סמינר חוגי: Ecophenomenology and Sustainability in Modern Greek Poetry: Concepts, Texts and Culture

Title: Ecophenomenology and Sustainability in Modern Greek Poetry: Concepts, Texts and Culture

Summary: Aimed at research scholars and advanced students in environmental studies, this lecture brings together the notions of ecophenomenology and sustainability in Modern Greek Poetry (19th – 20th ce.) and specifically in the works of Dionysius Solomos, Angelos Sikelianos and Odysseus Elytis. Εcophenomenology examines the inter-ship among Nature and body’s phainomena, the complex implications of chiasm which are represented through different ontological connotations based on the individual senses and cognitive state in order to perceive the nature of flesh, the landscape sceneries including flora and fauna etc. Thus, this lecture sets out to foreground the contributions of literary scholarship which might make to the study of sustainability, both as a concept with a particular meaning in the texts and as an attempt to reconceptualize the cultural agency. Here the literary analysis is to interrogate sustainability’s various paradoxes and to examine how Modern Greek Poetry might envisage notions of sustainability. To conclude, the perception of an existing universal flesh, considered as an upper hierarchically, continuous, sustainable and dynamic becoming, is the key axis of the forementioned Modern Greek poets’ biocosmic perception.

Speaker:  Nikoleta Zampaki is a PhD Candidate in Modern Greek Literature at the Faculty of Philology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece, Instructor at OLLI, Furman University (U.S.A.) and Junior Fellow at CIIS, Universität Tübingen. (Germany). She attended courses at Harvard Extension School, Stanford University, Oxford University etc. Her disciplines are Comparative Literature, Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, Literary Theory and Phenomenology of M. Merleau-Ponty. She is editor and reviewer in many journals overseas and current member of ASLE U.S.A, The International Merleau – Ponty Circle, BCLA, Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University in Canada, Environmental Humanities Network at Warwick etc. She has also participated in many conferences and she is multilingual student by working on English, French, Romanian, Russian, Japanese, Turkish etc.