Accents and Locality: Hungarian Literature as a Medium of Multilingual Cultural Memory

Mónika Dánél

doi:10.6093/1826-753X/8280

Mónika Dánél Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest / University of Oslo http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0760-7959

DOI: https://doi.org/10.6093/1826-753X/8280

Keywords: 1989 regime change, East-Central European Literature, Multilingualism, Poetics of accents, transborder Hungarian literature, World literature

Abstract

The contemporary global circulation of literature resulting in the «multiple recontextualizations of the texts» on the one hand «un- dermines the previously sacrosanct monopoly of methodological nationalism in literary studies» (Tihanov 2017), while on the other hand, in these «transculturation» processes, «the shaping force of local context» (Damrosch 2003) intensifies. Considering the multilingual legacy of East-Central Europe as a permanent mobile and shared coexistence, I will argue that national literary horizons and hierarchies could be replaced by a non-centered, mobile system based on shared multilingual cultural experience. In the case of transborder Hungarian literatures, the local affiliation is created through the interaction of different languages, dialects, and linguistic references. They transform the de- and reterritorialized Hungarian language into an audible archival medium of multilingual cultural spaces, creating local perspectives by juxtaposing (conflicting) historical mnemonic legacies and differences.

Author Biography

Mónika Dánél, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest / University of Oslo

Mónika Dánél (<danel.monika@btk.elte.hu>) is Assistant Professor at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and 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, space and body theory 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 (see: <http://contactzones.elte.hu/>). Between 2015 and 2018, she held the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 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).