Still Life: Modernism's Turn to Greece

Abstract

Hellenism is a way of seeing ghosts and contemplating inanimate objects. Normally associated with the Gothic, these shadowy visions persist in modernist writings in a variety of forms, representative of distinctive and often conflicting positions on art and life. The concern with cultural legacy and the presumed license of the modern artist and intellectual to energize the present by reanimating the past amounts to more than a mere exercise in classical allusion for a learned audience. Through meditations on mythical motifs, magical objects and staged encounters between ancient rituals and contemporary crises, writers and thinkers such as Pound, Eliot, Harrison, Woolf, Freud, H.D. and Heidegger turn to Greece as the site of haunting continuities.