“The Comic and the Poetics of Subversion”

Course description The course aims to furnish students with a comprehensive knowledge of the literary comic and its subversive potentials, as well as to develop skills relevant to postgraduate studies. The course therefore concentrates on four core concepts: satire, irony, parody, humor, which constitute basic writing tools and, at the same time, theoretical issues with philosophical implications. In addition to the knowledge and skills specific to the field of the Comic and the Poetics of Subversion, the course will investigate relevant terms, such as burlesque, pastiche, grotesque, caricature, allegory, quotation, related to the four main terms in many different ways. The course is so designed to give students an overview of developments within the theoretical field, from the Early Modern Period to today. Within such a chronological framework, the course introduces students to the ways satire, irony, humor and parody have been transformed and to the social and historical conditions under which specific works of literature were created. Students are introduced to critical and theoretical texts and debates which surround primary texts of the course, thereby being allowed to place their own interpretations within a proper academic context and to understand the developments in critical thinking surrounding a text and within critical theory in general. Different theoretical models are applied to a wide range of European and mainly Greek literary texts

Objectives

The course aims to train students in a variety of theoretical perspectives and to explore the major techniques the Poetics of Subversion uses through selected masterpieces of literature, both poetry and prose, mainly of the 19th and 20th century.

Prerequisites

Students have to register the Modern Greek Studies Postgraduate Program of the Department: http://www.philology-upatras.gr/postgraduate/home

Syllabus

Contents 1. Introduction to the “Poetics of Subversion” 2. Satire 3. Satiric persona: the case of Dionysios Solomos 4. Irony 5. Ironic persona: the case of Giannis Skarimbas 6. The “baroque” irony of C. P. Cavafy 7. Cavafy’s narrative and dramatic personas 8. Parody I: theoretical issues 9. Parody II: a typology of functions in literature 10. Parodying T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”