Post Byzantine Literary Tradition in the Mediterranean, sessions at the 2023 Modern Language Association Annual Conference, San Francisco, January 5–8, 2023

Artistic contact between Byzantium, Islamic states, and such countries of the Latin West as Spain, England, Hungary, and France as well as cultural interactions and connections with Byzantine society in Italy, especially in the south, have created a backdrop of a shared Mediterranean civilization across languages and borders. To this day, little to no attention has been given to the afterlives of the Byzantine aesthetic and its contribution to the construction of the modern Mediterranean imaginary. Sedimented regional particularities, invisibly connected, hold together a world, the practices of which are hidden in the modern national and popular collective memory of nations in the Middle East, the Balkans, Turkey, Greece, Cyprus, and beyond. This panel invites abstracts that discuss sedimentations of Byzantium residing in literature, art, film, and architecture. In response as well as in conjunction with global English, the panel explores Byzantium in a modern social and political context as it preserves “linguistic borders as crossing-places rather than an indication of impenetrability” (Spivak 2014). A literary and aesthetic Byzantium includes linguistic and artistic production in Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Romanian, Slavic, Albanian, Turkish, French, Italian, Spanish in their national as well as in various regional, hybrid, and dialectic expressions. Topics include, but are not limited to, identity and aesthetics; multilingualism; East-West; secular criticism; transition to the Ottoman Empire; Orality and literacy; hagiography; collective memory; new Mediterranean epistemology; Mediterranean thinking.

Session organizer
Maria Hadjipolycarpou, University of Illinois