(Un)doing Literary Theory

Those scholars who waver between the so-called centres and margins are asked to negotiate the growing split between doing theory in vastly different cultural and academic contexts: from the theoretical language they use to their interaction with dissimilar ideological, political and ethnic backgrounds. This gap, and all of its symptomatic manifestations, has been the subject of study at least since the 1980s, particularly in the field of postcolonial studies where the split between the “object” and “subject” of investigation seems to be more emphatic and more urgent. In this paper, I examine some of the theoretical constructs through which this split becomes apparent. In the context of the emerging critique of certain aspects of post-structuralist theory in the United States, particularly in the work of Rey Chow, I discuss some of the theoretical misappropriations of post-structuralism in the Greek academic context and particularly in relation to the reception of the poets belonging to the generation of the 1930s. More specifically, I concentrate on the critique of the perceived hellenocentrism of this generation as paradigmatic of the tension between ethnic studies and poststructuralist discourse in Greece.