Are there such things as peripheral modernity and postmodernity? This groundbreaking book focuses on the notions of modernity and postmodernity in two countries that never before have been studied comparatively: Argentina and Greece. It examines theories of the postmodern and the problems involved in applying them to the hybrid and sui generis cultural phenomena of the «periphery». Simultaneously it offers an exciting insight into the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Ricardo Piglia, Dimitris Kalokyris and Achilleas Kyriakidis, whose syncretist aesthetics are symptomatic of the mixing up of different and often opposed aesthetic principles and traditions that occur in «peripheral» locations. This book will be very useful to scholars and students of Latin American, Modern Greek and comparative literature as well as to those interested in Borges studies.

Peripheral (Post) Modernity: The Syncretist Aesthetics of Borges, Piglia, Kalokyris and Kyriakidis

Literature & Fiction

Kefala, Eleni

History & Criticism

Peter Lang Inc., International Academic Publishers

By 1920 Buenos Aires was the largest and most cosmopolitan city of Latin America due to mass immigration from Europe in the previous decades. Unbridled urban expansion had drastic effects on the social and cultural topography of the Argentine capital, raising ideological and aesthetic issues that shaped the modernist landscape of the country. Artists across disciplines responded to these changes with conflicting depictions of urban space. Centering these conflicts as a cognitive map of modernity’s new realities in the city, Buenos Aires across the Arts looks at the interaction between modernity and modernism in literature, photography, film, and painting during the interwar period. This was a time of profound change and heightened cultural activity in Argentina. Eleni Kefala analyzes works by Jorge Luis Borges, Oliverio Girondo, José Ferreyra, Xul Solar, Roberto Arlt, and Horacio Coppola, with a focus on the city of Buenos Aires as a playground of modernity.

Buenos Aires Across the Arts: Five and One Theses on Modernity, 1921-1939 (Illuminations)

Arts & Photography

University of Pittsburgh Press

In the middle of the fifteenth century, ominous portents like columns of fire and dense fog were seen above the skies of Constantinople as the Byzantine capital fell under siege by the Ottomans. Allegedly, similar signs appeared a few decades later and seven thousand miles away, forecasting the fall of the Mexica capital of Tenochtitlan?Tlatelolco to the Spanish and their indigenous allies. After both cities had fallen, some Greeks and Mexica turned to poetry and song to express their anguish at the birth of what has come to be called the ?modern? era. This study probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems, the ?Lament for Constantinople,? the ?Huexotzinca Piece,? and the ?Tlaxcala Piece.? Composed by anonymous authors soon after the conquest of the two cities, these texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic. They are the workings of creators who draw on tradition and historical particulars to articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.

The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity (Extravagantes)

Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

Winner of the State Prize for Poetry in Cyprus, these experimental linked poem-threads move across time, linking a young Cypriot to ancestors, contemporaries, and descendants through striking, disparate polyphony. In this bilingual collection of linked poems, Kefala creates a tapestry of motifs that transcend time and identity across early 20th Century Cyprus, 16th Century Scotland, a sailor on Christopher Columbus' ship La Pinta, and more. As the poem threads draw together, it is as if the protagonist, in his travels through the twentieth century, encounters Odysseus, Cervantes, Columbus, Rembrandt, and others, all moving in multidimensional synchronicity. In this way, the readers take part in the production of meaning by pulling the threads together, stitching together their own reading of the story. Through the reading of these threads, time remains fluid, creating a masterful declaration about the function of poetry: perhaps history is nothing more than the presence of innumerable human voices, some more and some less powerful, coexisting in an eternal present.

Time Stitches: Poems

Poetry

Phoneme Media

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kefala, Eleni. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Kefala, Eleni

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Kefala, Eleni. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Peripheral (Post) Modernity: The Syncretist Aesthetics of Borges, Piglia, Kalokyris and Kyriakidis

Buenos Aires Across the Arts: Five and One Theses on Modernity, 1921-1939 (Illuminations)

The Conquered: Byzantium and America on the Cusp of Modernity (Extravagantes)

Time Stitches: Poems