Accepted Abstracts -- 2022

Mester és tanítvány Babits Mihály és Németh László regényeiben (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Babits Mihály és Németh László barátsága mester-tanítvány viszonyként is értelmezhető, szakításukhoz pedig nagyban hozzájárulhatott e viszony eltérő értelmezése. Az érveléshez segítségül hívok egy-egy regényt a két író tollából, amelyekben a mester-tanítvány kapcsolat áll a középpontban, és amelyekből jól kirajzolódik a két eltérő elvárásrendszer. Németh Alsóvárosi búcsú című regénye Babits Timár Virgil fia című regényére adott válaszként is olvasható. Mindkét történet egy képzeletbeli kisváros szerzetesi iskolájának zárt világában játszódik, és a mester-tanítvány kapcsolat dinamikáját rajzolja meg a szerzetestanár és tehetséges tanítványa között. Babits számára az eszményi tanítvány a mester szellemiségének örököse, folytatója, kiteljesítője. Ahhoz, hogy a tanítvány felnőjön mesteréhez, a mester minden szellemi kincsét a tanítvány rendelkezésére bocsátja. A babitsi tanítvány sokat kap, de cserébe sokkal is tartozik, akár saját egyénisége feláldozásával. Némethnél a mester inkább inspirál, mintsem kijelöli a tanítvány számára a fejlődés útját. Németh számára a tehetség legfőbb ismérve, hogy ambíciója nem a mester utolérése, hanem annak diadalmas felülmúlása, meghaladása. A Németh László-i eszmény a mesternek inkább csak az alkotás örömét kínálja, a tanítványnak a növekedést, az egyéni kiteljesedést. A két modell szemmel láthatóan kibékíthetetlen. Babitsé a mester, Némethé a tanítvány irányában elfogult. Kettőjük mester-tanítvány viszonyában is ezeket az egymást kizáró álláspontokat képviselték, és kölcsönösen elégedetlenek voltak a másik fél hozzáállásával. Szakításuk elkerülhetetlennek bizonyult. Kutatásom kérdésfelvetése pszichológiai jellegű, a válaszokhoz viszont főként irodalomtörténeti jellegű vizsgálódások vezettek. A két tudományterület együttműködése újszerű kérdések újszerű megválaszolását teszi lehetővé.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Ágnes Bálint PhD
Profession: Professor of psychology
Affiliation: University of Pécs (Hungary), Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
MA: Teacher of Hungarian and English (1992)
MA: Psychologyist (1998)
PhD (2005)
Research interest: psychobiography, psychology of learning, cognitive neuroscience, literature
Contact information: balint.agnes@pte.hu

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Pandemics in Hungarian Literature (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Several Hungarian writers had addressed earlier pandemics. In his memoirs Ferenc Rákóczi mentioned the quarantines in Turkey, and István Széchenyi also made references to it. Governments were aware of the transmissibility of serious disease. Kelemen Mikes also wrote in his letters about the “pestis” that swept through the Hungarian settlement in Turkey. He was probably a victim of the plague. In the 19th century Ferenc Kölcsey also addressed the cholera epidemic but decides to ignore it. Ferenc Kazinczy is perhaps the most interesting subject as he wrote about his own experiences. The novel by Gergely Péterfy is a testament of the age but more importantly of the writer’s struggle with the pandemic. The Spanish flu adds another dimension since Dezső Kosztolányi’s widow writes about her husband’s brush with the flu. Several of Kosztolányi’s works deal directly with the epidemic, notably his Kenyér és bor cycle.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Enikő Molnár Basa received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. After teaching for several years at universities in the Washington, DC area, she took a position at the Library of Congress. In 2002-2004 she held the Kluge Staff Fellowship at the Library working on what will eventually be a book examining Hungarian literature from the point of view of its political and social commitment. Dr. Basa is the author of Sándor Petőfi in the Twayne World Author Series (G.K. Hall) and editor of volumes in the series. She was guest editor of Hungarian Literature in the Review of National Literatures series. Author of several articles on Hungarian and comparative literature, she has also been active in Hungarian and literary professional organizations, serving as the Executive Director of the American Hungarian Educators Association. In 1974 she organized a special session on Hungarian literature which a few years later was accepted as a Discussion Group and is now a Forum. Dr. Basa taught at the U. of Debrecen in the Fall semester of 2004 and at the U. of Szeged in the fall of 2009. In 2017 she received the Arany János Medal from the Hungarian Academy of Sciences of which she is an External Member.

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Amrita Sher-Gil's Self-portrait in Poetry (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Amrita Sher-Gil was one of the chief figures and shapers of modernism in India. Her paintings, her articles, her letters, her style – as one can see in the photographs mostly taken by her father, Umra Singh Sher-Gil all contributed to her becoming an iconic figure during her life-time. Her „ferocity of mind and sharpness of tongue” that prompted Salman Rushdie to depict one of his most successful protagonists, Aurora Zogoiby were well-known. Vivan Sundaram’s two volume Amrita Sher-Gil, a Self-Portrait in letters&writing contains all her existing diaries, letters and writings. She was multilingual, her letters were written in Hungarian, French and English. The paper takes up her Hungarian pieces, specially her thirty one line poem, a piece of confessional poetry. This genre has been considered as a marginal genre of life-writing. Amrita Sher-Gil was born in Budapest, in 1913, her mother was Hungarian and she wrote her diary and tales in Hungarian. It is clear from her childhood diaries and notes that she was influences a great deal by Hungarian poetry, specially ballads. Endre Ady’s poetry (1977-1919) was quoted and discussed by her in many letters, she called his collection of poetry „my bible”. The poem to be discussed in the paper is a collage, an intertextual piece where her own lines are fitted in and integrated with Ady’s lines. The poem presents Sher-Gil’s multiple identities against the background of Paris and urban Hungary similarly to the multiple presence of identities and locations in her paintings.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Dr.Margit Köves came to India in 1983 to teach Hungarian in Delhi University. She edited collections of Hungarian prose and poetry in Hindi and translated works by Hungarian authors jointly with Indian poets and translators. She has been working on Indian and Hungarian Cultural Encounters in the work of Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, Ervin Baktay and Amrita Sher-Gil, and the work of the new generation of Hungarian writers, for example László Krasznahorkai, János Háy, Gábor Lanczkor and Roland Orcsik. She is teaching Hungarian in the Department of Slavonic and Finno-Ugrian Studies.

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

Type of Abstract (select):

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.

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Commodification and the Repression of Agency in Zsigmond Móricz's Novel Gold in the Mud (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
With a focus on the aspirations of the protagonist of "Gold in the Mud," Dani Turi, and his wife Erzsi, this paper will demonstrate Móricz’s accomplishment in showing how reasonable agentic projects intended primarily to ensure the happiness and flourishing of the fictional agents who desire and act on their fulfillment are thwarted by social, legal, and economic structures imposed largely from the outside, structures they are powerless to counter in any substantive manner, and will thus argue Móricz’s status as a key contributor to the literary Realism that thematizes figures who find their agency obliterated by circumstances over which they have no control. In Gold in the Mud, Móricz successfully transforms erotic motifs from Naturalism that emphasize sexual transgression as a manifestation of biological determinism and moral decay, and uses them to demonstrate how potentially alterable social and economic structures conditioning the mechanism of commodification in the flawed international capitalist system doom aspiring agricultural entrepreneurs to rely on illicit and socially unacceptable means to engage in the economy, thereby thwarting their success in achieving a stable and secure life for themselves and their families, and undermining the overall progress of Hungary’s agricultural economy. The revealing light he thereby sheds on the rural Hungarian society of his day assures Móricz’s uniquely important status as an author of European Realism.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Virginia L. Lewis earned her Ph.D. in Modern German Literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1989, and she is currently Professor of German at Northern State University, where she has taught since 2005. She has translated several novels by Zsigmond Móricz and is currently authoring a book-length study on Móricz that is under contract with Peter Lang Publishing.

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Captured by Stereotypes – Representations of Refugees in Contemporary Hungarian Literature (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The lecture attempts to interpret the literary representations of refugees in contemporary Hungarian literature. The refugee crisis of recent years is not the central topic of Hungarian literature, but it can be found for example in the texts of Sándor Jászberényi, Zsuzsa Selyem, Ottó Tolnai, Krisztina Tóth, and Dénes Krusovszky. The refugees show up in the works in different ways. In some of them, migrants are background elements; in others, they have a more significant role, but we can see them as strangers, as the manifestation of Other throughout. The reader sees the refugees through the narrator's or the protagonist's eye. The migrants seldom have a voice. Based on the theories of stereotypes and strangeness, the work deals with the issues such as migrant, stranger, border crossing, refugee literature, migrant literature. Furthermore, the lecture compares the analyzed texts with the relevant pieces of world literature.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Anikó Novák, PhD. is an Assistant Professor at the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philosophy (Novi Sad, Serbia). She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Novi Sad. She received her PhD. in literary sciences at the University of Szeged in 2014. Her research interests include modern and contemporary Hungarian literature, museum studies, and migration literature.

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‘Páris felett a furcsán elborult hajnal. . .’: Radnóti and his French Connections (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In abundant biographies, Miklós Radnóti, one of the greatest Hungarian poets of the 20th century, very little concrete scholarship has appeared on the influence on his oeuvre of French authors, or his visits to Paris (1931, 1937, 1939). The Colonial Exposition of 1931 and the waning years of Parisian “negrophilia” even turned his attention toward African cultures, an interest that he maintained throughout his life, as evidenced by his eventual (1934) translation of a series of African folk tales: Karunga a holtak ura. Néger legendák. In 1930, Radnóti had enrolled at Szeged University, majoring in Hungarian and French. While his PhD was on Margit Kaffka, his early influences included French symbolists Baudelaire and Verlaine. His translations from French on the works of La Fontaine and Montherlant were an influence on his literary development. In his 1934 essay, he discusses French “exoticists” including Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars. While works such as his lyrical “Juliusi vers” (1931) date from his first Paris trip, his return trip in 1937 was to a very different Paris: he experienced first-hand public demonstrations in the streets and anxieties stemming from the Spanish Civil War next door. Living in the Hôtel des Trois Collèges across from the Sorbonne during the summers of 1937 and 1939, he recalls this period in his poem “Paris” (1943). A commemorative plaque by the hotel entrance celebrates the memory of Radnóti with a quotation from his “Hispánia, Hispánia”: “Népek kiáltják sorsodat, szabadság! ma délután is érted szállt az ének.” This paper seeks to add nuances to the intense and moving poetic production of a poet’s idyllic world eventually colliding violently with tragic socio-political realities and pain in his verses that reflect the horror and suffering caused by Nazi persecution unleashed in particular against people of Jewish heritage.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mártha Pereszlényi-Pintér is the former Chairperson of the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Cultures and Associate Professor of French at John Carroll University in Cleveland, OH. She earned her Ph.D. in Romance Languages from The Ohio State University, and studied at the Institut de Touraine (Tours) and the Bryn Mawr Program (Avignon) in France. Her research and publication accomplishments include French and also Hungarian Literature and Culture of the pre-modern period (Medieval, Renaissance, 17th century), Film, and Language for Business & the Professions. She has read papers at national and international conferences. While at OSU, she wrote or co-wrote 16 manuals for individualized instruction in both French and Hungarian with group grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Annenberg Foundation. She was born in Austria and emigrated to the USA with her Hungarian parents. She is also a past President of AHEA, and chaired or co-chaired four past AHEA annual Conferences.

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Jewish Mysticism and Difference Feminism in Anna Lesznai’s Early Love Theory (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In this paper I argue that Anna Lesznai’s radical imagining of sex and its use for transcendental purposes heavily relies on Jewish mystical ideas, intertwined with Otto Weininger's theory of gender binarism and Martin Buber's dialogue principle. In her early love theory—part of feminist discourse at the turn of the twentieth century—Lesznai describes szerelem as female love, using religious language and ideas from Jewish mysticism, especially those resembling Hassidic concepts, and ultimately compares sexual union to yihud-unio mystica with God. Working within the patriarchal understanding of the biological definition of gender and of the concept of "female difference," Lesznai’s difference feminism rooted in the belief that certain personality traits and skills are inherently gendered, reverses the hierarchy by placing women in the position of power, thus turning Jewish mysticism and Weininger’s gender philosophy on its head.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mari Réthelyi is an Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA. She received her PhD in Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research interests include modern Hungarian Jewish history and literature, Jewish race theories, Gender Studies, History of Nationalism, and Orientalism.

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Márai Sándor: Sociological Meditations of a Writer (1900-1928) (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The purpose of this paper is to outline a psychosociography of Sándor Márai from his early days, analyzing the sociological problems of the writer under Norbert Elias’ sociogenetic and psychogenetic theory, in order to comprehend the personal and social processes for the formation of the writer. Becoming a writer is a lifelong endeavor influenced by a variety of factors such as personal, emotional, or psychological characteristics formed since childhood, the family context, education, and social class, among others. Furthermore, being a writer is an intensive activity that requires constant effort, discipline, creativity, and a consistent strategy as well, in order to participate in a field dominated by other writers and forms of writing. Therefore, the temporal framework of this paper begins with the early days of Márai's family organization, mainly reviewing his relationships with his father, mother, siblings, and other relatives, crossing the landmark when he was 13 years old, coinciding with his lock up in a boarding school in Budapest, the beginning of the Great War, and his writing initiation. As it is discussed later, he left Hungary (1919) to free his hedonistic side and enter into the journalistic adventure in Germany and France, until he returned to Hungary in the spring of 1928 with the determination of becoming a recognized writer in his homeland. To examine the evolution of his career, we apply Norbert Elias’s methodology that he proposed in Mozart. Portrait of a Genius, together with the theory of fields given by Bourdieu, and the interpretative set of tools provided by the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Julián Romero is a sociologist and historian. He has published the book To the Fight I Have Come. The Electoral Campaign in 1930 in Colombia, as well as different articles on sociology of art and culture. He is currently a lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) and is working on his PhD dissertation dedicated to the literary reception of Sándor Márai abroad, at the Doctoral School of Sociology (ELTE). Email: jdromerot@unal.edu.co

Ferenc Réder is in the last year of the English BA programme at Eötvös Loránd
University (ELTE) in Budapest, and a member of Eötvös József Collegium (Hungarian and Anglo-American Workshop). His field of research is 20th-century American poetry, focusing on the works of Robert Creeley. His publications include literary translations of Simon Armitage’s and Paula Meehan’s works. Email: rederferenc99@gmail.com

Dalma Balogh studies English and Hungarian literature at ELTE in the teacher
training programme. Her research interest is postmodern literature mostly from a gender perspective, and György Petri’s poetry. Currently she writes for the journal Pesti Bölcsész. Email: kiseukaliptusz98@gmail.com

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The Impact of Online Media on the Public Language Used in Transylvania (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Due to the growing importance of online communication and of the online press, and as a consequence of the fact that online media are easily accessible on mobile phones, the importance of the linguistic influence of online media should not be overlooked. The present paper deals with the general characterization of the language used by professionals in online media (journalists, reporters) and it focuses on the impact of these language habits on public language use in Transylvania. The research part of our paper is based on the 2021 Research Project conducted by the group of researchers working at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania and Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj Napoca. The object of this research was the monitoring of online media written in Hungarian language in Romania. Our database is composed of more than 3000 entries of linguistic data. The theoretical background of the paper will be provided mostly by scholarly literature from the field of Sociolinguistics, such as professional language use, the language of mass media and language registers.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Sárosi-Márdirosz Krisztina is an Assistant Professor PhD. at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania (Târgu-Mureş, Romania). She gratuated the Faculty of Letters at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca and the Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca. She received her PhD. in philology at Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca in 2009. She has published studies on linguistics, translation studies and terminology. She is a member of External Public Body of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and at present, she is working on the Hungarian-Romanian cultural dictionary and on an electronic database of legal terminology in collaboration with Szabó T. Attila Linguistic Institute (Cluj-Napoca). She has also taken part to numerous national and international conferences and scientific sessions (New York, Budapest, Eger, Szeged, Wien, Novi Sad, Cluj-Napoca, Miercurea-Ciuc etc).

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Recent Hungarian History Reflected in Katalin Mezey's Poetry (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Poetry is not a whimsical stepchild of the cultural landscape in Hungary; on the contrary, it is regarded as the highest achievement of Hungarian culture. True, Hungary has contributed a lot in the fields of music and the creative arts, and has gained recognition for them, but poetry so far has not proven itself very exportable, at least not to the extent as other aspects of Hungarian culture. It seems to remain a secret treasure of those who speak the language. Unfortunately, the literary arts cannot stand on their own, cannot be exported without being transformed into another tongue. Even prose and theater have fared better in translation (see Ferenc Molnár, Sándor Márai, etc), but poetry somehow resists being dressed up in a foreign tongue. The importance of translating Hungarian poetry lies in the fact that poetry is considered important in Hungary, and its practitioners, the poets, are expected to deliver an important message, acting in the role of spokespeople for the nation.
For demonstration, a few poems are presented from Katalin Mezey’s newly translated selection of poems “Song Offerings”. She has witnessed a large segment of turbulent Hungarian history and very creatively commented on them in her poems. Her creative life was divided into two equal parts by an important historic event, the collapse of communism with the Soviet empire. Her poems will deal with the different problems people had to live with before and after the sudden transformation of the political and economic life of the country.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Paul Sohar came as a student refugee in 1957 from Hungary to the US where he got a B.A. in philosophy and a day job in a chemistry lab. He has been writing and publishing ever since in every genre and in the language of his adoptive country; by now he has published seventeen volumes of poetry in his translation and three of his own, the latest being “In Sun’s Shadow” (Ragged Sky Press, Princeton, 2020). Awards and Prizes: Four translation prizes received in Hungary, the latest being the Balassi Translation Prize (2021); for his own book of poetry “The Wayward Orchard” he received the Wordrunner Poetry Prize in 2011.

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

Type of Abstract (select):

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.

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"Once There Was a Central Europe". A chapter from Hungarian Literature As World Literature. (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
The concept of "Central Europe" plays a significant role in late 20th century Hungarian culture. My proposed paper, after briefly examining the cultural historical aspects of the regional thought in the 1980s and the 1990s, discusses the characteristic attempts at molding Central European cultural memory into a narrative form through examples of Hungarian fiction, (Miklós Mészöly, Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, Ádám Bodor, László Krasznahorkai) written between the 1970s and the 2000s, in comparison with contemporary Polish, Slovakian, and Ukrainian fiction.
The paper is a concise version of a chapter in the book called Hungarian Literature as World Literature. The collection of studies edited by Péter Hajdu and Zoltán Z. Varga is going to be published by Bloomsbury as part of the series of "Literatures as World Literature" in 2023/2024. The volume synthesizes contemporary pieces of research on world literature while introducing Hungarian literature)'s "worldliness" to an international readership. According to the logic of the Bloomsbury series, a reader less familiar with a particular national context, can gain new access to a local variation of an already familiar comparative or historical problem. The editors asked me to present the work in progress to the AHEA community, so in the last five minutes of the paper will be about this new comparative approach of Hungarian Literary History.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Dávid Szolláth, Ph. D. (1975) is a senior research fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies, Research Center for the Humanities, Budapest. He is a managing editor of Literatura literary studies review and author of three books, A kommunista aszketizmus esztétikája; (Aesthetics of Communist Ascetism, 2011) Bábelt kövenként (Babel, stone by stone, 2019) and a monography on Miklós Mészöly (2020). He was editor of the literary reviews Kalligram (2006-2008) and Jelenkor (2008-2018). His studies and articles are related to the fields of modern and contemporary Hungarian literature and history of 20th century Hungarian criticism. List of his publications: https://m2.mtmt.hu/api/author/10017009

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Multispecies Events in the Zoopoetics of Géza Szőcs (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Animals are ubiquitous in the poetry of Géza Szőcs. After “carrying” meaning as tenors in the tropes of his early poetry, they reappear in his later poetic output in a wholly novel form, as independent actors resisting the process of metaphorization. The presentation discusses a selection of poems as zoopoetic texts that are, in the definition of Kári Driscoll and Eva Hoffmann, “predicated upon an engagement with animals and animality.” These poems reflect on their own language and textuality by performing the re-embodiment of language through a peculiar partnership between the poetic self and the animal. It will argue that the zoopoetic texts of Szőcs capture the experience of radical otherness in “multispecies events” (Aaron Moe’s term). Such events open new horizons of meaning which would not exist without the shift between human and animal perspectives. The subversion and deconstruction of the human-centered worldview occurs, in the poetry of Szőcs, through encounters with animals, thinking through animals, and becoming animal. These moments of human-animal encounter are also an integral part of the identity politics of Szőcs as a Transylvanian poet.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Gabriella Vöő is an Associate Professor at the Department of English Literatures and Cultures, University of Pécs, Hungary. She specializes in nineteenth-and twentieth-century American literature and culture and the reception of British and American
authors in Hungary. Her publications include essays on US antebellum fiction and poetry,
gender in nineteenth-century cultural politics, a volume of essays on the reception of British and Irish writers in Hungary (2011), and a book on Edgar Allan Poe (2016).

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How Does Covid Shape Our Language (Accepted)

Type of Abstract (select):

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In the context of the pandemic, there is a completely new vocabulary that emerged with great speed: new words and phrases appear and disappear with the changing reality of the virus. As a consequence, we are living witnesses to how the language works, how it reacts to everyday reality. The presentation is based on a project conducted with the participation of researchers from Babes-Bolyai University and Sapientia University which aims to analyse the language use of Hungarian online media in Transylvania. 9 online platforms were analysed in the period of 22-29 March, 2021: Bukaresti Rádió, Erdély Online, Főtér.ro, Kolozsvári Rádió, Krónika Online, Marosvásárhelyi Rádió, Maszol, Székelyhon and Transindex, and the database exceeds 400.000 words.
The presentation is a case-study in order to form an accurate image of the pandemic-related vocabulary, and it focuses on the online articles which appeared on the platform of Bukaresti Rádió. In the period of the research, a total of 454 coronavirus-related lexemes appeared on the online platform, and based on this database one can draw conclusions on the mechanisms of language, namely what are the ways to enrich vocabulary (eg. loan-words, compound words, derivations etc.).


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
I am an assistant professor at the Department of Hungarian and General Linguistics at Babes-Balyoi University, Cluj for almost twenty years. I teach disciplines such as General Lunguistics, Morphology, Syntax, the History of the Language. My main fields of research are the Hungarian language used in Transylvania between the 15th and 19th centuries on the one hand, and on the other, the language use of Hungarian (electronic and online) media in Romania.

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