Literature creates what virtual reality tries to erase: the frame or boundary we fashion around the fabricated image that helps to better appreciate the real one.
10.02.2017
Beauty, whether in the animal or human world, exists in the eye of the beholder. Evolution is as much about allure, sensory delight, and subjective experiences as it as about survival of the fittest.
07.14.2017
In memory of a talented young teacher and rapper, Nes Wordz, featuring an excerpt from his rendition of the Homeric encounter between Odysseus and Polyphemus.
06.20.2017
Nostalgia is our reaction to rapid social change. It expresses our desire to return to a time we imagine as happier and more innocent. Cavafy’s cosmopolitanism was an ideal we cannot recreate. But neither should we dismiss it, as many are want to do, because of its imperfections and injustices.
04.25.2017
Friendship linked our dinner with Irakli and Anna, our drive to the Caucasus Mountains, and our final discussions in Tbilisi on conflict resolution. Friends inspire us to escape the monasticism of our thinking by asking us to embrace people who live outside our home.
11.22.2016
With culture as a space of action, artists can showcase alternative ways of being American in defiance of Trumpism.
09.07.2016
In a place of diminished resources, cultural work takes on a different meaning as students learn for no credit and professors teach for no pay.
06.06.2016
At the end of the service, after the monks left with their stern but beatific expressions, I stepped out to the terrace, hundreds of feet from the sea. At the distance the sun shimmered, calming the waves of the Aegean. The morning was all aglow. Was I beholding a revelation?
04.11.2016
In the literary market, there is a preference for narrative over analysis that provides plenty of anecdotal evidence but little understanding.
12.21.2015
For travelers it is difficult to untangle from the contradictions of tourism, colonialism, and inequality.
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Gregory Jusdanis
Gregory Jusdanis teaches Modern Greek literature and culture at The Ohio State University. He is the author of The Poetics of Cavafy: Eroticism, Textuality, History (1987), Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature (1991), The Necessary Nation (2001), and Fiction Agonistes: In Defense of Literature (2010). His book, A Tremendous Thing. Friendship from the Iliad to the Internet, was published in 2014.