Accepted Abstracts

Between Mind and Body: Decoding Illness in Karinthy's 'Journey Around My Skull'

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
My presentation examines the portrayal of illness in Frigyes Karinthy's "Journey Around My Skull." It delves into the metaphorization of the tumor, exploring how the novel intertwines the experience of illness with existential and philosophical themes. The study also considers the impact of narrative structure and intertextual references, demonstrating how they enhance the overall depiction of illness and its impact on the protagonist's physical and mental state. Through this analysis, the paper argues that Karinthy's work not only narrates an illness but also offers significant insights into the existential impact of physical ailments on personal identity and perception of reality, thereby making a notable contribution to the literature on illness narratives.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mária Bartal,PhD,is assistant professor at the Modern Magyar Irodalomtörténeti Tanszék of ELTE.

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You Cannot Forbid the Flower: Reimagining a Father's Life through Fact and Fiction (Book)

Type of Abstract (select): Book Presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Book Summary:

Seventeen and in love with a girl he'd never even spoken to, a young Hungarian is forced to fight for the Germans, then flee his homeland after Romania allies with the Soviet Union and wins control of northern Transylvania, liberating it from Nazi rule. A refugee in his own country, he soon finds love in the ruins of Budapest. But life under the ever-watchful eyes of "Father" Stalin and the notorious Hungarian secret police is a new kind of terror. When peaceful protests erupt into violence in October 1956, he joins the uprisers battling the mighty Soviets in one of the most important and tragic events of the Cold War.

In this award-winning debut, Elizabeth Lukács Chesla travels back and forth across time to tell the story of her father, a Freedom Fighter who escapes after the Soviet Union's brutal suppression of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. Weaving together stories, poems, historical documents, and memoir, she attempts to make sense of the twelve days that defined her father and his homeland. From the history and folklore of Transylvania where her father was born, to the first shots fired on the peaceful protestors sparking the revolution, to the history of the Molotov cocktail, Chesla explores the causes and consequences of the revolution to keep the memory of her father--and the nearly 3,000 rebels and civilians killed in the revolution--alive.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Elizabeth Lukács Chesla holds an MA in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University and a certificate in Transformative Language Arts Foundations. Her debut work of fiction, You Cannot Forbid the Flower, won the 2023 American Writing Award for Best Novella and was a finalist for Best Fiction Debut and Best Historical Fiction. She serves independent authors, nonprofits, and educational publishers as a professional writer and editor, is an assistant fiction editor for Consequence Forum, and volunteers as a Transformative Language Arts Network committee chair and board member. She writes, edits, and teaches from the suburbs of Philadelphia.

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Orthography Without Borders

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Orthography, the pillar of the uniformity in the written language, plays a special role in Hungarian culture. Its popularity is marked by the fact that competitions are organized throughout the Carpathian Basin at primary, secondary and higher education levels. In this presentation, we will highlight the values of the three-stage Simonyi orthographic competition, which involves primary schools. Besides nurturing talent and building professional relationships, our mission is to foster a love of the Hungarian language and promote the importance of Hungarian language culture. Tens of thousands of 5th-8th graders, i.e. 10-14-year-old students, from Hungary and ethnic Hungarian children from Slovakia, Romania, Serbia, Ukraine have participated in this competition since it was first held 27 years ago. The competition has been online for four years. The digital platform was developed by a research group at the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. The digital framework offers the opportunity to store the results in a database for each competition year. This growing corpus of student responses allows us to analyse the data from a special perspective, i.e. first language pedagogy. Also, we can explore changes in language use through a longitudinal analysis of the results. In our presentation, we focus on the differences between the results of students living in Slovakia, Romania, Serbia and Ukraine, and the results of participants living in Hungary. We examine which types of exercises pose the most problems for the schoolchildren and investigate the effects of a multilingual environment on the students' responses.



Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Tamás Csontos is a college senior lecturer at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary. He has an MA in English language and literature. He obtained his PhD in English linguistics at Eötvös Loránd University in 2018. His fields of interest include English syntax, teaching English as a foreign language, teaching English for specific purposes (ESP), digital technologies/ICT tools, first language acquisition and bilingualism.

Etelka Tóth is a professor on the Faculty of Pedagogy of Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary.

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Steps Leading Nowhere?: The Forming of the Self in the Hungarian-American Imagination

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
My exploration of lost identities, inspired by my great-grandfather's experience during a period of anti-Hungarian sentiment in the American Rust Belt, has led me to investigate how these identities can be reclaimed through narrative, both fictional and historical. This paper, titled “Steps Leading Nowhere?: Forming the Self in the Hungarian-American Imagination" seeks to provide a nuanced understanding of Hungarian cultural ideas surrounding identity formation by delving into the mother-child relationship in Attila Bartis’ Tranquility and Magda Szabó’s Iza’s Ballad, with the father-child relationship in Gábor Schein’s The Book of Mordechai and Lazarus. While not claiming representation of Hungarian literature as a whole, the psychological depth, social critique, and narrative structure of these authors merit attention from an American audience. This study contributes to the scholarly discourse on identity formation through a comparative analysis of these distinct works, offering unique insights into how we define and reclaim lost identities. The goal is to unravel cultural nuances in these narratives, transcending traditional boundaries and fostering an international dialogue on the meaning of the self. Examining diverse narrative structures—from Bartis’ fractional and experimental form to Szabó’s traditional approach and Schein’s linked-novel structure—the study aims to uncover the multifaceted nature of identity formation. Understanding how the “self” takes on meaning culturally enables insights into how a nation’s ideas influence its global context.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
G. W. Currier earned his Ph.D. in fiction rhetorics and literature in 2023 and is currently teaching at the University of Debrecen through a Fulbright English Teaching Award.

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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).

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Intergenerational and Collective Memory’s Role in Constructing Ethnic Identity: A Study of Interview Narratives and Hungarian Folktales

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Intergenerational memory (IgM), expressed in narrative form, is the mental and linguistic
representation of a series of past events drawn from the lives of the rememberer’s ancestors.
Located between personal and collective memories, IgM answers existential questions and
positions the individual in the surrounding culture. Scholarship on intergenerational memory
focuses on the impact of IgM sharing on mental health, its role in identity construction, and the
connection between personal, intergenerational, and collective memories (Fivush, R. 2011;
Fodor, M. 2019; Pohn-Lauggas, M. 2021. Findings reveal that intergenerational family memory
is often fragmented, marked by clues or figurative language only, seeming transient or easy to
miss in any narrative form.
In this talk, I will discuss and compare the features of intergenerational memory narratives from
interview excerpts with third-generation Hungarian Americans and selected Hungarian folktales
in 19 th -century collections to show how the narrative construction of intergenerational memory
is identical or very close. I aim to pinpoint that the Hungarian folktale is a collective memory
form that provides essential memory-sharing structures and meaning-making tools observable
in life-history interview-based narratives. I analyze the interview excerpts and the folktales with
narrative and discourse analysis to identify the narrative features of tellability, memorability,
and context-embeddedness. My analysis highlights how Igm’s appearance in remnant memory
fractions displays similar narrative features across genres, revealing remarkably similar identity
work. The findings provide more information on how narrative structure travels across genres,
especially in non-literary narratives, and demonstrate how acquiring narrative forms inherent in
folktales determines our life story telling modes.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Mónika Fodor is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Pécs. She has published on the conversational and discourse analysis of narratives, identity, ethnicity, oral histories, narrative, and memory in ethnic identity construction and using culture as content in the EFL classroom. Her recent research focuses on the role of intergenerational memory in narrative meaning-making in collective remembering.

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Inventing new Boundaries of East and West in Szaturnuszi mesék 1 (Saturnian Tales 1 2023) by Gábor Lanczkor

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
Hungarian interest in the Orient covers more than two hundred years of intellectual history. This interest in the earlier centuries depended on the immediate tasks of nation building, which affected political and literary formations. The work of János Háy and László Krasznahorkai in the 1990s and early 2000s is interwoven with the Hungarian interest in the Orient and with the renewed postmodern interest in travel literature, essays and imaginary travels. The poetry, prose and essays written by Gábor Lanczkor, Roland Orcsik, Anna Szabó T. and Krisztina Tóth also cover new geo-cultural spaces (India, the Middle East, China, Japan, Alexandria, Moorish Spain) with different sensibilities in history and everyday life.
The paper takes up Gábor Lanczkor’s new novel Saturnian Tales 1 (2023) that combines a number of genres: travelogue, archaeological description, epigraphs, poetry and diary. In many ways it reminds the reader of Imre Kertész’s Galley-Boat Log (Gályanapló) specially in its work on self-analysis, self-interpretation through dreams. Lanczkor’s novel invents new boundaries which reflect his involvement with India: in the narrative of the diaries of his dreams and in his associations, the Káli Basin near Balaton and Darjeeling in the Himalayas, Kiskunhalas and Saraya in Uttar Pradesh in India touch and exist through a magnetic pull. The paper explores the dynamics of reimagining boundaries in the context of coexistence of various genres, intellect and sensuality.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Margit Köves is teaching Hungarian in Delhi University. She has an MA degree in Russian, Turkish and Hungarian, and a Ph.D. in Central Asian Buddhism. Her book “Buddhism Among the Turks in Central Asia” was published in 2009. She is interested in Indian and Hungarian Cultural Encounters in the work of novelist, artists, playwrights and poets. She edited and co-translated collections of Hungarian prose and poetry into Hindi.

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Voice actors on Hungarian dubbing: Attitudes and experiences

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
In Hungarian cinemas, television and streaming channels, most products still get Hungarian dubbing/narration. For many people, it is the only accessible way of understanding these products, furthermore, it could serve as great help in Hungarian language maintenance in minority circumstances and/or learning the language as a heritage or a foreign one. However, many consumers, just like representatives of the profession themselves, witness a decline in quality of dubbing.
Therefore, a comprehensive research has been launched by the author in cooperation with the trade union of Hungarian dubbing that aims to explore the linguistic aspects of the problem, more precisely, the attitudes regarding different linguistic phenomena in Hungarian dubbing. The paper presents the results of the first phase in which voice actors were asked by a self-designed questionnaire. 69 voice actors participated in the study that means a representative 10% of this profession in Hungary.The findings reveal that although they consider themselves responsible for the quality, they face many problems of the texts to be read out, while they are not always allowed to correct them, not even the obvious ones. The paper provides a brief explanation of it by presenting everyday experiences and difficulties of the participants, and outlines the further phases of the research. The final results and the dissemination of them can help develop the quality assurance system of Hungarian dubbing that serves the interest of many millions of consumers in the end.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Andrea Parapatics is associate professor at the Institute of Hungarian and Applied Linguistics at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, Hungary. She is an associate editor of Hungarian Cultural Studies, Hungarian Journal of Applied Linguistics, founding member and editor of Anyanyelv-pedagógia journal, and she founded the Veszprém group of the Hungarian Linguistic Society. Besides dozens of articles, she published a monograph, a monolingual dictionary and two exercise books. Her research area is the study of language attitudes towards regional dialects and slang, and she has started a research on the attitudes towards Hungarian dubbing in cooperation with representatives of the profession.

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Still Hungary: A Poetry Reading

Type of Abstract (select): Paper presentation

Abstract (max. 250 words):
As many first-generation Hungarian-Americans in the United States, I focused on assimilating into the Irish-Catholic school into which I was enrolled. Raised by my grandmother Mamcsi, a recent immigrant, I spoke only Hungarian. I didn’t understand the other children and nuns, and they didn’t understand me.
Over a half century later, I look back at my career devoted to English Literature, only to realize that, despite long periods absent from Hungarian communities, I am still very much my Mamcsi’s child. As elegy to her and exploration of my experience as a child of immigrants, I have completed a collection of poetry tracing Mamcsi’s life, my experience of bridging cultures, and my return to my Hungarian heritage.I propose to read a selection of these poems accompanied by a PowerPoint of images.


Brief Professional Bio (max. 100 words):
Susanna Lippóczy Rich is a bilingual Hungarian-American, a Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing (Hungary), a Collegium Budapest fellow, and Distinguished Professor Emerita of English at Kean University (NJ). With two Emmy Award nominations for poetry, Susanna is founding producer of Wild Nights Productions, LLC. Her repertoire includes the musical Shakespeare’s *itches: The Women v. Will and ashes, ashes: A Poet Responds to the Shoah. Susanna is author of five poetry collections, most recently Beware the House, and SHOUT! Poetry for Suffrage. She is currently writing “Still Hungary,” a book-length elegy in verse for her grandmother Mamcsi. Visit her at www.wildnightsproductions.com.

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