A modern poet reads ancient war texts: politics, life and death in George Seferis’ ‘The Last Day’*
It has been argued that ‘The Last Day’, written during the Metaxas dictatorship and while the Second World War was looming on the horizon, constitutes Seferis’ answer to the exhausted model of the ‘national poet’. The aim of this article is to examine in detail the poem’s allusions to ancient war texts, in order to deal with what stood at the heart of this answer, namely the key concept of the ‘historical poet’. Of prime importance will be issues of language and gender raised by the poem, as well as the historical context of its writing and reception.
From Mythos to Logos: The Poetics of George Seferis
"It was its two component parts that made me choose the title of this piece of work; MYTHOS1 (myth), because I have used quite plainly a certain mythology; ISTORIA (history/story), because I have tried to express, with some coherence, a situation as independent of myself as the characters in a novel" (Seferis 1972: 314). With this note to the sequence of 24 poems published in 1935 under the title MithistÃ3rima or Novel, Seferis drew attention to the references to ancient Greek mythology which abound in the poems and also to the strategy which some of the texts, at least, pursue of juxtaposing this mythology with the world of real experience (history or story). This strategy owes an acknowledged debt to that of T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, but rather more to Eliot's now famous review of James Joyce's novel Ulysses, which had been published in the same year (1922). There Eliot credits Joyce with the achievement of a new "method," which he contrasts with the "narrative method" of the obsolescent genre of the novel. This method uses a myth (here the paradigmatic story of the Odyssey) as "a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history" (Eliot 1970: 270). The relevance of Eliot's conception of myth, distilled from Joyce's novel, to a reading of Seferis' sequence of poems goes beyond the disputed question of how far this "mythical method" is actually used in individual sections of MithistÃ3rima.2 The link between the
EL TRATAMIENTO NEOPRAGMATISTA DE LA VERDAD EN RICHARD RORTY NEOPRAGMATIST TREATMENT OF TRUTH IN RICHARD RORTY
Richard Rorty, one of the most influential authors of our time, presents a critique of the philosophical concept of truth as correspondence. The conclusion of Rorty's neopragmatism is that the idea of truth as correspondence between language and facts is ineffective because it no longer works. The neopragmatist conception of truth indicates the only possible uses for the term «truthful,» revolving around the idea of jus - tification. In this article, the neopragmatist notion of truth is presented in order to