Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Spring, 2020, Vol 26, No 1.
Éva Mathey, Ed.
Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary, 2020
242 pages
ISSN: 1218-7364
Ad American. Journal of American Studies, 2020. Vol. 21.
Łukasz Wordliczek, editor-in-chief
Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
168 pages
ISSN: 1896-9461
The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS), Spring, 2020, Volume 26, No 1. is an intriguing collection of essays framed by Éva Mathey’s meaningful “Editor’s Notes,” where she emphasizes the duty and responsibility of the humanities profession in particular and the translatable social values of arts and humanities in general. The volume seems from the first glance to be a pivotal contribution to the field of English and American Studies that deserves proper attention. The broad spectrum of the contained material presents papers by Hungarian and international contributors from diverse fields of study, including cultural, literary, media, gender studies, critical gerontology, theatre and drama studies, and history (1). Nevertheless, the issue’s strength lies in the content and its interdisciplinary perspective by bracing new critical viewpoints.
Don Gifford, the late Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies, motivated generations of students and scholars both in the USA and abroad. His essay on “The Destructive Potential of the Imagination” is the first essay of the volume and is published posthumously in this issue; his text is followed by three essays on detective fiction, film studies, and history. The second part of the volume is devoted to the topic of “Negotiating Aging and Ageism in English-Speaking Fiction and Theatre,” guest-edited by Mária Kurdi. The five essays of this section focus on age studies from various perspectives. Kurdi’s initiative covers an uncharted research field in Hungarian English and American Studies since Age Studies is a relatively new field of academic research with increasing importance today in many fields. As Jane Fonda argues, “the process of aging is, to a large degree, negotiable” (Fonda, Jane. “Women Coming of Age” at https://www.janefonda.com/women-coming-of-age) and with our generation inheriting the whole mythology of aging, we need proper discourses on this. The five essays included in the special section on aging challenge and transgress the boundaries of this mythology concerning the perception, representation, and prejudices towards aging and ageism. The volume concludes by a review essay by Erika Mihálycsa and eight book reviews by Donald E. Morse, Vera Benczik, Ildikó Limpár, Janka Kascakova, Éva Pataki, Eszter Ureczky, Krisztina Káló and Dávid Szőke, respectively.
The second essay in the collection is Renáta Zsámba’s “The Female Gentleman and the Myth of Englishness in the Detective Novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham” scrutinizes a selection of British detective fiction such as Strong Poison (1930), Gaudy Night (1935), and Bushman’s Honeymoon (1937), Sweet Danger (1933), The Fashion in Shrouds (1938), and Traitor’s Purse (1941) and introduces the new terminology of the “female gentleman,” the intelligent, independent, modern, and strong female detective character. Next, Zsófia O. Réti’s essay on “Telling the Untellable: Trauma and Sexuality in Big Little Lies” scrutinizes the first season of the HBO mini-series Big Little Lies arguing that the series problematizes the genre-specific features of soap operas by creating a unique, innovative narrative technique with its novel, creative strategies, and representational modes. Thus, it is a kind of “spectacular storytelling,” which differs from conventional soap operas (55). Moreover, Big Little Lies highlights, as O. Réti argues, the unspoken and buried individual traumas that had become subject of inquiry in the TV, media, and popular culture concerning the #MeToo movement. In the fourth essay, “Eugene Havas and an Early Attempt at Personal Diplomacy to Normalize US-Hungarian Relations, 1960-1964,” István Pál focuses on the uncharted work of diplomat Eugene Havas after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and War of Independence and his role in the American-Hungarian bilateral relations by relying on extensive archival research of primary sources.
In her introduction to the special section on “Negotiating Aging and Ageism in English-Speaking Fiction and Theatre,” Mária Kurdi consults with and highlights the most prominent journals, forums, and books written on the topic of Age Studies, a relatively new research field emerging within the contemporary humanities. According to Kurdi, The Journal of Women and Aging and The Journal of Aging Studies begun their activity at the end of the last century and published articles that inquire into various issues by focusing on aging, mainly from sociological and psychological standpoints (81). The selection of five essays in this particular section is a novel contribution to the discourse of aging and ageism in Hungary from the vantage point of literature and theatre studies. The common feature of these essays is the underlying assumption that age is not merely a biological fact but, to a considerable extent, a socially constructed performative concept. As Kurdi emphasizes in her introduction, all the authors of the five essays are paradoxically women—from Hungary, Italy, and India—with the focus of their studies being on texts written by male writers, while the aging protagonists constructed in these works are both men and women. As Kurdi states, there are two essays on contemporary British and postcolonial fiction, respectively, and three essays on modern American and Irish drama, investigating the complex representation of aging and ageism. The first text of this cluster is Angelika Reichmann’s essay “‘No country, this, for old men:’ A View of the Aging Artist through Intertexts in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace” which scrutinizes the age-related concerns of protagonist David Lurie within the framework of an intertextual reading of modernist works by W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. According to Reichman, the representation of aging and the evident approaching of death is “in the parallel presence of Romantic visions and the skeptical solution of placing the moment of grace beyond the limits of one’s lifetime and consciousness” (101). “Life Is a Terminal Illness: The War against Time and Aging in David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks” by Noémi Albert investigates questions of time, memory as an archive, mortality, and immortality, life, and death, and highlights that Mitchell’s novels are preoccupied with the persistent war against aging, death, and oblivion and offers a possible novel interpretation of the process of aging and time (120). Interestingly, in her analysis of the novel, the author highlights the connection of the personal aging story of the protagonist, the writer Holy Sykes, and the destiny of humanity as such by facing self-extinction.
In addition to contemporary British and postcolonial fiction, three essays analyze American and Irish dramas. Réka M. Cristian’s article “Aging and Death in Edward Albee’s The Sandbox and Tennessee Williams’s The Milktrain Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” focuses on the representation of aging women characters, namely, Grandma in Albee’s The Sandbox and Mrs. Goforth in Williams’ Milktrain. Cristian argues that the connection of these two characters to aging and death are substantially different although they both share “the complex representation of transgressive images of aging” (136). According to Cristian, the protagonists of Albee’s and Williams’ plays are reuniting and healing with their pasts in unique ways with the help of a mediator character. For example, they create a kind of “age autobiography” (based on the definition of Margaret Morgenroth Gullette) and build up an “agewise” (Gullette) identity. Therefore, the representation of these characters make indistinct the dividing lines of the old and the young people and the one between men and women as well because death has neither age nor gender. Giovanna Tallone’s “Old Age and Aging: Presence and Absence in the Plays of Brian Friel,” investigates the diversity of forms through which Friel presents the topic of aging and old age via stagecrafting diverse dramatic choices. She says that “the manipulation of mimetic and diegetic space in terms of presence and absence in particular” (139) and analyzes the examples of these in The Enemy Within (1962) to Dancing at Lughnasa (1990), including Aristocrats (1979) also in her primary literature list. The special section is framed and concluded by Ambika Singh’s essay “‘No Country for Old Men:’ A Poignant Portrayal of Aging and Ageism in Arthur Miller’s Mr. Peters’ Connections,” which scrutinizes Miller’s experimental late play from the perspective of critical gerontology to explain the helplessness, irrelevance, and disenchantment often experienced by senior citizens. Singh’s essay also proves how “change” that naturally accompanies the process of aging does not necessarily mean “decay,” in contrast to the stereotypes of estranging ageist practices in personal and public histories (172). A continuation of this project on Age Studies, the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) will launch a collection of essays on the same topic in 2022 entitled Negotiating Age: Aging and Ageism in Contemporary Literature and Theatre edited by Mária Kurdi to be published by the Debrecen University Press.
The next text in the HJEAS volume is Erika Mihálycsa’s review essay “’Petits pas. Nulle part. Obstinément:’ Writing Finitude, Writing On” resonates with the special section on aging. This review focuses on the last volume of Samuel Beckett’s letters written between 1966 and 1989. As Mathey argues, it is the last in Mihálycsa’s extensive analysis project of Beckett’s letters in HJEAS (2009.2, 2014.2, and 2016.2) (8). Her monograph “A wretchedness to defend:” Reading Beckett’s Letters will also be published within the framework of the HJEAS books project forthcoming in 2022. Finally, the review section includes eight thoughtful reviews by Donald E. Morse, Vera Benczik, Ildikó Limpár, Janka Kascakova, Éva Pataki, Eszter Ureczky, Krisztina Kaló, and Dávid Szőke presenting their critical commentaries on a list of recent publications.
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Ad Americam. Journal of American Studies provides a different but equally intriguing perspective on the current tendencies of English and American Studies in Central Europe. Ad Americam is an open-access interdisciplinary journal published once a year at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. The journal publishes articles by researchers on North and Latin American history, politics, law, culture, sociology, and comparative studies (website: https://adamericam.journals.uj.edu.pl/). In addition, its 21st volume offers an intrinsic critical insight into the history and contemporary practice of English and American Studies in Central Europe.
The volume embraces ten insightful essays presenting their surveys and histories about the state of the art in Romania, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Hungary offering commentaries on recent projects, which cover a wide range of topics. Such is the article of Rodica Albu and Cristina Petraş which focuses on the “Romanian Canadiana” on the rise and decline of Canadian Studies in Romania in the past twenty-five years and Diana Benea’s “What’s in a Name?” The Institutionalization of American Studies in Romania. Benea focuses on the emergence (from American literature to American studies) and institutionalization of American Studies as an academic discipline in Romania with the University of Bucharest as a case study and concluding with a survey of contributions that Romanian Americanists have made to international scholarship.
In “Studies of the Americas. Research and Teaching in American, Latin-American, and Inter-American Studies at the University of Szeged,” Réka M. Cristian, Zoltán Dragon and András Lénárt reflect on the joint effort to present the Studies of Americas within the framework of the Inter-American Studies Research (CENTRO) in Szeged, Hungary. The multidisciplinary Inter-American Research Center of the Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged, established in the early fall of 2015 by the cooperation of the Department of American Studies and the Department of Hispanic Studies fosters the study of the entire American continent through joint conferences, publications, group, and individual research, and lecture series on the Americas as an interconnected area of study. The article presents the development and the current status of American, Latin-American, and Inter-American Studies at the University of Szeged with a special focus on the research fields and publications of the faculty members from the Department of American Studies, Hispanic Studies, and the Inter-American Research Center of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Also of Hungarian relevance, the paper on “Canadian Studies: The Hungarian Contribution” by János Kenyeres presents the history of Canadian Studies in Hungary starting of 1979 and later on in the international academia by examining the fields of research and individual achievements of Hungarian scholars and the challenges Canadian Studies has endured.
Katarzyna Dembicz discusses in “Where Power Meets Knowledge. The Case of Latin American Studies in Poland” the terrain of reshaped research activities and academic education in Poland with the focal point on Latin American Studies after the 1980s and 1990s and outlines the current situation of these studies concluding that “the transformation of Polish Latin American Studies requires further observation and analysis, not only as a mere documentation of Latin American Studies in Europe and in the world, but first and foremost in order to analyze the relationship and interactions between science and politics” (68). Similarly, Tomasz Płudowski’s article focuses on the development and current state of American Studies in Poland, from its total absence in communist times to a post-1989 significant expansion despite the fact that the field is mostly affiliated to English programs.
In “Canada as an ’Extra:’ The Story of Canadian Studies in Slovakia” Lucia Grauzľová and Marián Gazdík, set their goal in outlining the history of the study of Canada in Slovakia by identify its ’pioneers’ and its milestones in the field’s institutionalization—similar to the work of Gene Wise—but it seems that, unfortunately, Canadian Studies is still inhabiting a marginal posititon in the Slovak academia.
Apart from the English-language articles, the Pécs-based Domingo Lilón’s article “Los Estudios latinoamericanos en Hungría: historia, objetivos y perspectivas para el futuro” [Latin American Studies in Hungary: History, Objectives, and Perspectives for the Future], written in Spanish, makes a journey through the history of Latin American Studies in Hungary from the sixties up to recent developments and networks of cooperative projects and provides an insight into the future(s) of Latin American Studies centered especially on the Hungarian diaspora in Latin America and hosted by the Hispanic departments of major universities where Latin American studies have their “own space” for development. Valentin Petroussenko also writes about the development of Latin American Studies but this time in Bulgaria—especially after the revolution in Cuba and Bulgaria’s communist ties with this Caribbean country conditioned by the socialist doctrine, which changed after the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, allowing for a proliferation of a wide range of opinions and voices that slowed down recently due to the economic decline of the country but with various attempts at refreshing connections with the entire Hispanic world on academic grounds.
Don Sparling in his work on “Canadian Studies in the Czech Republic and Central Europe – A Personal History” investigates the ’life’ of Canadian Studies in Czechoslovakia (or then the Czech Republic) from 1985 to the present, dealing with the wider context of the development of Canadian Studies in Central Europe under the aegis of the Central European Association for Canadian Studies. The trajectory of these studies in both the Czech Republic and Slovakia witnessed a steady growth until the first decade of the twenty-first century when it slowed down as a result of various changes in the Czech higher education and in the Canadian financing. Although, as Sparling writes, the “current situation may give rise to feelings of pessimism, a more appropriate view might perhaps be that of long-term optimism” (152).
The presented volumes of Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies and Ad Americam are relevant and informative contributions to the current researches in American studies in Hungary and Central Europe. These two volumes are intriguing collections of essays about the current state of the art with an extensive list of references that can be useful for undergraduate and graduate students, teachers, academics, and—why not?—a more general readership interested in the Central European developments of the field of Americana studies in particular and the humanities in general.
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