Unit:
Κατεύθυνση Αγγλόφωνη Λογοτεχνία και ΠολιτισμόςLibrary of the School of Philosophy
Supervisors info:
Καραβαντά Ασημίνα, Αναπληρώτρια Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Μπλατάνης Κωνσταντίνος, Επίκουρος Καθηγητής, Τμήμα Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Γερμανού Μάρω, Καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα Αγγλικής Γλώσσας και Φιλολογίας, Εθνικό και Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Original Title:
Jacques Derrida and Anne Carson’s Poetics of Hospitality: Epitaphs, Photographs and Antigones’ Unbearable Mourning
Translated title:
Jacques Derrida and Anne Carson’s Poetics of Hospitality: Epitaphs, Photographs and Antigones’ Unbearable Mourning
Summary:
This thesis draws on Sophocles's Antigone and Oedipus at Colonus to examine Jacques Derrida’s theory of hospitality and the politics of mourning and analyze Anne Carson’s translation and rewriting of this politics in Antigo Nick, a rewriting of Antigone in a post 9/11 era and Nox, a lyrical, autobiographical book/epitaph on mourning. Derrida’s hospitality is both conditional and unconditional, arguing for a politics of an unconditional welcoming of the other that is, however, intertwined with the laws of the polis that receives the foreigners, the xenoi. Derrida affiliates the double bind of hospitality with the practices and rituals of mourning, prevalent in every culture and present in all human communities. The performance of the mourning ritual is not only a social but also a political practice that can challenge sovereignty, a key theme in the two Sophoclean tragedies, centering on burial rites. An overarching and recurrent symbol in the dissertation is the stele, the monument bearing the name and the traces of the dead. Carson’s post-classicist and postmodern texts operate like epitaphs, speaking to the irreplaceability of the dead and welcoming, that is, offering hospitality to the mourning process of the living, while representing a community to-come. Antigone constitutes the symbol of the unfortunate mourner, fighting for her right to the funeral rites for the unmourned kin and arguing for an unconditional hospitality for the dead others. Performing the burial rites, respecting the individuality of the dead, constructing a stele and remembering the lives lost are highly political acts; they can endanger the inhospitable state or open it up to welcome the often forgotten and ungrievable parts of the population and the strangers, the xenoi.
Main subject category:
Language – Literature
Keywords:
hospitality, mourning, lamentation, stele, stranger
