The Conquered probes issues of collective memory and cultural trauma in three sorrowful poems composed soon after the conquest of Constantinople and Tenochtitlán. These texts describe the fall of an empire as a fissure in the social fabric and an open wound on the body politic, and articulate, in a familiar language, the trauma of the conquered.
Are there such things as peripheral modernity and postmodernity? This groundbreaking book focuses on the notions of modernity and postmodernity in two countries that never before have been studied comparatively: Argentina and Greece. It examines theories of the postmodern and the problems involved in applying them to the hybrid and sui generis cultural phenomena of the «periphery». Simultaneously it offers an exciting insight into the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Ricardo Piglia, Dimitris Kalokyris and Achilleas Kyriakidis, whose syncretist aesthetics are symptomatic of the mixing up of different and often opposed aesthetic principles and traditions that occur in «peripheral» locations. This book will be very useful to scholars and students of Latin American, Modern Greek and comparative literature as well as to those interested in Borges studies.