[Moderngreek-l] SYMPOSIUM ON NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS: SIXTY YEARS LATER, THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY, OCTOBER 27-28, 2017

[Vrasidas Karalis]

THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

SCHOOL OF LANGUAGES AND CULTURES

DEPARTMENT OF MODERN GREEK AND BYZANTINES STUDIES



CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline: July 30th, 2017



SIXTY YEARS AFTER NIKOS KAZANTZAKIS' DEATH: AN

INTERNAT­IONAL SYMPOSIUM

The University of Sydney, October 27-28, 2017



[kazansignature]

Convenors : Professor Vrasidas Karalis & Dr Nick Trakakis
The Department of Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies organises a two-day symposium dedicated to the work of Nikos Kazantzakis (1883-1957), the most celebrated and popular Modern Greek writer. Speakers are invited to approach Kazantzakis' work from new interdisciplinary perspectives exploring his works through the interpretive strategies of interstitiality, post-colonialism, intersectionality, diacritical hermeneutics, religious syncretism, trans-culturalism or in more traditional approaches translation studies and post-truth political theories.
The multifaceted work of Kazantzakis invites for such new approaches in its trans-generic hybridity, its formal complexity and its linguistic marginality (in the original). The adaptation of his two famous novels Zorba the Greek (Michael Cacoyannis, 1964) and The Last Temptation of Christ (Martin Scorsese, 1988) is another topic to be discussed, vis-à-vis the adaptability of novels into films and the semantics emerging in the process. Finally, the important aspect of the novelist as a moral thinker in a world without stable beliefs or crystallised cultural norms can find a deep ground for research in Kazantzakis' oeuvre.
The central postulate of the Symposium is to present Kazantzakis as a modernist writer, and dissociate his artist work from the folk-loric and orientalising interpretations that have essentially limited its semantic potentialities. A close, historical and contextual reading of his works shows the extreme complexity of its structural configurations, as we see in his early novels Toda Raba and The Rock Garden, written originally in French, or in the hybrid prose of his post-communist manifesto, The Saviors of God. The experimentation with form can be also seen in his epic poem The Odyssey: a Modern Sequel, with its paradoxical formal oscillations as well in his grand forays in playwriting culminating with his flawed theatrical masterpiece Buddha.
Together with them, the strange world of his novels must be approached from new and fresh perspectives beyond the claustrophobic conceptual schemes of a vague and indeed imaginary Greekness. Finally, the most unexplored part of his work remained to this day his travel writings a body of trans-cultural interpretive writings constructed around a complex amalgam of essay-writing, reportage, travelogue, autobiography and cultural criticism. We believe that sixty years later a new approach is warranted in order to re-consider Kazantzakis' cultural contribution.
Please submit title and abstract (approx. 250 words) to
Vrasidas.Karalis at sydney.edu.au
Nick Trakakis [Nick.Trakakis at acu.edu.au]

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