Giorgos Dialegmenos is among the few domestic post-war dramatic writers – one of the most significant of his time – whose work obsessively delves into the issues of memory and its manifestations: the passage of time, the traumas of the past, and the haunting of the living by their ghosts.
Thus, the present book deals with the interdisciplinary field of memory and its complex tropes, attempting to apply to Dialegmenos's dramaturgy the various analytical perspectives that have been opened in recent years through memory studies.
Dialegmenos's "neo-Gothic" genre of drama, which often introduces the audience to the realm of the uncanny, the terrifying, and the paradoxical, addresses all the tropes of memory: (1) traumatic memory, characterized by the pathological compulsive repetition of past trauma as a current nightmarish experience that, apart from the victim, also affects the perpetrator; (2) modern nostalgic recollection associated with the sense of an impossible return to the idealized past "happy" era, to the safe "home/nurturing cradle" of origin, and to youth, due to the rapidly accelerating social, economic, and technological transformations that lead immigrants of the modern world to a state of spiritual homelessness, cultural exile, and spatiotemporal displacement; (3) and finally, the postmodern commodified nostalgia of the retro that, mediated by contemporary consumer products of mass communication, recycles the past, offering it to the audience in a simulated, hallucinatory, and acausal manner, as if it is being "genuinely" revived in the present.
The intense engagement of Dialegmenos's dramatic heroes with memories and the past showcases their desperate struggle to forge or maintain their autobiographical identity, intertwined with recent collective social and historical memory.
Number of pages
630
Cover
Soft
Year of publication
2022
Publisher
Ekdoseis Papazisi
24 Coins
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