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Amid the Ruins of Time: The Classics as Modernist Project in Gadamer and Seferis

2015; Duke University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00104124-2890957

1945-8517

Ricardo Apostol,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

Both the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and the Greek poet Giorgos Seferis attempted to solve the problem of classical reception by connecting the modern reader with the poetry of ancient Greece. Read according to Gadamer, Seferis's poetry of the 1930s articulates and enacts the classical world's final gasp, as its supposedly timeless significance and power is used one last time in order to inaugurate its relegation to the category of the insignificant, the arbitrary, the personal, and merely local. This abdication of the Classics' claim to universality under the aegis of their own authority could only be managed without paradox by a Greek poet, in whose work the transition from Classical to “merely Greek” could occur seamlessly and without contradiction. In turn, the poetry of Seferis reveals that Gadamer's hermeneutic enterprise is in essence a late attempt to justify the modernist project in the postmodern period.