Color Pluralism: A Posthumanist Approach to the Color Narratives of Ancient and Modern Greek Lyric Literature

December 5, 2025

10:00 a.m. EST, Friday

attend virtually: LIVESTREAM LINK

Abstract

This lecture examines color in Comparative Literature, particularly focused on various texts of Ancient and Modern Greek Lyric Poetry. Color is not only conceived as visual stimuli, but also a subjectivity of zoe that possesses vitality and interacts dynamically with its environment and other entities through the lenses of posthumanism. Moreover, color is not a lifeless tool used by authors to embellish the text, but an active force that interacts with nature, humans and nonhuman life-forms, predicting or influencing their actions. This approach expands human understanding of nonhuman life-forms and facilitates the construction of non-anthropocentric standpoints to foster the dialogue on the “color pluralism” (e.g., Mizrahi, 2006; Kalderon, 2007), found in the nature, human and nonhuman world, not only conceived it as theme or representation in texts, but also shaping the narrative structures and mechanics to approach color narratives as life, like life and as production. The latter guides readers in understanding the human and nonhuman relationship, while fostering a post-anthropocentric worldview that challenges traditional distinctions between life and non-life.

Presenter

Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Philology of the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She earned her PhD in Modern Greek Literature from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. She was Instructor at the Utah University in the U.S.A. She is author of the monograph titled The Biocosmic Perception of the Poet. Nature and Body in Walt Whitman and Angelos Sikelianos’ works (Athens: Sokoli Publications, 2023, in Greek) and co-edited with Professor Peggy Karpouzou the edition titled Symbiotic Posthumanist Ecologies in Western Literature, Philosophy and Art. Towards Theory and Practice (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2023). She is Associate and Managing Editor at the scientific journal Ecokritike and current member of the Education Team of V.I.N.E. at Glenn Research Center of NASA. She is Series Editor of the “Exeter Studies in Environmental Humanities. Past, Present and Future Econarratives” at University of Exeter Press and co-Editor of the book series “Posthumanities and Citizenship Futures” at Bloomsbury. Her disciplines are the Environmental Humanities, Posthumanities, Comparative Literature and Digital Humanities.

Website: https://en-uoa-gr.academia.edu/NikoletaZampaki

E-mail: [email protected]

Attending Instructions:

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