Take my word
Give me your hand
Empirikos’ tiny little poem most probably evokes everything poetry tends to provoke, while addressing an open invitation to its public. Our course will tend to catch the different tonalities of poetic discourse: the cavafian “words that tell and hide”, Kariotakis’ corrosive sarcasm – is he a form of tomb for Megali idea and other great expectations? -, the so called “myth” of the generation of the 30s – did / does Greece really possess a genuine cultural core of its own that would permit an active communication with the international scene, as this much reputed generation tended to demonstrate? What is Greece’s cultural identity according to this generation? Are there any words to be found after the horror of a War and indeed after a civil grief? What happens to struggles when they face the bitterness of defeat and to political beliefs when their ideological basis tends to fall apart? What are the dynamics and limits of a discourse like poetry, especially when it constantly eroticises with silence? And what if the 20th century persistently defied its relation to any sort of meaning?