#  Graduate-Student Papers in Cultural Politics 

 



####  calendar\_today Date and Time 

 **November 15, 2016** 

 04:00PM - 06:00PM EST 

####  pin\_drop Location 

 **CGIS South Building, 1730 Cambridge Street, Doris and Ted Lee Gathering Room (S030)**  



 

 



 

## "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.



 

 



 

 See also:- [ 2016–2017 ](/academic-year/2016%E2%80%932017)
- [ Graduate-Student Papers on Cultural Politics ](/seminars/cultural_politics_graduate_student_papers/schedule)
 
 

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