Professor Vrasidas Karalis will present the inaugural Dimitris Tsaloumas commemorative lecture, at the Greek Centre, on Thursday 2 November 2017, as a part of the Greek History and Culture Seminars. This is a joint initiative by the Greek Australian Cultural League and the Greek Community of Melbourne.

The lecture provides a general overview of Dimitris Tsaloumas’ poetic language and its evolution through various genres and forms. It discusses his early modernist poetics and explores their permanent vestiges in his later mature poetry both in English and Greek.

It also examines the experiments with form that we see in different moments of his poetic evolution and discusses the social and artistic contribution of his language to the wider Australian literary history. The central point of the lecture is that Tsaloumas preserved the radical potential of formal experimentation as found in modernism while at the same staying faithful to the need for formal transparency.

The lecture concludes with a brief discussion of his final book in English Helen of Troy (2007) exploring the poetics of formal minimalism that Tsaloumas articulated there.

Vrasidas KARALIS teaches Modern Greek Studies at the University of Sydney where he holds the Sir Nicholas Laurantos Chair in Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. He has published extensively on Byzantine historiography, Greek political life, Greek Cinema, European cinema, the work of Patrick White and contemporary political philosophy. He has edited volumes on modern European political philosophy, especially on Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis.

His books include Recollections of Mr. Manoly Lascaris (2007), The Demons of Athens (2014), A History of Greek Cinema (2012), Realism and Post-War Greek Cinema (2017).

He is currently working on the films of Elia Kazan and John Cassavetes. When: Thursday 2 November 2017, 7.00pm Where: Delphi Bank Mez, The Greek Centre, 168 Lonsdale Street