Cultural Studies paper by Jablonczay, Tímea
Liberated Women Survivors (?) Effects and After-effects of the Holocaust in Women’s Narratives (Teréz Rudnóy and Boris Palotai)
Type of Abstract (select):Abstract (max. 250 words):
Although scholarly interest in Holocaust representation and remembrance from a gendered perspective emerged, over the last decades a few researches on Holocaust in Hungarian scientific studies began to analyze the significance of gender differences regarding Holocaust experiences and narratives. Many women Holocaust survivor attempted to record and preserve their suffering in fiction and poetry, using literary and aesthetic strategies to mediate their experiences emphasizing how gender differences shape the perceptions, experiences, and representation of the Holocaust. In my presentation I will focus on two intertwined novels; Teréz Rudnóy’s Szabaduló asszonyok, 1947 (Liberated Women Survivors) and Boris Palotai’s A férfi, 1964 (The Man) can be analyzed foregrounding issues of gender, the representation and trauma of Holocaust concerning social and historical context, which frame the literary texts.
Teréz Rudnóy in her text of Szabaduló asszonyok [Liberated Women Survivors] - published in 1947 [2011], a month before her death – narrates her experiences in creating novel about devastation, hopelessness, tormented memories, in posing questions about law and revenge right after the liberation. The text portrays the strong female bodily experiences; within this representation the fragmented female body could be revealed as a sign of suffering, absence and vulnerability. The complexity of memory in narrating the woman’s experience after the Holocaust can be seen in Boris Palotai’s text (titled, A férfi, The Man), contained fictionalized set of biographical elements referring to Teréz Rudnóy’s tragical story after the liberation. The protagonist of the novel struggles to recover a collapse connection with life, but she cannot survive her suffering, loss of her family and own liberation.
The aim of this presentation is to explore the extratextual and intratextual interconnections between these two texts produced within the representation of the women’s experience in Holocaust concentrating on the dilemma of interpreting representations.
Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Tímea Jablonczay teaches gender, media and cultural studies at the King Sigismundus College, Budapest. She was trained as a literary scholar and her interest in scholarship includes narratology, gender studies, Holocaust and Central-European Literature. Jablonczay has published a co-edited volume Narratívák 6. Narratív beágyazás és reflexivitás (2007) [Narratives 6. Embedded Narratives and Reflexivity] on narratology and her publications include various articles on literary and gender studies including “Nation, Sexuality and Gender in Literary Representations of Ilona Zrínyi”, Hungarian Studies Review (2014) or "Marginality and the Practice of Border-crossing: Hybrid Forms of Identity in Erzsi Senesh’s Works (in Hungarian", TNTef Interdisciplinary E-Journal of Gender Studies (2014).