Cavafy on the road: the fabric of a myth in progress and queer history in the present

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Provisionally entitled 'Cavafy on the road: the fabric of a myth in progress and queer history in the present', my DPhil project considers texts and artworks, ranging roughly from 1963 to 2013, that are in direct conversation with the poetry and authorial persona of C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933). Cavafy and his body of work have at times been mediated by discourses of homophobia and nationalism, while being claimed by queer subcultures as a platform for identity expression. Consequently, my project investigates Cavafy's 'becoming myth' as the ground for an incessant competition between diverse agents. My research sets out, therefore, to recontextualise the Cavafian mythopoesis within the framework of new queer historiography, as a narrative of queer oppression but also queer assertiveness, and to underscore its possible contribution to queer politics.Cavafy is one of Greece's national poets, one of the cornerstones of the institutional establishment of Modern Greek Studies, and a canonical author of world literature. Foteini Dimirouli's research has cast light on the cultural mechanisms that set in motion the accumulation of Cavafy's symbolic capital. However, recent literature problematises this success story of rise to fame. More precisely, my project is mainly informed by the works of Benjamin Kahan, and James Faubion. By highlighting Cavafy's liminal position in a semi-periphery of the sexual world system, and in Alexandria's 'colonised elite', they pinpoint the ways in which a homosexual writer of minor literature manages to impose himself in the cultural field, propel models of sexuality that resist totalising categorisations, but also articulate a proleptic poetry, offering templates of action for the lives yet to come. My research is equally inspired by Dimitris Papanikolaou who investigated Cavafy's poetics of sexuality as well as their role as an ethical instrument preparing queer futurities, and Maria Boletsi, who stressed the overlap of irony and affect. In this vein, I consider the peripheral, queer strand of Cavafian mythopoesis as capable of decentralising the standardised narrative surrounding Cavafy. By focusing on the transmission and circulation of queer affect, my project's innovative character lies in the conception of Cavafy's 'becoming myth' not as a simple allegory of the processes of queer history, but as actively implicated in it. Thus, my approach draws on the theoretical models of 'feeling backward' (Heather Love), 'queer futurity' (J. E. Muñoz), 'queer regeneration' (Jin Haritaworn), and 'queer failure' (Judith Halberstam), so as to explore how queer subcultures create, unite, and resist thanks to affective operations of identification and envisioning triggered by Cavafy. Opposing an interpretative tradition that has disavowed and hunted down Cavafy's queer aspects, and impact, the Cavafian mythopoesis that I propose, construed as rhizomatic, and revisited from a queer optic, may result in a radical paradigm shift, and offer an exemplary case study for key concepts in queer, affect, and myth theory.Therefore, my project addresses the following questions: how has the phenomenon that we call Cavafy become the conduit for queer affect within and beyond the audiences of Cavafy's poetry? How does the queer mythographers' propensity for Cavafy's affective structures create communities of trauma and transformational reparation? How does this collective response to the 'Cavafy affects' reposition queer (inter)textuality as a participatory project compensating for the past's failed queer sociability? How do Cavafy's queer afterlives counter nationalist and homophobic agendas? Can the content and production of myth be premised on the overflowing, and the dissemination of queer affect? How does it partake in queer politics' fighting/writing back at dominant discourses?