Ritsos and The Tragic Vision

Catalog description

How is it that the dead speak? In what way can the past be said to survive in the present?tragically? These are the questions around which Yannis Ritsos?s The Fourth Dimension is organized. Composed of a series of dramatic monologues that move between the past and the present, the dead and the living, Ritsos?s poem demands that we think about the relations between memory, history, and language. This course traces Ritsos?s poetic strategies by reading and reconstructing the classical intertexts that inform The Fourth Dimension. In each instance, it seeks to analyze the reasons behind his appropriations, distortions, revisions, and translations of these classical texts.