Maria Boletsi Books

The Greek Alexandrian poet C. P. Cavafy (1863–1933) has been recognized as a central figure in European modernism and world literature. His poetry explored the conditions for animating the past and making lost worlds or people haunt the present. Yet he also described himself as “a poet of the future generations.” Indeed, his writings address concerns and desires that permeate the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How does poetry concerned with the past, memory, loss, and death, carry futurity? How does it haunt, and how is it haunted by, future presents? Specters of Cavafy broaches these questions by proposing spectral poetics as a novel approach to Cavafy’s work. Drawing from theorizations of specters and haunting, it develops spectrality as a lens for revisiting Cavafy’s poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction, as well as his poetry’s bearing on our present. By examining Cavafy’s spectral poetics, the book’s first part shows how conjurations work in his writings, and how the spectral permeates the entanglement of modernity and haunting, and of irony and affect. The second part traces the afterlives of specific poems in the Western imagination since the 1990s, in Egypt’s history of debt and colonization, and in Greece during the country’s recent debt crisis. Beyond its original contribution to Cavafy studies, the book proposes tools and modes of reading that are broadly applicable in literary and cultural studies.

The main catalogue of documenta 14 will take the form of a reader, evoking the various meanings associated with the term. The documenta 14 reader will both reflect the reading subject and the subject who reads or recites to an audience—emphasizing the importance of literature, orality, performance, pedagogy, and radical reception for the documenta 14 project overall—as well as comprise a critical anthology that features international theoretical, historical, and literary writing that explores and expands on the attendant exhibitions in Athens and Kassel. The indigo ribbon that marks the pages of the book was prepared at the MENTIS Center for the Preservation of Traditional Textile Techniques, part of the Benaki Museum, in Athens. Cotton thread was dyed in an indigo vat prepared by documenta 14 artist Aboubakar Fofana, and woven into ribbon using the machines that make up the MENTIS donation in what remains a „living workshop museum“ at 6 Polyfimou Street.