Memory, Revenge, and Political Violence: Two Case Studies in Greek Fiction

Abstract

C ombined considerations of the terms “political violence” and “fiction” normally fall within two contiguous research fields, each employing disparate theoretical frameworks, methodological tools, and sets of questions. Scholars from disciplines as diverse as political sociology, cultural studies, and cultural anthropology attempting to move beyond absolutist or deceptively objectivist accounts of violence focus on its status as a variable, contextually specific discursive construction pertinent to politically motivated narratives. The second approach deals with representations of political violence in various cultural forms and genres (films, theater productions, novels, etc.), raising questions regarding the fictionalization of contested histories and audience/reader responses. Viewing literature as a specific embodiment of “cultural memory,” we hold that, despite being an ideologically overdetermined form of social discourse, it also serves as a “medium for observing the production of cultural memory” regarding, in our case, leftwing disobedience in the wake of a traumatic past. Staging a “production of a production,” in other words constituting “ideology to the second power,” literary texts don’t mirror social reality or history, but, as attentive critiques can reveal, they hold a mirror against ideology, VASILIKI PETSA