Radical Postmodernist Literature

Abstract

This paper explores how classical antiquity was dealt with by Greek radical postmodernism of the late twentieth century. It focuses on the work of the renowned writer Nanos Valaoritis, whose short story A Classical Education (1990) ironically and playfully summarizes the disenchantment, confusion, sense of inadequacy and need for transcending antiquity. The following issues are studied: a) postmodernist visualization of antiquity; b) the ‘situational’ classicism activated by aesthetic conversion (détournement) of the ‘classics’; c) anti-modernism as a critique of Greek modernists. The term ‘ “equarrent” classicism’, coined by Valaoritis, is introduced as a process of ‘paralogical’ conditioning of the classics by post-colonial contemporaneity.