ABSTRACT

There is a well-established correlation between play and modernism that does not need much explanation. But there is a feature of play that most succinctly pertains to modernism, and this demands more critical attention, not least because it shifts the emphasis from the level of aesthetics to that of literary institutions. The theoretical landscape in the area of literature somehow reproduces the disparity featured in anthropological, psychological or aesthetic discussions of play, and therefore it is worth trying to locate some prevailing trends. Greek high modernism has been identified with the literary 1930s. But the modernist project extends well into the 1960s, during which some of its initial vanguard aspects are revived. The rhetoric they endorsed saw Greece as peripheral to Europe ever since its foundation as a modern state in the early 1830s. Greece's Ottoman past had essentially disconnected it from the consensus of the Western world and its intellectual trajectory.