The Hellenic Centre

In recent years students of the Greek Civil War have begun to look beneath the web of high-power politics. This chapter offers a preliminary reconstruction of everyday life by concentrating on the unadulterated personal testimony of an ordinary couple whose life was thrown apart by events beyond its control. Most of the letters were written by Sakis and Anna and addressed to each other. Sakis was born in 1922, in Drama (eastern Macedonia), the second son of Yiannis and Evridiki. As quartermaster and secretary to the battalion's aide-de-camp, Sakis' duties ranged from managing the company's food and clothes warehouses to dealing with 'all secret and confidential issues'. Army life, especially in times of war, can be at once hazardous and monotonous, unpredictable and static. Sakis' experience of his more than two years of service, as illustrated through his letters to Anna, provides ample evidence to this effect.

Contents: Foreword Introduction: Greek language-standardizing, past, present and future, Alexandra Georgakopoulou Part I Establishing a Standard: The invention of Greek: Macedonians, poets and others, Michael Silk The Greek koine and the logic of a standard language, Stephen Colvin Primary education teaching in a non-standard language as a tool of social and national integration: the case of vernacular Greek, 1923a 30, George Kritikos Greek with no models, history or standard: Muslim pontic Greek, Pietro Bortone. Part II Standardization Practices: The lexica of the 2nd sophistic: safeguarding Atticism, Claudia Strobel Grammatical metaphor and the function of participles in high-register versions of the Life of Aesop, Chrystalla Thoma Orthographic standardization of the modern Greek classics: gain and loss, David Ricks Correcting the courtroom cat: editorial assaults on Cavafy's poetry, Anthony Hirst Modern Greek dictionaries and the ideology of standardization, Assimakis Tseronis and Anna Iordanidou Greek in Cyprus: identity oscillations and language planning, Dimitra Karoulla-Vrikki 'Greeklish': transliteration practice and discourse in the context of computer-mediated digraphia, Jannis Androutsopoulos. Part III Ideologies and Contestations: A tradition of anomaly: towards the regularization of the Greek language, Emmanuel Kriaras Mother and daughters, roots and branches: modern Greek perceptions of the relationship between the ancient and modern languages, Peter Mackridge Constructing a science of language: linguistics and politics in 20th-century Greece, Effi Gazi 'Language issues' after the 'language question': on the modern standards of standard modern Greek, Spiros Moschonas Competing ideologies and post-diglossia Greek: analysing the discourse of contemporary' myth-breakers', Dionysis Goutsos Korais and the 2nd sophistic: the Hellenistic novel as paradigm for a modern literary language, Roderick Beaton Indexes.

While the majority of Greek prose fiction writers in the 1930s attached themselves to a canon heavily influenced by European trends, Yannis Skarimbas, in his novel Μαριάμπας, shows an "irreverent" attitude toward such European influences by employing playful citation strategies. Skarimbas's novel renews its sources by means of bold montage and collage techniques, thus featuring an intertextual game which can be effectively described as a friction between different fictional worlds that compete to establish themselves. Four main intertexts of various genres, Knut Hamsun's novel, Mysteries ; Pierre Louÿs's short story, "La Fausse Esther"; excerpts from the ancient historian Polybius (his account of the battle of Zama); and Shakespeare's play, Macbeth , interact and subvert each other in the text, which offers a commentary on the reading process by monitoring reading performances of both the author Skarimbas and his hero-double aspiring novelist, Mariambas.

The ways in which interactional details and roles enacted by participants in relation to the ongoing production of a story connect with larger roles and identities have not been at the center of the problematics of identity construction in narrative. In an attempt to redress the balance, this article uses a broad definition of the conversation analytic concept of discourse identities and takes into account the ethnography of its data to explore the discourse identities management in the course of a conversational tale of tomorrow constructed by 3 Greek female adolescents. Stories of projected events, along with stories of shared events, form the specific group's main narrative practices. I show that the joint construction of the story at hand rests on the participants' enactment of a set of discourse identities that are intertwined with the story's emerging internal structure, particularly the components of complicating action and evaluation. These identities are interrelated to the participants' larger social roles and identities as friends and members of a close-knit group who share an interactional history.

Narrative is widely held as a fundamental mode of discourse, unquestionably primary in everyday social lives, and central to the organization and sense making of personal and sociocultural experience (Bruner, 1990; also see Georgakopoulou & Goutsos, 1997). It is thus not surprising that pragmatic studies of socialization have consistently privileged the development of narrative mode. Recent work has focused on children’s participation in narrative events occurring within family life, as an ideal point of entry into the interactive, jointly achieved aspects of the socialization process. Work with this emphasis has documented the culture-specificity of family narrative activities; in addition, it has provided valuable methodological tools for establishing links between the microanalysis of storytelling practices and macrolevel, sociocultural stances and norms bearing on children’s socialization (e.g., BlumKulka, 1993, 1997; Blum-Kulka & Snow, 1992; Erickson, 1982; Ochs & Taylor, 1992).