Graduate-Student Papers in Cultural Politics
Date and Time
Location
"Romantic Hellenism and Violence: The Case of P. B. Shelley"
Speaker:
Simos Zeniou, PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Contact:
Heather Conrad
hconrad@wcfia.harvard.edu
Chair:
Panagiotis Roilos, Faculty Associate. George Seferis Professor of Modern Greek Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
Abstract:
This talk proposes a reading of P. B. Shelley’s lyrical drama Hellas as a critical encounter with early nineteenth-century philhellenic discourse. This reading challenges, therefore, the still prevalent understanding of Shelley as an archetypal idealizing Philhellenist. By reading Hellas in the context of Shelley’s manifold engagements with classical and modern Greece and by examining the subversive deployment of the “westering” theme in the lyrical parts of the work, I argue that: 1) Shelley draws attention to the appropriation of Hellenism by hegemonic political and cultural discourses of the period and to its entanglement with imperial politics; 2) the chorus’s gradual recognition of the historical situatedness of its discourse simultaneously resists its wholesale subsumption under Eurocentric universalism and retains a utopian, future-oriented Hellenism as a guide for radical politics.