Embodiment, Violence, and Intertextuality in Anna Szabó T.'s Szabadulógyakorlat (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
The presentation focuses on Szabadulógyakorlat (2020), a short story collection by Hungarian poet, translator, and short story writer Anna Szabó T. Most reviews highlight the inherent musicality of the collection, the genre-bending nature of some of the pieces, or the volume’s thematic preoccupation with affects such as desire and shame, but most elide Szabadulógyakorlat's engagement with female embodiment in the face of brutality. The characters who populate the stories are mostly women of various ages, living in differing settings and family structures, in diverging temporal frames, but, as I demonstrate, the primary concern of the characters is to survive the quotidian violence directed at them, be it physical, sexual, emotional, epistemic, or linguistic. While the stories “Három női történet” and “Visszafogott” reinterpret Ágnes’s character and narrative from János Arany’s “Ágnes asszony” (1853), I argue that stories such as “Csupaszdomb,” “Isten kéje,” and “Holló,” although obliquely and implicitly, offer a revision of László Németh’s novel Iszony (1947) through their evocation of the female body in pain and confined to intimate yet suffocating settings such as the marital bed or the kitchen. I trace the significance of such places relying on cultural geographer Jon Anderson’s formulation of places of various scales, ranging from human skin to the wider socio-cultural environment, and I argue that Szabó T.’s volume can be read as the reinterpretation of both Arany’s 19th-century ballad and Németh’s 20th-century novel insofar as it reconfigures the silence and suffering of its female characters.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Dr. Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka (lenartmuszkazs@arts.unideb.hu) is an instructor at the North American Department of the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. She received her doctorate from the University of Debrecen (2021); the title of her dissertation is Mothers in the Wake of Slavery: The Im/possibility of Motherhood in Post-1980 African American Women’s Prose. Her research interests include the portrayals of maternal bodies and subjectivities in contemporary American literature and visual culture, Black feminism, girlhood studies, Afropessimism, and Canadian literature.