International Cavafy Summer School 2018: Cavafy and Antiquity

Following the inaugural summer school that took place in July 2017, on the theme of Cavafy in the World, this year’s summer school will take place on 9-15 July 2018. The International Cavafy Summer School 2018 will focus on Cavafy and Antiquity, a theme that shares many points of connection with the first summer school and its global concerns. The study of antiquity is itself experiencing a junction where both the ancient world and the modern world relating to it have expanded and changed. To probe against this background Cavafy’s antiquity, which is decentred yet concrete, untimely yet temporally specific, shared yet individually mediated, uncertain yet asserted, offers the potential for new insights and new second-order questions about the study of Cavafy and of the study of Classics alike.

Among the topics that the International Cavafy Summer School will aim to consider are: does Cavafy’s approach to antiquity constitute a form of classicism, or post-classicism? Does it constitute a critical classicism, as well as enable a new, critical approach to canonicity? How capacious is Cavafy’s ancient world, spatially and temporally? Can Cavafy’s antiquity provide new impetus for thinking about the relationship of the classical, untimeliness, or lateness? What new models and theoretical insights for both Classical Reception Studies and Modern Greek Studies can Cavafy’s antiquity offer? What mediators shaped and shape Cavafy’s antiquity, such as scholarship, translations, or archaeology? To what extent has Cavafy shaped them in turn? What is Cavafy’s relation to the archeological, museological and philological breakthroughs of his time? How is Cavafy’s antiquity related to notions and histories of Greek nationalism or other forms of ethnic, community and affective belonging? How does Cavafy’s Hellenism respond to the international movements of Aestheticism and Decadence? To what extent can we categorize Cavafy’s antiquity as a “queer fiction of the past”? What media does Cavafy’s antiquity communicate with, other than textuality? Does Cavafy offer us new forms of comparison and relationality with the past? Is Cavafy’s antiquity an urgent antiquity for our time? We are encouraging research and thought that is open to theoretical, historical, and comparative issues, and that seeks to leverage Cavafy’s antiquity to ask fresh questions about the knowledge of antiquity and the stances and practices this knowledge can involve.