La « crise grecque » dans l’Ultime Humiliation de Rhéa Galanaki

• Main Author: Loïc Marcou
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Centre d'Études Balkaniques 2018-01-01
• Series: Cahiers Balkaniques
• Subjects: Golden Dawn; Greek crisis; Polytechnic University generation; Galanaki Rhea (1947‑); Greece land of immigration; history of modern Greece
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ceb/9850

Since 2008, Greece is facing one of the most serious crises in its history. This financial bankruptcy, which is also a social and humanitarian disaster, is fueling an interesting albeit uneven literary production. In The Ultimate Humiliation, her last book, Rhea Galanaki (1947‑), one of the greatest contemporary novelists, offers a radiograph of the "Greek crisis" in a polyphonic novel featuring characters representative of the current Greek society: two retired ladies damaged by life and turned into beggars, a crooked politician, an anarchist fighting against the political establishment, a neo‑Nazi prompt to fight against strangers and migrants, an immigrant housekeeper, a devoted female social worker. What interpretation Rhea Galanaki, always very attentive to the upheavals of the Greek society, proposes on the so‑called "Greek crisis"? More generally, what are the social uses of contemporary Modern Greek literature?