Voices of Greek Women: Two Introductory Comments

Abstract

Voices of Greek Women Two Introductory Comments The conference "Voices of Greek Women" organized by Gail HolstWarhaft and hosted by Cornell University on 9-10 March 1990 was a remarkable event for many reasons, but perhaps above all because it linked so many discourses. Conferences by definition bring together scholars to dissect disciplines, texts . .., and each other. This one was, in my experience, unique in drawing not just scholars and critics from the United States, Australia, Denmark, and Greece, but also poets, novelists, and singers. Women artists, invited to such occasions (if at all) only to divert and entertain over banquets when the "serious" discussion is over, were given back their voice in the interpretation and analysis of their own craft. The result was a lively and constructive dialogue on production and performance, as well as on diverse academic approaches. Certain schools of post-structuralist criticism (including some feminist ones) create such a distance between "author" and "text" that the producer—let alone the performer—is excluded, misinterpreted, discarded. That imbalance was redressed, as Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, Mariza Koch, Olga Broumas, and Alki Zei each demonstrated through performance the emotive power of word and song (image as sound), yet at the same time contributed generously throughout to debates on questions like: Is there such a thing as "women's writing"? What is the role of experience in the creation, reception, and interpretation of literature and music? Can folk song still be creatively exploited in our technologized, postmodernist world? Another unusual feature of the conference was the wide generic representation of "Greek women's voices": lamenting voices from Homeric epic, Akritic song, modern poetry and song; protesting and heroic voices of suffering and endurance during the Resistance, informally narrated; voices from contemporary fiction, bio-mythography , poetry and song relating personal and historical experiences, questioning conventional boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and language . But perhaps our most important contribution was to bring together , from new and diverse perspectives, the many generations of Journal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 9, 1991. 141 142 Introductory Comments Greek culture and scholarship. Pat Easterling reminded us of the formidable power of woman's voice of lamentation in the Iliad; Nancy Sultan eloquently illustrated the interaction between κλÎ-ος and γόος in heroic song; Gail Holst-Warhaft bridged the gap between antiquity and the present, the literary and the oral/popular, the male and the female, in her treatment of the lament in modern prose, poetry, and song. Theirs are the three papers selected for inclusion in this issue of JMGS because they form a provocative introduction to articles on modern literary texts that, it is hoped, will appear in future issues. MARGARET ALEXIOU Harvard University What prompted the conference held at Cornell University was the long overdue need to recognize women as creative voices in modern Greek culture—and not only as poets and prose writers but also as song writers and composers. Although it is doubtful that anyone involved in modern Greek studies can be unaware of the contribution that women have made to modern Greek letters, there is still a lag between our appreciation of individual writers' works and our willingness to consider those works in terms of Greece's broader sociopolitical context. The voices that Greek women employ are no less affected by their cultural background than are men's voices; but since Greek society expects different things from women, it also expects them to speak a unique language meant to be evaluated in specific ways. In the small circles of Greek criticism where new theoretical models are being proposed and old ones discarded, it seemed timely to consider the forms, traditional as well as novel, used by Greek women to speak, sing, and write, and how the voices that women have adopted are related to the roles they are expected to play—and do play—in Greek society. Like all conferences, "Voices of Greek Women" reflected the personal prejudice of its organizer. To me, Greece is still a nation dominated by its oral tradition. In Greece, "voice" is not simply a literary metaphor. To discuss Greek poetry without hearing that poetry declaimed, intoned, or sung seems to me to deprive it of an essential element. Unlike...