Specters of Cavafy

The Modern Greek Program at the University of Michigan warmly invites you to a book discussion on the first book in the series "Greek / Modern Intersections," (edited by Artemis Leontis, published by U Michigan Press).

C.P. Cavafy’s poetry explored the conditions for animating the past and making lost worlds or people haunt the present. Yet he also described himself as “a poet of the future generations.” Indeed, his writings address concerns and desires that permeate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does poetry concerned with the past, memory, loss, and death carry futurity? How does it haunt, and how is it haunted by, future presents?

In her book Specters of Cavafy, Maria Boletsi broaches these questions by proposing spectral poetics as a novel approach to Cavafy’s work. Drawing from theorizations of specters and haunting, she develops spectrality as a lens for revisiting Cavafy’s poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, as well as his poetry’s bearing on our present. By examining Cavafy’s spectral poetics, the book shows how conjurations work in his writings, and how the spectral permeates the entanglement of modernity and haunting, and of irony and affect. Boletsi also traces the afterlives of specific poems in the Western imagination since the 1990s, in Egypt’s history of debt and colonization, and in Greece during the country’s recent debt crisis.
In this online event, Maria Boletsi will talk with Will Stroebel (University of Michigan) about her new book, Cavafy, poetry and haunting.

Join this event on Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/j/96401478491, passcode: 761866.

Maria Boletsi is Endowed Professor of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Amsterdam, where she holds the Marilena Laskaridis Chair, and Associate Professor in Film and Literary Studies at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She is the author of Barbarism and Its Discontents (Stanford University Press, 2013) and Specters of Cavafy (University of Michigan Press, 2024), and co-author of Barbarian: Explorations of a Western Concept in Theory, Literature and the Arts (Metzler, 2 vols; 2018/2023). She has published, among other topics, on the concepts of barbarism, spectrality, crisis, and literatures and cultures of resistance in Greece and the Mediterranean. Her latest project focuses on the concept of the weird and its mobilizations in fiction, ecology, and politics.

Will Stroebel is Assistant Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. His book, Literature's Refuge: Rewriting the Mediterranean Borderscape, has just been published by Princeton University Press.