Book Launch. Anna Dimitrious’s Reading Greek Australian Literature Through the Paramythi

Event Details

Reading Greek Australian Literature through the Paramythi is a book by Dr. Anna Dimitriou that explores Greek Australian literature through its paramythic tropes and focuses on reading it as a bridge between multiculturalism and world literature. The poems, novels and novellas that draw from paramythic forms and tropes draw from its symbolic power and its performative function, and often use it subversively to speak the unspeakable. They often merge incommensurate forms and include foreign words and registers or dialects, which lead to the need for translation, as well as the possibilities for what Emily Apter calls the ‘untranslatable’. Foreign words and strange customs as well as oral story-telling forms may be untranslatable to outsiders – but their usefulness is tied to what Apter refers to as a ‘linguistic form of creative failure with homeopathic uses.’ So, when the paramythic voice, forms and tropes are located, translated, compared and interpreted in works by Australian writers having a Greek heritage, we have a new way to read Australian literature. We no longer read these texts in isolation given an affiliation with an ethnic minority group, but instead we see these as works that, as Sneja Gunew says, ‘share a world’, works that include and converse with other neo-cosmopolitan writers with double or multiple cultural perspectives.

Dr. Anna Dimitriou gained a PhD in Literary Studies in 2014 from Deakin University and is currently teaching in the Dean’s School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University.

About Dr Andonis Piperoglou

Dr Andonis Piperoglou is Hellenic Senior Lecturer in Global Diasporas at the University of Melbourne. He is a specialist in migration and ethnic history and has published extensively on Greek Australian history. He works on historical connections between colonialism, racism, and migration, as well as human movements between the Mediterranean and the Pacific.