Hungarian History Through the Looking Glass of Tamás Dobozy (Accepted)

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Abstract (max. 250 words):
Tamas Dobozy (1969) is a Canadian writer of Hungarian descent who has published four collections of short stories to date. Himself a second-generation Hungarian- Canadian, Dobozy highlights the impact of key historical events in the lives of subsequent generations. The stories of Last Notes and Other Stories (2005), Siege 13 (2012) and the most recently published Ghost Geographies (2021) reveal the heavy burden of the past and the lasting effects of transgenerational trauma suffered by the surviving victims and their descendants. This paper focuses on the role of Hungarian diaspora literature in terms of unveiling new meanings about the uncertain boundaries and the mutable nature of identities. In Dobozy’s stories, historical events often provide a meta-experience that connects the first-hand real-life events of past generations with that of the unlived and imaginary realms of their descendants. While Dobozy's stories confront us with the unclear questions of our past, they also hold up a mirror in which we can discover the multifarious nature of our own identities, and by exposing universally familiar griefs and losses, the stories also celebrate the powerful bond between our personal and national attachment to history.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Gertrud Szamosi, Ph.D. Assistant professor at the Institute of English Studies of the University of Pécs in Hungary. She has taught and published in the fields of Canadian, Scottish, and Postcolonial literatures. She was guest editor of the postcolonial issue of the literary and theoretical journal Helikon (1996), edited a volume of contemporary Scottish short stories in Hungarian (1998), and co-edited the volume Contested Identities (2015) on the literature of regions and nations. She has published several articles on Hungarian-Canadian literature.