1.

Marios Chakkas' Third Kidney; a case of the postmodern sublime

2.
Agata Wiśniewska
3.
Journal of Modern Greek Studies, The John Hopkins University Press
Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Cambridge University Press
Critical Quarterly
5a.
What is the source of the sublime in Marios Chakkas' short story Third Kidney.
What's the aesthetic manifesto of the Third Kidney.
What is the aesthetics of Marios Chakkas?
5b.
Postmodern mode of representation with a special … on the role of sublime.
6.
The article investigates traces of the postmodern sublime as defined in Lyotard's Postmodern
Condition in M. Chakkas' short story the Third Kidney .
7a
The literature of Marios Chakkas are widely considered as ironic commentary on the death heroism
during the rise of the post-war capitalism era. I'd like to approach his work from a new perspective
and namely that of aesthetics.

7b.
Identifying what position the Third Kidney has in the corpus of Chakkas works.
Close reading and analysis of the text.
Identifying intertextual references.
Application of postmodern theory of the sublime to the textual analysis.
7c.
Third Kidney is not only a work of literature but also about literature, a work of poetics. It enters a
dialogue with the tradition of modernism, rejecting its rhetorics and the attitude towards sublime,
presented in the modernist tradition only as the „missing contents”.What is proposed as an
alternative is the postmodern account on sublime. The „third kidney” which constitues the means of
„bringing the unpresentable to the account” on the textual level, becomes on the meta-levela a
device which lays stress on the inability of such a representation, therefore putting foreward the
„unpresentable” in the text - the represantation, itself.
7d.
Establishing the connections between the work of M. Chakkas and philosophical thought of
postmodernism.
8.
The political effects of the aesthitic function of the sublime in Chakkas' work.
The role of the „fugural” and the „discoursive” in the work.

Resources:
Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and
Brian Massumi, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.
Lyotard, J.-F., The Different: Phrases in Dispute, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1988.
Lyotard, J.-F., Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991