workshop on Tragedy and World War II which will take place on Tuesday 15 December 2015 at the University of Patras, Greece. On the occasion of the completion of 72 years since the Kalavrytan Holocaust (13 December 1943) and 70 years since the end of WWII, the workshop seeks to explore the interrelatedness between tragedy and events preceding or succeeding World War II, thus being circumscribed in a postclassical total-war climate.

We are interested in examining whether tragedy anchored in the Graeco-Roman world has functioned as a template for the renegotiation of anxieties, traumatic experiences or conflicting memories related with the advent or the aftermath of World War II. In particular we are interested in asking the following methodological questions:

• Is tragedy conceived as a genre or as a vehicle of a worldview adequate for the articulation and the negotiation of a large-scale tragic event?

• Why do adaptations of Ancient Greek myths proliferate in the years before and after World War II?

• Are the tragic adaptations reconfigurations of politics of resistance or of poetics of remembrance?

• What does the fact that tragedy was a medium for the dramatisation of conflicting worldviews at a climactic moment in modernity after which the value of Classics became highly contested mean?

Programme

16.00-16.30 Opening Remarks –Introductory Notes

16.00-16.15 Efstathia Athanasopoulou on “Tragedy and Tragic”

16.15-16.30 Alexandros Velaoras on “War and WWII”

16.30-17.00 Gonda Van Steen “The Antigone of Aris Alexandrou: 1940s Greece from a Modern Tragic Perspective” (Department of Classics, University of Florida)

17.00-17.30 Efstathia Athanasopoulou “Sartre’s The Flies: The Tragic oscillating between Anti-Nazism and Existentialism” (Department of Philology, University of Patras)

17.30-18.00 Gesthimane Seferiadi “Albert Camus’ absurd conception of the Tragic in the course of WWII: Le Myth de Sisyphe, 1943” (Department of Philology, University of Patras)

18.00-18.20 Coffee Break

18.20-18.50 Penelope Kolovou Penelope (1954) by Liebermann and Strobel. The politics of Entpolitisierung (German: depoliticisation) (Trinational Graduate College, Universities of Bonn, Paris-Sorbonne IV, Florence)

18.50 -19.20 Sampatakakis, Giorgos “Brecht, Müller, and the Post-war Melancholies” (Department of Theatre Studies, University of Patras)

19.20-19.50 Alexandros Velaoras “Burying the Dead: from Kalavryta to Thebes” (Department of Philology, University of Patras)

19.50-20.05 Anastasia Bakogianni “War as spectacle” (Institute of Classical Studies, London)

20.05-20.15 Closing Remarks

Efimia Karakantza (Department of Philology, University of Patras)

The workshop is generously hosted at the University of Patras Library and kindly supported by the University of Patras Network Operations Centre.Air Jordan Trainer Essential