Adrianne Kalfopoulou
 Adrianne Kalfopoulou lives and teaches in Greece and is a part of the Scottish Universities' International Summer Schools Program at the University of Edinburgh. Her scholarly work has focused on Nineteenth and Twentieth-century American literature, particularly the contributions of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Toni Morrison and Marilynne Robinson. She is currently at work on a monograph of Sylvia Plath's poems. |
Broken Greek: A Language to Belong
This memoir/testimonial is divided into 5 chapters and an epilogue that braid recurring and overlapping themes of cultural identity, multiple belongings and exclusions. Built around a particular experience (applying for a University position, buying an island house, negotiating Athens traffic), each chapter addresses the speaker’s changing relationship to Greece, beginning with an introduction to the culture through the lives of the speaker’s paternal grandparents. The narratives become cumulative stories of initiation into modern Greek culture as the speaker’s ‘broken Greek’is the language by which she negotiates clashing orientations to her bi-cultural world and tries to understand how and where she belongs. |