Keynote Speakers

 

 

Godwin, Richard

 

Richard Godwin is the critically acclaimed author of Apostle Rising, Mr. Glamour, One Lost Summer, Noir City, Meaningful Conversations, Confessions Of A Hit Man, Paranoia And The Destiny Programme, Wrong Crowd, Savage Highway, Double Lives, The Pure And The Hated, Disembodied, Buffalo And Sour Mash and Locked In Cages. His stories have been published in numerous paying magazines and over 34 anthologies, among them an anthology of his stories, Piquant: Tales Of The Mustard Man, and The Mammoth Book Of Best British Crime and The Mammoth Book Of Best British Mystery, alongside Lee Child. He was born in London and lectured in English and American literature at the University of London. He also teaches creative writing at University and workshops. You can find out more about him at his website www.richardgodwin.net , where you can read a full list of his works, and where you can also read his Chin Wags At The Slaughterhouse, his highly popular and unusual interviews with other authors.                                                        

 

MacCurdy, Carol

cmaccurd@calpoly.edu

 

Dr. Carol MacCurdy is Professor Emeritus of California Polytechnic State University, Fulbright Scholar at the University of Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2016), Fulbright Scholar at the University of Pecs, Hungary, 2009. She is managing editor of the journal Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.

 

 

Participants

 

 

Annus Irén

iannus@lit.u-szeged.hu

 

Dr. Annus Irén is Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Szeged. Her research has focused on various aspects of Identity Studies, in particular the socio-cultural construction and visual representation of marginalized groups in the US (predominantly racial/ethnic communities, women and Mormons). She has lectured and published in these areas both in Hungary and abroad.

 

 

András Ferenc

andrasf2011@gmail.com

 

Dr. András Ferenc is Assistant Professor at the University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary. His main research areas are the philosophy of language and communication. His book (English title: The Philosophy of Spatial Communications, Budapest: Gondolat, 2010) examines the problem of meaning-skepticisms. As a managing editor of a regional television channel, he is also involved in producing documentaries on philosophy, scientific research and education.

 

 

Balogh Beatrix

trixiebalogh@yahoo.com

 

Relinquishing her previous business career Dr. Balogh Beatrix began researching the US overseas territories some ten years ago. In her capacity as lecturer she is currently teaching a variety of courses at Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary.

 

 

Balogh Máté Gergely

baloghmategergely@gmail.com

 

Máté Gergely Balogh is an instructor at the North American Department of the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Debrecen. He earned his degree majoring in English at the University of Debrecen, and also graduated majoring in international relations at the Corvinus University in Budapest, and in Central European history at the Central European University. His research area is the international relations of the United States after 1945, with a special focus on Hungarian-American relations.

 

Bartók András

bartoka@uni-nke.hu

 

Bartók András is a graduate student in International Security Studies at the Hungarian National Public Service University’s Faculty of Military Science and Officer Training. His dissertation project “The Effect of the Senkaku Islands Dispute on Asia-Pecific Security: Strategic Cultural Analysis in the Context of China and Japan” examines the ongoing confrontation between the two Asian powers (and the United States as Japan’s key ally) and focuses on the role of cultural background in strategic thinking. His research aims to broaden the application of the concept of strategic culture, examining not only its effects on grand strategy but also in case studies of small-scale confrontations, foreign policy and operational concepts.

 

 

Baranyi Gyula Barnabás

barnabasbaranyi@gmail.com

 

Baranyi Gyula Barnabás is a second-year MA student in the American Studies Master’s program at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, and is a member of the Hatvani István College for Advanced Studies. His main research interest is the relationship between human and technology, but he is also doing research in videogame studies. He won second prize in the visual culture section of the 2013 National Conference of Students’ Scientific Associations in Hungary. He has been a contributor to Szkholion, the journal of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at the University of Debrecen.

 

 

Bartnik, Anna

anna.bartnik@uj.edu.pl

 

Dr. Anna Bartnik earned her Ph. D. from the Institute of Political Science of the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. Since then she has been working as an assistant professor at the Institute of American Studies and Polish Diaspora of the Jagiellonian University. Her research contains studies on American immigration law, Hispanic immigrants in the USA and local government in the United States. She also published a book “Latino immigrants in the United States after World War II. Cubans, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans.”

 

 

Baylan, Ergün

ergbaylan@gmail.com

Dr. Ergün Baylan is Research Assistant at the Faculty of Science and Letters, Department of Western Languages and Litratures at Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey. He earned his Master’s Degree at Ruprecht Karls Universität Heidelberg, Heidelberg Center for American Studies, and his Ph. D. at Free University Berlin, John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies. His research interests include American Transcendentalism, literary theories, cultural theories, cultural studies, literature and philosophy, literature and religion, fiction theories, comparative literature, and popular culture theories.

 

Benarioua, Amira

benarioua.amira@gmail.com

 

Amira Benarioua earned a Master’s degree in Literature, linguistics and Anglophone Civilization in the faculty of Foreign Languages, University of Guelma 2015. Actually I ‘am a PhD student at the American Studies PhD program at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Szeged 2016. My current research focuses on the relationship between race, gender equality, cultural dislocation and oppression in contemporary literature and minority literature.

 

 

Benczik Vera

benczikvera@gmail.com

 

Dr. Benczik Vera is Senior Lecturer at the Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Her research interests include science fiction, popular culture and Canadian literature, with special respect to the fiction of Margaret Atwood. She wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on the motif of the journey in the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, and has since published widely about science fiction, James Bond in popular culture, and the fiction of Margaret Atwood. Her publications include  studies on the spatial politics and the iconographic convergence of historical and fictional trauma in post-9/11 disaster cinema, the male body in Skyfall, and the use of the landscape as projection of female identity in Atwood’s early prose. Her current projects focus on the spatial rhetorics of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic science fiction narratives, and the use of modes of the fantastic in Margaret Atwood’s prose.

 

 

Cristian Réka Mónika

rekacristian@gmail.com

 

Dr. Cristian Réka Mónika is Associate Professor, Chair of the American Studies Department and Director of the Inter-American Center, Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged. She is the author of Cultural Vistas and Sites of Identity. Essays on Literature, Film, and American Studies (2012), co-author of Encounters of the Filmic Kind: Guidebook to Film Theories (2008) and founding editor of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary and its AMERICANA eBooks division.

 

 

Csató Péter

csatop@gmail.com

 

Dr. Csató Péter is Assistant Professor at the North American Department of the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Debrecen. In 2015, he taught at the University of Texas at San Antonio as Fulbright Visiting Lecturer. His academic interests include contemporary American prose fiction and cinema in the context of contemporary moral philosophy, American neo-pragmatism, theories of interpretation, and the philosophy of science. His publications include scholarly monograph Antipodean Dialogues: Richard Rorty and the Discursive Authority of Conversational Philosophy (Debrecen University Press, 2013), and journal articles related to American prose fiction, questions of interpretation and interpretability in the context of literary theory and criticism, the hermeneutic aspects of cultural practices, neo-pragmatist philosophy, and filmic representations of philosophical topics.

 

 

Czeglédi Sándor

czegledi@almos.uni-pannon.hu

 

Dr. Czeglédi Sándor is Associate Professor at the English and American Studies Institute (EASI) of the University of Pannonia (Veszprém, Hungary), where he teaches subjects focusing on American Studies from the perspective of applied linguistics/language policy. His publications are chiefly related to the fields of U.S. history, civilization, nation-building, and language status politics, discussing and analyzing especially the areas of bilingual education, language rights, and the officialization issue.

 

 

Đergović-Joksimović, Zorica

djzorica@eunet.rs

 

Dr. Zorica Đergović-Joksimović is Associate Professor at the Department of English Studies, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad, Serbia, where, among other subjects, she teaches American History and Culture, Modern American Drama, Utopia, and Science Fiction. She also participates in the project Serbian Literature in the European Cultural Space at the Institute for Literature and Arts, Belgrade, which is funded by the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Serbia. Zorica Đergović-Joksimović is the author of two books: Utopija: alternativna istorija [Utopia:An Alternative History] (Belgrade, 2009) and Ijan Makjuan: Polifonija zla [Ian McEwan: The Polyphony of Evil] (Belgrade, 2009). She has published numerous articles. She has recently edited Embracing Utopian Horizons, a collection of her MA students’ utopian stories and co-edited with Sabina Halupka Rešetar English Studies Today: Prospects and Perspectives (selected papers from the Second international conference ELALT).

 

 

Dragon Zoltán

dragon@ieas-szeged.hu

 

Dr. Dragon Zoltán is senior assistant professor at the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary. His fields of research are digital culture and theories, film theory, film adaptation, and psychoanalytic theory. He is founding editor of AMERICANA – E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary and the publishing label AMERICANA eBooks, and head of the Digital Culture & Theories Research Group at his home university. He is currently working on aspects of the digital archive and augmented subjectivity.

 

 

Espák T. Gabriella

gespak@unideb.hu

Dr. Espák T. Gabriella is Assistant Professor in the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary. Her Ph. D. (2003) was awarded for a thesis on federal multicultural policies and the politics of Indigeneity in Canada and Australia between 1988-1992. She has been teaching, researching and publishing on topics in Australian, Canadian and US social history since 1998, with special interest in issues of multiculturalism, minority rights and Indigeneity. She organised the 2005 conference of the European Association for Studies of Australia, and edited ReVisions of Australia: Histories, Images, Identities, a special double issue of the Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (12.1-2, 2006).

 

Federmayer Éva

federmayer.eva@gmail.com

 

Dr. Federmayer Éva is Associate Professor at the Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, and at the Department of American Studies, University of Szeged, Hungary (part-time). She was the recipient of research fellowships (IREX, ACLS, USIS, Free University /Berlin/ Fellowship, and Fulbright) at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Indiana University, Bloomington, Kennedy Institute, Berlin, the University of Iowa, Iowa City, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She participated in various postgraduate programs and seminars in Europe and the USA, such as the Salzburg Seminar, the Stuttgart Seminar, the Pulawy Seminar and The School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College. Though most of her current research focuses on African American Studies, her professional interests range from literary criticism to cultural studies, critical race studies, gender studies, multiculturalism, and American women writers. Eva Federmayer is the author of Psychoanalysis and American Literary Criticism (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 1983) and editor and co-author (with Irén Annus and Judith Sollosy) of the electronic textbook, Netting America: Introduction to the Culture and Literature of the United States. She is currently working on a book about discourses of race in African American culture.

 

 

Fodor Mónika

fodor.monika@pte.hu

 

Dr. Fodor Mónika is Assistant Professor at the the University of Pécs. Her research interest includes narratives, identity, ethnicity, oral histories, ethnographic fieldwork and the applications of these fields in teaching English as a foreign language. Her most recent publications include a volume co-edited with Eleftheria Arapoglou and Jopi Nyman, Mobile Narratives: Travel, Migration and Transculturation, published by Routledge in 2014. Currently she is working on a book exploring uncertainty and the complexity perspective in the context of assimilation and narrative identity construction.

 

 

Forintos Éva

forintos@almos.uni-pannon.hu

 

Dr. Forintos Éva is Associate Professor at the English and American Studies Institute of the University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary, lecturing on linguistics and applied linguistics. Her research interests include bilingualism and contactlinguistics. Her publications are mainly related to the contactlinguistic study of the language of Hungarian minority communities in English speaking countries as well as the domain language use of these communities.

 

 

Hortobágyi Ildikó

ildiko@almos.uni-pannon.hu

 

Dr. Hortobágyi Ildikó is Associate Professor at the English and American Studies Institute, Pannon University Veszprém. She graduated in English and in French language and literature. She holds holding university doctoral degree in English linguistics and a PhD in language sciences (multilingualism and intercultural communication), and has been lecturing in historical and comparative linguistics, applied linguistics, (translation and interpreting, minority language issues), as well as intercultural communication. For more than two decades she has also been lecturing and conducting seminars in American history, culture and civilization, American popular culture and U.S. media. Her current research areas are media linguistics, and critical media literacy in education, with special focus on American icons. 

 

 

Jancsó Katalin

jkattinka@gmail.com; kjancso@hist.u-szeged.hu

 

Dr. Jancsó Katalin is Senior Assistant Professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies of the University of Szeged. Her main areas of interest are the history and social and economic situation of minorities and immigrants in Latin America. More special areas of her investigations are indigenism in Peru and Mexico, Asian immigrants in Latin America, women in Latin American history and Hungarian immigrants in Latin America. 

 

 

Kovács Ágnes Zsófia

agnes.zsofia.kovacs@gmail.com

 

Dr. Kovács Ágnes Zsófia is Associate Professor of American Studies in the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She is teaching courses on 19th-20th century American literature, literary theory, and the methodologies of American Studies. She has published two books, The Production of a Civilized Experience in Henry James (Mellen, 2004), Literature in Context (JatePress, 2010), and edited the volume From Renaissance to Postmodern: Students’ Essays from the OTDK(2012).

 

 

Kökény Andrea

akokeny23@gmail.com

 

Dr. Kökény Andrea is Senior Assistant Professor of History at the Department of Modern World History and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Szeged. Her fields of research and teaching include modern European history and world history, U.S. history from colonial times to the 1950s-1960s, with a special interest in nineteenth-century westward expansion and the formulation of American identity.

 

 

Lénárt-Muszka Zsuzsanna

lenartmzs@gmail.com

 

Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka graduated from the American Studies MA program of the Institute of English and American Studies at the University of Debrecen in 2013. Her main research areas and interests include African American literature, popular culture and television studies. She is currently enrolled in the MA English teacher training program of the University of Debrecen.

 

 

Lévai Csaba

levai_csaba@yahoo.com

 

Dr. Lévai Csaba is Associate Professor of History at the Department of History of the University of Debrecen. He was educated at the University of Debrecen (MA in history 1998, PhD in history 2000) and the Loránd Eötvös University of Budapest (MA in sociology 1992). A Fulbright visiting scholar at the University of Virginia (1999), he was also a visiting professor at the National University of Ireland, Galway (2005-2006). His research interests are the history of the British Colonies in North America and the history of the American Revolution, including early Hungarian-American contacts from the beginnings to the American Civil War. His publications include The Republicanism Debate. A Discussion in American Historiography about the Intellectual Background of the American Revolution (Budapest, 2003, in Hungarian), and American History and Historiography (Budapest, 2013, in Hungarian). He also edited several scholarly volumes in English and Hungarian, including Europe and the World in European Historiography (Pisa, 2006).

 

 

Ildikó Limpár

limparildiko@gmail.com

 

Dr. Limpár Ildikó is Senior Lecturer of English, Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest (Hungary) has a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature and an MA in Egyptology. She has extensively published on Shakespeare and American literature. Her primary interest resides in examining the subversion of myths in the works of contemporary American authors, extending now her research to fantasy authors, including Robert Holdstock, Neil Gaiman, and Suzanne Collins.

 

 

Mathey Éva

matheyeva@gmail.com

 

Dr. Mathey Éva, Assistant Professor of the North American Department, the Institute of English and American Studies, teaches American history and culture. Her special fields of research include American society and political culture during the period between the world wars, Hungarian-American relations with special emphasis on the interwar years, and her interest also extends to the history of the American woman. She earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Debrecen in 2012. She has published articles both in Hungarian and English in journals such as, for example, Aetas, Studii de limbi si literaturi moderne, Eger Journal of American Studies, Hungarian Studies Review and the Hungarian Journal for English and American Studies. Currently she is working on a project to publish her dissertation Chasing a Mirage: Hungarian Revisionist Search for US Support to Dismantle the Trianon Peace Treaty, 1920–1938.

 

 

Máté Zsolt

zsolt.mate@hotmail.com

 

Máté Zsolt is an M.A. student in the History and IT Teacher Training program at the University of Pécs. He achieved first place in two National Student Research Competitions (in the sections “World History in the Twentieth Century” in 2013, and “World History After 1945” in 2015). He was a Pro Scientia Gold Medalist in 2015. He has done research in the National Archive and the Presidential Library of the United States.

 

 

Molnár Judit

judit.molnar@arts.unideb.hu

 

Dr. Molnár Judit is Associate Professor at the North American Department, University of  Debrecen, Hungary, where she is also the Director of the Canadian Studies Centre. She introduced Canadian studies at the University of Debrecen. She teaches courses on Canadian literature and culture also 19^th century American literature and civilization of the USA. She has published a large number of articles on Canadian literature and edited two books related to Canadian studies. Her book Narrating the Homeland:The Importance of Space and Place in Canadian Multicultural English-Language Fiction was published in 2013. She has given a wild range of papers at numerous conferences in and outside Europe. Her main field of interest is multicultural literatures in Canada and English–language writing Quebec. She has gained several scholarships from ICCS (International Council for Canadian Studies), and was Seagram Fellow at the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada.

 

 

Nagy Judit

jnagy70@yahoo.co.uk

 

Dr. Nagy Judit is Associate Professor at the Department of English Linguistics of the Budapest-based Károli Gáspár University of the Hungarian Reformed Church, where she has been teaching courses in Canadian Studies and applied linguistics. She defended her PhD dissertation entitled But a few Acres of Snow? — Weather Images in Canadian Short Prose (1945–2000) at Eötvös Loránd University in early 2009. Her current fields of research include East Asian Canadians, transculturation and metaphors of acculturation in an interdisciplinary approach as well as curriculum and teaching material development in Canadian Studies and applied linguistics. In 2012, the Central European Association for Canadian Studies awarded her with the CEACS Certificate of Merit for her contribution to Canadian Studies. As of October 1st 2013, she has been working as Academic Advisor for International Relations at the Dean's Office next to her teaching position.

 

 

Németh Lenke

nemeth.lenke@arts.unideb.hu

 

Dr. Németh Lenke, Assistant Porfessor of American Studies and Associate editor of HJEAS, University of Debrecen teaches courses in American drama, American literary history, the history of Americna art, and the methodology of teaching American culture and literature. Her academic interest include postmodernism in American drama, drama theory, post-multicultural drama, gender studies, and transnational studies. She has published several essays on these topics as well as a book on the plays of David Mamet, All It Is, It’s  a Carnival: Reading David Mamet’s Female Characterss with Bakthin (2007). She was Guest Editor of Edward Albee’s Late-Middle Period in HJEAS 15.1 (2009).

 

 

Palatinus Dávid Levente

dlpalatinus@gmail.com

 

Dr. Palatinus Dávid Levente is Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Ruzomberok. His research moves between and across film and television studies, digital media, and cultural theory. He has worked and written on violence in serial culture, medicine and autopsy, autoimmunity and war, and digital subjectivity. He is co-editor of the ECREA blog section of Critical Studies in Television Online, and sits on the editorial board of Rewind: British and American Studies Series of Aras Edizioni (Fano, Italy). He is currently working on a book-length project called “Spectres of Medicine: The Ethos of Contemporary Medical Dramas.”

 

 

Peterecz Zoltán

zpeterecz@yahoo.com

 

Dr. Peterecz Zoltán is Associate Professor in the American Studies Department at Eszterháyz Károly College in Eger. His main field of research is American-Hungarian relations in the interwar years.

 

 

Pintér Károly

pinterk@gmail.com

 

Dr. Pintér Károly is Associate Professor and chair of the Institute of English and American Studies, Pázmány Péter Catholic University (PPKE), Budapest, teaching a variety of courses on British and American history and culture, as well as elective seminars on diverse topics such as utopian and SF literature. His study entitled Anatomy of Utopia: Narration, Estrangement and Ambiguity in More, Wells, Huxley and Clarke was published by McFarland in 2010 and won the HUSSE Junior Book Award in the same year. His current research interest is church-state relations in the US and the phenomenon of American civil religion. He also wrote introductory textbooks on British and American culture as well as literary essays on Beckett, Huxley, More, and Wells.

 

 

Rubóczki Babett

babett.ruboczki@gmail.com

 

Rubóczki Babett graduated at the American Studies Master’s program at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen in 2015. She was the member of the Hatvani István Szakkollégium and the talent management program of the University of Debrecen (DETEP). Her current research focuses on the relationship between space, ethnicity and gender in contemporary Chicana literature. She also investigates American modernist literature with special attention to the representation of sexuality and gender in Ernest Hemingway’s works. She received a special prize at the 32^nd National Conference of Scientific Students’ Associations, held in 2015 with her paper “Queering the Uncanny: Sexual and Textual Doubles in Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Mr. and Mrs. Elliot’ and ‘The Sea Change.’”

 

 

Sári B. László

sari.laszlo@pte.hu

 

Dr. Sári B. László is Associate Professor at the Department of English Literatures and Cultures, University of Pécs, Hungary, where he teaches cultural and literary studies, contemporary American fiction and postwar British film history. His publications to date include two monographs in Hungarian, the first on the literature of the Kádár regime, the second on contemporary American minimalist fiction, edited volumes and journal issues on literary theory and cultural studies, and numerous articles and reviews in Hungarian as well as in English. He is also a translator of contemporary fiction, including works by Amy Hempel, Dennis Johnson, Chuck Palahniuk and A. S. A. Harrison.

 

 

Szabó Éva Eszter

evaeszter@t-email.hu

 

Dr. Szabó Éva Eszter is Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies, School of English and American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Member of HAAS, HUSSE, LASA (USA), and SHAFR (USA). Her field of research includes the history of inter-American relations, Latino communities in the US, and the correlation between U.S. foreign and immigration policies.

 

 

Andrea F. Szabó

szabofa@gmail.com

 

Dr. Szabó F. Andrea is Senior Assistant Professor at the English and American Studies Institute, University of Pannonia, Veszprém, Hungary. She teaches courses in North-American literature and Gender and Culture. Her research interests focus on Gothic Studies and spatiality, more particularly on female gothic literature, and, most importantly on Alice Munro.

 

 

Szente-Varga Mónika

szevamoni@gmail.com

 

Dr. Szente-Varga Mónika earned her Ph. D. in history (University of Szeged, 2005), and her habilitation also in history (University of Szeged, 2014). She works at the Faculty of International and European Studies, National University of Public Service, Budapest, Hungary. Her fields of interest: are the modern history of Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, Hungarian minorities and image of Hungary in the Spanish speaking world.  

 

 

Szamosi Gertrud

szamosi.gertrud@pte.hu

 

Dr. Szamosi Gertrud is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies, Pécs University, Hungary. She has taught and published in the fields of Scottish, Canadian and Postcolonial literatures. She organised and hosted the 14^th RNLA Conference in Pécs, and co-edited the volume on the conference proceedings, Contested Identites (2015).

 

 

Tarnóc András

tarnoca@ektf.hu

 

Dr. Tarnóc András, Associate Professor of American Literature, serves as Head of the Department of American Studies at Eszterházy Károly College of Eger where he teaches courses on American history, culture, literature, and government. His main research interests include settler-Indian relations in the colonial period, the dynamics of multicultural societies, and the slave narrative. He earned his Ph.D. in 2011, and was awarded habilitation by the University of Debrecen in 2013. His thesis is scheduled to be published in 2016 under the title The Indian Captivity Narrative as the Cornerstone of the American Origination Myth explored the literary, historical, psychological, and educational aspects of narratives of confinement reflecting the experiences of mostly white captives of Amerindians. Recently his research has been focusing on the field of autobiographical literature with special emphasis on the cultural significance of antebellum slave narratives, treating the latter both as examples of life writing and texts of travel. He works also as editor-in-chief of the Eger Journal of American Studies. His publications have appeared in journals such as AMERICANA and the Eger Journal of American Studies, his monograph The Dynamics of American Multiculturalism: a Model-Based Study came out in 2005.

 

 

Tóth Zsófia Anna

tothzsofianna@gmail.com

 

Dr. Tóth Zsófia Anna received her PhD in British and American literature and culture from the University of Szeged and is currently Junior Assistant Professor at the Department of American Studies, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Szeged. Her general research interests are film studies, cultural studies, gender studies, literary theory, English and American literature, American cinema. Her main research field is concerned with the representation of female aggression and violence in American literature and film. Her current research topic is the issue of women’s humor, and especially Mae West. Her first book, which was based on her PhD dissertation, entitled Merry Murderers: The Farcical (Re)Figuration of the Femme Fatale in Maurine Dallas Watkins’ Chicago (1927) and its Various Adaptations was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (UK) in 2011.  In 2012, she co-edited two other works with Zoltán Vajda: American Studies and Visuality – on the horizon of information society, Special Issue, AMERICANA, E-Journal of American Studies in Hungary, and Amerikanisztika és vizualitás. Metszéspontok az információs társadalom horizontján, AMERICANA eBooks.

 

 

Vajda Zoltán

vajda@lit.u-szeged.hu

 

Dr. Vajda Zoltán is Associate Professor of American Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Szeged. His main areas of research and teaching are early American intellectual and cultural history, antebellum Southern history, Thomas Jefferson and his times, Cultural Studies and US popular culture. He serves on the editorial board of Americana, an electronic journal of American Studies and Aetas, a historical journal, both edited in Szeged.

 

 

Venkovits Balázs

balazs.venkovits@gmail.com

 

Dr. Balázs Venkovits, Assistant Lecturer in American Studies, University of Debrecen, earned his MA degree in 2007 and his Ph.D. in 2014, both from the University of Debrecen. His broader academic interests include travel writing studies, nineteenth-century Hungarian travel accounts on Mexico and the United States, migration studies, and US-Hungarian relations. He teaches courses on American civilization, history, travel writing, translation, and also works with students in various language classes. His current research focuses on the evolution of the image of Mexico in Hungary, especially in an inter-American comparison with that of the United States. He is currently working on a book on Hungarian travelers in North America.

 

 

Vöő Gabriella

voo.gabriella@pte.hu

 

Dr. Gabriella Vöő is Associate Professor at the Department of English Literatures and Cultures at the University of Pécs. She specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and culture. Her publications include essays on antebellum fiction and poetry, the American frontier, and gender in the context of nineteenth-century cultural politics. She has also published essays and a book about the reception of English and Irish literature in interwar Hungary.

 

 

Walsh, Elizabeth

elizabeth.walsh08@gmail.com

 

Elizabeth Walsh, American Fulbright Student Grantee, currently teaches American history and literature courses at her host institution Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Piliscsaba, Hungary. She earned a BA in English and History from St. John’s University and an MA in English from St. John’s University in Queens, New York. Before coming to Hungary on Fulbright, she spent two years teaching English in Newark, New Jersey, as a Teach for America Corps Member.

 

11^th BIENNIAL CONFERENCE

of the Hungarian Association for American Studies (HAAS)

The Americas: Global Challenges and Responsibilities

University of Pécs, 12-14 May 2016

University Library and Regional Center for Learning, Nr. 2 Universitas St. 7622 Pécs

 

 

PROGRAM

 

 

 

Acknowledgment: This conference is part of the series of public scientific events dedicated to the 650^th anniversary

of the foundation, by King Louis I, of the first university in Hungary.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Keynote Lectures

 

 

Richard Godwin

Writer, United Kingdom

 

Outlaws and Big Business:

The Enduring Nature of the Wild West and the Frontier in the Novels of James Lee Burke

 

            My paper will examine the enduring nature of the frontier in the American psyche and its use in James Lee Burke’s fictions. It will also discuss how the author portrays the corruption of the wilderness by oil giants and multi-national interests he believes are polluting an essentially American purity that is geographical but also part of his portrait of US history. His use of four key areas in his fiction to exemplify this are: big business, the Vietnam War, the US economy, organized crime and the criminal justice system as well as its failings and corruption. Burke, while known as a crime fiction writer, sees himself as a historical writer.   

            Burke uses the memories of his first person narrators, Dave Robicheaux and Billy Bob Holland and the third person narratives of Hackberry Holland to build a complex picture of America’s past and present, from the pioneers to the modern era. He dramatizes US cultural heritage through its economic and political interests and uses the modern day to shed light on the past. While the frontier may exist primarily in a geographical sense in his fictions, particularly those set in Montana, he also uses it to illustrate the treatment of the native American Indians. In the Robicheaux novels, set in Louisiana, he explores the history of the French settlers. I will focus on four key novels:

            Heaven’s Prisoners, Robicheaux novel, 1988

            Cimmaron Rose, Billy Bob Holland novel, 1997

            White Dives At Morning, standalone novel about the Civil War, 2002

            Wayfaring Stranger, Weldon Holland novel, 2014     

 

 

Carol McCurdy

California Polytechnic State University

 

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: 

No Way Out but into the Cane Fields

 

            The Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao excited critics and the reading public alike with its high-energy linguistic display of Spanglish, street slang, Tolkien’s Elvish language, “nerd” speak, and Superhero lingo. The dynamism of the languages and the wide-ranging cultural references articulated in a complex, new way the Caribbean diasporic experience. Initial critics argued that the novel acts as an alternative to traditional histories of the Dominican Republic as personified by the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo. Because of the historical gaps left by the violent and corrupt Truijllo regime, the narrator Yunior, serving as writer-historian steps into this void with his own alternate, multi-vocal text that reconstructs a history of the Cabral-de-Leon family and simultaneously a Dominican history. Currently the critical debate centered on the novel is whether or not it succeeds as “resistance history” (Hanna, Callaloo, 2010) and therefore participates in an anti-colonial, emancipatory terrain along with other ethnic texts.

            For the purpose of my presentation, I will focus on one aspect of Diaz’s pastiche devoted to the Dominican Republic: the sugar cane fields. Three climatic scenes that occur in the sugar cane fields highlight, more than anything else in the novel, an important convergence: the convergence of the history of African slavery, Spanish and French colonialism, and Dominican and US nation-making.  What happens in these scenes underscores how historical, racial and gender classifications as related to power exert devastatingly harmful and limiting effects, but also suggest the power in the personal reshaping of these normative categories.

 

 

 

Presentations

 

Irén Annus

University of Szeged

 

Race and “Social Erosion” in the Depression Art of Dorothea Lange

 

            Dorothea Lange is one of the most outstanding American documentary photographers of the twentieth century, having earned her fame particularly through images that captured the Great Depression. She has typically been associated with the US government and its propaganda during this period as she worked for a New Deal agency, the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This presentation takes a closer look at her photography with an eye to her depiction of Mexican (-American) migrant farm workers. Through an iconological reading of these, the presentation argues that, while Lange indeed created images that provided a persuasive tool for the FSA in evoking powerful emotions regarding the desperate situation of millions of agricultural laborers in the country, her photography was color-blind, thus reflected no bias in terms of the race or legal status of the people whom she portrayed. On the contrary, she displayed her powerful sense of humanity, sensitivity and empathy towards everyone who had been touched by the general “social erosion” of the age, thus silently but openly challenged the racist, and, in particular, anti-Mexican, public discourses and official actions that characterized the decade.

 

 

Ferenc András

University of Veszprém

 

Translation and the Philosophy of Willard van Orman Quine

 

            What does it mean when a person understands another person? “I understand you!” “I understand what you're saying!”—What do these phrases mean? The situation is theoretically simple, and at first glance, it is obviously language related. Two people, standing face to face, and with their searching gazes on the other one, are trying to understand each other’s words, signs, allusions. Quine’s anthropologist arrives at an alien tribe to write a vocabulary for their language. During the encounter between representatives of two languages and two cultures, what tools will they use in order to understand each other? Radical translation, as Quine calls this situation, is when one has to understand the other person without the help of a contact language. Quine’s apprentice, Donald Davidson, referring to his teacher, introduces the concept of radical interpretation. While in Quine’s thought experiment, the problem of translating two completely foreign languages is formulated, in radical interpretation Davidson asks about the relationship between a language speaker and a child who does not speak any languages. The radical interpretation searches for the moment of arrival from the state without language to the state of language. The normative nature of language does not only require from us to know what the person is like, but also what they should be like. This latter leads us to the problems of free will, morality, and right choice.

 

 

Beatrix Balogh

Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, Budapest

 

Political Development in the US Pacific Islands

 

            The paper invites its audience to an island-hopping adventure to a region that is less talked about in the multiple intersections of Hemispheric History. As booties of the Spanish-American War of 1898 the United States acquired not only Puerto Rico in the Caribbean but also Guam and the Marianas in the Pacific. Whereas these islands experienced a direct change of guard, US control was also established on other islands prior to the Splendid Little War, as well as in the following half century. The galley trade the Spanish conducted between Manila, Guam, and Mexico was replaced by other trading, communication, and military interests, the Pacific islands featuring as cable and coaling stations, and strategic outposts in World Wars and the Cold War. Indeed, if at all, island names fleetingly pop-up in these latter contexts as venue of decisive Pacific battle, or nuclear testing site. The historical affiliation of these territories with the United States, political development, progress from colonial rule towards various degrees of home rule or sovereignty are, however, much neglected areas of investigation.

            Against the backdrop of past and current geostrategic considerations the talk intends to explore the intricate relationship between the US Overseas Territories in the Pacific and their metropolitan center. Benchmarking Guam, a point of reference in the military complex of the Pacific, the presentation will highlight the features of “eternal territorial status;” and will point out how a recent Supreme Court case is making waves in the territorial citizenship debate at the time when other US Pacific Islanders are literally washed away by climate change. 

 

 

Máté Gergely Balogh

University of Debrecen

 

“The Rotting Imperialist System Influences the Moral Views of the Americans”:

Americans Through the Eyes of the Hungarian State Security

 

            According to a 1971 textbook of the Hungarian State Security for work against the United States from third countries, “as the United States is the most ardent enemy of all the progressive workers in the world, the intelligence organizations of the countries of the socialist world have to fight against it in the most focused way.” In order to be able to pursue this struggle, these agencies had to understand how Americans behaved, how they thought, and what motivated them, notwithstanding the fact that normally studying the United States and American culture was strongly discouraged or even forbidden in the socialist bloc. This knowledge was especially important for the socialist agents who were working among Americans, wanted to avoid detection by the American counterintelligence agencies, tried to get information from American citizens, and possibly even attempt to enlist them as informants. As the aforementioned document asserts, “Enlisting American citizens is the most important, but at the same time most difficult task of the residenture.” This paper will present and review the preparation materials that were published by the Hungarian State Security during the 1960s and 1970s, focusing on which traits of the “American personality” were considered to be important, what was presented as characteristic and typical of American people, and how the Hungarian (and Eastern bloc) intelligence intended to use and take advantage of these aspects.

 

 

Barnabás Baranyi

University of Debrecen

 

Transnational Cyborgs: Hacking as a Means of Posthuman Identity Formation in Latin-America

 

            As the Internet of Things, a web of interrelated and intercommunicative computers, is becoming more widely accepted and implemented throughout the world, it raises significant questions about the ways in which this new technology transforms our life, while making it increasingly problematic to define the epistemic and ontological status of a computer in relation to a human being. Moreover, explicating the relationship between human and machine through cultural phenomena provides a handle on how new technological innovations influence, even construct, our practices of identity formation. My paper traces the increasing presence of hacker culture in Latin-America to the recent dissemination of technologies related to the Internet of Things in an attempt to illuminate the cultural implications of the phenomenon of hacker subculture. It is my contention that hacking can be read as a “technology of the self” (Michel Foucault), whereby it poses a transformational force for the identity. This brings about a shift from “system operativity” to “unit operativity” (Ian Bogost) of the self that makes it possible to stop basing its identity in totalizing metanarratives. Such a reconfiguration of the self is nonetheless a clear indication of the influence of the posthuman (Stefan Herbrechter). The posthuman identity thus formed is necessarily a transnational one insofar as its unit operational structure lets it reimagine its relation to the world not in terms of a national ideology or a belonging to a location demarcated by geographical borders but as being part of a complex network in which “information, capital, and people flow in a multidirectional manner” (Katheryne Mitchell in Kay Anderson et al.).

 

 

András Bartók

National University of Public Service, Budapest

 

Pacific Rivalry: The Role of Strategic Culture

 in Chinese and American Security Policies

 

            The foreign policy initiative “Pivot to Asia” has undoubtedly characterized the United States as an Asia-Pacific power. A shift of attention to this region necessitates new strategic approaches as well as new concepts for ensuring the security of key interests, even more so with a regional and soon-to-be global peer competitor, the People's Republic of China on the rise. In the last decade we have seen the efforts of each power to conceptualize their response to the presence of the other in the Asia-Pacific zone. Besides building a blue-water navy, China has focused on building up its A2/AD (Anti-Access / Area Denial) capabilities and has presented itself as a revisionist actor in terms of its numerous territorial disputes, most of them with key US allies in the region. The American response has been a major shift of power towards the Pacific theater and the development of the concept of Air Sea Battle, a joint operational way of securing access to the global commons. With the advent of new approaches to warfare, non-conventional conflicts and “grey zone” confrontations, the cultural background of strategic thinking has become one of the main foci of security studies.

            My presentation will examine how the two opposing strategic concepts of Air Sea Battle and A2/AD fit into the respective strategic cultures of the United States and the People’s Republic of China. By highlighting the absence of the concept of “global commons” in Chinese strategic culture and the relation between the communist leadership's ability to deny outside intervention in the Sinosphere and the legitimacy of its power, I would like to present how A2/AD is not only an operational security concept, but a cornerstone of communicating the power of the regime. Also, I will examine how Air Sea Battle, with its emphasis on multi-layered operational objectives is deeply rooted in American strategic culture's leaning towards technological superiority and the relevance of the hub-and-spokes security alliance system built up in the Pacific theater.

 

 

Anna Bartnik

Jagiellonian University Cracow

 

Contemporary Trends in Cuban Migration to the United States

 

            International affairs between the United States and Cuba have been strongly marked with immigration issues. Cuban refugees became a political instrument between these two neighboring countries in the past. Now the Cuban diaspora in the United States is an important part of American society and policy. Since 1995, the American government used the so called “wet foot, dry foot” policy toward Cuban immigrants. It meant, that any Cuban stopped in the waters between these two countries, could be returned to the island. Those who managed to lay down their “dry feet” on American soil, before being stopped by the U.S. Coast Guards, had a chance to apply for permanent resident status. After half a century of very complicated relations between the United States and Cuba, the time of change has come. Now, Cuba is experiencing the effects of a new policy implemented by Raul Castro, who has been in charge of the island’s future since 2008. One of the fruits of Castro’s normalization policy is increasing Cuban immigration to the United States. U.S. Coast Guard reported that interceptions of Cuban immigrants rose by 117% in a first month only, after the announcement of restoring normalized mutual relations. It is believed, that one of the reasons is an opinion, that the United States is going to stop its “dry foot” policy. Many Cubans are ready to take a risk of an extremely dangerous sea voyage, in order to experience a privileged immigration policy of the United States. In my presentation I will analyze the most contemporary situation in immigration between Cuba and the United States.  

 

 

Ergün Baylan

Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey

 

Thoreau’s Unique Morality

 

            As a Transcendentalist, Thoreau attached great importance to Nature. Differing from Unitarians, Transcendentalists including Thoreau, believed the connection to the Divine can only be reached by the individual through Nature, not Scripture. Many Transcendentalists stressed that empirically based rationality alone cannot be the way to learn truth and morality. According to Thoreau, an individual, living in harmony with Nature accesses truth and morality. Transcendentalists’ distrust against rationality is important to illustrate the distinction between Kantian ethics and Thoreau’s morality. Thoreau did not believe that rationality is the way for the individual to reach morality. Acquiring a mistaken reading of Kant’s concept of “reason” from Coleridge, for Thoreau, Transcendental “reason,” or “intuition,” largely gained through nature, is the source of all knowledge. Thoreau did not believe in institutionalized religion, because he believed religion went beyond institutions, churches, certain rules or technicalities. For him, individuality is the most important. His belief system is based on individuality. He felt that belief was personal and non-transferrable, and determined by one’s own path. Morality and truth are distinctively personal and private for Thoreau. He had no intention to spread his morality upon others. I argue that Thoreau, in his life and writing, presents a unique understanding of morality.

 

 

Amira Benarioua

University of Szeged

 

Black Feminist Voices and Space in The Color Purple by Alice Walker

 

            In my paper I aim to discuss the importance of faith, solidarity and will in challenging the racist and sexist prejudices found within the American society in the portrayal of several female characters from The Color Purple (1982) by Alice Walker. Moreover, the paper explains how people can simultaneously examine identity, discover selfhood, and free the spirit from the bondage of oppressive only by fighting adversity.  The novel turns around the life of a family in rural Georgia focusing specifically on the life of African-American women in the southern United States in the 1930s such as Celie and Sofia, who are truly doubly oppressed; in the larger context they are treated as objects or simply as second-class citizens because of the white racist mentality. On the other hand, they are oppressed by their fathers and husbands, which makes them second-class citizens in the domestic life as well. Obviously, in neither place can the black woman enjoy their basic human rights of self-determination, independence, and ownership of their own bodies. Using feminism as an approach I will trace the most crucial points that Alice Walker used to give voice to the voiceless and create a sphere were all black women can argue their existence and humanity. 

 

 

Vera Benczik

Eötvös Loránd University Budapest

 

Colonialism, Trauma, and Narration in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling

 

            Liminality, alterity and colonialism have always been at the center of Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction. Her anthropologist heroes are usually involved in narratives which reflect on questions of cultural difference, and on discursive strategies linked to encountering the Other. Like much of her science fiction, her novel, The Telling, takes place in the Hainish universe, a far-future secondary world dominated by humanoid species. Its protagonist, Sutty, a human woman of Indian descent, arrives on the planet Aka as the emissary of the controlling intergalactic political body after having witnessed the death of her partner in a terrorist attack; while working through her own personal tragedy she has to make sense of the collective trauma that has put Akan society on the verge of social catastrophe.

            In my paper I would like to explore how the novel subverts the colonial narrative, and uses intercultural communication as a means of working through personal trauma, utilizing the traditional framework of the quest. The act of narration, which stands at the center of the novel, not only functions as a means to bridge the gap between familiar and alien, and also as the subversive force to destabilize the dichotomy of colonizer/colonized, but also as a prosthetic device to effect the telling of the untellable.

 

 

Réka Mónika Cristian

University of Szeged

 

The World According to Sixto Rodriguez and Sixto Rodriguez According to the World

 

            My talk scrutinizes the most important features of transnational flows and polylocal agencies ma(r)king the art of the American folk musician Sixto Diaz Rodriguez (born in 1942 in Chicago in a Mexican immigrant family), who issued two albums entitled Cold Fact (1970) and Coming from Reality (1971). He was quickly forgotten in the USA―but luckily not outside of it; Cold Fact became the unofficial anthem for the anti-Apartheid movement in South Africa in the seventies―only to be rediscovered through a hoax with the help of enduring Australian, Botswanan, Zimbabwean, South-African and New-Zealander fans, and through the patient research of the Swedish-Algerian filmmaker Malik Benjelloul, who directed Searching for the Sugar Man (2012), that became later an Oscar-winning documentary film. The quest for Rodriguez’s global itineraries is mapped more recently not only through his official webpage(s) but also through the release of Sugar Man: The Life, Death and Resurrection of Sixto Rodriguez, (2015), a book authored by two amateur ’detectives,’ the journalist Craig Bartholomew-Strydom and Stephen “Sugar” Segerman, a jeweler, who started the search for Sixto Rodriquez (believed to be dead for years by its fans) by setting up a website, called “The Great Rodriguez Hunt” in 1997. My inquiry will focus on the representation of the Americas in a number of global discourses developing on the internet around the cultural phenomenon known as the musical “Sugar Man” and on the challenges this practical phenomenon can pose to mainstream approaches inhabiting current American Studies scholarship.

 

 

Péter Csató

University of Debrecen

 

The Morality of Lying: Principles vs. Performance in James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma

 

            James Mangold’s 3:10 to Yuma (2007) pays honest tribute to classical Western, both in terms of thematic concerns and visual representation. A remake of Delmer Daves’s 1957 film of the same title, Mangold’s rendition seems to add just enough to gratify the tastes of contemporary audiences (more action scenes, wide shots of the breathtaking Arizona landscape, and some understated sexual tension), but he apparently leaves the straightforward morale of the tale untouched. A down-on-his-luck, but morally uncompromising rancher, Dan Evans (Christian Bale), turns into a proper hero at the climax of an epic posse-ride transporting high-profile criminal Ben Wade (Russell Crowe) to the city of Contention, to put him on the prison train to Yuma. Mangold’s film certainly does not make deconstructive reflections on genre of the Western (as do, for instance, Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven [1992], Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained [2012], or, for that matter, the spaghetti Westerns), yet it does raise complex questions about the manifold nature of ethics and morality, which effectively get thrown into relief against the backdrop of a “morally straightforward” genre. In my presentation, I will argue that the film is far from making a case for a principle-based ethical/moral behavior in the manner of classical moral philosophies. Instead, ethics and morality can be discussed as matters of representation and performance, where, paradoxically enough, lying becomes the primary prerequisite of moral action. In my analysis, I will rely and reflect on the relevant moral philosophical arguments of Friedrich Nietzsche, Bernard Williams, Richard Rorty, Harry G. Frankfurt, and James O’Rourke.

 

 

Sándor Czeglédi

University of Pannonia Veszprém

 

Language as a Means of Oppression, Assimilation, Integration and Empowerment:

Language Policy Initiatives on the Republican and Democratic Party Agendas since the 1840s

 

            The United States is sometimes simplistically described as a country whose standard government policy is “to have no policy on language” (Crawford). Nevertheless, according to Schmidt there have been at least three major areas of language policy conflicts since the 1960s where considerable federal-level legislative, executive and judicial activism can be expected to occur: these are (1) setting educational policies for language minority children; (2) ensuring linguistic access to civil rights and government services; (3) the battle over declaring English the sole official language of the United States. The present paper examines how language-related issues have appeared since the mid-nineteenth century on the official agendas of the major parties of the American political scene by mapping and categorizing all the relevant activities concerning the English language plus “foreign” and “minority” languages, relying on Terrence G. Wiley’s extended comparative framework for formal language policy analysis. Besides classifying the overt and covert language policy proposals into “promotion”-, “expediency”-, “tolerance”-, “restriction”- and “repression”-oriented initiatives, the present analysis also attempts to give a representative account of the areas of real and perceived language policy conflicts from the perspective of U.S. party politics. The corpus of the examination is based on the collection of selected party platforms available as a subset of the online American Presidency Project database (maintained by John Woolley and Gerhard Peters).

 

 

Zorica Đergović-Joksimović

University of Novi Sad

 

Woman on the Edge of Time: A (Radical Feminist) Chicana’s Utopia

 

            In her experimental science fiction novel Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), in which elements as different as heterotopia, eupsychia, utopia and dystopia are neatly interwoven coexisting side by side, Marge Piercy uses her protagonist, Consuelo (Connie) Ramos, a Mexican American, to explore the boundaries of various (im)possibilities imposed upon the Other in an oppressive, patriarchal society. Connie is a marginalized social outcast in every respect:  she is a woman, a Chicana, underprivileged, unemployed, officially labelled as violent, and diagnosed as mentally ill. Thus she is ostracized by her gender, ethnicity, class and her nonconformist behavior. Nonetheless, she is contacted by a missionary from the future. As Kathleen Komar notices, in feminist utopias “the space of literary text becomes a site of critical rethinking and often of female rebirth.” In that respect, Connie’s visit to the futuristic feminist utopian society of Mattapoisett is of exceptional significance. In that sexually equal society, where both sexes breast-feed their babies, Connie learns that she has been chosen in a decisive historical moment upon which the future of all humankind depends. Namely, in an either-or situation Connie’s actions determine what our future will be: the Mattapoisett utopia or its alternative dystopian society. In the spirit of the 1970s radical feminist movement member, Connie opts for a violent act of war.    

 

 

Zoltán Dragon

University of Szeged

Dávid Levente Palatinus

University of Ruzomberok

 

Subjectivity after the Algorithmic Turn: Digital Capitalism and Its Critiques?

 

            The expansion of archiving technologies has ostensibly triggered the proliferation of a techno-deterministic vision of a future where the question of subjectivity is inexorably linked to the hauntology of the digital: the notion of an empirically verifiable reality has been replaced by the absolutization of the Archive: that of which there is a record, exists. The archive has come to denote a supplement or prosthesis of cultural memory, a de-centered space allowing for the free play of meanings, identities, episteme and ideologies to take place. Recent controversies surrounding Internet surveillance practices (signal intelligence, collection of metadata, the PRISM program, etc), the debates in US and EU legislations about limiting (or extending) the NSA’s jurisdiction, or the controversy surrounding the Snowden report all indicative of a growing necessity to the re-think the legal, political, and philosophical implications of the production, management, and most importantly, the ownership of digital records, and in close connection to these, the conception of subjectivity.

            Our paper attempts to re-assess the cultural, political and ethical implications of the relationship between the technological apparatus (the algorithm, the machine), the episteme (record, knowledge, intel, etc.) that is produced by it, and the underlying ideological framework that capitalizes on them. Questions about the ownership of data, the democratization of access, the inadvertent coupling of privacy and transparence, or the much-capitalized-upon issue of security, all accentuate that the concept of the archive is always-already linked to the spectrality of the subject: where is this subject located, and how does it come to be? Who owns the data? And who owns the archive? If (the locus of) ownership sublimates in spectrality, what becomes of agency and responsibility? This hauntology necessitates the re-thinking of the ethical dimension of the digital via criticisms of their underlying political agendas.

 

 

Gabriella Espák

University of Debrecen

 

Gun Control in Australia

 

            The current hot debate on gun control in the United States has raised the issue to the level of public discussion in Australia as well. The Australian colonial, remote and anti-authoritarian experience may serve as comparison to the US, especially to understand the historical background to liberal gun holding arguments. Besides the historical beginnings, this conference paper will examine the legislative foundations, social impact, stakeholders, cases of violence, and rhetoric of bearing arms in Australia, all for the benefit of better understanding the dynamics of the American debate. In addition, for the Australian situation, I hope to highlight why gun control in Australia has never been as topical and controversial as in the United States.

 

 

Éva Federmayer

Eötvös Loránd University Budapest

 

The Map of the Anthropocene:

An Ecocritical Reading of Octavia Butler’s Parable of Talents and Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

 

In my ecocritical exploration of two African American novels I engage with the implications of the “Anthropocene,” a term that denotes the geological epoch caused by human impact on the Earth’s eco-system amounting to the power of a geological force. I am interested in how Butler’s and Morrison’s texts address and construct the interaction of the human and the non-human world to create a storyworld in which distinct characters operate not only according to the logic of the narrative in their local places and (semi)private/communal spaces but also as distinct configurations of the Anthropocene, that is, as agents of a larger story of humans. Engaging with this ecocritical project, I pay close attention to the environment in which the respective characters enact their destiny within their historically and ecologically inscribed narrative space. I will discuss Octavia Butler’s novels first in which the storyworld is set in the 2020s-2090s, and only then turn to Morrison’s novel of an earlier time, where the storyline pursues the trajectory of the years between 1682-1690. The four hundred years elapsing between the two diegetical end-dates of the novels by Morrison and Butler—1690 and 2090 respectively—draw the boundaries of an imaginary fictional map staked out by A Mercy and the Parable novels that dovetail as I hope to point out, with Lewis and Maslin’s inferential narrative of the Anthropocene (Nature, 12 March 2015).

 

 

Mónika Fodor

University of Pécs

 

Narrative Perspective on the Sites of Subjective Ethnicity Construction

 

            In this paper I describe ethnic identity formation as a spatialized process tied to recognizable geographical locations—places that prompt ethnic activities or make the already existing practices memorable. I interpret four interview-based narratives within their discursive and narrative environment to discuss how storytellers relate to their subjective ethnicity against the backdrop of ethnically marked sites and locations. The four stories will highlight four modes of conceptualizing space related to ethnicity: 1) the ethnic neighborhood, 2) ethnic reclamation sites, 3) sites of heritage tourism, and 4) heterolocalism. I probe the space-centered stories in this conceptual matrix of ethnic geography to explore under which circumstances storytellers find ethnically imbued sites meaningful. I also reveal how narrators locate these sites as centers of cultural-social networking and thus a source of symbolic capital. Furthermore, the analysis pinpoints the ways in which investment becomes a necessary prerequisite to community formation and maintenance. I suggest that traditional ethnic identity sites as well as those newly designed cultural geographical formations rooted in the subjectivization of ethnicity gain long-term meaning and become sustainable if they are seen as locations of investment with the capacity to bring profits as symbolic capital.

 

 

Éva Forintos

University of Pannonia Veszprém

 

Language Mixing in Written Discourse:

Intentional Code-Mixing in the American and Canadian Hungarian Communities’ Newspaper

 

            Scholarly literature provides convincing evidence that in the field of bilingualism and language contact research, spoken data have always been considered superior to written data. In the focus of research, during the last forty years, there has been the mixing of language in discourse with special attention to ‘conversational code-switching’ (Sebba 2014). Consequently, numerous theoretical approaches have been created for spoken data, written code-switching however, has not been as thoroughly studied. The lack of interest in studying written language to gain wider knowledge on written mixed-language discourse stimulated the present research, which intends to follow the new approach suggested by Sebba (2014). According to him, visual and spatial elements of particular written language samples should also be included in the study of written mixed-language texts, since they can provide important contextualization cues. In other words, in addition to concentrating on written text as text, i.e. sequences of words on the page, it is worth studying it in the visual context a reader would encounter it, e.g. style, colors, font sizes, etc.

            If newspapers in general can offer a solid basis for linguistic studies, then community newspapers of minority groups of different countries are especially suitable for this function. That is the reason why the present research uses the American and Canadian Hungarian communities’ weekly published newspaper as a source to study code-switchings on the basis of the approaches discussed above.

 

 

Ildikó Hortobágyi

University of Pannonia Veszprém

 

Following the Americas on Multimodal Media Platforms

 

The fundamental dynamics of current media communication create an invisible synergy between change and continuity in discourse. Nowadays most forms and instances of communication—predominantly texts—are regarded in relation to electronic platforms. Both in the content and in the form of their discourse, cultural industries can be considered creators and perpetuators of iconicity. As media opens a window on the great variety of English-speaking cultures and subcultures, it is challenging to analyze how the Americas strive to establish balanced presence in the news.  Departing from the building blocks of media literacy and drawing on recent scholarship (Allan, Danesi, Hesmondhalgh, Tannen and Trester), my paper, which is situated at the intersection of epistemology and media linguistics, explores how the cultural industries transmit information and help build knowledge structures of the global issues the Americas are sharing. The mixed-method study, based on a comparative approach and triangulation, aims to find out whether print news and their related e-platforms (TIME, The Economist, The White House Blog) promote both change and continuity in their discursive narratives, and whether these platforms tend to reach social and cultural homogenization of knowledge against the backdrop of multicultural societies. As media studies are present in a variety of teaching and academic contexts, the findings of this study can help instructors design multidisciplinary teaching material in New American Studies.

 

 

Katalin Jancsó

University of Szeged

 

Indigenous People of 19th-century Central America

from a Hungarian Perspective

 

            In my presentation I will deal with a Hungarian traveler who arrived in the Americas in 1889, in a period characterized by an increasing emigration (economic, first of all) to the continent. Jenő Bánó, after the death of his wife, decided to try his luck in the faraway continent and, after having explored various regions of the United States, he came to know Mexico during Porfirio Díaz’ dictatorship full of social tensions and conflicts. He established two plantations in Oaxaca, a region with high proportion of indigenous population and he married an indigenous woman, therefore he had the opportunity to get to know this social group that was living under extremely difficult social, political, cultural and economic conditions. Land dispossessions, exploitation and servitude of the rural population created a wave of revolts in the second part of the century. The time spent among indigenous people made a deep impression on Bánó, who, in his memories published in various books (Uti képek Amerikából (Images of a journey in America, 1890), Mexikó és utazásom a trópusokon (Mexico and my travels in the tropics, 1896) and Bolyongásaim Amerikában (My wanderings in America, 1906) made countless comments on these ethnic groups and he even ventured to compare the indigenous population and Hungarian people. What’s more, he raised the question of a possible parentage. On the basis of the results of former Hungarian researches and of the texts written by Bánó, I will offer a contribution to the work carried out so far, outlining the image of the Mexican society and indigenous people created by the Hungarian traveler.

 

 

Ágnes Zsófia Kovács

University of Szeged

 

The Memory of the Black Atlantic in Toni Morrison 

 

                Morrison’s novel Beloved has been discussed extensively as part of a literary project to construct a new history of slavery and its legacy in the US. The reception of the novel normally links the venture to Morrison’s essays and interviews that stress the need to voice the African American presence in the American literary tradition, the project of rememory. Pyschoanalytic or cultural memory oriented accounts explain how traumas of slavery are remembered and processed in the novel. In this paper I propose to rethink the project of rememory in Beloved in a transatlantic context: with a focus on the palimpsest presence of African American folk culture in it. My point of departure is Lars Eckstein’s analysis of the novel in Remembering the Black Atlantic (2006), which reads Beloved as a neo-slave narrative and links its polyphony of narrative voices primarily to African American musical traditions. Incorporating Eckstein’s design, I wish to broaden the study of African American vernacular culture in Beloved. My idea is that it is possible to extend Sundquist’s method in Folk Culture in Modern African American Fiction (1993) to Beloved and explore how alternative modes of knowing—hearing, feeling, singing, dancing—that African American culture has brought to America, function in Morrison’s novel. With reference to the rhetoric of Signifyin’ (Gates), African American folk music (Eckstein), and black worship (Sundquist), I wish to unfold layers of meaning connected to African American discursive practices in Beloved. I argue that the rememory of slavery cannot be separated from the discourse of African American folk culture in the novel.  

 

 

Andrea Kökény

University of Debrecen

 

The Texan Santa Fe Expedition

 

            The Texan Santa Fe Expedition was a commercial and military enterprise. It was unofficially initiated by Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, second President of the Republic of Texas, in the summer of 1841. His aim was to gain control over the lucrative Santa Fe Trail and to establish Texas jurisdiction over the area. The expedition included twenty-one wagons carrying merchandise and was accompanied by businessmen, Lamar’s commissioners, and a military escort of some three hundred volunteers. Poor preparation and organization, sporadic Indian attacks, summer heat, and lack of supplies and fresh water, however, led to the complete failure of the venture. The members of the expedition expected a warm welcome by the citizens of New Mexico, but instead, were surprised to be met by a detachment of about 1500 men from the Mexican Army. The Texans, reduced in number and broken in health and spirit, were forced to surrender, and then to march 2,000 miles from Santa Fe to Mexico City where they were held prisoners for almost a year. Based on primary sources, the paper proposes to discuss the organization, course, and consequences of the ill-fated expedition.

 

 

Zsuzsanna Lénárt-Muszka

University of Debrecen

 

“But this is about my father’s father”:

Memory and Trauma in Edward P. Jones’s “Spanish in the Morning”

 

“Spanish in the Morning”, a shorty story by Pulitzer Prize winner African American writer Edward P. Jones, was published in the shorty story collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children in 2006. I argue that even though on the surface this story of a young girl’s first days at school might read as a traditional coming-of-age narrative, the narrator-protagonist continues to be trapped in a state of liminality long after the transformative events that shape her nascent selfhood. Even though she comes from a seemingly peaceful, loving middle-class background, as a child she is not only exposed to her family’s tragic stories of racism, addiction, and abuse, but also she is subtly sexualized by her male family members and subjected to abandonment and the unforgiving atmosphere of a religious school. Her identity is negotiated by surrounding narratives, attitudes and identities that belong to the male domain, and her écriture féminine fails at contextualizing her experiences. Her reminiscing as an adult woman crosses boundaries of time and space (including memories from infancy as well as dreams and dream-like sequences), and these shifting perspectives assign more significance to her family’s anecdotes than to her own stories. Her preoccupation with other people’s stories while avoiding self-reflection, I argue, signifies that she still hasn’t come to terms with either her deeply tragic family history, the traumatizing atmosphere of her upbringing, or the unsettling childhood experiences.

 

 

Csaba Lévai

University of Debrecen

 

One Revolution and Two Empires:

The Reception of the American Revolution in the Spanish and the Habsburg Empire at the End of the Eighteenth Century

 

            The impacts of the American Revolution were somewhat similar in the Spanish and the Habsburg Empire. This impact had two levels in both empires. It affected the core territories and the dependencies or peripheries of the two empires. On the first level, imperial centers reacted to the American Revolution unambiguously. On the one hand, it was in the interest of the court of Madrid to intervene in the war on the side of the North American rebels against Britain, but the Spanish government did not want to recognize American independence on the other. The decision makers in Madrid were fully aware of the fact that this would set a dangerous example for her colonies in Latin-America. Although the Habsburg Empire was the ally of France, which supported the American cause, it was not in the interest of Vienna to alienate London on the long run. But on the second level, imperial dependencies reacted differently. Some intellectuals in Spanish America as well as Hungary considered the American Revolution as an example to be followed. This topic is fully in accordance with the call for papers of the 11^th Biennial Conference of the HAAS, since it “contextualizes the Americas in national, regional and global frames of reference.”

 

 

Ildikó Limpár

Pázmány Péter Catholic University Budapest

 

The American Colonizer as a Bloodsucker: Cole Haddon's Dracula TV Series (2013)

 

            The British-American TV series Dracula (2013-14), canceled after its first season of ten episodes is mostly referred to as a “reimagining” of Bram Stoker's Dracula novel. Keeping the original setting of Victorian England yet treating the novel freely, the series recontextualizes the well-known characters and themes of the original piece. The paper focuses on how some of the changes successfully contribute to understanding this new Dracula character as a cultural signifier of our time, presenting an Americanized Dracula as a colonizer. This notable change in the concept of the character allows us to rethink America's position as a colonizer communicated via the metaphorical use of the vampire.

            One of the important features to consider in this respect how the TV series breaks with the original East-West simple binarism, thus problematizing the understanding of what Europe is by subverting Dracula's character when presenting him as both Eastern European and American, while connecting the economic-political forces that Dracula fights against to the Eastern European Order of the Dragon. The American background reinforces Dracula as an “Other” in nineteenth century England, but also lends an aspect of inventiveness and modernism to its character. This feature evokes the theme of technology versus religious heritage that is central in Stoker's work in a transformed manner, identifying the vampire as a threat both ancient and modern. To support the observation that this newly fashioned Dracula is subversive and reflective of our age, the special features of the substantially redesigned subsidiary character Renfield will also be looked at.

 

 

Éva Mathey

University of Debrecen

 

The Monroe Doctrine and Post-World War One Europe

 

            One of the fundamental principles of American foreign policy has been the Monroe Doctrine, the century-old ideology of hemispheric separation, which, following US involvement in World War One seemed to have taken root again during the 1920s and 1930s. The US Senate had not signed the Paris peace treaties, and objected to American membership in the League of Nations; so the United States refused to undertake the political and military commitment to, and the responsibility for enforcing the peace, and decidedly pursued the policy of non-entanglement, primarily with European issues. While the US declined to accept international commitments and obligations, political isolationism from Europe every now and then was loosened up in accordance with ever-increasing American interests in the European economy due to mainly the interrelated questions of debts, wartime and peacetime loans and the claims, reparations, occupation costs as well as other economic privileges arising from the separate peace treaties the US signed with European countries. The opportunity for US investments and prospective trade relations with post-war Europe also underlined American economic interests. The presentation proposes to highlight the contradictions of the American policy of hemispheric separation with regard to Europe after World War One, and, at the same time, it discusses how the idea of political isolation had affected the US scope of action to revisit the Paris peace settlement, and create what Frank N. Costigliola calls an “awkward dominion.”

 

 

Zsolt Máté

University of Pécs

 

Daily Life in Camp Kilmer, 1956-1957

 

            In my presentation I will introduce the daily life of the Hungarian refugees in Camp Kilmer as represented in the archival documents of the US President’s Committee for Hungarian Refugee Relief and the U.S. Army. Camp Kilmer was an US Army camp where all the cca. 32 000 Hungarian refugees went through between 9 November 1956 and 9 May of 1957. The refugees made paperwork, took English courses, job interviews and attended several social programs (for example greeting Santa Klaus). As the US Army had to reopen the camp after a year of emptiness, they also had to solve language issues with setting up several Hungarian signs. With the use of the US Army daily reports I could reconstruct the daily events of the camp. Also, I am able to present the process of what the refugee had to do in order to be able to start his/her new life in the United States. While the US Army was responsible for the camp, several other organizations worked there, like US Public Health Service or the State Department. In my presentation I will introduce the daily life in the camp with pictures taken by US Army personnel that nobody could see in the last decades.

 

 

Judit Molnár

University of Debrecen

 

Québec Enlivened: Montréal Seen through the Lenses of a Contemporary Anglophone Writer (Gail Scott)

 

            Gail Scott’s novel Heroine (1987) is among the forerunners of what Linda Leith (2010) calls "Anglo Literary Revival" in Québec in the 1990s and afterwards. Nationalism gained importance both in English Canada and in Québec (French Canada) in the 1960s. English-language writers in Québec have become “doubly marginalized”; it is a minority within a minority, a close-knit community that has been trying to find possible ways for a meaningful “survival.” Scott is a bilingual, voluntary, “domestic,” and internal migrant in Canada who meandered through her voyages from Ontario to Québec, and has fully immersed herself in the intercultural milieu of Montréal.

            The protagonist in the novel under discussion has a very similar inter/transcultural background to that of the author. On the 10th anniversary (1980) of the October Crisis in Montréal, she remembers the events of Québec’s Sovereignty Movement including the terrorist activities, murders and kidnappings. The novel recounts the incidents through a “narrative of belonging” that embodies both displacement and emplacement. The main character’s liminal state (an Anglophone in a basically French cultural ambiance) is closely connected to her interrelatedness to and interdependence on other people/s and neighborhoods in and outside the city. Through her memories a mixed sense of belonging develops, a transformative experience is in the process of being unearthed. I argue that the novel demonstrates that the traditional border/s of nations (English, French and also allophones) have been transformed and spatially unbound communities have started to appear. The novel is a testimony to possible identity formations that transcend locations and boundaries with which individuals interact, the result is manifest in the multiplicity of translocal affiliations. I wish to elucidate the impact of the city that is inextricably linked to the “heroine’s” self-definition as a woman.

 

 

Judit Nagy

Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church Budapest

 

Cultural Encounters in Ins Choi’s Kim’s Convenience

 

            Korean immigration into Canada has been a relatively recent phenomenon. Statistical data reveal that the Korean-Canadian population is largely composed of first generation immigrants, and Koreans have maintained strong family ties even when immigrating into Canada (Cf. Lindsay 2007, Yoo 2008, Park and Sarkar 2007, Noh and Kaspar 2007), which makes their community an interesting research subject from the point of acculturation and transculturation. In the foreword to his play entitled Kim’s Convenience, Korean-Canadian playwright Ins Choi introduces the work—which has toured Canada and is now being adapted for the small screen by CBC—as follows: it is “my love letter to my parents and to all first-generation immigrants who call Canada their home” (V). After defining and interpreting the notions acculturation and transculturation, the paper aims at exploring what acculturation patterns the characters of Ins Choi’s play realize, and to what extent transculturation is visible in their life.

 

 

Lenke Németh

University of Debrecen

 

Haunted Borders, Nostalgia, and Narration:

Cherri Moraga’s Giving Up the Ghost and Helena Maria Viramontes’ “The Cariboo Cafe”

 

            “Regarded as an inner space of psychic and emotional resonance” (Vallis) nostalgia shapes plot, theme, and narration in Cherri Moraga’s drama Giving Up the Ghost (1986) and Helena Maria Viramontes’ short story “The Cariboo Cafe” (1985). Within their own generic frames of reference, they stage personal lives that are forced to function and play out an existence on the borders of two cultures and countries, the US-Mexican and the US- El Salvadorian, respectively. Both authors engage in a critical dialogue about the local and transnational histories and stories of their characters who struggle with their inner shadows and ghosts as well as with various forms of outer societal oppression in the borderlands. I argue that utilizing the spatial and temporal aspects of nostalgia Moraga and Viramontes introduce a complex interplay of focus that constantly shifts narrative perspectives from distant to specific, from past to present, whereby they create a “register of affect” in the borderlands. I will examine visual images of historical dislocation and cultural relocation through the lenses of nostalgia and affect, while positing that the histories and identities thus evoked in the borderlands remain fragmentary and entangled.

 

 

Zoltán Peterecz

Eszterházy Károly University of Applied Sciences Eger

Reflection of and about Hungary in the English-Speaking World in the Interwar Years

           
The presentation would like to serve as an addition of the perceived historical picture of foreign perception of Hungary in the Anglo-Saxon world, relying on articles published in British but mainly in American periodicals and magazines. While some of the articles were by Hungarian authors, the majority was not and, therefore, they can give a good indication about the impressions that Anglo-Saxon peoples were getting about Interwar Hungary. One can find voices from both the Left and Right of the political spectrum, positive and negative interpretations of Hungary alike in such well-known periodicals as The New Republic and Foreign Affairs, or lesser known outlets as The Living Age or Current History. This picture is a colorful one, spanning from politics to economics to cultural aspects.

 

 

Károly Pintér

Pázmány Péter Catholic University Budapest

 

American Civil Religion and Political Rhetoric: Two Case Studies from the 2000s

 

            The paradigm of American civil religion, after its brief vogue in the 1970s and its relative eclipse in the following two decades, has experienced a revival after 9/11. This development was clearly related to a substantial change in the national mood and the conservative turn in national politics: George W. Bush, a proud born-again Christian, consciously utilized well-established rhetorical elements of civil religion in his political rhetoric, particularly after he proclaimed the War on Terror. His successor, Barack Obama, also displayed an attraction to a religiously tinged rhetoric, albeit with significantly different emphases. In my presentation, I would like to provide a brief contrastive analysis of the two Presidents’ civil religious rhetoric, with particular attention to their utilization of traditional clichés, formulae and archetypes, as well as their adaptive strategies to accommodate the altered social realities and the transformed audience expectations of the twenty-first century USA.

 

 

Babett Rubóczki

University of Debrecen

Bodyspaces of Intimate Harm: Emotional Geographies of Illness and Recovery

in Ana Castillo's So Far From God

 

            By investigating the inextricably intricate relationship between Chicana social, cultural and spiritual identity and geography in Ana Castillo’s So Far From God (1993), I aim to demonstrate that the emotions of the female characters not only gain expression in spatial and geographical terms but also affect and deconstruct the cultural, sexual, gendered, and geographical borders assigned to them. The novel foregrounds Joyce Davidson’s perception that “the first and foremost, and most immediate felt geography is the body, the site of emotional experience and expression”. Castillo’s work features four sisters, who live near the New Mexican border and whose impaired or often even fatally injured bodies signify the patriarchal exploitation and cultural stigmatization of the female body. However, these female figures challenge the confinements of their gendered boundaries, which is manifest in their emotional and spiritual power to become healed as well as healing bodies of both themselves and their community. Through their powerful emotional relations to each other based on solidarity, empathy or bereavement, these sisters are capable of affecting the space relegated to the domestic home, nature, sacred sites (such as Chimayo) or the politicized sites of the US factory and Saudi Arabia. Their bodies as embodied emotional geographies signify their female empowerment to deconstruct and renegotiate the borders prescribed for the Chicana identity by the white patriarchal society and Chicano male community.

 

 

László Sári B.

University of Pécs

Literature Meets the Crisis: The Case of DeLillo’s Cosmopolis

 

            Don DeLillo’s novel of 2003 met mixed critical reaction for the poise of the writing and its bravado of joggling with ideas it cannot possibly tackle in the format in which it is written. My presentation will connect these issues of form and content to suggest that Cosmopolis’s central aesthetic preoccupation with the asymmetry—of power relations and social and economic processes, but also of the body as epitomized in Eric Packer’s anatomical disfiguration in the novel—yields an interpretation beyond the division of form and content, one that probes into the ethical possibilities of representing, or as the case may be, anticipating, the global financial crisis.

 

 

Éva Eszter Szabó

Eötvös Loránd University Budapest

 

The Migration Factor and the American Civil War

 

            Migration—in its international and internal forms alike—has been one of the most important driving forces in American history, and as such it has played a crucial role in each and every phase of the nation’s life. The direct or indirect significance and impact of migration can be traced from colonial times to the present, and the era of the Civil War is most exciting and illuminating from the viewpoint of the political, economic, and social interests working behind contemporary population movements. The point for us to explore is the complex role that the migration factor played in the American Civil War. In addition to the obvious significance of immigration in the war process, less conspicuous aspects of the migration factor will also be addressed. These include the impact of emigration from the United States in the early years of the war, then from the Confederacy at the end of the war. Equally important to consider are the effects of internal migration upon the Civil War. These involve the form of voluntary migration, such as homesteading, and that of involuntary or forced migration, such as slave refugee movements or Indian relocation. The claim put forward in the paper is that the migration factor contributed significantly to deciding the outcome of the Civil War.

 

 

Andrea F. Szabó

University of Pannonia Veszprém

 

“An older and darker Arcadia”: Cormac McCarthy’s Southwestern Novels

 

            Cormac McCarthy’s southwestern novels are noted to represent a sudden change in the author’s career not only because McCarthy moved to the Southwest from the South of the United Sates but also because this move has fundamentally changed the settings of his fiction as well as, it seems, his themes and interests. His southern novels are customarily discussed within the Southern Gothic tradition, which line up the suffocatingly dense atmosphere of the region. In contrast, his southwestern novels, especially his Border Trilogy, have been seen to eulogize the cowboy quests in the wide open prairies. My paper explores the ways in which McCarthy’s texts construct the Mexican North and the American Southwest, arguing that notwithstanding the open vistas presented in All the Pretty Horses (1992), The Crossing (1994), and Cities of the Plain (1998), the settings in his novels of the Borderland, also including Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness of the West (1985) and No Country for Old Men (2005), show a lot in common with his Southern locales. Rather than celebrating the freedom of cowboys, so dear to the Western, McCarthy’s revisiting of the genre should be read as an elegy to the loss of an American pastoral dream, which has always already been tainted by violence. Thus, rather than moving away from the focus on violence, which tended to exist on individual and interpersonal levels in the Southern novels, McCarthy extends violence to regional and national levels in his narratives of the Borderland, which thus becomes a dark Arcadia.

 

 

Gertrud Szamosi

University of Pécs

 

Misplaced Notions of Home and Belonging in Canadian Diaspora Literature

 

            According to the writer Tamas Dobozy, all North American writing is to some degree the result of diaspora. Dobozy is a second generation Hungarian diaspora writer living in Canada. His latest collection of short stories Siege 13, revisits Budapest at the time of World War II, and connects the historical events to the present lives of the Hungarian diaspora community of Toronto. Having to accommodate differences, the need to transform and change has provided some of the most formative experience in the context of Canadian culture. Margaret Atwood observes, that the immigrant to Canada when searching for a new identity discovers that “there is no new ‘Canadian’ identity ready for him to step into: he is confronted only by a nebulosity, a blank; no ready-made ideology is provided for him (Survival).” In case of the Hungarian-Canadian diaspora the problematic nature of transatlantic connections, the strong attachment to European roots, together with the complexities of Central-European identities, often set hurdles to matters of identification. Dobozy addresses some of the key markers of identity like home, name, language and culture, that have become increasingly problematic and challenging when combined with the uncertainty and lack of a Canadian identity. Dobozy also foregrounds the futility, the absurdity and some of the damaging aspects of diasporic existence that have haunted the lives of the Hungarian diaspora for several generations. My paper tries to assess the experience of diasporic communities in relation to the universal experience of dislocation, loss and grief. With the help of Dobozy’s narratives, I am going to offer models of identity construction that diasporic subjects face as they try to come to terms with their irretrievable losses.

 

 

Mónika Szente-Varga

National University of Public Service Budapest

 

A “True” Opportunist: Gabor Naphegyi in the Americas

 

            “I dip my pen in the sources of the past and the present. My reviewer is THE TRUTH.” This is how the English language book The History of Hungary—focused on the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848/49—begins, a piece of writing elaborated for the US public and published in New York in 1849. The author has for a long time been a mystery, reflected in the titles of the investigations related to him: The Enigmatic Gabor Naphegyi (1960) and From the Sahara to Mexico: the Adventurous Life of G. Naphegyi (1992). Naphegyi described himself as a Hungarian physician, and appears in various US, Latin American and Hungarian publications as such, although he might have been neither Hungarian nor a doctor. This investigation is an effort to shed new light on his activities on the American continent (namely, the USA, Mexico and Venezuela), that take us to the field of Inter-American Studies and to the times that preceded the modernization era in Latin America: decades with severe economic problems, internal strife, armed conflicts and, at the same time, some breezes of change, including the first attempts to construct railroads and, in general, develop and improve the transport system. Progress, inventions and modern technology were often associated with Europe or the United States. Naphegyi, a European by birth and later a US citizen, could seem to be a guarantee of these. Yet appearances might not always be true in this case…

 

 

András Tarnóc

Eszterházy Károly University of Applied Sciences Eger

 

Progressing from “mistress’ lap-dog to freeman:” Commemorating the slavery experience in the Hispanic world as shown by the Narrative of Juan Francisco Manzano

 

            The narrative of Juan Francisco Manzano Life of the Negro Poet, Written by Himself, and Translated from the Spanish by R. R. M (1840) is the first document describing slavery in Cuba. First only available in Spanish, it was written between 1835 and 1839 and includes not only the actual experiences of the protagonist, but his poems along with the verses written by the Irish abolitionist, Richard Robert Madden. The Narrative is a unique document providing a valuable bilingual insight into slavery in Cuba, or by extension, the Hispanic world.

 

 

Zoltán Vajda

University of Szeged

 

Modernity, Generations, and the Subjugation of Jefferson’s Indians

 

            This paper offers an analysis of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas about generations with regard to Native Americans within a broader intellectual context, drawing on the scholarship of historians Hannah Spahn and David W. Noble. Informed by the Enlightenment view of generations as discreet units of a given population Jefferson thought of them as isolated entities, each taking a possibly distinct place in the process of rational development and civilization. Their isolation implying difference from the “parental stock,” he also regarded them as being in an antagonistic relationship with one another, equaling the distinct status of a nation. I argue that understanding of the generational divide proved crucial in Jefferson’s assessment of Native American cultures and their capacity for change and assimilation into white American society. His plans to break generational ties within Native American cultures was an integral part of his project to bring them under the power of modern rational time as well as to achieve such a change gradually, thus leaving parents (i.e. older generations) behind. Aware of the Native Americans’ generational model being different from the modern European one, he took serious efforts to impose his own model of generations upon them by calling for an epistemological revolution among them, promoting their assimilation. Since Jefferson connected the civilization level of a people with its ability to love, I also argue that his imagining generations without any links including bonds of affection it was easier for him to imagine Native Americans as being transferable into modern rational white culture.

 

 

Balázs Venkovits

University of Debrecen

 

Closing the Gates: Mexico and Canada as Alternative Destinations for Immigrants

 

            Despite its global range, international repercussions, and ramifications ranging across numerous boundaries, migration is still often perceived as if it was the matter of bilateral relations, many studies focusing on the interactions between two countries when investigating migration patterns of an era. While this is a suitable approach in certain cases, it often results in geographical limitations and does not provide enough opportunities for more scrupulous analysis. This paper aims to widen such an approach, transcend nation-based models, and study migration in a North-American context, when it introduces changes in migration patterns to the United States, Canada and Mexico. It focuses on the period following the major restrictions on immigration in the United States and explores their effects on North America. It presents these countries as possible destinations for migrants, the factors influencing decisions of immigrants, and the impact of US restrictions on the two neighboring countries. The presentation widens the focus not only from the perspective of the receiving side by studying three countries but brings examples and brief case studies from different migrant nationalities and communities. The paper attempts to answer, for example, how restrictions influenced Chinese migration patterns or how Hungarians reacted to the unforeseen limitations on entry to the United States. And in general, it presents the impact of strict quotas on migration at the time.

 

 

Zsófia Anna Tóth

University of Szeged

 

“I’ve been things and seen places.”

The Diversity of the Americas in Mae West’s Works

 

            In my paper I will examine and reveal how Mae West challenged and widened the interpretational realm of what is America or American in her works and how she tried to present America, or rather the Americas in its/their complexity and diversity. While she does not seem to be a person who poses a real challenge or threat to serious concerns and issues, still, she does that in various forms. For example, the one-liner in the title is from I’m No Angel (1933) when a (WASP) middle-class suitor is boasting that “I have been to places and I have seen things,” to which West’s character replies: “Oh yeah? And I’ve been things and seen places,” which holds much more relevance concerning the everyday realities of average people. I will primarily focus on her films but also include some of her plays and novels to explore her concept of America/the Americas. In her oeuvre, she geographically as well as culturally covers almost the entire United States (from New York, to New Orleans, to San Francisco, to Alaska etc.) while also making trips to (or she even lives there for a while) Canada, Central and South America forming a wider concept of America. Additionally, race, class and gender issues are also addressed in her works as people from various races, ethnicities, nationalities as well as gender get a voice and have visibility, even their accents are considered important; while people from various classes also have a right to tell their stories and have a chance for positive representation as well as women of all color, nationality and social layer.   

 

 

Gabriella Vöő

University of Pécs

 

World Systems in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes

 

            Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1996 novel subverts Euro-American paradigms related to economy, gender, corporeality, and feeling. Following the adventures of a 9-year-old Native American girl in locations as distinct as the Arizona desert and the cities of Riverside, California, New York City, Bath (England) and Lucca (Italy), Gardens in the Dunes re-examines cultural and gender-based binaries like capitalist-imperialist vs. ecologically based economy, chronological history and deep time, individualist vs. community-based conceptions of the self, as well as male vs. female forms of knowledge and sentiment. Silko re-defines the concept of “the garden” and holds forth a world in which a rhizomatic network of female affect and solidarity supplants male dynamics of domination and exploitation. Also, the novel calls for a radical shift in our anthropocentric vision. Gardens in the Dunes proposes that community includes all living creatures, transcends conventional social morality and even boundaries between species; the movement of living organisms and goods is mobility across space and time; the body is not a bounded unit but a conduct of life and part of a global network; the city is just one temporary and time-bound manifestation of the processes of nature. I argue that Silko offers an alternative to the center/periphery binary of world systems theory.

 

 

Elizabeth Walsh

Pázmány Péter Catholic University Budapest

 

White Fear after 9/11

 

            Shortly following the turn of the twenty-first century, the US was rocked by the most significant and catastrophic act of war on the home front since 1865. Since, American life can be categorized within the framework of pre-9/11 naivety and post-9/11 paranoia. Thomas Friedman “attributed the colossal failure of U.S. intelligence prior to September 11 to the trusting good nature of the American character that could not conceive of such evil” or fathom the possibility of an attack on American soil (Kaplan). Once 9/11 occurred, however, the US was irrevocably changed: in the abstract, 9/11 marks the end of an age of generous inclusion in the United States. Through the lenses of rhetoric, social psychology, history, and culture, I hope to trace the origins of current anti-immigrant sentiment and the expansion of what NPR refers to as “white fear” to September 11^th, 2001. I will show what this means for immigrants or those resembling immigrants in American society. Moreover, I will attempt to unearth the underlying issues in American culture which have allowed for the rising appeal of Donald Trump, encapsulating this hateful and paranoid America through his ethnically-charged, borderline-fascist, and reactionary hate-speech. The embodiment of “white fear: is visible in the strong support for Trump as the next Republican presidential nominee for a large portion of the campaign cycle. Trump is a current frontrunner who, I argue, is the result of this new, post-9/11 American psyche and would seem quite out of place in a pre-9/11 America.