(En)taseis kai (dia)staseis: he Hellenike tragodia kai he theoria tou eikostou aiona

Abstract

Reviewed by: [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="01i" /] [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="02i" /] Stratos E. Constantinidis Savvas Patsalidis . [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="03i" /] [inline-graphic xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xlink:href="04i" /]. Athens: Yorgos Dardanos. 1997. Pp. 470. Savvas Patsalidis is Professor of American Literature and Drama at the University of Thessaloniki. His book, one volume in a series of theater studies published under the general editorship of Thodoros Grammatas, Professor of Theater at the University of Athens, surveys the theoretical models of the West that have controlled the revival, rewriting, adaptation, editing, updating, or censoring of classical Greek tragedies in Europe and the United States in the twentieth century. Many Greek critics feel that the foreign alterations imposed on the classical Greek tragedies have not promoted the Greek point of view. Patsalidis takes issue with these Greek critics and especially with Kostas Georgousopoulos, who, according to Patsalidis, has appointed himself to the role of "a privileged guardian of the tradition and a preserver of the superiority of Greekness" (p. 19). In six chapters, Patsalidis informs his readers about the major foreign theoretical models that have influenced the readings and revivals of classical Greek tragedies in the West—and briefly in Greece. In the first chapter, entitled, "Romanticism and Realism: Enter Ethnocen-trism," Patsalidis begins by surveying the opinions of twelve German authors (e.g., Lessing, Goethe, Hegel, Wagner), eleven French authors (e.g., Hugo, Dumas, Musset, Coquelin), and seven British authors (e.g., Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Shelley). He argues that the model of Romantic ethnocentrism used the classical Greek tradition to help Europeans build a strong modern national tradition, but that it was later challenged by the model of naturalism (e.g., Zola, Shaw), which emphasized objective truth, observable reality, empirical analysis, and historical explanation. Despite Shaw's claim that classical Greek tragedy died with Wagner (p. 104), classical Greek plays flourished in terms of translations, productions, and scholarly studies in subsequent years. The model of naturalism declined when challenged by the first "modernists" (e.g., Appia, Craig). Patsalidis also sketches the modern Greek model according to the opinions of four post-1975 Greek scholars (Tziovas, Dimiroulis, Grammatas, Puchner) and four British scholars (Mango, Fermor, Herzfeld, Holden), who discuss the work of twelve Greek authors—Paparrigopoulos, Therianos, Psycharis, Palamas, Giannopoulos, Dragoumis, Vernardakis, Delmouzos, Varnalis, Paraschos, Karaoglou, Roidis—from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Patsalidis concludes that the modern Greek model rests on the nineteenth-century European imaginary of the Greeks as a people who feel that their identity is [End Page 181] being divided between East and West, between classical Hellenism and Byzantine Hellenism. In the second chapter, entitled "Europe from 1900 to 1940: Modernism," Patsalidis examines the psychoanalytic interpretations of classical Greek tragedy (Freud, Jung, Jones, Rank) and their influence on American dramatists (O'Neill, Williams); the ritualistic interpretations of classical Greek tragedy (from the evolutionist views of the Cambridge School of Anthropologists to the "timeless" archetypal and formalist views of Frye, Campbell, and Levi-Strauss) and their influence on the poetic dramas of T. S. Eliot and Lorca; the historical avant-guard interpretations of classical Greek tragedy by twenty surrealists, dadaists, futurists, and expressionists (e.g., Jarry, Apollinaire, Toller, Kaiser); and the sociological interpretations of classical Greek tragedy by ten Marxists (e.g., Piscator, Kautsky, Lunacharsky, Trotsky) who, in his opinion, returned to the nationalist, naturalist model without particular focus on classical Greek tragedy. The anti-national, anti-naturalist model in Russia was influenced by French Symbolism and was championed mainly by eleven artists and theorists who worked either outside the U.S.S.R. (Diaghilev, Benois) or inside the U.S.S.R. (e.g., Andreyev, Meyerhold, Evreinov, Tairov). He examines Brecht's anti-Aristotelian posture vis-à-vis the rival views of other Marxists (Lukács, Horvarth, Gabor), and he concludes that Lukács's views on imitation and tragedy remain Aristotelian especially on the issue of Besonderheit (). The chapter ends with a synopsis of Benjamin's views, which underline the common points between Brecht's epic theater...