Vrasidas Karalis
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, literary criticism and contemporary political philosophy. He has translated two books by Patrick White into Greek, Voss (1996) and The Vivisector (2004) and one of his plays, A Cheery Soul (1197) after a grant by the Australian Council for the Arts. He has also translated modern Greek poetry into English.
He is the editor of the Modern Greek Studies Journal of Australia and New Zealand. He has also 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) and Reflections on Presence (2017).
He is currently working on the films of Elia Kazan, John Cassavetes and George Miller.
All essays by Vrasidas Karalis
Nikos Kazantzakis and the Temptations of Writing
‘Kazantzakis was a writer in constant conflict with his verbal idiom and in structural collision with language itself. Whoever reads his novels is impressed (or annoyed) by the gothic grandiosity of his rhetoric, the romantic extremism of his contradictions, the quest for a certain redemption that never comes and finally, his relentless efforts to construct a literary work that would fuse genres, forms and styles. And here exactly lies his significance as a writer.’
