The compilation below surveys American Studies scholarship published in Hungary in 2020, 2021 and 2022. Lívia Szélpál compiled and organized this material.
a.) General: Literary History
2020
"International Scholarship: Central European Contributions, 2019–2020" was edited by Réka M. Cristian with contributions from Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina (Dubravka Ðurić), The Czech Republic and Slovakia (Jaroslav Kušnír), Croatia and Slovenia (Jelena Šesnić) and Poland (Grażyna Zygadło) (American Literary Scholarship [2020] 1: 381-399). This compilation surveys scholarship published in print and on digital platforms on American literature in Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Croatia, and also with some from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro and Slovenia between 2019 and 2020. Réka M. Cristian prepared the commentary on Hungarian and Romanian publications and compiled and organized the entire material of the chapter on Central Europe.
The AMERICANA e-Journal of American Studies published three isues in the period between 2020 and 2022. The 2020 AMERICANA e-Journal of American Studies (Vol. XVI, Nr. 1) was a special issue focusing on “The Trianon Treaty, Post-War Settlement and the Anglo-Saxon World: 100th Anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon,” guest edited by Zoltán Cora and edited by Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon. The 2021 AMERICANA e-Journal of American Studies (Vol. XVII, Nr. 1) and the 2022 AMERICANA e-Journal of American Studies (Vol. XVIII, Nr. 1) were miscellaneous issues including American literature and culture, edited by Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon.
2021
In his book Mi jön a posztmodernre? Változatok a posztmodern utáni amerikai fikciós prózára (What Comes Over Postmodernism? Variations on Contemporary American Fiction After the Postmodern) (Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2021) László B. Sári offers an overview of recent trends of negotiating the postmodern by reading the late literary output by high postmodernist authors like Pynchon, DeLillo or Roth along with Wallace, Franzen, Chabon, Eggers and Vollmann, each providing a specific reaction to a waning of postmodernism in their ways. The author’s argument provides no easy answer to the titular question claiming that the disappearance of postmodernism in the mainstream is not only the result of how, despite its radical formal inventions, its politics had been perceived as ineffective but these inventions, previously privileged practices for white male novelists in the mainstream, are now used for marking their ethnicity – the equivalence between "technicity" and "ethnicity" for postmodernists previously described by Mark McGurl.
Revisiting the Past: American Culture in Contemporary Context (edited by Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács) collects and connects publications by the staff of the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged in their first volume of the ebook series on Szeged Studies in American Studies (SZESAS) across a wide range of subjects including American popular cuture, visual culture, children’s literature, modernist literature, autobiography, performance studies and Interamerican Studies.
2022
"Örvendj az ünnepeden!": Írások Bollobás Enikő tiszteletére ("Rejoice on Your Celebration!": Essays in Honor of Enikő Bollobás), edited by Réka M. Cristian and Pál Hegyi (Budapest: Eötvös Kiadó, Cser Kiadó, 2022) is the Festschrift honoring the work and legacy of the Hungarian Americanist Enikő Bollobás, showcasing her unique achievements in this field of science. The volume spans roughly four decades, including the most important period in the making and development of American Studies in Hungary. It is a considerable record of this era in the history of Hungarian sciences and also a significant page in the annals of Hungarian scholarship. "Bollobás Enikő amerikanisztika, prozódiai, költészettörténeti és líraelméleti témájú írásairól" pp. 37-51 and "Bollobás Enikő tudományos műveinek visszhangja" pp. 187-192 in Réka M. Cristian and Pál Hegyi, eds. "Örvendj az ünnepeden!": Írások Bollobás Enikő tiszteletére (Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, Cser Kiadó, ELTE Bölcsészettudományi Kar, 2022) are two chapters written by Réka M. Cristian in honor of the prominent Hungarian Americanist Enikő Bollobás, where the author surveys Bollobás’s impressive work in the broader field of American studies, literary history and theory of literature, alongside the national and international reception of her works. Also part of this volume is Anna Kérchy’s essay "Egy korporeagrafikus metafikcionális múzeumregény," ("A Corporeagraphic Metafictional Museum Novel,") pp. 111-129 in Réka M. Cristian and Pál Hegyi, eds., "Örvendj az ünnepeden!": Írások Bollobás Enikő tiszteletére (Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó, Cser Kiadó, 2022, which examines the fictional representation of the embodied experience of museal space in Chloé Aridjis’ novel Asunder showing how the museal gaze becomes a postmodern narratological strategy that invites readers to reflect on the politics of spectatorship and visibility while interconnecting the cracks on the canvases with the ruptures in semiosis and subjectivation.
Critical Explorations of U.S. Culture, Literature and History edited by Réka M. Cristian and Zoltán Dragon is the second volume of the ebook series on Szeged Studies in American Studies (SZESAS), which collects and connects publications by the staff of the Department of American Studies at the University of Szeged across a wide range of subjects including American popular culture, visual culture, children’s literature, modernist literature, autobiography, performance studies and Interamerican Studies.
b.) 19th-Century Literature
2020
In "A rabszolganarratíva mint ön-emancipációs eszköz" ("The Slave Narrative as a Vehicle of Self-emancipation"), pp. 239-250 in Kicsák Lóránt, Körömi Gabriella and Kusper Judit, eds. Emancipáció ― tegnap és ma (Eger: Líceum, 2020), András Tarnóc examines the effectiveness of the emancipation process initiated on the part of the slave and also the slaveholder. In addition to exploring the phenomenon on the macro and micro-social level, his article also probes the respective psychological and volitional dimensions of the emancipation process.
2021
Mária Kurdi’s "A Variety of Responses to and Engagement with J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats in American Literary Works" (Americana: E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary 17.1 [2021]), Mária Kurdi focuses on the appearance of J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats in American literature written in the last hundred years. The argument departs from recent critical ideas about the contact points between Irish and American literary production in the context of modernism. American authors who allude to, borrow, and quote from various texts and themes by the two Irish writers range from Eugene O’Neill to Philip Roth and Susan Howe. The appropriation of material rooted in Irish culture enables American writers and poets to use it in the form of intertexts and paratextual elements to enhance the scope of meanings in their own works. A scrutiny of interfaces, affinities, and resonances between modern Irish and American literary texts advances knowledge about the role they can have in sustaining the powerful transnational expressiveness as a characteristic of these two literatures.
In "Remembering Henry James: Paris, Perspective and Panic in A Small Boy and Others," pp. 78-91 in Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács, eds. Revisiting the Past: American Culture in Contemporary Context (Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks, 2021), Ágnes Zsófia Kovács investigates the issue of homosexual panic in Henry James’s first volume of autobiography. By combining formalist and gender studies concerns it reviews the ways in which the formal issue of Jamesian perspective is linked to the process of gendering and rejecting a homosexual subject position in the author’s A Small Boy and Others. Kovács argues that one central scene (of the hallucinative dream in the Louvre at the end of the narrative) can be interpreted not as one about the artist’s renunciation of the world but as one about a typical nineteenth-century male homosexual panic, similar to that of the one in "The Beast in the Jungle." Another article also written by Kovács entitled "The Business of Marriage: Clashing American and French Roles for Turn-of-the-century Married Women in Edith Wharton," pp. 92-104 in Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács, eds. Revisiting the Past: American Culture in Contemporary Context. (Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks, 2021) investigates Wharton’s ambiguous representation of cultural change in the life of a married woman in The Custom of the Country (1913), Undine Spragg. Kovács analyzes Undine’s changing social positions as a married woman, investigating what Undine actually learns in the course of her marriages by comparing the extent of her adaptation to norms of behavior in Wharton’s chapter on "The New Frenchwoman" in her French Ways and their Meaning (1919). The paper claims that Undine becomes a professional businesswoman, and her position is represented ambiguously in the novel because it is shown both from the perspective of American and French ideas of married womanhood.
András Tarnóc’s essay titled "The Reflection of Solitude in Selected Works of American Literature" (Confluente [2021]: 64-81) retraces the manifestations of solitude in three works of American literary culture: the recollections of Daniel Boone serving as the prototype of the western hero, one of Washington Irving’s best-known short stories, "Rip Van Winkle," and an example of the Indian captivity narrative written by Rachel Plummer. The interdisciplinary inquiry applying the tools of psychology and literary studies explores the impact of solitude on the given protagonists’ psyche, personality, and life in general.
c.) 20th-Century and Contemporary Fiction
2020
Enikő Bollobás’s study in Hungarian, "A kereső hős travesztiája – Harry (Nyúl) Angstrom" (“The Questing Hero’s Travesty—Harry [Rabbit] Angstrom”) (Országút 1, 17 [2020]: 35-37), demonstrates how Updike subverts the questing hero of classic American fiction. For Rabbit, the author argues, does not run in search of some noble and sublime ideal, rather away from routine, mediocrity, and oppressive social conventions, ridding himself on the way of several supposedly masculine character traits. Grounded in intersubjective theory, Enikő Bollobás’s "Behavioral Paradigms in the Short Fiction of Henry James—An Intersubjective Approach" (Eger Journal of American Studies 16, 1 [2020]: 21-33) offers two interactional paradigms of James’s fiction. James’s characters, the author argues, are clearly defined in terms of how they perceive themselves and others, whether they recognize other perspectives than their own, or not; whether they open onto others, or not; whether they are touched by others, or not. In addition, Bollobás provides an overview of the relevant claims of intersubjective theory applied in her interpretation.
Korinna Csetényi’s "Az emberi identitás mibenléte egy fantasztikum uralta világban. Richard Matheson: Legenda vagyok" ("Being Human in a World Governed by the Fantastic: Richard Matheson’s I am Legend"), pp. 103-112 in Bakti Mária and Újvári Edit, eds., Nyelv és Identitás (Szeged: Juhász Gyula Felsőoktatási Kiadó, 2020), analyses a major source of inspiration for contemporary horror fiction, Richard Matheson’s dystopian novel I Am Legend (1954), which offers multiple readings for scholars, ranging from a reflection of what it means to be human to a critique of science. It is a post-apocalyptic narrative, refusing easy labeling since it employs features of both sci-fi and horror. Categorization is thematized in the work itself, as the protagonist’s chief preoccupation is the boundary setting between human and inhuman, normal and abnormal, the healthy and the infected. Shifting power relations, role reversals, a new world emerging out of the ashes of the old one, and the overturning of majority concepts are some of the main concerns of the book. Csetényi concentrates here on the novelty of I Am Legend, and on how it reinvigorates and demythologizes the vampire figure, and how human identity is defined in relation to the figure of the other.
"Prize-winning Poet, Translator. In Honor of Herbert Woodward Martin" (FOCUS: Papers in English Literary and Cultural Studies XII [2020]: 135-140), by Mária Kurdi is a commemorative piece written about the works and accomplishments of Herbert Woodward Martin (1933), a Fulbright American professor between 1990 ans 1991, who taught courses in the English Department of Janus Pannonius University, Pécs, familiarizing students with the literature, mainly poetry, of twentieth-century African American authors. Being a prize-winning poet and performer, Martin also translated Géza Szőcs’s poems, with the latter translating a poetic text by Martin in turn.
In the online article "A kanonizált nyugati művek nem végezhetik el helyettünk a múltfeldolgozás piszkosmunkáját" ("Canonised Western Works Cannot Come Clean with the Past instead of Us") (Áldozatiság és dekolonializáció [Victiomhood and Decolonization Series]). Mérce, September 25, 2020), Eszter Vilmos explores the main differences between American and Hungarian Holocaust memory as represented in contemporary art, concluding that the cultural and historical context is so different in the two countries, that one cannot rely on the other to deal with such a significant historical trauma. For Hungarians, focusing only on American artworks and theories of Holocaust memory might facilitate the intentional forgetting of our own country’s participation in the crimes of the Shoah. "A narratíva ereje: Jonathan Safran Foer: Globális öngyilkosság". ("Power of the Narrative. On Jonathan Safran Foer’s We are The Weather") (1749, December 15) also by Eszter Vilmos observes how contemporary New Yorker author Jonathan Safran Foer deals with the trope of catastrophe in his works, more precisely on the Holocaust in Everything Is Illuminated, 9/11 in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, on the climate crisis in Eating Animals, and his latest non-fiction book, We are the Weather. The latter one is the center of Vilmos’s article.
2021
"Hol kapja el a legény a leányt: a Rye gázlójánál vagy egy rozsmezőben? – Egy kultuszregény újrafordításáról" ("Where does the Lad Catch the Lass, in the Ford of the River Rye or in a Rye Field?—Retranslating a Cult Novel"), pp. 171-182 in Adrienn Gulyás et al., Klasszikus művek újrafordítása (Budapest: Károli Gáspár Református Egyetem – L’Harmattan Kiadó, 2021) is the title of Enikő Bollobás’s comparative study on the two translations of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, published in Hungarian in 1964 and 2018, respectively. The new translation, Bollobás points out, is not only more precise and more colorfully slangish, but also evokes the extremely vivid first translation, which became a Hungarian cult novel on its own right.
In her Monstrous Femininity in Stephen King’s Fiction - PEAS XXVI. (Szeged: JATEPress, 2021), Korinna Csetényi provides an introduction to the pleasurable thrills of horror through mapping the genre’s historical development, its major theoretical trends and social critical potentials. Her close reading analysis of King’s fiction tackles a wide range of topics from the American author’s colloquial poetics to his terrifying monsters, malevolent machines and violent/violated women. Her case studies focus on the representation of the monstrous female body in two iconic novels, discussing the figure of the castrating mother as a terrible muse in Misery and the figure of the Other through the telekinetic teenager protagonist of Carrie.
Osprey Notes, edited and with an introductory note by Ágnes Zsófia Kovács (Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks 2021) extends the map of Edith Wharton’s travel writing by rendering available short texts related to Wharton and travel from the Wharton Collection of the Beinecke Rare Book Collection at Yale University. The book features the text of Edith Wharton’s previously unpublished Osprey notebook about her cruise to the Aegean in 1926, her early essay on seeing "Education through the Eyes," and her poem "Penelope" (by courtesy of the Watkins and Loomis Agency). The archival material documents Wharton’s ongoing early interest in architecture, travel from the perspective of a woman, and writing about travel: at the intersection of these issues lies Wharton’s travel writing. The introductory essay locates Wharton’s 1888 journal and 1926 notebook about the Aegean, The Cruise of the Vanadis and the Osprey Notes, in the context of her theories about architecture in general and her other travel writing in particular. In this "Introduction," pp. 1-40 in Ágnes Zsófia Kovács ed. and intr., Osprey Notes (Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks, 2021) Kovács provides an extended survey of the theme of historical continuity in Edith Wharton’s travel texts and explicates this theme in Wharton’s fragmented travel manuscript about Greece (published subsequently in the same volume for the first time). Kovács claims that in her travel writings, Wharton is primarily interested in historical continuity encoded in visual art, especially in architecture, an interest originates in Wharton’s intimate familiarity with John Ruskin’s theories of observing architecture, elements of which she also criticizes in her Italian travel accounts. Another essay by Kovács "Illustrations and the literary marketplace in Edith Wharton’s Italian Villas, Fighting France, and In Morocco," pp. 193-210 in Magalie Fleurot, Nathalie Jaëck, eds. Puissance du mode Mineur (Bordeaux: Publications de la Maison des sciences de l’homme d’Aquitaine, 2021) surveys the role of illustrations in Edith Wharton’s travel writing she wrote primarily for the market of US periodicals from the turn of the century after World War I. Kovács explores how the use of descriptions and actual images reflect contending expectations of the literary marketplace in Wharton’s three travel texts spanning her career as a travel author: Italian Villas (1904), Fighting France (1915), and In Morocco (1920). In the chapter "Wharton Observing Ruskin’s Venice: Edith Wharton’s Concept of the Italian Baroque in Italian Backgrounds and Italian Villas," pp. 77-106 in Tamás Juhász, ed., Art in Urban Space: Reflections on Urban Culture in Europe and North America (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2021) Kovács traces a double tendency in Wharton’s early Italian travel writings arguing that Wharton not only turns away from an early nineteenth-century impressionistic method of describing picturesque scenes of travel in Italian Villas and their Gardens (1904) but also making a case against John Ruskin’s mid-nineteenth-century accounts of Italian art in her Italian Backgrounds (1905).
Ildikó Limpár’s book entitled The Truths of Monsters: Coming of Age with Fantastic Media. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2021) explores the role of monsters linked to a coming-of-age narrative. Part I discusses monstrous family relations, such as vampire romance variations in The Twilight Saga and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer; the apocalyptic family in zombie narratives, including Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall; and the feminist narrative of daughter-father relationships in Theodora Goss’s The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club series. The monster-ridden psychic landscape of the teenage mind is foregrounded in Part II, which includes a chapter on the Wayward Children Series by Seanan McGuire. Part III links monsters, coming of age, and the frontier experience in Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking trilogy, Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy, and HBO’s Westworld. Ildikó Limpár’s article "Újragondolt poszthumán: A zombi mint fejlődésszimbólum" ("Reconsidering the Posthuman: The Zombie as a Symbol of Evolution"), pp. 234–259 in Limpár Ildikó, ed., Rémesen népszerű: Szörnyek a populáris kultúrában (Budapest: Athenaeum, 2021), examines two zombie novels, one of which is American author Daryl Gregory’s Raising Stony Mayhall demonstrating a paradigm shift in zombie narratives that challenges the traditional notion of the zombie as a symbol of disintegration and using it as a signifier of growth and evolution that is inherently linked to a previous destruction. A vegetal monster and its relation to death and rebirth as well as storytelling is the topic of Limpár’s "A Valóság szörnyetegsége Siobhan Dowd és Patrick Ness Szólít a szörny című regényében" ("The Monstrosity of Reality in Siobhan Dowd and Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls"), pp. 278–302 in Limpár Ildikó, ed., Rémesen népszerű: Szörnyek a populáris kultúrában (Budapest: Athenaeum, 2021). "Disztópia és monstruozitás: Vámpír-motívum Az éhezők viadala trilógiában" ("Dystopia and Monstrosity: The Vampire Motif in The Hunger Games Trilogy") (Prae 2021.3 [2021]: 51-60), also by Ildikó Limpár presents the Capitol as a metaphorical vampire feeding on the blood of the marginalized and examines various appearances that suggest this association especially via the presentation of the arena and the character president Snow.
In "‘We Are Not Aliens in the Universe’: Marilynne Robinson’s Imaginative Re-enchantment of Protestantism" (Religion and the Arts 25, 1-2 [2021]: 147-171) Sára Tóth says that Marilynne Robinson sets out to retrieve a foundational strain of religious experience, one that has been minimized or even repressed in most branches of the Protestant tradition. This is what, following Paul Ricœur, David Tracy calls "the manifestation orientation" in religious expression. Building on Tracy’s distinction between "manifestation and proclamation" within Christianity, Tóth identifies and analyzes a shift of emphasis from the "proclamation orientation" of Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping, with its presentation of human existence as radically homeless and alienated, to "manifestation" in Robinson’s later work. In the Gilead novels, Robinson corrects the one-sided Protestant emphasis on divine transcendence and human sin, affirming a fundamental "at-home-ness" in the universe; her fictional Protestant minister displays a sacramental imagination and a mystical sensibility which perceives the divine presence incarnated in ordinary, everyday reality. Another essay by Tóth is "Vizes sötétség:" Marilynne Robinson: Háztartás ("‘Watery darkness’: Marilynne Robinson: Háztartás") (Alföld 8 [2021]: 117-122), where she discusses three foundational interpretive strains in the extensive literature on Housekeeping: the psychoanalytical, the feminist, and the mythical or spiritual. The first-person narrator of the novel, Ruth Stone, traumatized by the loss of grandfather, father, and mother, rejects the boundaries and comforts of home and joins her eccentric aunt Sylvie in a life of vagrancy. Sylvie is associated with the fluidity and chaos of water: the scene of their nocturnal bonding on the lake is experienced by Ruth as an immersion into "watery darkness." Tóth argues that the spiritual or mythical approach provides the possibility of a synthesis between the feminist subversive self-assertion and the psychoanalytical interpretation of tragically arrested mourning. In this perspective, Ruth’s imaginative and hallucinatory experience is transformed from a pathological oddity into a vision of the permanent grief at the heart of existence and into an act of solidarity with the dispossessed and marginalized.
2022
Enikő Bollobás identifies in "Egy különös történelmi örökség rejtett működése az amerikai Dél prózairodalmában" ("The Hidden Workings of a Curious Historical Legacy in the Literature of the American South") (Magyar Tudomány 183, 3 [2022]: 379-388) the manifestations of coverture in various instances when women are "covered" or not covered by men, the Southern belle and the "spinster," in the writings of Kate Chopin, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor, among others.
Péter Csató focuses on Paul Auster’s novel, Invisible (2009) in "Metaleptic Confessions: The Problematization of Fictional Truth in Paul Auster’s Invisible" (Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 28, 2 [2022]: 267-288), aiming to explore the text’s intricate metafictional dimensions, especially the deployment of metalepsis as the main organizing principle of its narrative structure. Csató argues that the novel employs a subtle metaleptic narrative structure which, moves beyond the classical postmodernist phase of textual experimentation and serves as a means of raising questions of ethical and existential relevance. Metalepsis is construed in the paper as a trope of transgression, whereby its epistemological and ontological functions are regarded as a means to an end, which is the problematization of the interrelation between narrative structure and ethical agency. The main contention of the article is that the novel’s surreptitiously deployed metaleptic structure results in the ontological destabilization of the narrative, which in turn undermines the epistemic function (truth-telling) of the act of confession, so that its ethical purpose (atonement, absolution) remains unfulfilled.
Korinna Csetényi’s essay "Reading the Monstrous Female in Stephen King," pp. 231-248 in Kiss Attila, Matuska Ágnes and Péter Róbert, eds., Fidele Signaculum, Írások Szőnyi György Endre tiszteletére (Szeged: Szegedi Tudományegyetem, Bölcsészet- és Társadalomtudományi Kar Angol-Amerikai Intézet, 2022), concentrates on the genre of horror, inseparable from representations of the body including its vulnerabilities, its suffering, and its ultimate destination as death into the focus. She examines the interrelatedness of femininity and monstrosity in two texts by Stephen King, Carrie (1974) and Misery (1987), where the body, its functions, sensations and fluids receive major emphasis, and where a female character is assigned the role of the monster.
Ágnes Zsófia Kovács’s essay "A Literary Afterlife: The Figure of Henry James in Colm Tóibín’s The Master," pp. 81-93 in Cristian Réka Mónika and Zoltán Dragon, eds., Critical Explorations of U.S. Culture, Literature and History (Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks, 2022) discusses the intertextual connections among Leon Edel’s biography of Henry James and Tóibín’s biofiction The Master to examine their respective representations of James’s homoeroticism. In this reading, The Master explores the enormous moral consequences of James’s disguises in his personal relationships, while Edel’s narrative forgives the treacheries of James the person for the sake of the achievements of James the author. Also by Kovács, "Törekvők és simlisek" ["Strivers and Crooks"] (1794. March 10, 2022) discusses the African American literary legacies of Colson Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle as a novel of New York City and of double-consciousness by focusing on the metaphorical values of the father-son relationship for Ray, the protagonist of the novel, and discusses the role of Harlem space in the fabrication of Ray’s double consciousness. Kovács’ "Edith Wharton on French Manners in the Context of World War I," pp. 69-80 in Cristian Réka Mónika and Zoltán Dragon, eds., Critical Explorations of U.S. Culture, Literature and History (Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks, 2022) explores Wharton’s model of French culture in French Ways and Their Meaning (1919) from the perspective of her work on social patterns of behavior. The paper argues that Wharton’s account of French culture in the book reflects her concern that Wrold War I has ruined exactly those social patterns she considers superior and that it also records her effort for a partial reconstruction of said patterns. Continuing her research on Wharton, Kovács’s next article entitled "Continuity in Museum Space: The Role of the Cesnola Collection in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence," pp. 539-547 in Attila Kiss, Ágnes Matuska and Péter Róbert, eds. Fidele Signaculum: Írások Szőnyi György Endre tiszteletére / Writings in Honour of György Endre Szőnyi (Szeged: IEAS eBooks, 2022) discusses the symbolic role the Cesnola Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art plays in Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence. The Age is a historical novel about social change and unfulfilled love through the tale of the social failure of New York City gentile, Newland Archer, in which the Cesnola serves as a setting twice. The article charts the history of the Cesnola collection from famed acquisition to questionable goods at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and compares the devaluation of the collection to Newland Archer’s outdated preference for the past in the novel. In "The Perception of Time in Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1920) in the Context of Her War-Related Nonfiction" (Partium Arts and Humanities Review 2/1 [2022]: 65-80) Kovács connects Wharton’s famous novel to her ongoing concerns about the Great War and looks into how the perception of time is represented in Wharton’s non-fiction war text Fighting France (1915) and in her novel The Age of Innocence (1920) by comparing their representations of the contrast between the past and the present. Both Fighting France and The Age of Innocence contain spatial descriptions that employ Wharton’s rhetoric of what the article proposes to call "the presence of the past," in which past moments reappear in the present, problematizing what is actually seen as real or unreal by the characters.
Ildikó Limpár’s essay "Értelem és érzelem Patrick Ness Szólít a szörny és Seanan McGuire Mélybe ránt a Lápvilág kisregényeiben" ("Sense and Sensibility in Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls and Seanan McGuire’s Down among the Sticks and Bones") (nCOGNITO: Kognitív Kultúraelméleti Közlemények 2022.02 [2022]: 93-111) provides a cognitive scientific analysis of the monster narratives to explore the importance of negative emotions and feelings in interpreting one’s situation.
András Tarnóc in "’I don’t want to go through that hell again:’ Interpretations of Love in Ernest Hemingway’s Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (1926)" (Confluente [2022]: 78-94) explores the various dimensions of love in the respective novel. The inquiry is based on C. S. Lewis’s taxonomy utilizing classic Greek philosophy, Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Merle-Ponty’s theories of intersubjectivity and Enikő Bollobás’s works on catachresis. In addition to identifying the presence of Eros, Philia, and Agape in the given character dynamics, the essay investigates the relevant personal attitudes and perspectives.
In "‘A fény állandó:’ Marilynne Robinson Gilead-regényeinek szakramentális világa" ("’Light is constant’: The Sacramental World of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead-novels") (Vigilia 87, 5 [2022]: 482-491) Sára Tóth discusses Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping together with three of the Gilead-novels arguing that in the Gilead-saga Robinson sets out to retrieve a sacramental religious orientation, one that has been minimized in most branches of the Protestant tradition. Whereas the dominant imaginative orientation of Protestantism is prophetic, with an emphasis on divine transcendence, the sinfulness of the world and humanity’s fundamental alienation from it, a sacramental imagination conceives of reality as ultimately holy and good and the divine as immanent in it. Robinson’s Housekeeping presents human existence as radically homeless and alienated, while the Gilead novels display a sacramental imagination and a mystical sensibility which perceives the divine presence incarnated in ordinary, everyday reality.
"A vér és a tér öröksége: A holokausztemlékezet kortárs irodalmai az Újvilágban és az Óhazában" ("Legacy of Blood and Legacy of Space: Contemporary Literatures of Holocaust Memory in the New World and in the Old Country") (Helikon Irodalom- és kultúratudományi szemle LXVIII, 3. [2022], 551–567) by Eszter Vilmos highlights the differences and similarities between contemporary novels of Holocaust memory written in North America, and the ones written in Eastern Europe – often labeled as "the Old Country" from the dominant perspective of the United States. The paper analyzes recurring themes, the representation of the Holocaust and its historical context, the relationship towards Jewishness, and the transmission of memory in contemporary American and Hungarian fiction, while focusing not only on the temporal, but also on the geographical distance from the Shoah.
"The Discourse of Wilderness and Wildness in Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy", (Molnár Dániel, Molnár Dóra, Nagy Adrián Szilárd, eds. Tavaszi Szél 2022/Spring Wind 2022 Tanulmánykötet 1. Budapest: DOSZ, 2022, 478-488) by Kitti Somogyi investigates Cormac McCarthy’s historical western, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, re-examines the identity-forming potential of the sublime landscape, rewrites the classical wilderness narrative and deconstructs established political, social and cultural constructs on the borderland territory. The historical context of the nineteenth-century frontier myth and the imperial ideology of manifest destiny in the Wild West entail violent masculine ideals, ethnic conflicts and culture wars on the symbolic borderland territory between the United States and Mexico. Somogyi shows that McCarthy uses the blend of vernacular, philosophical, and literary language in Blood Meridian to conceptualize the varied cultural notions of wilderness and the wildness, or barbarous methods, of people in the nineteenth-century southwestern landscape.
d.) 20th-Century Poetry
2020
In the study entitled "Historical Reconstruction, Rough Book Poetry, and the Dissolution of the Self—Susan Howe and the Tradition," pp. 81-110 in Pál Hegyi, ed., Tradition and Innovation in Literature—From Antiquity to the Present (Budapest: Eötvös Kiadó, 2020), Enikő Bollobás identifies three central innovations in Susan Howe’s poetry: her historical reconstruction informed by the urge to a return to origins; her "rough book poetry" imbued by the return to a cognitive state not governed by habitualized patterns of thinking; and her dissolution of the self, whereby the "lyrical I" is suppressed by the reversal of topic-comment relations and the use of discursive filters, in particular. In a related article written in Hungarian, "Az újító költői hagyományok megújítója: Susan Howe" ("Renewing the Innovative Traditions of Poetry: Susan Howe"), pp. 143-168 in Zoltán Kulcsár-Szabó, ed., Hagyomány és innováció a magyar és világirodalomban (Budapest: Eötvös Kiadó, 2020), Bollobás argues that Susan Howe’s innovations tie the poet to the Pound-Olson tradition. In support of this argument, Bollobás discusses Howe’s incorporation of historical documents in her own "poetry including history," her withdrawal or suspension of the self comparable to objectism as defined by Olson, and her composition in a pre-conquest discursive space, called "conceptual apocatastasis" here, that often defies the rules of language.
2021
Written in Hungarian, Enikő Bollobás’s short monograph Ami szép, az nehéz – A nem alanyi költészetről (χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά—The Beautiful Things Are Difficult. On Non-Lyric Poetry] (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2021) explores American lyric and non-lyric poetries. The lyric mode is presented through the analysis of a poem each by Louise Glück, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, followed by chapters on non-lyric modes such as the poetries of attention (imagism and the American long poem), attempts at getting rid of the lyrical ego (Charles Olson), withdrawals of the self (Susan Howe), concrete poetry, the ideogram and verbivocovisuality (Augusto de Campos), and language poetry (Charles Bernstein). "Louise Glück – a személyesség fegyelmezett költője" ("Louise Glück, the Disciplined Poet of the Personal") (Magyar Tudomány 182, 1 [2021]: 45-53), written by Enikő Bollobás, is a celebration of the Nobel laureate American poet, a late modernist of authentic presence, with self-expressive lyrical poems focusing on painful moments of the present, exploring, with almost callous restraint, the personal connections with the universal, the natural, and the mythological. Adherent of both confessionalist poetics and the poetics of attention, Bollobás explains, Glück is the chronicler of difficult human relationships, who often frames her observations with mythological narratives in pursuit of meaning informing everyday fragments of experience.
e.) Drama
2020
"Aging and Death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore" (Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 2020 26/1: 123-154) by Réka M. Cristian focuses on the tropes of aging and death in two dramas written by canonized American playwrights by investigating the negotiations of the protagonists’ identity through specters of age and the means of encountering death. The dialogic potential of some characters’ empathy, care and unconditional support during the end-game of elders’ life accommodates difference in various contexts by blurring the age and gender boundaries, because death has neither age nor gender, showing that intergenerational exchanges help elder characters’ agewise enterprises into the unknown gain a cathartic sense of freedom. Cristian’s "Transnational Encounters in a Selection of Works by Tennessee Williams" pp. 59-73 in Aleksandra Izgarjan, Dubravka Ðurić and Sabina Halupka-Rešetar, eds. Aspects of Transnationality in American Literature and American English (Novi Sad: University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of English Studies, 2020) analyzes transnational encounters in Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (1944), A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), Suddenly Last Summer (1957), Sweet Bird of Youth (1959), The Night of the Iguana (1961), and The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (1963) on a theoretical background provided by various issues of transnationalism as enounced by Randolph Bourne (1916) and Shelley Fisher Fishkin (2004), along those of Thorstein Veblen’s theory on conspicuous consumption and leisure (1899), and John Ryders’s approaches to cosmopolitanism (2007).
2021
The essay on the "End-Life Crisis in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and The American Dream" (Cultural Perspectives. Journal for Literary and British Cultural Studies in Romania 2021 26/1: 53-72) by Réka M. Cristian centers on the end-life crisis in two plays by Edward Albee, The Sandbox (1960) and The American Dream (1961), investigating the contexts of this crisis through the figure of Grandma and her means of encountering age and death through the specter of age studies and the close reading of the dramas. In these plays, senior citizens challenge mainstream constructions of aging by reconnecting with their pasts in various ways on their deathbeds, building up an idiosyncratic age autobiography in an inventory of events and feelings by assessing a complete(d) life.
f.) Ethnic Studies, Race Studies, Gender Studies
2020
Ágnes Zsófia Kovács’s article "Becoming Visible: On the Role of Pictures in Michelle Obama’s Becoming," pp. 277-289 in Aleksandra Izgarjan, Dubravka Duric, Sabina Halupka-Resetar, eds. Aspects of Transnationality in American Literature and American English (Novi Sad: University of Novi Sad, 2020) discusses the role of photo illustrations in the performance of racial visibility in Michelle Obama’s autobiography. Kovács argues that parallel to the book’s main narrative of finding one’s voice and becoming audible, the illustrations perform the project of changing the female African American narrator’s social visibility for the American gaze from a stereotypical racially biased version to a more personalized one closely connected to issues of education and self-help.
In "Latina Humor in the Works of Sandra Cisneros," pp. 609-616 (Acta Hispanica, Supplementum II: América Latina y el Mundo: Espacios de Encuentro y Cooperación. Actas del XIX Congreso de la FIEALC, 2020), Zsófia Anna Tóth discusses three works written by Sandra Cisneros, namely Woman Hollering Creek, The House on Mango Street and Caramelo from the point of view of women’s humor. According to Tóth, Cisneros uses Latina humor in order to highlight intersectional problems concerning her identity and to reveal important facts and features about Latinx existence. Moreover, humor is also usd to redeem the pain and suffering through laughter instead of utilizing the tragic mode of artistic expression.
2021
"Rabszolga-elbeszélés, műfajság és a posztmodern rabszolga-regény. Charles Johnson Oxherding Tale (1982) és Edward P. Jones The Known World (2003) című neorabszolga-elbeszélésének elemzése" ("Slave Narrative, Genre, and the Postmodern Slave Narrative: Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale" [1982] and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World [2003],” Argumentum, 17 [2021]: 754-773) by Éva Federmayer explores both what the American slave narrative is and what the American slave narrative does, how its taxonomic markers are mapped out by American criticism, and how narratives about slavery—the slave narratives, in particular—morph into neo-slave narratives. Prompted by recent contributions to innovative approaches to the concept and operation of genre, the article discusses two contemporary African American novels, Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale (1982) and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003), and reads them as neo-slave narratives, representing two distinctive post-civil-rights approaches to fictional enactments of slavery, pointing out that despite their substantial differences, the two neo-slave novels are similar in their tendency to manifest the "eruption of genre" by playing out their distinctive textual processes and challenging their own boundaries, highlighting the problem of referentiality as an extremely vulnerable textual and cognitive process.
In her essay "‘They Weren’t Even There Yet and Already the City Was Speaking to Them’ – The Translocal Experience as Fascination with the City in Toni Morrison’s Jazz," pp. 125-138 in Ágnes Györke and Imola Bülgözdi, eds. Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture: Central Europe and the West (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2021), Imola Bülgözdi discusses fascination as the main affect that structures the Southern African American migrant’s relationship with the city. The protagonists’ translocal experience and the construction of new urban subjectivities is more than aptly highlighted in the novel by the affects evoked by various forms of black music that become building blocks of the black metropolis as well.
Ágnes Zsófia Kovács’s article on "Body Marks of the Past in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy and Home" (Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory 7,1 [2021]: 160-176) investigates the memory of female bodies in Toni Morrison’s novels. Relying on Marianne Hirsch’s method of reading how body marks create a "sense memory" of traumatic experience, the paper explores the webs of meaning bodily wounds of memory invoked in Morrison’s late novels and claims that although these novels rely on the representation and processing of sense memories, they represent a truncated version compared to earlier novels, in which wounds figure as metaphoric nodes of interaction, while in the later texts, body marks appear as basic themes. Kovács’s other essay, "Precarity and Healing: On the Role of Grief in Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones (1998)" (Studia Philologica 67, 2 [2022]: 329-346), locates Danticat’s novel in the African diasporic tradition of writing about the traumatic past. The Parsley massacre of black Haitian guest workers by Rafael Trujillo’s government in the Dominican Republic in 1937 is highlighted as one such traumatic event of Haitian diasporic writing.
2022
In the essay "Szabadulás a torz tükörből. A fekete női szubjektum megképzései Audre Lorde egy korai versében" ("Escaping the Glass with Distortions: Constructions of Black Female Subjectivity in an Early Poem by Audre Lorde") pp. 143-153. in Réka M. Cristian and Pál Hegyi, eds. Örvendj az ünnepeden! Írások Bollobás Enikő tiszteletére (Budapest: ELTE Eötvös Kiadó-Cser Kiadó, 2022), Gabriella Vöő examines the ways in which Audre Lorde’s poem "Good Mirrors are not Cheap" problematizes both the social construction of the African American female subject and the master discourse that defined Black subjectivity, Du Bois’s concept of "double consciousness." Vöő argues that the poem performatively deconstructs the order created by hegemonic discourses of power, and reveals that conceptualizations of Black female subjectivity are catachrestic.
"Inter-American Homes in Sandra Cisnero’s Works" pp. 94-107 in Critical Explorations of U.S. Culture, Literature and History, edited by Réka M. Cristian Réka and Zoltán Dragon Zoltán (Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks, 2022) by Réka M. Cristian maps and explains the extensive and intricate issue of inter-American home(s) and maps its various extensions within and outside the literary realm of Sandra Cisneros’s narratives, including the vignettes of The House on Mango Street (1984), the collection of short stories of Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991) and Caramelo, or, Puro Cuento (2002) by discussing several identity frames depicted by the more or less domestic(ized) metaphor of the house―and its inhabitants. Cristian’s argument shows that the concept of home as a double-faceted construct of identity goes well beyond Cisnero’s published texts since her rooms of identity transcend fictional and non-fictional borders exemplified by her personal webpage and by the transgenerational discourse of the museum installation set up in the memory of Elvira Cordero Cisneros, Sandra’s mother, at the Smithsonian National American History Museum, Latino Center.
In her essay on the "Racialized Discourse in the Hungarian Classroom through Toni Morrison’s A Mercy," pp. 15-31 in Lawrence W. Mazzano and Susan Norton, eds. Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom: Teaching and Texts. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) Ágnes Zsófia Kovács explores how Toni Morrison’s A Mercy directs attention to problems of the social construction of race and the textual production of historical knowledge, both highly relevant not only in the US of the past and present but in contemporary Hungary as well. Kovács argues that in the Hungarian classroom specific activities are needed to bridge the gap between Morrison’s recurring representations of psychological issues and her representations of the social construction of racial and gendered identities. In Morrison’s novels it is the construction or racialized and gendered identities that lead to processes of individual memory, and eventually to the construction of historical knowledge, but unless prompted, students tend to limit their focus on psychological issues only.
g.) Literary Theory
2020
In the Hungarian language volume Kölcsönösségek – Irodalomelmélet, szövegolvasás, kultúraközvetítés (Reciprocities—Literary Theory, Reading, Cultural Mediation) (Budapest: Balassi, 2020), Enikő Bollobás explores adaptations of various theories, among them, performative, intersubjective, tropological, rhetorical, and feminist by addressing diverse topics such as paradigms of performativity and catachresis as trope and gesture, as well as authors Henry James, Emily Dickinson, Charles Bernstein, Augusto de Campos, Susan Howe, Thomas Pynchon, J. D. Salinger, John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Sylvia Plath, and Charles Olson.
In "Based on a True Story: Oscillating Tales of the Real Simulacra," pp. 204-217 in Pál Hegyi ed., Tradition and Innovation in Literature: From Antiquity to the Present (Budapest: Eötvös Kiadó, 2020), Pál Hegyi detects a domineering interest in primarly Anglo-American biographical narratives which seem discernable in both cinematography and literature in the prolonged aftermath of postmodernism an ever-growing demand for "true stories." "Faction-creep" encapsulated in the tagline ‘based on a true story’ refers any investigation into the nature of a narrative claiming for truth value to the domain of adaptation theories at first glance; context-transcending truth claim as a narrative drive in reception is the primary concern of theorems such as Lyotard’s master narrative, Derrida’s concept of totalization or Barthes distinction between work and text. Representational conventions created fixed bookends for canonized pieces of literature by categorizing them as works of either fiction or non-fiction. This reassuring dichotomy is what was upset by the poststructuralist claim that historiography is but an archive of narratives whose meanings lie in the way events are represented, and by no means in historical fact. Paradoxical assignations and cross-references detected will highlight the impossibility and indeterminacy of locating the source of authenticity outside the text.
2021
Enikő Bollobás’s collection Reading Through Theory—Studies in Theory-framed Interpretation of the Literary Text (Budapest: Eötvös Kiadó, 2021) brings together critical studies framed by various theoretical perspectives, including performative, intersubjective, postmodern, feminist, tropological and rhetorical. In some essays the author discusses the theoretical frameworks themselves, delineating the various paradigms, while also demonstrating how they can be applied in literary interpretation; other studies explore intersubjectivity in Henry James; Emily Dickinson’s catachreses; metalepsis and rhizome in H.D.‘s prose; the fantastic as performative in Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce; performative genders in Carson McCullers and David Hwang; narrative triangles in the works of Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Michael Cunningham; Charles Bernstein’s imploded sentences; Augusto de Campos’s visual experiments; and Susan Howe’s innovative poetry.
In "From Logocentric to Discursive—On the Paradigms of Performativity," pp. 9-26 in János Kenyeres and Éva Illés, eds., Changing Perspectives—Studies in English at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest: ELTE School of English and American Studies, 2021), Enikő Bollobás traces the history of the concept of the performative from its inception in linguistics to its vigorously adopted poststructuralist reconceptualizations. The author shows that while the Austinian logocentric paradigm conforms to a transitive process with its direct object outside the speech situation, the new poststructuralist paradigm follows a reflexive process, having the subject of the sentence as its direct object, thereby replacing transitivity by reflexivity. Moreover, while the original concept was the product of linguistics and the philosophy of language, the adoptions reached well beyond the original disciplinary lines.
Pál Hegyi’s monograph Az amerikai fenségesről: a puritanizmustól a metamodernig (On the American Sublime: from Puritanism to the Metamodern) (Budapest, Eöötvös Kiadó, 2021) on the American Sublime is the first historical overview of the subject in Hungarian. The premise of this research is that contemporary subcategories of the sublime, such as the ecological, the digital or the neo-romantic, signal a return to the pre- and grand-modern aesthetics that preceded postmodern irony. Interpretations of canonical works of American literature from Puritanism to the present seem to demonstrate that both the diversity of the tradition of aesthetic quality and its contemporary proliferation are the result of dichotomies that give rise to the effect of the infinite. These dualities, although they have characterized the tradition of the sublime from its inception, give rise to novel poetic structures in contemporary literature and film culture, of which the chapters of his book provide numerous examples. In his essay on the "Meme Theory as an Approach to Delineating the Aesthetics of the Weird," pp. 147-175 in János Kenyeres and Éva Illés, eds. Changing Perspectives: Studies in English at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest, ELTE School of English and American Studies [SEAS], 2021), Pál Hegyi examines the genre of the weird tale from a scattered multitude of focal points. The author insists that very reason for such diverse methodology is rooted in the object of the exploration itself, that is, the weird tale. Crossing and breaking down genre boundaries, subverting clichés, and confronting reader expectations are widely associated with the concept. "The Weird," as an adjective promoted to substantival status, is used here for two purposes. The first one is a technical consideration; it is of practical use for the object of this paper to differentiate between a Freudian theory of the uncanny and the weird as a term identifying a genre (i.e. uncanny literature). Secondly, the weird is seen as an appropriate concept to emphasize the radical dislocation innate in a particular type of narratives referred to with several other frequently used labels (e.g. bizarro, fantastique, science fantasy, slipstream).
András Tarnóc’s article "An Order Is Given to Remember, but the Responsibility is Mine, and It Is I Who Must Remember:’ The Role of Memory in Subject Construction," pp. 63-81 in Péter Gaál-Szabó et al eds., Memory, Trauma, and the Construction of the Self, (Debrecen, Nagyvárad: Partium Kiadó, 2021), investigates the subject formation capability of various narratives of confinement including the Indian captivity narrative, the slave narrative and the prisoner of war narrative, making use of a variety of relevant theoretical approaches developed by Pierre Nora, Kathleen Brogan and Robert Doyle.
2022
In "Faith and Interpretation: Religious Belief as an Epistemic and Hermeneutic Concept in Neo-Pragmatist Philosophy and Literary Theory" (Eger Journal of American Studies 17 [2022]: 41-60), Péter Csató explores the interrelatedness of faith, pragmatism, and interpretation. "Faith," primarily meant as religious belief, serves as a model to be used in a broader sense to denote unconditional belief implicit in such epistemologically conceived terms as "premise," "axiom," or "unexamined interpretive assumption." The aim of the essay is to offer an analysis of the epistemological and interpretive functions of faith in a specifically pragmatist context by first giving a brief overview of various philosophical attempts to accommodate faith (mostly meant in a religious sense) within the realm of epistemology, and then focusing on classical pragmatist (William James) and neo-pragmatist (Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish) strategies aimed at dissolving the dichotomy between faith and reason and argue that the apparently emancipatory gesture can only be executed at the expense of depriving faith of its metaphysical properties.
h.) Inter-American Studies
2020
"Kortárs kubai prózairodalom Magyarországon 1959-1989" ["Contemporary Cuban Prose in Hungary 1959-1989"] (Orpheus Noster 12, 4 [2020]: 64-78) by Zsuzsanna Csikós presents a review of the Hungarian reception of contemporary Cuban fiction between 1959 and 1989. It explores the similarity between the cultural policies of the two countries in the given period, and the presence and reception of Cuban anthologies, short stories and novels published in Hungary.
In her "Political Families: Narration, Memory and Healing in Cristina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban" (Acta Hispanica 25 suppl. 2 [2020]: 519-526) Ágnes Zsófia Kovács interprets Cristina García’s novel Dreaming in Cuban against the backdrop of contemporary multicultural identity prose by women. Against expectations of the possibility of healing and belonging in the feminine diasporic text, the novel problematizes the possibility and costs of healing, reconnecting, and reconciliation for victimized women in the novel. Kovács shows how the text represents profound interconnections between political and family history on an individual level, and how the intersections of family, politics, and individual issues limit the scope of change for the protagonist.
2021
Revisiting the Past: American Culture in Contemporary Context (Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks, 2021), edited by Irén Annus and Ágnes Zsófia Kovács collect and connect publications by the staff of the Department of American Studies at the University of Szeged across a wide range of subjects including American popular culture, visual culture, children’s literature, modernist literature, autobiography, performance studies and Inter-American Studies.
"‘Hungría, doble es tu rostro como una medalla’. Visitas, amigos y escritos húngaros de Pablo Neruda” [“‘Hungary, double is your face like a medal’. Hungarian Visits, Friends and writings of Pablo Neruda"] (Ars et Humanitas 15, 2 [2021]: 73-89) by Zsuzsanna Csikós examines the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s ties to Hungary, which included both his six visits between 1949 and 1967, and the friendships with Hungarian writers, translators, and other intellectuals, along with his Hungarian-related writings and poems. The article presents the history of these visits, of these friendships and the different Hungarian editions of Neruda’s books up to 1988, the date of the edition of the last volume of his work published in Hungarian. The article examines the reception of his works in the Hungarian press as well.
2022
Critical Explorations of U.S. Culture, Literature and History, edited by Réka M. Cristian Réka and Zoltán Dragon Zoltán (Szeged: AMERICANA eBooks, 2022) collect and connect publications by the staff of the Department of American Studies at the University of Szeged across a wide range of subjects including American popular culture, visual culture, children’s literature, modernist literature, autobiography, performance studies and Inter-American Studies.
"La presencia de la narrativa cubana contemporánea en la prensa escrita en húngaro durante el comunismo (1959–89)" ["The Presence of Contemporary Cuban Narrative in the Hungarian-language Press during the Communist Era"] (Hispanic Research Journal 22, 4 [2022]: 377-395) by Zsuzsanna Csikós presents a review of the Hungarian reception of contemporary Cuban fiction in different areas of the Hungarian press, published between 1959 and 1989. After giving a brief summary of the establishment and development of Hungarian-Cuban diplomatic and bilateral relations, the article offers a concise description of the communist period’s cultural landscape, especially the press and publishing landscape. In order to highlight the apparently paradoxical fact that, despite the close political and cultural ties between the two countries, the reception of Cuban literature was quite moderate. The article puts special emphasis on the Hungarian editions of Alejo Carpentier’s works. In her other, online article "Tíz éve hunyt el Carlos Fuentes" ["Ten Years after Carlos Fuentes Died"] (1749.hu, [2022]) Csikós briefly explores the life, career and legacy of the Mexican writer, based on five themes: Fuentes and Fuentes, Fuentes and Octavio Paz, Family, The Carlos Fuentes Prize and Carlos Fuentes in Hungary.
i.) American-Hungarian Relations
2022
"József Reményi —A Literary Portraitist," which appeared in the online version of Irodalmi Jelen, August 1, 2022) by Enikő Bollobás presents the life work of József Reményi (1891-1956), a scholar with a twin mission, who worked in two directions and two languages, introducing American literature to Hungarians (in Hungarian) and Hungarian literature to Americans (in English). Bollobás’s study surveys Reményi’s scholarly work, focusing both on his books on major American writers written from a European perspective and his overview of Hungarian literature presented to the American reader.
j.) Canadian Literature
2020
In "Taktilis tekintet Margaret Atwood A szolgálólány meséje című regényében," ("Tactile gaze in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale") pp. 14-26 in Vera Kérchy and Ákos Tóth, eds., "Let Us Compare Mythologies": Írások Kürtösi Katalin születésnapjára (Szeged: Szegedi Tudományegyetem, BTK, Összehasonlító Irodalomtudományi Tanszék) (republished in Tiszatáj 75, 2 [2021]: 68-76) Anna Kérchy’s close-reading of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale demonstrates that the tactile gaze functions as a somatic means of ideological resistance and sisterly solidarity in the dystopic storyworld as well as the foundation of a feminist poetics and politics.
In her essay on "The Human Geometry of Deathscapes and Homes in Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock" (Elope: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 19:1 [2020]: 81-91), Gertrud Szamosi focuses on the different stages of Alice Munro’s journey on the road of her personal and artistic self-quest. Munro is an iconic figure of Canadian literature and has also exerted a central influence on short-story writing. In The View from Castle Rock (2007), she revisits 18th-century Scotland in order to recover the history of her Scottish side of the family. At the time, the Laidlaws lived in the Ettrick Valley, south of Edinburgh, and they were descendants of the famous Scottish writer James Hogg. Munro claims to portray the history of her ancestors by traveling through time and space and putting her fictional self in the center of the narrative.
"Kanadától Kanadáig: Bernice Eisenstein és a másodgenerációs holokausztirodalom". (“From Kanada to Canada. Bernice Eisenstein and Second Generation Holocaust Literature”) (Literatura 46, 1. [2020]: 23–3) by Eszter Vilmos analyzes the major characteristics of second generation Holocaust literature in North America, centering the experimental nature of these works, eg., graphic narratives by Bernice Eisenstein or Art Spiegelman.
2022
In her encyclopedia entry "Gibson, William," pp. 1-6 in Patrick O’Donnell, Stephen J. Burn, and Lesley Larkin, eds., The Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Fiction 1980–2020 (Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell, 2022), Imola Bülgözdi gives an overview of the oeuvre of American-Canadian writer of science and speculative fiction, one of the founding fathers of the subgenre cyberpunk. Gibson’s works show an uncanny presentience of and interest in the all-encompassing effect computer technology would have on every aspect of human existence, while his early postmodern questioning of the existence of one single reality turned to addressing posthumanist concerns in the novels he published in this past decade.
k.) Children and Young Adult Literature
2020
"Humor, horror, hiátus: A groteszk gyerektest mint szövegmotor Kócos Petitől Pacasrácig," ("Humour, Horror, Hiatus: The Grotesque Child Body as a Narrative Engine from Struwwelpeter to Stain Boy") pp. 63-76 in Zoltán Hermann et al. eds., Medialitás és gyerekirodalom (Budapest: L’Harmattan, 2020) by Anna Kérchy examines the significance of the grotesque child body after the corporeal turn and in the light of posthumanist theories of subjectivity through a select corpus of post/modern children’s literary texts including Edward Gorey’s Gashleycrumb Tinies, Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, Tim Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy, and Jon Stone’s The Monster at the End of this Book.
Translating and Transmediating Children’s Literature, edited by Anna Kérchy and Björn Sundmark (New York, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2020) shows how the classics of children’s literature have been transformed across languages, genres, and diverse media forms. The book argues that translation regularly involves transmediation―the telling of a story across media and vice versa―and that transmediation is a specific form of translation. Beyond the classic examples, the book takes readers on a worldwide tour, and examines, among others, the ethical uses of the Star Wars franchise, trans-sensory storytelling in Jessica Anthony’s and Rodrigo Corral’s Chopsticks and intergenerational transmission in Maurice Sendak’s tales.
2021
In "Halottakkal táncolók: Halálvágy és életigenlés a természetfeletti ifjúsági románcokban” (Dances with the Dead: Longing for Death and Longing for Life in Supernatural YA Romances") (MeseCentrum – az IGYIC ifjúsági és gyerekirodalmi folyóirata, 2021. október 25, no pagination) Ildikó Limpár discusses two vampire narratives, the Twilight Saga, Buffy, the Vampire Slayer and Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Gods of Jade and Shadow that feature a God of Death to highlight how a narrative concerning life and death emerges in the underappreciated genre of supernatural romance.
2022
The comic aspect of the vampire character Spike in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is the focus of "A Spike for an Angel: How the Comic Bites into the Dramatic," pp. 202-212 in Simon Bacon, ed., Spoofing the Vampire: Essays on Bloodsucking Comedy, (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2022), in which Limpár examines the dynamism of the power relationship between the two main vampire characters and discusses how issues of masculinity transform the comic character Spike into an equal—or even a superior—to Angel, which from a certain perspective gives a humorous touch to the interpretation of Angel’s character as the dramatic hero.
Ildikó Limpár explores the devastating effect of toxic, unaccepting parenting in her "Wayward Children Series, Sheanan McGuire (2016—Present) – Toxic Parenting," pp. 119-127, in Simon Bacon, ed., Toxic Cultures: A Companion, (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2022), where fantasy otherworlds are seen as mental landscapes shaped by problematic parental attitudes.
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