Toward a Poetics of Accents: Re-mapping the National from Shared Borderland and Transnational Spaces

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In the context of newly flourishing nationalistic and ethnocentric ideologies and mutual exclusive nationalisms, as seen in post-1989 East-Central Europe, focusing on ‘cultural contacts’ is even more important today than during the Cold War period (see Corniș-Pope 2016). The returning idea of national monocultures based on traditional family and Christian values mobilizes the “one nation-one language-one territory” ideology. In contrast with the container thinking of national-states, East-Central Europe as “Mutter aller Geschichtsregionen” (Troebst 2010), as a historical in-between territory, merges traces of different national, ethnic memories. In East-Central Europe “the movement of borders over people” (Brubaker 2015) and the layering of maps as political representations resulted in the displacement and the reframing of static spaces and their inhabitants. The intersections and divergences of the concepts of country border and homeland create the geographical space as a symbolic texture “constructed by images and narratives” (Feischmidt 2005, 24). This statement written by a sociologist indirectly also stresses the role of artistic works in relation to understanding spaces, territories and their histories.
In my paper I will re-conceptualize the Hungarian Transborder Literature (határon túli magyar irodalom) and Hungarian Emigré Literature (emigráns/nyugati magyar irodalom) as multilingual literature. The two historical categories are a result of two distinct forms of mobility in Hungarian culture and literary history. ‘Transborder Hungarian Literature’ came to denote works produced in the Hungarian language in the contemporary territories of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia (the former Czechoslovakia, USSR, and Yugoslavia), a result of the post-WW1 redrawing of borders in the region. Literature produced by authors who left Hungary in 1946-48 during the consolidation of state-socialist rule, and in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution came to be known jointly as ’Hungarian literature of the West’ in literary historical discourse. The inherent linguistic otherness, i.e. the coexistence of these literatures with other, surrounding languages dislocates both the traditional descriptive categories Hungarian literary history operates with, and the canon based on the borders of the nation state.
In my paper I will argue that due to the prominence of increasing global mobility and the consequent foregrounding of multilingual literatures, the above two phenomena could be seen in a different light, reinterpreted not only through their belonging into Hungarian literary history, but also through their specifically non-Hungarian aspects, and interactions with neighbors literatures. Being multilingual allows these authors (e.g. Ádám Bodor, István Domonkos, László Kemenes Géfin) to work in embedded into many cultural and linguistic networks and traditions. Their poetic languages create specific “commuting grammars” (Beáta Thomka, 2018) between different languages, transferring, juxtaposing cultural worlds and social experiences as “sites of intercultural negotiations” (Beáta Thomka, 2018).
More specifically I will focus on Transylvanian born Ádám Bodor’s novels The Sinistra Zone (1992) and Birds of Verhovina (2011), which through the interaction of different cultural memories, languages, accents “display and juxtapose divergent and contested memories and create mnemonic multiperspectivity” (Erll 2011). The novels are set somewhere in a Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish and Moldavian border zone that appears to be an interface between real and imaginary worlds. The Hungarian novels as examples for “born translated memories” (Laanes 2021) create a fictitious, re-integrative, intermediate discursive space where the different cultural, multi-linguistic references are saturated with each other in the most natural way. Through the multilingual hybrid characters and place names the novels provoke the monolingual reader. Due to their hybridity, the names can be pronounced in several ways, they have inherently dispersive pronunciation possibilities, therefore the novels implicitly embody their readers as accented. The narration strengthens its consistent poetic tendency that names cannot be appropriated by a single language, and definitely not from a Hungarian perspective.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mónika Dánél is Assistant Professor at Eötvös Loránd University and was postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo (2018-2021). Her research interests lie in contemporary Eastern European Studies (especially Hungarian and Romanian Literature and Film), theory of intermediality, multilingualism, space and body theory, memory and gender studies connected to post-socialist societies. She led the international project Space-ing Otherness. Cultural Images of Space, Contact Zones in Contemporary Hungarian and Romanian Film and Literature. She co-edited two scholarly volumes Event-Trauma-Publicity (2012), Space – Theory – Culture. An Interdisciplinary Handbook of the Space (2019) and published two monographs in Hungarian:Transparent Frames: The Intimacy of Reading (2013) and Language-Carnival: The Poetics of Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde Artworks (2016).