Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Current Issue

This article explores the presence of Greek modernism and the emergence of mediated innovations towards the communication and reception of literature in the literary broadcasts of Ethnikon Idryma Radiofonias (EIR) (the ‘Hellenic National Radio Foundation’) during the golden age of Greek broadcasting (1945–65). The article attempts a cross-disciplinary study of ‘radio’ and ‘modernism’ by exploring how consumerism, technological progress, mass culture and media radically transformed the production and communication of literature and culture, and by highlighting the importance of materiality and medium-specificity in cultural and historical approaches. Through the emergence of new radiogenic programmes, media experimentations and technical innovations, new cultures of listening, as well as the updating of the criteria pertaining to poetry’s canonization, the article argues for an expansive conception of Greek modernism in the post-war Greek cultural sphere, which includes also cultural, social and technological markers of innovative experimentation in the production, transmission and reception of literature, culture and lived experiences.

This article investigates the role of Greek émigré writers in the early ‘Cold War of the ether’ against the backdrop of the increasing youth mobility prompted by the Greek civil war (1946–49). It traces the itineraries of émigré writers in their 20s who contributed to the Greek-language programmes of the Overseas Service of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Through the study of unpublished broadcast scripts kept in the BBC Written Archives Centre (WAC), the following questions are explored: how was life in the West depicted in the radio features and plays transmitted to Greek-speaking listeners? To what extent do the transmitted texts betray the influence of literary modernism, on the one hand, and formal experiments in radio writing, on the other? In contrast to the literary productions of the Greek state radio (EIR), which excluded modernist works until as late as the mid-1950s, the BBC Greek broadcasts mirror the fresh outlook and modernist aesthetics of their creators, contributing to the belated modernization of Greek radio culture.

This article returns to the life and work of a writer who was once much-lauded in the Anglo-Greek tradition: Lawrence Durrell. It does so with a view to reassessing the repeated expression in Durrell’s writing of a particular fantasy – the philosophy of ‘islomania’, a madness for island life – and to gauging the impact on this fantasy of radio culture. The article deals in depth with Durrell’s official island books – Prospero’s Cell (1945), Reflections on a Marine Venus (1953) and Bitter Lemons of Cyprus (1957) – and interpolates discussion of these with re-readings of his early novels: namely, Panic Spring (1937), The Black Book (1938) and The Dark Labyrinth (1947). As well as seeking to evaluate Durrell’s fascination with insular Greece, both as tourist, settler and government employee, the article makes a new case for contextualizing his composition of Bitter Lemons in relation to his work at the BBC, upon his return to Britain in 1956.

In 1958, Samuel Beckett asserted that his one-act play Krapp’s Last Tape is non-radiogenic. And yet, it was through this play that the Greek state radio (EIR) introduced Beckett’s dramatic output to Greek audiences in 1961 – that is, two years before the play was staged by Karolos Koun’s Art Theatre. This article examines this radio adaptation, created by the playwright Vassilis Ziogas (1937–2001), a unique voice in Greek post-war drama who studied theatre and cinema in Vienna and was influenced by surrealist and absurdist theatre. It contributes to a deeper understanding of EIR’s international outlook in the early 1960s, as evidenced by the cutting-edge productions of its Drama Department. It shows that, apart from forming its own canon by exploiting the medium’s codes, EIR’s Drama Department was engaged in a reflexive dialogue with the avant-garde theatre of its day, introducing to Greek listeners an array of key modernist playwrights (e.g. Beckett, Ionesco, Frisch, Dürrenmatt).