International Cavafy Summer School 2017: Cavafy in the World

The International Cavafy Summer School is a major international annual scholarly event organised by the Cavafy Archive and the Onassis Foundation, the first such event to be devoted exclusively to Cavafy and the impact of his work.

The inaugural summer school will take place on 10-17 July 2017, based at the historical building of the Onassis Foundation in the centre of Athens. The theme for this year is Cavafy in the World. The aim will be to examine Cavafy’s work in wider, indeed global, literary and cultural contexts, to revisit Cavafy as a major figure of world literature and to reassess the impact of his life and work on Greek and international culture.

Among the topics that the first Summer School will aim to revisit are: Cavafy’s relationship to movements such as symbolism, aestheticism, decadence and modernism; Cavafy's dialogue with other literary figures; Cavafy as a cultural myth; the place of biography in Cavafy studies; paratextual uses of Cavafy's poems; the construction of a Cavafy “canon” through editing and translating; Cavafy’s importance for modern queer writing and culture. It will also pose questions such as: What kind of methodological and theoretical approaches can be productive in revisiting Cavafyʼs work as world literature? How does Cavafyʼs appeal as a world literary figure relate to (and challenges) national appropriations of the poet in Greece? How does Cavafyʼs poetry speak to present cultural, social, and political concerns and what kind of responses does it offer to contemporary local and global realities?