An Invisible Border: The Reduced Identity of Poor People

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
The problem of poverty is one of the most sensitive questions of Hungarian society. The discussion of poverty has been a taboo subject throughout the twentieth century. Yet, there are many novels and studies in Hungarian literature depicturing the life of the poor in the twentieth century.
This is the case with the novels of Sándor Tar also, one of the most important writers in Hungary in the last century. His novels are about people living on the periphery of society: in little poor villages, in suburbs, in mental hospitals, etc. His characters have no chance of living a better life and vegetate on the periphery of civilized human life. Sometimes they try to break out, but all the attempts are fated to fail from the very beginning. These dark stories reveal the real living standards of large segments of Hungarian society during the nineteenth century. Poor people live on the other side of an invisible border. They do not have access to the common goods, such as culture, education, sport, wealth, etc. They construct their identity not on the basis of these goods but on their lack of these assets. People living in need have no possibility to identify themselves as autonomous human beings. The codes and narratives of self-identification are reduced to the experience of poverty and deprivation. Tar’s writings will be analyzed from this perspective of identity.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Sarolta Deczki, who received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Debrecen, 2012, works as a scientific assistant at the Institute for Literary Studies of Hungarian Academy of Sciences. The topic of her dissertation was the problem of crisis in the husserlian phenomenology. Now she researches the history of the Hungarian "Geisteswissenschaftliche Schule", writes a monography of Sándor Tar, and writes regularly on contemporary Hungarian literature. She has published a collection of essays in 2013. (Az érzékiség dicsérete; The Laudation of Sensuality), and her dissertation in 2014 (Meredek sziklagerincen: Husserl és a válság problémája; On the Rocky Ridge: Husserl and the Problem of Crisis)