Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity by Dimitris Tziovas (review)

IF 0.2 4区 社会学 0 HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES Pub Date : 2023-10-01 DOI:10.1353/mgs.2023.a908561
Vangelis Calotychos
{"title":"Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity by Dimitris Tziovas (review)","authors":"Vangelis Calotychos","doi":"10.1353/mgs.2023.a908561","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity by Dimitris Tziovas Vangelis Calotychos (bio) Dimitris Tziovas, Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity. London: I. B. Tauris, 2021. Pp. vii + 309. Hardback $108.00, Cloth $35.95, and E-book (PDF) $28.76. Literary critics no longer content themselves with completing literary histories. Instead, they pursue not the diachrony of primarily literary texts but the synchrony of an entire cultural system. Such a shift is arguably discernible in the long and prodigious output of Dimitris Tziovas, professor emeritus of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. His numerous monographs and edited volumes in English and in Greek fit schematically into just such a first and second phase. In his first phase, his primarily textual lens progressively widens from “the nationism of the demoticists” (Tziovas 1986) to a long-due evaluation of Greek modernism (Tziovas 1997), and thence to the conditions of the self and society as revealed through an appraisal of Greek fiction (Tziovas 2003b). His second phase draws from a series of topical conferences, presciently organized at the University of Birmingham by Tziovas himself, that highlighted contexts: the Balkans (Tziovas 2003a), the Greek diaspora (Tziovas 2009), antiquity (Tziovas 2014), and austerity and crisis (Tziovas 2017). These in turn spawned collected volumes under his editorship, many of them reviewed in this journal. Tziovas’s reorientation toward contexts also coincided with his stint as a regular columnist in the culture sections of the Greek press, when he occasionally found himself a reluctant combatant in the culture wars. Meanwhile, in the field of Modern Greek Studies, Tziovas often gamely defended critical theory to his colleagues in Greece or was caught in the crossfire of Anglo-American critical disputes. In various ways, these tributary streams all flow into the present rich volume on Greece “from junta to crisis,” a volume that marks the synthesis of so much important earlier work and is a fitting monument to a long and illustrious career. Greece from Junta to Crisis positions culture at the center of the period in question, the metapolitefsi. This decision should not be understood solely as the natural disciplinary inclination of a cultural critic weary of structural political [End Page 287] analysis, even if Tziovas does write that “we do not need yet another book about [the metapolitefsi’s] politics” (1). Instead, it springs from his contention that the collapse of the dictatorship’s centralized and authoritarian rule released diverse constituencies within Greek society from a longstanding chokehold. In a society marked by the weakness of intermediary and associational forms of power that might have nurtured better forms of social differentiation (Tsoukalas 1981, 295)—beyond party politics and top down hierarchies—the new openness produced fragmentary cultural understandings that appeared neither all at once nor in a simple linear fashion, but rather continued to take shape throughout the period from 1974 to the crisis of the 2010s. Top-down directives for preserving pre-1974 homogenization and assimilation were interrupted by bottom-up glimmerings of difference, Otherness, hybridity and, ever more so, popular culture. Consequently, the processes of modernization, transition, and diversity touted in the book’s subtitle ebbed and flowed as a succession of groups, interests, and identities embraced them at various points in time. The initial swell came with grand ambitions for democratic consolidation, modernization, and Europeanization. On all these fronts, the debilitating under-tow of Greece’s perceived dependency or belatedness in relation to the West was nevertheless felt, and was discursively expressed through a set of persistent cultural dualisms: Hellenic-Romaic; West-East; modernity- traditionalism; modernization-populism. These structuring metaphors through which Greeks have understood themselves have been unpacked in the quite diverse writings by Leigh Fermor, Mouzelis, Diamandouros, Herzfeld, and others. Tziovas devotes his first two chapters to how they frame the terms of modernization and Europeanization; his third chapter also reflects, in a similar manner, on Greece’s relation to an idealized antiquity. As we shall see, Tziovas even saves for the book’s conclusion a recent reboot of the same typology. This is not to suggest that Tziovas is unaware of the paradigm’s exhaustion or even its internal contradictions. Diamandouros...","PeriodicalId":43810,"journal":{"name":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mgs.2023.a908561","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

Reviewed by: Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity by Dimitris Tziovas Vangelis Calotychos (bio) Dimitris Tziovas, Greece from Junta to Crisis: Modernization, Transition and Diversity. London: I. B. Tauris, 2021. Pp. vii + 309. Hardback $108.00, Cloth $35.95, and E-book (PDF) $28.76. Literary critics no longer content themselves with completing literary histories. Instead, they pursue not the diachrony of primarily literary texts but the synchrony of an entire cultural system. Such a shift is arguably discernible in the long and prodigious output of Dimitris Tziovas, professor emeritus of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Birmingham. His numerous monographs and edited volumes in English and in Greek fit schematically into just such a first and second phase. In his first phase, his primarily textual lens progressively widens from “the nationism of the demoticists” (Tziovas 1986) to a long-due evaluation of Greek modernism (Tziovas 1997), and thence to the conditions of the self and society as revealed through an appraisal of Greek fiction (Tziovas 2003b). His second phase draws from a series of topical conferences, presciently organized at the University of Birmingham by Tziovas himself, that highlighted contexts: the Balkans (Tziovas 2003a), the Greek diaspora (Tziovas 2009), antiquity (Tziovas 2014), and austerity and crisis (Tziovas 2017). These in turn spawned collected volumes under his editorship, many of them reviewed in this journal. Tziovas’s reorientation toward contexts also coincided with his stint as a regular columnist in the culture sections of the Greek press, when he occasionally found himself a reluctant combatant in the culture wars. Meanwhile, in the field of Modern Greek Studies, Tziovas often gamely defended critical theory to his colleagues in Greece or was caught in the crossfire of Anglo-American critical disputes. In various ways, these tributary streams all flow into the present rich volume on Greece “from junta to crisis,” a volume that marks the synthesis of so much important earlier work and is a fitting monument to a long and illustrious career. Greece from Junta to Crisis positions culture at the center of the period in question, the metapolitefsi. This decision should not be understood solely as the natural disciplinary inclination of a cultural critic weary of structural political [End Page 287] analysis, even if Tziovas does write that “we do not need yet another book about [the metapolitefsi’s] politics” (1). Instead, it springs from his contention that the collapse of the dictatorship’s centralized and authoritarian rule released diverse constituencies within Greek society from a longstanding chokehold. In a society marked by the weakness of intermediary and associational forms of power that might have nurtured better forms of social differentiation (Tsoukalas 1981, 295)—beyond party politics and top down hierarchies—the new openness produced fragmentary cultural understandings that appeared neither all at once nor in a simple linear fashion, but rather continued to take shape throughout the period from 1974 to the crisis of the 2010s. Top-down directives for preserving pre-1974 homogenization and assimilation were interrupted by bottom-up glimmerings of difference, Otherness, hybridity and, ever more so, popular culture. Consequently, the processes of modernization, transition, and diversity touted in the book’s subtitle ebbed and flowed as a succession of groups, interests, and identities embraced them at various points in time. The initial swell came with grand ambitions for democratic consolidation, modernization, and Europeanization. On all these fronts, the debilitating under-tow of Greece’s perceived dependency or belatedness in relation to the West was nevertheless felt, and was discursively expressed through a set of persistent cultural dualisms: Hellenic-Romaic; West-East; modernity- traditionalism; modernization-populism. These structuring metaphors through which Greeks have understood themselves have been unpacked in the quite diverse writings by Leigh Fermor, Mouzelis, Diamandouros, Herzfeld, and others. Tziovas devotes his first two chapters to how they frame the terms of modernization and Europeanization; his third chapter also reflects, in a similar manner, on Greece’s relation to an idealized antiquity. As we shall see, Tziovas even saves for the book’s conclusion a recent reboot of the same typology. This is not to suggest that Tziovas is unaware of the paradigm’s exhaustion or even its internal contradictions. Diamandouros...
查看原文
分享 分享
微信好友 朋友圈 QQ好友 复制链接
本刊更多论文
希腊从军政府到危机:现代化、转型与多样性迪米特里斯·齐奥瓦斯
作者:Dimitris Tziovas,希腊,从军政府到危机:现代化、转型和多样性。伦敦:i.b.金牛座,2021。7 + 309页精装本108.00美元,布面35.95美元,电子书28.76美元(PDF)。文学评论家不再满足于完成文学史。相反,他们追求的不是主要文学文本的历时性,而是整个文化系统的共时性。这种转变可以从伯明翰大学现代希腊研究荣誉退休教授迪米特里斯•齐奥瓦斯(Dimitris Tziovas)冗长而惊人的著作中看出。他的许多专著和编辑卷的英文和希腊文大致符合这样的第一和第二阶段。在他的第一阶段,他主要的文本视角逐渐扩大,从“民主主义者的民族主义”(Tziovas 1986)到对希腊现代主义的长期评价(Tziovas 1997),然后到通过对希腊小说的评价揭示的自我和社会条件(Tziovas 2003b)。他的第二阶段借鉴了Tziovas本人在伯明翰大学有先见之明地组织的一系列专题会议,这些会议突出了背景:巴尔干半岛(Tziovas 2003a),希腊侨民(Tziovas 2009),古代(Tziovas 2014)以及紧缩和危机(Tziovas 2017)。在他的编辑下,这些书又产生了许多集,其中许多在本刊上发表了评论。齐奥瓦斯对语境的重新定位也与他在希腊媒体文化栏目的定期专栏作家的工作相吻合,当时他偶尔发现自己是文化战争中不情愿的战士。与此同时,在现代希腊研究领域,齐奥瓦斯经常勇敢地为他的希腊同行辩护批评理论,或者陷入英美批评争论的交火中。这些支流都以不同的方式汇入了这本关于希腊的丰富著作“从军政府到危机”,这本书综合了如此多重要的早期著作,是对他漫长而辉煌的职业生涯的恰当纪念。《希腊:从军政府到危机》将文化置于这一时期的中心。这个决定不应该仅仅被理解为厌倦了结构性政治分析的文化批评家的自然学科倾向,即使齐奥瓦斯确实写道“我们不需要另一本关于[大都市]政治的书”(1)。相反,它源于他的论点,即独裁统治的崩溃,中央集权和专制统治将希腊社会中不同的选区从长期的束缚中解放出来。在一个以中介和联合形式的权力的弱点为标志的社会中(Tsoukalas 1981,295),这种权力形式本可以培育出更好的社会分化形式(超越政党政治和自上而下的等级制度),新的开放产生了碎片化的文化理解,这些理解既不是一下子出现的,也不是以简单的线性方式出现的,而是在从1974年到2010年代危机的整个时期继续形成。自上而下的保留1974年以前的同质化和同化的指令被自下而上的差异、差异性、杂交性以及流行文化的微光所打断。因此,本书副标题中所吹捧的现代化、转型和多样性的进程,随着一系列群体、利益和身份在不同的时间点上拥抱它们而起起落落。最初的膨胀伴随着巩固民主、现代化和欧洲化的宏伟目标。在所有这些战线上,希腊对西方的依赖或滞后所产生的削弱性的暗流仍然被感觉到,并通过一系列持续的文化二元论被话语地表达出来:希腊-罗马;西;现代性——传统主义;modernization-populism。这些希腊人理解自己的结构隐喻在Leigh Fermor, Mouzelis, Diamandouros, Herzfeld等人的不同作品中得到了揭示。齐奥瓦斯的前两章主要讲述了他们是如何定义现代化和欧洲化的;他的第三章也以类似的方式反映了希腊与一个理想化的古代的关系。正如我们将看到的,齐奥瓦斯甚至在书的结尾保留了最近对同一类型的重新启动。这并不是说齐奥瓦斯没有意识到范式的枯竭,甚至没有意识到它的内部矛盾。Diamandouros……
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
求助全文
约1分钟内获得全文 去求助
来源期刊
JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES
JOURNAL OF MODERN GREEK STUDIES HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY-
CiteScore
1.00
自引率
0.00%
发文量
40
期刊介绍: Praised as "a magnificent scholarly journal" by Choice magazine, the Journal of Modern Greek Studies is the only scholarly periodical to focus exclusively on modern Greece. The Journal publishes critical analyses of Greek social, cultural, and political affairs, covering the period from the late Byzantine Empire to the present. Contributors include internationally recognized scholars in the fields of history, literature, anthropology, political science, Byzantine studies, and modern Greece.
期刊最新文献
Resituating Europe's Greek Origins from the Athenian Polis to the Cypriot Sugar Plantation The Cypriot collection of Petrarchist and other Renaissance poems ed. by Paschalis M. Kitromilides, and: Studies on the Cypriot Collection of Renaissance poems ed. by Marina Rodosthenous-Balafa (review) The Influence of "Greek Lifestyle" Perceptions on Polish Migration and Settlement on Zakynthos Contributor Bouboulina and the Greek Revolution: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Heroine of 1821 ed. by April Kalogeropoulos Householder (review)
×
引用
GB/T 7714-2015
复制
MLA
复制
APA
复制
导出至
BibTeX EndNote RefMan NoteFirst NoteExpress
×
×
提示
您的信息不完整,为了账户安全,请先补充。
现在去补充
×
提示
您因"违规操作"
具体请查看互助需知
我知道了
×
提示
现在去查看 取消
×
提示
确定
0
微信
客服QQ
Book学术公众号 扫码关注我们
反馈
×
意见反馈
请填写您的意见或建议
请填写您的手机或邮箱
已复制链接
已复制链接
快去分享给好友吧!
我知道了
×
扫码分享
扫码分享
Book学术官方微信
Book学术文献互助
Book学术文献互助群
群 号:481959085
Book学术
文献互助 智能选刊 最新文献 互助须知 联系我们:info@booksci.cn
Book学术提供免费学术资源搜索服务,方便国内外学者检索中英文文献。致力于提供最便捷和优质的服务体验。
Copyright © 2023 Book学术 All rights reserved.
ghs 京公网安备 11010802042870号 京ICP备2023020795号-1