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| Irene Kacandes |
Wednesday, October 28th
Hanover Inn, room 116, 6:00pm
Irene Kacandes, Professor of German and Comparative Literature
Dartmouth College
Author of Daddy’s War: Greek American Stories
Earlier this year Irene Kacandes published Daddy’s War: Greek American Stories, a text she labels a “paramemoir” to signal its similarities to the memoir genre, but also its dissimilarities. In narrative form she recounts having an indistinct sense of her father’s past in wartime and she narrates certain key events that eventually led her to researching the “truth” of what happened to her paternal family in Greece during the Second World War and the Axis Occupation. That research involved interviewing family members of several generations and of course historical research. However, it also involved theorizing about the effects of trauma on those individuals and the stories they told. The final form mixes genres and experiments with “voice” as Kacandes tries to strike the right tone for communicating both the tragedies of what happened to previous generations and the damaging way those tragedies affected her own.
In her conversation with us, Kacandes would like to share some of the ethical dilemmas she faced as she confronted the reality of some key players no longer being alive to tell their sides of the story or of some who were alive but monolingual not being able to vet what she was writing in English; of her father’s increasing dementia and the fact that he couldn’t fully understand her project; and more generally of the difficulty of telling a morally complex story within an American cultural context that craves simplification.
6:00 – 6:30 cash bar
6:30 – 7:30 dinner
7:30 – 9:00 discussion
Subsidized cost of the dinner: $24.00
RSVP by October 20th
Make check(s) payable to the Ethics Institute
Mail to: Stephanie Kvam
Ethics Institute
Dartmouth College
HB 6031 Haldeman Ctr, 2nd Floor
27 N. Main Street
Hanover, NH 03755
Contact the Ethics Institute for more information.
