Proceedings of the 5th Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, 2003

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/2328/8139

This volume of the fifth Biennial Conference Proceedings contains 35 refereed articles in English and Greek text, including articles on:

  • Classical Greek Philosophy
  • Greek Australian Literature
  • Modern Greek Literature
  • Contemporary History: Greeks and Cypriots at Home and Abroad
  • Modern Greek Language and Culture in Australian Schools
  • Aspects of Greek Culture Past and Present
  • Greek Australian Education
  • Greek Australian Politics
  • Linguistics

    •

    Browse

    Browsing Proceedings of the 5th Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, 2003 by Issue Date

    Jump to a point in the index:
    Now showing 1 - 20 of 36
    • Item
      Pain and Pleasure in Plato's Physiology
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Couvalis, Spyridon George ; Usher, Matthew L
      We trace the development of Plato’s physiology of pleasure and pain from a rudimentary account in the "Gorgias" to a sophisticated account in the "Philebus". In the earlier account Plato treats pains as lacks and pleasures as replenishments. In the later account he treats pleasures and pains as in part object directed mental states. In particular, he treats pains as perceptions of disintegrated states which lack determinate being. We argue that Plato’s later account constitutes a considerable advance on previous theories of pain and on his own earlier theory. However, we point out that modern research has shown that Plato is wrong to identify pains with perceptions of disintegrated states. Nevertheless, we suggest that had Plato known about the results of modern research, he would have been able to say that pains are perceptions of threats of disintegration into the indeterminate.
    • Item
      A Proposal for a Study of the Seconded Teachers from Greece Program in Western Australia
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Yiannakis, Angela
      This paper forms the basis of a proposal for a doctoral thesis that will focus on the improvement of the quality of the curriculum for teaching Greek as a second language under the Seconded Teachers from Greece program. Specifically, the paper proposes that a focus on the perspectives of the key stakeholders on the curriculum for teaching Greek as a second language is the key to understanding the problems encountered by the seconded teachers in Australia. While the study is specific to Western Australia, the paper outlines the broad history of the seconded teacher program in Australia and the developments over time. There follows a more detailed account of the history of the teaching of Greek in WA and the association between local efforts and the contributions of the Greek government appointees to various institutions. The perceived problems of the seconded teachers are outlined and the paper proposes that the perspectives of the key stakeholders be canvassed.
    • Item
      Διαπιστωτικά γλωσσικά τεστ στην Ελληνική και διδακτικό υλικό για την αντιμετώπιση προβλημάτων σε γραφή και ορθογραφία: Η περίπτωση της Βικτώριας Αυστραλίας
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Tripolitakis, Konstantinos
      Please note: This article is in Greek. The purpose of this presentation is to present a framework of language placement tests of Greek language proficiency and to demonstrate a framework of material to manage problems in Greek writing and spelling. The framework of language placement tests and the framework of material have been designed to be used by primary students who are learning Greek as a second language in Victoria Australia. In the introduction, the theoretical framework of the two parts of the presentation is presented. Then it presents a framework of language placement tests (copy, dictation, spontaneous writing) and reading–comprehension tests. For each test the features, the aim, the application and the way of the outcomes’ record are described in detail. In the second part of this presentation the framework of material to manage problems in writing and spelling are presented.
    • Item
      Hippias of Elis
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) O'Grady, Patricia Frances
      Hippias of Elis cut an elegant figure as he strolled through the crowds at Olympia, dressed entirely in garments and accessories he had, himself, made. But there is more to Hippias than the man Plato portrays as vain in "Hippias Minor". Hippias was not only the exemplar of self-sufficiency but ranks among the most talented and versatile of the sophists. He lectured on poetry, grammar, history, politics, and archaeology, he was a chronographer, and a prolific writer. In this paper I will discuss Hippias’s work in geometry and the social contract he mentioned, and I will show that these two aspects of his work elevate him to another level. It will be seen that Hippias was more than an extremely rich and successful sophist, but that his work warrants his inclusion amongst the philosophers.
    • Item
      Το απομακρυσμένο “Σήμερα” στην πεζογραφία της περιόδου 1960–1975
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Spilias, Thanasis
      Please note: This article is in Greek. With regard to thematic approaches, what concerns writers of the period 1960-1975 and what motivates them most is mainly the present. The past appears to occupy them very little. And when it does, it is, in essence, a “distant present”. I support this claim by specific reference to, and analyses of R. Roufos’s novel Οι Γραικύλοι and M. Koumandareas’s short story Τα Μηχανάκια. I contend that though both of these writers talk about the past, what they want to project is their contemporary historic reality.
    • Item
      Ethnicity as an Organisational Concept in the Life of the Community
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Nicolacopoulos, Toula ; Vassilacopoulos, George
      In this paper we explore ethnicity as a basic organisational concept in the life of the Greek-Australian communities. We begin our discussion by outlining two conceptions of ethnicity that we call static and dynamic. We explain the ways in which these conceptions have respectively informed two types of community organisation that have been influential in the life of the communities. These are the Greek Orthodox Communities and the Greek workers leagues that have operated in Australian cities for most of the twentieth century. In our discussion we explain the strengths and limits of the concept of ethnicity for organisational purposes, through an analysis of its uses as the basis of members’ organisational unity.
    • Item
      Σκιές, αντικατοπτρισμοί και αναδίπλωση: Η μυθοπλαστική “περιπέτεια” του Στέλιου Ξεφλούδα
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Palaktsoglou, Maria
      Please note: This article is in Greek. In this paper I will examine the “adventures” on narrative structure of Stelios Xefloudas. Stelios Xefloudas, a Greek writer of the Generation of the thirties was educated in both Greece and France and was an advocate of interior monologue and innovative novel in his country. During the thirties he wrote four innovative novels: Τα Τετράδια του Παύλου Φωτεινού (1930), Εσωτερική Συμφωνία (1932), Εύα (1934) and Στο Φως του Λευκού Αγγέλου (1936). These four novels are written with the technique of interior monologue and they explore themes such as the recording of the unconscious process, the dreamy state of self and escapism. Through these novels we’ll examine Xefloudas’ capacity in “constructing” female characters. For the writer it seems that character “construction” is a long and hard process regulated by his views on fiction as well as his personal limitations or impediments on narrative structure.
    • Item
      Learning Greek and Maintaining Greek Ethnic Identity. St George College, South Australia: Students' Perspectives
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Holeva, Alexandra
      This paper presents the first findings of a thesis undertaken as part of the requirements for completing a research doctoral degree in Education at the University of Adelaide. It describes a research proposal regarding the perspectives of students, their parents and teachers about children from a Greek background who are taught Greek at school during their secondary education. The project has been submitted and approved by the Department of Education, Training and Employment in South Australia as well as the Ethics Committee of the University of Adelaide. The research commenced during Term 3 of 2002 and this paper presents the data for one of the schools involved — St. George College. This institution represents one of the biggest and most important components of the group of respondents, and not only because students choose to attend the school for the reason that the Greek language is offered as a subject. The main factor probably is also that students’ families are aware that the school is targeting the maintenance of Greek culture, Greek Orthodox Christianity and the ethos of the Greek family.
    • Item
      Γυναίκες απόφοιτες θετικών επιστημών στην Ελλάδα και η περίπτωση των εκπαιδευτικών
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Frantzi, Kyriaki
      Please note: This article is in Greek. This paper examines the ways in which factors such as gender and class co-exist and interact in the history of both twentieth century Greek education and employment. It begins with the historical data regarding women’s participation in Science, the unilateral theoretical orientation of the Greek educational institutions, the quantitative data and the personal evidence. The paper focuses on the main conclusions of a research referring to women Science graduates who worked as teachers in the Greek secondary education during the pre- and the post-war periods.
    • Item
      Between Divine and Human Justice: A Reading of Papadiamantes's 'The Murderess'
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Vardoulakis, Dimitris
      Papadiamantes’s novella "The Murderess" has been read either as a moral tale exhibiting its author’s Orthodox beliefs, or as a critique of the gender positions and class structure of Greece at the end of the nineteenth century. Despite the seeming divergence, both approaches share a common foundation, namely that the author is conceived of as the bearer of the truth of the novella. Whereas the issue of truth in narration is presupposed, it remains unexamined. I argue that a conception of “truth” in "The Murderess" is to be gleaned, first, in a series of irresolvable tensions such as inside and outside, narrator and character, and even the very fact of Hadoula’s guilt, and, second, in the site of Hadoula’s death which takes place “between divine and human justice”. The ultimate purpose of this article is to offer the conditions of possible interpretations of "The Murderess" beyond the hold of either religion or sociology.
    • Item
      Museums, World Heritage, and Interpretation -- the Case of the Parthenon Marbles
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Simpson, Moira
      The status of the Parthenon Marbles as objects of world heritage lies at the heart of arguments for their retention in the British Museum as part of one of the most significant universal museum collections in the world. This paper challenges the logic of this argument. After a brief description of the circumstances that enabled western museums to acquire their collections and led to the development of the “universal museum”, I will outline the efforts that have been made at national and international levels to protect cultural property, efforts which have curtailed the ability of museums to accumulate materials on the scale of previous periods in their history. I then discuss the reasons why, despite this, international cultural property protection measures do not resolve many of the debates surrounding ownership and repatriation of items in existing museum collections. I will then use the case of the Greek claim for the return to Athens of the Elgin collection of Parthenon Marbles, currently held in the British Museum, to examine the issues relating to the nature of universal museums and international responsibilities for the preservation and effective interpretation of items of world heritage value.
    • Item
      Η Νέα Εστία του Γρ. Ξενόπουλου και τα Ιταλικά Γράμματα
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Vafiadou Pashalinou, Sofia
      Please note: This article is in Greek. This article presents a representative portion of my doctoral thesis concerning Italian literature in the Athenian periodical Nea Estia from 1927 to the end of the 20th century. More than 500 Italian texts described and analyzed, are invaluable in terms of structure and presentation of the periodical itself, and for the greater aesthetic of Hellenic periodical literature, as well as for Hellenic comparative literature in general. The inclusion of Italian letters in Nea Estia in the specific period supplies much of the spirit of the Italian Renaissance — which has continued to influence Italian thought and letters even up to the present time — and which dynamically enriches the often prescriptive forms of Hellenic cultural production. As Greek scholars argue, Italian letters are the most closely aligned to the Hellenic. Rather than separating the two cultures, the historical and political conflicts between Italy and Greece operate in combination towards an unending reciprocation of ideas and ideals from ancient to modern times.
    • Item
      Το αποικιοκρατικό παρελθόν στο μεταποικιοκρατικό παρόν στο μυθιστόρημα του Nίκου Ορφανίδη Ο Άγγελος έφυγε ευτυχισμένος
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Herodotou, Maria
      Please note: This article is in Greek. This paper is part of an extensive research project, which examines the Greek novels of Cyprus within the framework of postcolonial theory, in an attempt to add another paradigm to the universal body of postcolonial literature. It begins with a general introduction to postcolonial theory and critique and it then focuses on Frederic Jameson’s thesis that all literatures produced by ex-colonized countries are concerned with their nation’s situation in the decades that followed anti-colonial struggles and de-colonization and thus could be considered as “national allegories”. The main part of the paper analyses N. Orfanides’s novel, "Angelos Departed Happy", in order to establish the extent to which Jameson’s thesis applies to this novel. More specifically, it examines how the writer uses local history, symbolism and inertextuality in order to give a voice to a “subaltern” nation, to project national identity and to undermine the colonial perception of cultural superiority and local cultural inferiority. The conclusion drawn is that, indeed, Orfanides’s novel could be read as “a national allegory of the embattled situation” of the Greek nation.
    • Item
      Με αφορμή μια ανέκδοτη επιστολή του Γ. Κ. Κατσίμπαλη προς το Γ. Ζερβό: Παλαμάς versus Σολωμός
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Frazis, George
      Please note: This article is in Greek. From the personal archives of the Kalymnian writer Yiannis Zervos, we present an unpublished letter dated 1929 of the well-known critic Katsibalis. In this letter Katsibalis criticizes the work of Solomos, the poems of Zervos and other well known critics of the 20th Century. In this paper we analyse Katsibalis’ letter with respect to the critique of the poet Yiannis Zervos. It was evident in the letter that Katsibalis believed that Zervos possessed the literary potential to revolutionarise Greek poetry. Katsibalis attempts to persuade Zervos to follow in the steps of Palamas and not Solomos. We place this preference within the aesthetic, artistic and literary canon of “alithophaneia” which although had its genesis between 1850 and 1880 still continued to infl uence the Greek critics of the first half of the 20th Century. The correspondence of the above mentioned writers ceased suddenly in 1932, two years after the publication of Serefi s’ “Strofi ” where Katsibalis realised that the revoluntionary change to Greek literature was brought about by the collection of poems in Seferis’ work entitled “Strofi ”.
    • Item
      Conference Photos
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Photos
      Conference photos taken at the Fifth Biennial International Conference of Greek Studies, 2003.
    • Item
      'H Ποιητική τῆς Βαθειᾶς Εἰκόνας καί ἡ Γλώσσα τῆς Κένωσης στό ἐργο τοῦ Ἄθου Δημουλᾶ
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Karalis, Vrasidas
      Please note: This article is in Greek. This paper deals with the rather neglected poetry of Athos Dimoulas (1921-1985) and addresses two central dimensions of its poetics. First the invention of the “deep image” in order to depict the open nature of representational language and its culmination in the gradual self-signification of poetic text. Second, the existential reality of kenosis as poetic material and the way such complete and utter self-emptiness was expressed in the last phase of his artistic development. Dimoulas is one of the most important post-war poets of contemporary Greece who struggled with the idioms of the great predecessors of high modernism; namely C. P. Cavafy and Giorgos Seferis. Against their presence and under the “anxiety of influence”, Dimoulas and his generation tried to undermine the representational codes and the formal devices employed by high modernism in order to give mythopoetic coherence to the vicissitudes of history. Thus his poetry is crystallised around images in the making, fluid depictions of evanescent feelings which are articulated through a macroscopic self-presentation of their own creation and referential indexicality. By doing so, Dimoulas emptied his language from any kind of emotion, creating an idiom of absence and silence, based on geometric abstraction and almost Euclidian linearity. His poetry became the liminal form of expression in Greek beyond which language nullifi es itself as both form and articulation. This papers attempts to explaining such “negativity” as a structural principle of his poetry and contextualises its function within post-war poetics in Greece.
    • Item
      Τα Απογευματινά Σχολεία της Αυστραλίας και η χάραξη μιας Εθνικής Εκπαιδευτικής Πολιτικής στον 21o αιώνα
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Arvanitis, Eugenia
      Please note: This article is in Greek. The present article examines the role of the afternoon schools in the Australian educational system and its implication in developing an inclusive national educational policy. Language policy and program development is regarded as one of the most salient features of a modern post-industrial and highly liberal society and its concomitant plurality (Banks, 1994). Australian public discourse on immigration has reflected a wide and changing spectrum of attitudes from hostility and assimilationist practices to acceptance and encouragement of language and cultural maintenance. Similarly, the presence of multilingualism in Australia has triggered a direct and conscious political response in areas such as education, and has taken on diff erent ideological complexions over time. Languages were seen as the clearest and most evident component of cultural diversity (Ozolins, 1993). The function and development of the afternoon schools, and in particular the Greek ethnic school system, was a process which combined broader socio-political and educational considerations. Ethnic schools are educational institutions that fall into the sphere of Australian language policies constituting one key “topos” (or milieu) where both the aspirations of ethnic communities for language maintenance and official policy and practice responses to Australian inter-ethnic relations intersected. The article examines the Australian responses towards Afternoon schools and attempts to highlight some major components in developing a national agenda for these institutions.
    • Item
      A Page from the History of the Greek Presence in the Pacific Rim
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Kanarakis, George
      The field of history in relation to the Greek Diaspora is one which is immensely rewarding for the researcher. It constitutes a treasure trove of lives and achievements of Greeks who have crossed the oceans to the Antipodes and, according to their ability and talent, made a contribution to their new homeland. For a very few of these, Australia has even been a stepping stone to further lands, where they shared their skills, their knowledge and the flame of Hellenism. This paper examines one such latter case which my research has uncovered, bringing to light the admirable life, achievements and contribution of a Hellene who spent almost half a century in the Pacific Rim, and in whose person merged the educator, industrialist, press man and diplomat.
    • Item
      Γυναίκα, ανάγνωση και μυθιστόρημα. Αναγνώστριες και αναγνώσεις του έργου της Γ. Σάνδη στην Ελλάδα του XIX αιώνα
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Lalagianni, Vasiliki
      Please note: This article is in Greek. The different image that the woman of letters has at times held in society can also be detected in the literary works of every age, where the educated heroine — a reader of literary works, particularly fiction — is sometimes reviled, frowned upon and presented with an ironic disposition, and at other times — more rarely and mainly in works with an educational dimension — is presented in a positive light, with the aim of being presented as an example. From the 17th to the 19th century, woman writers (Mlle Lheritier, Mme d’Aulnoy, Mlle de Scudery, Mme de Genlis, Germaine de Staël, etc) attempted to replace the negative image of lettered women through their works. Women authors, whilst escaping the role that society has confined them to, have to face a two-fold problem: to confirm their right to write, and to persuade their detractors that they can write without sacrificing any of their femininity. The work of George Sand expresses the desire for a change in mentality as deserved by women readers and creators. The engagement of Sand’s work in Greece reveals several negative aspects: on one hand, the discussion frequently focuses on the gender identity of her writing since critical and ideological thought attribute a degrading position to women writers in the world of literature. On the other hand, it appears that the work of Sand is not excluded from the climate of the age which considers the consequences of reading fiction to be morally and ethnically harmful.
    • Item
      On the Methodology of Greek-Australian Historiography
      (Flinders University Department of Languages - Modern Greek, 2005) Nicolacopoulos, Toula ; Vassilacopoulos, George
      This paper addresses some of the methodological issues that are raised by efforts to write the history of the Greek-Australian communities. In general Australian historiography tends to undervalue the national significance of Greek-Australian history. We attempt firstly to outline the conditions under which we might begin to redress this weakness. To this end we identify the role that the communities play in the development of white Australian national identity throughout the twentieth century by arguing that white Australia has assigned to the migrant communities the social position of what we call the “perpetual foreigner-within”. We then proceed to sketch some of the main features of two patterns of response to this assignment that have developed within the Greek-Australian communities of the twentieth century.