“I am what’s involuntary of existence”:

A conversation between Evangelos Vaiannis with Stathis Gourgouris

Greece in USA presents a panel on Nikos Karouzos with Stathis Gourgouris (poet, essayist, translator, sound artist, and professor of Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University) organized and presented by Evangelos Vaiannis, research associate at Greece in USA, on Saturday September 28th at 6pm and The Hellenic Studies Program at Columbia University.

The discussion honors the 34th anniversary of the poets death.

The event inspires to be a part of the over-arching project on Greek identity, and aims to inaugurate a “literature turn” in the works of Greece in USA https://greeceinusa.com

Karouzos’ work, unique, beautifully abstruse and difficult to categorize, occupies a prominent place in the modern Greek literary canon yet it lacks until today a cohesive English translation. However, Karouzos’ poetry and his distinct idiom still attracts a considerable amount of attention and the horizons of his work remains vibrantly reapproached by readers and publishers within the Greek literary field today. Although characterizations of the poet as “religious” or “metaphysic” have sufficiently been challenged, it is legitimate to claim that ideas of the sacred, purity and catharsis, as well as a recurrent biblical imagery and lexicon are central to his work. Vacillating between hope and despair, Karouzos search for the miracle and its pure beauty becomes an imperative, albeit an unattainable one. We believe, therefore, that Karouzos’ work constitutes a province for critical engagement with the role of the sacred in contemporary society. From Cultural Sociology to Comparative Literature and Philosophy, the notion of the sacred and its antithetical binaries continue to receive substantial interdisciplinary scrutiny. Stathis Gourgouris’ longstanding intellectual projects and his overall profundity are remarkably adequate to offer us valuable insights into a contemporary reading of Karouzos. We consider Karouzos’ work as an exemplar way for transitioning into Stathis’ new book, Nothing Sacred, and develop a dialogical connection between Karouzos’ axes and the book’s main premises. Themes and questions that we wish to elucidate can be summarized as follows:

· How does the sacred manifest in Karouzos’ work? What is a “secular” reading of Karouzos poems?

· Why is it legitimate to claim that Karouzos Poetry is not ahistorical, thus, metaphysical? How does the post-war social and cultural landscape informs his idiosyncratic existentialism? To what degree is Karouzos’ poetry related to the social demands of his epoch?

· Is Karouzos’ existentialism and its adjoining anxieties relevant today? Can we speak about the existence of a “crisis generation” in modern literature that “discusses” with the post-war canon?

· The “Late Style” of Karouzos

· Karouzos against modernity? Isolation, meaninglessness, solidarity, the private and the social. Language as ethics (?).

· The language of transcendence vs radical social change

Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/nikos-karouzos-the-poetics-of-the-sacred-literature-late-modernity-tickets-1031292793507?aff=oddtdtcreator

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/greeceinus/

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Nikos Karouzos was born in Nafplion in 1926 and died in Athens in 1990. He is considered one of the foremost Greek poets of the twentieth century. Karouzos took part in the Resistance and studied Law at The University of Athens. His first poems appeared in 1949, and between 1954 and 1990 he published more than twenty poetry collections. His final volume appeared, posthumously, in 1991.
Karouzos also wrote literary criticism and essays on the theatre and art. He received the State Poetry Prize twice, in 1972 and 1988. His collected works were published between 1993 and 2002 by Icaros publishing house in Athens: Poems I in 1993; Poems II in 1994; his Selected Prose in 1998; and Interviews with Nikos Karouzos in 2002. In 1993, a major Symposium on Nikos Karouzos was held at The University of Athens, the proceedings of which were published by Icaros in 1996. In 2000, on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of his death, a second Symposium, organized by Icaros, was held there.
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