Books by John Xiros Cooper
Norman Carney SA Editions, 2020
A famous chef is stabbed to death in his own kitchen. Could an argument over how to bake stuffed ... more A famous chef is stabbed to death in his own kitchen. Could an argument over how to bake stuffed tomatoes lead to murder? This is Greece, so anything is possible. John Xiros Cooper has set the table for Captain Panos Akritas and his partner Lieutenant Valia Sternatia to catch the perpetrator who’s cooked up this mystery. The youngest of the chef’s three daughters is accused of carving up her Michelin-starred father. She insists she’s innocent. But the evidence points to her guilt. Xiros Cooper has served up a spicy recipe of simmering excitement. The story has many twists and turns, memorable characters, several more corpses, and a gangster with the head that resembles a lizard. There’s also a love story that turns sour. The surprising finale, when the wrongdoers get their just desserts, completes this feast of a tale! Kalí órexi!
Now available as ebook and paperback
Norman Carney SA Editions, 2020
A dead body, a beautiful librarian, an Albanian assassin, and an ancient letter lost for two thou... more A dead body, a beautiful librarian, an Albanian assassin, and an ancient letter lost for two thousand years, all threaten the stability of Christendom. More murders follow. Captain Panos Akritas finds himself pulled into a case that could shake the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Protestant churches to the core. The hunt for the lost letter exposes Akritas and his partner to dangers they’ve never faced before.The investigation is hindered by the machinations of church officials, politicians, and even his superiors in the Hellenic Police who do not want the lost letter to be made public. Danger lurks everywhere as Akritas doggedly pursues the truth. A compelling narrative, sharply drawn characters, and a careful evocation of the Greek background make Pillar of Faith a novel that will remain in your memory well after you’ve finished reading it.
Norman Carney SA Editions, 2020
Why would anyone want to kill some old men? Six have been murdered already when Police Captain Pa... more Why would anyone want to kill some old men? Six have been murdered already when Police Captain Panos Akritas is put on the case. At first it seems the straightforward business of theft. The old men were rich and defenceless. Easy pickings, it seems. But there are small anomalies that baffle Akritas and as he investigates they begin to multiply. The case grows more complicated and disturbing. He becomes a target of the killers and from that point on the case threatens to spin out of control. The investigation takes him into a dark underworld of vengeance, greed, and violence. As the bodies pile up, Akritas realizes that the case has its roots in the darkest episodes of modern Greek history, going back over sixty years to civil war and dictatorship. Against a background of economic and political crisis, the sunny, friendly Greece that tourists love to visit has another side, sinister and deadly. The story takes the reader on a thrilling ride through a modern Athens that tourists never see. With a compelling plot, a careful eye for detail, and unforgettable characters Death in Athens adds a new voice to the Mediterranean noir of that Andrea Camilleri, Manuel Montalban, Michael Dibden, Donna Leon, and Maurizio De Giovanni have made popular.
John Xiros Cooper was born in Athens, Greece. He turned to fiction writing after thirty-five years as a university professor of literature in Canada. The Panos Akritas series adds a new voice to the tradition of Mediterranean noir.
The Benefits of a Liberal Arts Education and Other Essays
What benefits are there in studying the liberal arts or humanities? In an age of technology, comm... more What benefits are there in studying the liberal arts or humanities? In an age of technology, commerce, and materialism, the liberal arts often find themselves beleaguered by the dominant idea that all education should constitute a form of training for the job market, that it be instrumental in making each of us an economic unit in the interests only of wealth accumulation and production. The resulting cultural deficits cannot be quantified, but they are not negligible. This collection of essays, speeches, talks, and other occasional writings begins by trying to answer the question. But there’s more here than the opening piece. The collection encompasses other subjects as well, some public and cultural, and others that are the private experience of the author, including a series of pieces that describe his impressions of returning to the land of his birth after an absence of more than sixty years. John Xiros Cooper spent over thirty-five years as a university professor of English literature. He is a scholar, teacher, and writer and this collection of mainly unpublished works supplement his published scholarship in books, articles, and chapters. Personal reflection, public utterance, and open engagement with the issues of this world make this a collection that will make you think. Some of the pieces may also touch your heart.
Many critics argue that the modernist avant-garde were always in opposition to the commercial val... more Many critics argue that the modernist avant-garde were always in opposition to the commercial values of market-driven society. For John Xiros Cooper, the avant-garde bears a more complex relation to capitalist culture than previously acknowledged. He argues that in their personal relationships, gender roles, and sexual contacts, the modernist avant-garde epitomized the impact of capitalism on everyday life. Cooper shows how the new social, cultural, and economic practices aimed to defend cultural values in a commercial age, but, in this task, modernism became the subject of a profound historical irony. Its own characterizing techniques, styles, and experiments, deployed to resist the new nihilism of the capitalist market, eventually became the preferred cultural style of the very market culture which the first modernists opposed. In this broad-ranging study John Xiros Cooper explores this provocative theme across a wide range of Modernist authors, including
Recent criticism of Eliot has ignored the public dimension of his life and work. His poetry is of... more Recent criticism of Eliot has ignored the public dimension of his life and work. His poetry is often seen as the private record of an internal spiritual struggle. Professor Cooper shows how Eliot delib-erately addressed a North Atlantic 'mandarinate' fearful of social disintegration ...
Chapter 1 Life Early life, 18881914 1 A bohemian life, 19151922 5 Man of letters, 19231945 12 ... more Chapter 1 Life Early life, 18881914 1 A bohemian life, 19151922 5 Man of letters, 19231945 12 The sage, 19451965 19 Early life, 18881914 At East Coker in the English county of Somerset, St. Michael's parish church, situated on gently rising ground, looks out over a ...
... AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS IN THE WORKS OF ARNOLD SCHOEN BERG edited by Charlotte M. Cross and Russe... more ... AND RELIGIOUS IDEAS IN THE WORKS OF ARNOLD SCHOEN BERG edited by Charlotte M. Cross and Russell Berman VIRGINIA WOOLF IN ... 6 Eliot's Impossible Music 111 Brad Bucknell 1 Eliot's Ars Musica Poetica: Sources in French Symbolism 129 John Adames PART III ...
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This study examines 'tone' and 'voice' in TS Eliot's early poetry and pr... more This study examines 'tone' and 'voice' in TS Eliot's early poetry and prose from sociological and historical perspectives. A procedural framework is proposed drawn from recent work in the sociology of knowledge, social anthropology, and the sociology of language which helps to ...
The winter in the Balkans is cold and grey. In these last days of September 1995 there are only t... more The winter in the Balkans is cold and grey. In these last days of September 1995 there are only the faintest anticipations of the chill to come. Slađana and I are boarding the rickety old bus that will take us away from the Balkan winter. We are beginning our long journey to far off, unimaginable Vancouver in Canada. What awaits us there we do not know. We only know that it can't be worse than what we're leaving behind. We hope the distant Pacific coast, on an unfamiliar continent, will give us a new beginning. International economic and commercial sanctions against Yugoslavia ended flights from Belgrade Airport some time ago, so we are travelling on this old bus to Budapest in order to catch a gleaming Malev jet at Ferhedji Airport for Zurich and the flight west. Slađana and I were married in Belgrade just before our departure. I was living and working in the capital after leaving Mostar in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992. She remained in our home town with her family. She was my great love before the civil war started, but the war separated us for almost three years. Despite the whirlwind of war, she was able with great difficulty to come to Belgrade and we realized our old plan to marry. The two of us had very different war experiences. In this we were not unique. Everybody's experience of war is particular and personal and this has been the case for the whole population of the formerYugoslavia. We have all been changed by the events that for outsiders were often no more than short segments on the nightly news, or detached discussions among so-called 'experts'. For us, these events were the living, and often deadly, reality. Perhaps you will say I am exaggerating if I tell you that, as a result, we are no longer who we were. It is no exaggeration. All of us have been changed by war. Slađana and I even more because we have gone away. Perhaps in some societies the matter of personal identity is not bound so fiercely to the land. But it is so in the Balkans. Family, community, the very landscape and history of our particular place are powerful forces which shape our individual identities and we, as individuals, cannot be so easily disentangled from our instinctive sense of being there. It is how the peoples of the Balkans have resisted the oppression of foreign empires for centuries. For someone born and raised in the Balkans, the question of personal identity is not an intellectual abstraction, but a concrete synthesis of temperament, culture, geography, and education. Four years after our flight from the wreckage, I find myself, now and then, surprised still by what seems at times a new person, an orphan self. I am surprised by the stranger in my body, or the face which looks out from the mirror every morning. The rattling bus is full of refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina. We have all experienced the difficult years. Our world is destroyed. So, going to Canada is like a new birth. But, each birth is difficult and uncertain. Many of us are young. But I think we look older than our years. We have survived, and survival, in the situation of our homeland, comes at a high price. As we roar down the highway, darkness descends on the rich grain fields of Vojvodina in northern Serbia and Yugoslavia. Most passengers have fallen asleep, while others are wakeful and silent. Are they thinking about their lives and the years that have been destroyed by madness and war? Or are they simply trying to forget? The sound of the bus engine disturbs the silence. The lights of Belgrade have finally disappeared in the night. Belgrade, my Belgrade. A fragment of my heart stays there, another in Mostar, my place of birth, and a third I bring with me to a new land. I moved to Belgrade from Mostar because of the civil war in Bosnia. The war ended in 1995 with partition and a foreign presence, but peace is still uncertain, the truce uneasy, and in many small ways, the war continues to take new victims. As I lean back in my seat, the memories of the last five years crowd back as words and images and, of course, as conflicting emotions. **** Our lives and experiences become our memories. Memory is our only contact with our past. It gives us, in the present, a sense of continuity. For many people, memory is a refuge from the present and the past is often idealized, so that their wish for a different reality becomes nostalgia for an idealized past.
Papers by John Xiros Cooper
This lecture began about two years ago for two reasons. I was living in the village of Nailsworth... more This lecture began about two years ago for two reasons. I was living in the village of Nailsworth in Gloucestershire. It's a small place four miles south of Stroud in the southern Cotswolds. During the winter, spring and summer of 2016, the campaign for the referendum on whether Britain would leave or remain in the European Union concentrated the attention of the village. The campaign was by turns loud, sometimes a little nasty, but most of the time civil. It was difficult to predict how the local people would vote. It seemed evenly divided between remainers and leavers (in the end they narrowly voted to remain). As a man recently liberated from the external time constraints of gainful employment, I developed a number of small rituals to my day to at least give it a bit of a shape. One of them was to stroll down the village high street and go to the Britannia pub (yes, that is its name) for lunch. On one of those darling days of May of which the Cotswolds are famousabout a month before the vote -I entered the Britannia, ordered a sandwich and a glass of white wine and went out to the pretty
Originally published in Ampersand 6 (2001).
With the publication of Nostromo in 1904, Conrad reached a new plateau in the evolution of his ar... more With the publication of Nostromo in 1904, Conrad reached a new plateau in the evolution of his art. The writer of carefully crafted narratives of life on the sea had made himself over by 1904 into a novelist of the very highest order. Lord Jim had already anticipated Nostromo four years earlier in the means by which conduct and intention, as invariably ambiguous aspects of human ethics, are explored and developed. There Conrad had inquired tentatively into that difficult area of existence where the unintended consequences of decision lead away from simple resolve towards the dusks of doubt, error, and shame.
T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is undoubtedly a great poem, a major achievement for one of the twen... more T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land is undoubtedly a great poem, a major achievement for one of the twentieth centuries most important literary figures. It is a beautiful and mysterious poem that, after 92 years, still has the power to beguile and astonish the reader. Fiona Shaw's recital
The bourgeois societies of the North Atlantic world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuri... more The bourgeois societies of the North Atlantic world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were organized in a form that C. B. Macpherson called 'possessive market society' (53-56). Socioeconomic cohesion within such a society is formally constituted by the relations of exchange between individuals buying and selling commodities and labour within a juridical framework based on the idea of contractual obligation. But these relations are not so fully installed that they erase all other possibilities. Informally, such a society also carries over from pre-capitalist 'customary and status society' (49-51) remnants, not yet obliterated, of earlier forms of social cohesion. These may exert quite a powerful hold on individuals even as the new forces unleashed by the marketplace melt down the old ties. These remnants of past social formations include possessions of land as a mark of status and
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Books by John Xiros Cooper
Now available as ebook and paperback
John Xiros Cooper was born in Athens, Greece. He turned to fiction writing after thirty-five years as a university professor of literature in Canada. The Panos Akritas series adds a new voice to the tradition of Mediterranean noir.
Papers by John Xiros Cooper
Now available as ebook and paperback
John Xiros Cooper was born in Athens, Greece. He turned to fiction writing after thirty-five years as a university professor of literature in Canada. The Panos Akritas series adds a new voice to the tradition of Mediterranean noir.
Chapter 4 directs our attention to a third current in modernism.
D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love (1921) attempts to reconcile the clash of the inward and the external, that is, the contrasting currents of early modernism. It engages, like T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land (1922), the notion of mythopoeic consciousness as the mediating epistemology of the modern. The transgressive potential of mythic thought is fully exploited by Lawrence in his treatment of identity and character, of individual and community, of the personal politics of domination and submission. The novel will also be considered as an attempt to reconcile the experimentalism of Joyce and Lewis and the traditional realism inherited from the great Victorians, chiefly the fiction of Thomas Hardy. The matter of the relationship among the arts, especially the relationship between literature and the visual arts, and literature and music will also be considered.