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Reading between Worlds: Contemporary Greek Women's Writing and Censorship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Karen Van Dyck
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Abstract

This essay accounts for the recent prominence of women's writing in Greece by examining how women writers applied writing strategies developed under the dictatorship (1967–74) to their critique of fixed gender roles. Margarita Karapanou's novel Kassandra and the Wolf deconstructs the victor-victim opposition and poses the process of inversion itself as a position from which to write. Jenny Mastoraki's collection of poems Tales of the Deep works out a similar perspective formally, suggesting that such a position requires that the order of language also be disturbed. By analyzing these texts in the historical context of the dictatorship and in the theoretical contexts of feminist works such as Christa Wolf's Cassandra and Luce Irigaray's Speculum of the Other Woman, I show how Karapanou's and Mastoraki's responses to censorship are not individual exceptions but key components of recent Greek women's writing.

Type
Special Topic: Literature and Censorship
Information
PMLA , Volume 109 , Issue 1: Special Topic Literature and Censorship , January 1994 , pp. 45 - 60
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1994

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