Journal of Greek Media & Culture - Current Issue

The aim of this article is to examine the information and knowledge available for diagnosing the potential for mediated deliberative communication in Greece. The article reviews existing structures, research and data sources and assesses their capacity to support the monitoring of media developments and the risks and opportunities deriving from the latter for deliberative communication. It explores the main features of the research and data collection activities carried out in four areas considered to exert an influence on the media’s contribution to deliberative communication: media law and ethics, journalism, media usage and media users’ competences. The research shows that considerable differences exist across the four areas reviewed regarding the availability and comprehensiveness of the research conducted and data. This impacts on capacities for monitoring and evaluating with equal rigour risks and opportunities regarding deliberative communication across the four areas examined. The research underlines the need for more institutionalized and adequately funded domestic research structures for boosting oversight capacity. It also points to the need to systematize and diversify data collection processes as well as to improve the accessibility of the available research data and findings.

This article focuses on the work of Manto Aravantinou (1923–98), a Greek poet, critic and translator of Joyce, mainly active in the 1960s–80s. Specifically, it discusses her 1977 monograph Ta Ellinika tou Tzeims Tzois (James Joyce’s Greek) in which she explores Joyce’s connection to the Greek language, culture and people. This book is based on her archival research on Joyce’s Greek notebooks (1916–17), a small and underexplored part of the Zurich notebooks (1915–19), which contain notes from what she claims are the Irish author’s Greek lessons with Pavlos Phocas. This article examines Aravantinou’s reading of the Greek part of the Joyce archive, how she uses it to interpret and translate Joyce, and how that introduces new modes of reading Joyce’s work. Contrary to negative reviews she received about misreading and misinterpreting Joyce, I argue that Aravantinou’s approach to the Greek notebooks considers the note as a productive space of meaning, and takes into account the invitation to etymological speculation as well as the singular multilingualism of Joyce’s later work. Finally, considering recent discussions about the ‘weird’ as a mode that is based on the creation of an archive, I argue that Aravantinou reconstructs the Joyce archive in such a way that she introduces the weird as a possible way of reading Joyce.

This article proposes a postcolonial reading of Stratis Tsirkas’s Ariagne (1962) through Paul Gilroy’s concept of ‘convivial culture’ (2004). It suggests that the Mediterranean may transcend history and geography, gain metaphorical and symbolic weight and offer an analytic trope to explore issues of diaspora, community coexistence and neighbouring in Ariagne (1962). The analysis aims to trace in Tsirkas’s text a submerged ethos of antiracist solidarity among subaltern subjectivities in their trans-Mediterranean, transnational and diasporic encounters. It focuses on three aspects: the motif of ‘going native’, the embodiment of subaltern interracial affinity and Indigenous visibility. The article contributes to the theoretical elaborations of a postcolonial engagement with modern Greek fiction and the way texts reflect the colonial moment. The choice to examine literary stories of conviviality within the Mediterranean archive, such as Ariagne’s, is also an attempt to tackle ethnic essentialism and imagine an alternative perspective on Mediterranean modernity.

Review of: Colonial and Postcolonial Cyprus: Transportal Literatures of Empire, Nationalism, and Sectarianism, Daniele Nunziata (2020)

Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan, 297 pp.,

ISBN 978-3-03058-235-7, h/bk, € 106.99

ISBN 978-3-03058-238-8, p/bk, € 74.89

ISBN 978-3-03058-236-4, e-book, € 58.84

Review of: I Logotechnia Sto Panepistimio: I Sygkrotisi Tis Epistimis Tis Neoellinikis Filologias (1942–1982) (‘Literature at the University: The Formation of the Scholarly Study of Modern Greek Literature [1942–1982]’), Venetia Apostolidou (2022)

Athens: Polis, 560 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-60435-785-7, p/bk, €27.70

Review of: Kosmopolites Ethnikistes: O Moris Barres kai oi ana ton Kosmo ‘Mathites’ Tou (‘Cosmopolitan Nationalists: Maurice Barrès and his ‘Disciples’ Around the World’), Paraskevas Matalas (2021)

Heraklion: Crete University Press, 416 pp.,

ISBN 978-9-60524-640-2, p/bk, €20.00

Review of: Ta Ellinika Periodika tou 19Ou Aiona (‘The Greek Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century’), Martha Karpozilou (2021)

Athens: Vivliothiki tis Voulis ton Ellinon, 220 pp. (vol. 1), 407 pp. (vol. 2),

ISBN 978-9-60560-207-9, p/bk

ISBN 978-9-60560-208-6, p/bk (free distribution)