Literatura

Warsawa/Dresden

Gergő Melhardt — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The essay focuses on the representation of architecture and urban space in the first phase of János Térey’s career (until the turn of the millennium). After an introduction on the connections of the oeuvre and depictions of the built environment in the context of literary history, the paper interprets the city images of Térey’s works, distinguishing three paradigms: (1) that can be called visionary, in the texts of the 1990s, where the city is an unsettling, transitory, but, in terms of the unfolding of the personality, inspiring space; (2) in the period around the millennium, where the city appears as a social issue, and the questions of ruins and the destruction of buildings come into the foreground; and (3) from the second half of the 2000s onwards, where the representation of cities focus on the interrelationship between individual and social memory: archaeological exploration of the history of buildings is a means of self-understanding and common way of dealing with the past; the rhetoric around city images is increasingly focusing on heritage conservation. The essay then takes a closer look at the first two paradigms: firstly, the volumes A természetes arrogancia and A valóságos Varsó, then Drezda februárban and Paulus (with Warsaw and Dresden as the two most important cities), interpreting the different patterns of interconnectedness between history and identity, destruction and construction.

The Smell of 18th-Century Paris in Louis Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris

Katalin Bartha-Kovács — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The paper shows the literary representation of the French capital at the end of the 18th century, based on Louis Sébastien Mercier’s main work, the Tableau de Paris (Picture of Paris), published between 1781 and 1788. Mercier’s work reveals the importance of sensorial impressions, the almost naturalistic depiction of sights, sounds and above-all smells in 18th-century Paris. After an analysis of the genre of Tableau de Paris, the paper attempts to emphasize the unjustly marginalised role of the stench in Paris in the last days of the Ancien Régime.

„This City is a Faraway Planet”

Csaba Horváth — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The city has always been a cultural construction and a real place to live. It was able to reflect, to represent and to metaphorise the complexity of social hierarchies, the cultural characteristics of human life by its real spatial relations. The parallel notions of polis, urbs, and civitas can be shown as models of a complex and contradictory form of existence belonging to the representation of a settlement.

The paper examines the representation of the city of Budapest in the context of the Hungarian underground lyrics in the 1980s. The fictionalised images of the city in the texts under discussion move from the particularity of subculture to the universality of culture.

The lyrics of Spions, URH, Kontroll Csoport (Control Group) Európa Kiadó, Balaton, Bizottság (The Commitee) mixed the literary topoi, Foucault’s “heterotopias”, rock and roll pop-cultural clichés and the “effets du réel” sociological reality in order to create a highly complex and enduring vision of Budapest in the particular conditions of the cultural politics of the time.

The Poetics of Transitory Spaces in the Margaret Island Episode of Péter Nádas’ Parallel Stories

Anna Kenderesy — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The paper examines the spatial poetics and the spatial metaphorisation of the novel’s narrative thread that takes place on Margaret Island. In the analysis, I argue that the motif of in-betweenness appears not only in the geographical positioning of the island but also in several further details of the spatial representation, which carries metaphorical meanings in terms of character representation. I scrutinize the motifs of transitory spaces at different stages of Kristóf’s route on the island: firstly, I look at the meanings of the path, then at the ambiguous spatial elements appearing at the urinal, and finally I examine the metaphorical meanings of the bridge.

Between Political and Intellectual Cults

Zsófia Kalavszky — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The present study sketches the possible historical and synchronous contexts of Daniil Kharms’ Anecdotes from the life of Pushkin. The study argues that it is important to read Kharms’ literary anecdotes alongside the nineteenth-century precursors in literature and cultural history of the Pushkin anecdote as a unique phenomenon, for example the literary-historical Pushkin anecdotes and the urban Pushkin anecdotes, as well as the cheap storybooks and anecdote collections of Pushkin published around the turn of the century. At the same time, Kharms’ Anecdotes are organically and deeply embedded in the Soviet cultural, literary, and social setting of the 1930s (i.e. the Pushkin cults of the state, or the scientific and artistic elite), and they are also inseparable from the poet’s poetics, philosophy of art, and world view and thus from the children’s literature Kharms wrote on Pushkin at the same time as this cycle. Examining the various approaches of cult and genre history, poetics, narratology, and the sociology of literature together makes it possible to expand the range of interpretation for Kharms’ writing.

Two Futurist Impressions

Marcell Hocza-Szabó — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The paper examines two early prose texts by Lajos Kassák from the perspective of futurist aesthetics. By introducing new interpretative possibilities inherent in this approach, it attempts to transform the interpretative consensus that has so far emerged in criticism on the poetics of Hungarian activism. In a comparative analysis of the narrative and motivic systems of Ballada and Anarkistatemetés,the text aims to highlight the micro- and macro-level interrelations within the individual structure of these works. While describing the simultaneously allegorical and analogical organizing principles of the textual and tropical structures, the paper also seeks to describe the central concept of Hungarian activism (the collective individual), thus immanently incorporating into the interpretation of the works the characteristics of activism of the Hungarian avant-garde movement in the 1910s. The study shows that the scrutinization of the texts’ futuristic poetic traits can productively contribute to their understanding. The analyses of Kassák’s writings also juxtapose their imaginative structures concerning aesthetics and ideology, which may also help to reconsider the role of Hungarian activist literature that has been underestimated presumably due to the same duality.

Hogyan ne írjunk a holokausztirodalomról?

Magdolna Balogh — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Dante túlvilágképének antik és középkori előzményei

Elvira Pataki, Eszter Szegedi, Monika Pesthy — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Egy lehetséges patchwork – együttolvasási lehetőségek és értelmezések

Kinga Sági Varga — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

„tárgyakat cipelek”

Katalin Bucsics — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000