reimagining-abstracts - University of Birmingham

aristocratic ideology as Nyota, his Masai warrior associate, who is explicitly
compared to a Dorian. Both Andreas and Nyota clash with the colonial regime, and
Andreas’ attitude towards the Africans is felt by them to be typically different from
the behaviour of the colonizers: Greeks are different.
In this way, the Dorian component of Greek identity is highlighted in both
novels as the part that stands for permanent rebellion against an oppressive society,
even though the ideological framework of the two novels is very different.
Rowena Fowler
Plato, Seferis and Heaney: Poetry as redress
The nekyia, talking with the dead, is a familiar metaphor in classical reception.
Conjuring a shade is an attempt to understand the past, influence the present or see
into the future, to seek guidance, reconciliation or revenge. Unlike metamorphosis
(another powerful trope of reception) it is explicitly concerned with justification and
knowledge. Plato, re-inventing the Homeric katabasis and nekyia, moralised the
afterlife; his eschatalogical fables introduce an ethics of judgement and punishment
and therefore of redress.
My paper examines Seferis' «Επί ασπαλάθων» and Heaney's rejoinder, "To
George Seferis in the Underworld", in the light of Heaney's essay The Redress of
Poetry. Acknowledging the poets' broader engagement with classical texts (in
particular Seferis with Homer, Heaney with Vergil) I concentrate on their use of Plato
as "the court of appeal through which poetic imagination seeks to redress whatever is
wrong . . . in the prevailing conditions". I argue that a classically-inspired poetry of
redress will have several distinctive features: an insistence on the local, specific and
topical; direct reference or address to a classical author; some engagement with the
source language; a consciousness of the pressures of testimony.
A hallmark of Heaney's poetics is the weaving of language back into
landscape; his reading of «Επί ασπαλάθων» reveals correspondences between two
national poetries. The interplay of language and political violence in Ireland gives a
special edge to his understanding of Greece. Alongside his own "much-contested"
political poems (e.g. "Punishment", "Whatever You Say Say Nothing"), «Επί
ασπαλάθων» strikes him as dangerously unequivocal, lacking any shade of doubt.
However, Heaney's reservations about declarative utterance should not be read as a
reproach to Seferis (as some have argued) but as a surprised awareness of the two
poets' dissimilar uses of a classical authority.
Bruce W. Frier
The ‘New Hellenism’ of Constantine Cavafy
In an earlier paper, I tried to explain Constantine Cavafy’s fascination with the
Hellenistic world during the last two centuries BCE, when the Hellenistic kingdoms
were being gradually subjected to Roman rule, as a device he used to explore aspects
of his own sense of marginalization as the subject of a great empire and as a
homosexual – a condition in which he eventually learned to glory as a liberating
intellectual force. In the present paper, I want to describe this complex reevaluation
in more detail, by linking Cavafy more closely to the historiographic debates of his
own time.
About the depth of Cavafy’s interest in the late Hellenistic monarchies there
can be no doubt. Nearly a sixth of his surviving poetry is linked to this era, and many
of his best known poems – such as “Orophernes” (1904) and “Of Demetrius Soter”
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