Literatura

Workshop – Transculturalism

Magdalena Roguska-Németh — 2024-12-18

Being in Motion as Transcultural Poetics

Magdalena Roguska-Németh — 2024-12-18

One of the key topoi of transcultural literature, broadly defined as works that cross the confines of a single culture to explore the interstitial transcultural space, is „being in motion”. Characters in these narratives are often on the move, embodying roles such as tourists, migrants, outcasts, vagabonds, and nomads. However, “travel issues” typically emerge merely as motifs. The present paper attempts to interpret the work Turbulence by David Szalay, an English writer with a multicultural background. The initial theoretical section discusses insights from scholars including Rosi Braidotti, Zygmunt Bauman, and Ariana Dagnino, while the subsequent part offers a textual analysis to argue that the concept of motion transcends thematic representation to become the poetics of the narrative itself. Additionally, the paper’s final segment names other transcultural works that similarly incorporate the poetics of travel, akin to Szalay’s approach.

Transculturality and the Global Turn in Literary Studies

Katarzyna — 2024-12-18

The article compares Wolfgang Welsch’s concept of transculturality and the global (transcultural and transnational) turn in literary studies, both of which seem to propagate similar attitudes towards research that crosses national and cultural boundaries. Transculturality and the global turn propose opening up towards marginalised non-Western cultures, the need to change the way we think about and talk about the global circulation of art and ideas, and a vision of culture as a fluid, hybrid entity, rather than a homogenic paradigm of container culture.

Translingualism in the Hungarian Literary Context

Éva Toldi — 2024-12-18

Transnational movements were followed by transcultural relocations at the end of the 20th, and especially at the beginning of the 21st century. And transcultural phenomena are more and more frequently followed by translingualism. In the case of great national literatures, it is becoming less and less rare that, as a result of the forced or voluntary spatial displacement of social mobility, the authors do not write in the language they first learned, but in the language of their new environment. The process of migration has also affected Hungarian society. Hungarian literature also faced the phenomenon of deterritorialization in recent decades, as writers who moved to other places regularly thematized the circumstances of their integration. Migration, however,did not necessarily have to be followed by translingualization to such an extent and nature that would have necessitated the learning of a foreign language. This paper looks at the diversity of theoretical approaches to translingualization and gives examples of Hungarian literary manifestations of translingualism.

Transcultural Archives

Zoltán Németh — 2024-12-18

Transculturalism as a literary theoretical approach primarily examines cultural and linguistic hybridity, the literary methods of engaging with foreignness and otherness, and the literary depictions of bilingualism and multilingualism. These phenomena are typically interpreted through the lenses of movement and border crossing, viewed within the context of migration and globalization. Additionally, transculturalism offers an alternative viewpoint. Rogers Brubaker differentiates between “the movement of people across borders” and “the movement of borders across people”, with the latter gaining prominence in the realm of autochthonous minority literature, closely associated with the concept of memory. The paper explores the movement of borders across people, focusing on Alfonz Talamon’s Samuel Borkopf:Barátaimnak, egy Trianon előtti kocsmából and Pál Száz’s Fűje sarjad mezőknek. Phytolegendárium. The study will not only scrutinize transcultural situations and poetics but also the idea of the archive. In case of both works, language itself functions as an archive.

Inspiration and the Nation

György Tverdota — 2024-12-18

Shortly before the final interruption of his academic studies in the summer of 1928, Attila József began writing a significant essay in which he sought to summarize his theoretical understanding of his vocation. The manuscript survives in an unorganized and fragmentary state among the papers of his estate. This body of work was published in the 1958 edition of his prose under the title Aesthetic Fragments. The editors attempted to reconstruct the manuscript fragments, which had been mixed together in multiple layers. However, the result was a disjointed and incomprehensible collection of texts. Adding to the confusion, the editors mistakenly dated the theoretical experiment—written between 1928 and 1929—as an attempt to develop Literature and Socialism, written between the autumn of 1930 and 1935. This misinterpretation persisted until the mid-1980s, when a surprising discovery of a substantial new collection of Attila József manuscripts by Iván Horváth enabled researchers to separate the layers of the manuscript and attempt a more authentic interpretation. The newly uncovered material revealed the intended title of the study, along with its subtitle, which offers critical insight. József aimed to formulate The Metaphysics of Art as a kind of aesthetics of creation. The appropriate interpretation had to be reached from a new ideological-historical approach, completely different from the Hegelian-Marxian direction: that is from the philosophy of Benedetto Croce and Ákos Pauler. This paper undertakes an analysis of Attila József’s fragmentary early study in light of these insights, illuminating the theoretical foundations of his poetry, particularly the works from his Medáliák period.

We are Transcultural

Magdolna Balogh — 2024-12-18

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Melinda Szarvas — 2024-12-18

Literary Modenism and Social Modernity

Zoltán Szénási — 2024-12-18

Miscellaneous Insanities

Katalin Ludmán — 2024-12-18