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.
The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity
This is the first historical account of the masculine stereotype as it evolved in modern Western culture. It shows how 20th-century fascism gave the manly ideal its extreme expression - in mass rallies that glorified the storm trooper while attacking such 'unmanly men' as Jews and homosexuals.
Myth and Text: Readings in the Modern Greek Novel
‘… they did not suspect that La Mancha and Montiel and the knight’s lean figure would be, for posterity, no less poetic than the episodes of Sinbad … For in the beginning of literature is the myth, and in the end as well.’ J.L. Borges, ‘Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote’ Mythos is used by Aristotle both in its received sense in his day, meaning a story which need not be literally true but has a special institutional status outside of literature, and in a sense which seems to be new in the fourth century B.C., as a rational ordering of events (synthesis ton pragmaton), a mediating term between story (pragmata) and discourse (tragodia). It is specifically by means of mythos (whether invented or traditional) that tragedy (discourse) can be an imitation (mimesis) of action (praxis/story).