Language/Literature paper by Szolláth, Dávid
Research Centre for the Humanities; Institute for Literary Studies, Budapest

"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