Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek

I-Chun Wang

Cultural Discourse in Taiwan

Irene Sywenky

University of Alberta. Research Institute for Comparative Literature and Cross-Cultural Studies

The systemic and empirical approach to literature and culture as theory and application

This work is a comparative study of nineteenth-century English-Canadian and French Canadian novel prefaces, a previously unexplored literary topic. As a study in Comparative Literature - with the application of a specific literary framework and methodology - the study conforms to theoretical and methodological postulates formulated in and prescribed by this framework when applied. This a priori postulate necessitates that the research on and the presentation of the Canadian novel preface be carried out in a specific manner, as follows. First, the study will establish the hypothesis that the preface to nineteenth-century English-Canadian and French-Canadian novels is a genre in its own right. This hypothesis will rest on the following: 1) a taxonomical survey of related terms meaning "preface"; 2) a survey of secondary Iiterature of works dealing with the preface; 3) a discussion of the theoretical framework and methodology of the Empirical Theory of Literature and its appropriateness for the study of the preface; and 4) a discussion of the process of the compilation of the corpus of nineteenth-century Canadian novel prefaces (Chapter one). In a second step, the theoretical postulate outlined in the hypothesis will be put into practice by the development and production of a preface typology (Chapter two). In a third step, further tenets of the Empirical Theory of Literature will be tested on the corpus of the prefaces (Chapter three). In a fourth step, the prefaces will be analysed following the tenets formulated in and prescribed by the systemic framework applied (Chapter four).

On the Rhetoric and Function of Prefacing Novels in the Nineteenth-Century Canadas

The Social Dimensions of Fiction

Louise Olga Vasvári

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Contents -- Introduction to Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies -- Part One: History, Theory, and Methodology for Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies -- The Study of Hungarian Culture as Comparative Central European Cultural Studies -- Literacy, Culture, and History in the Work of Thienemann and Hajnal -- Vámbéry, Victorian Culture, and Stoker's Dracula -- Memory and Modernity in Fodor's Geographical Work on Hungary -- The Fragmented (Cultural) Body in Polcz's Asszony a fronton (A Woman on the Front) -- Part Two: Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Literature and Culture -- Contemporary Hungarian Literary Criticism and the Memory of the Socialist Past -- The Absurd as a Form of Realism in Hungarian Literature -- On the German and English Versions of Márai's A gyertyák csonkig égnek (Die Glut and Embers) -- Exile, Homeland, and Milieu in the Oral Lore of Carpatho-Rusyn Jews -- Part Three: Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and the Other Arts -- Nation, Gender, and Race in the Ragtime Culture of Millennial Budapest -- Jewish (Over)tones in Viennese and Budapest Operetta -- Curtiz, Hungarian Cinema, and Hollywood -- Lost Dreams and Sacred Visions in the Art of Ámos -- Art Nouveau and Hungarian Cultural Nationalism -- Part Four: Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Gender Studies -- Hungarian Political Posters, Clinton, and the (Im)possibility of Political Drag -- The Cold War, Fashion, and Resistance in 1950s Hungary -- Sándor/Sarolta Vay, a Gender Bender in Fin-de-Siècle Hungary -- Women Managers Communicating Gender in Hungary -- Part Five: Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Contemporary Hungary -- Commemoration and Contestation of the 1956 Revolution in Hungary -- About the Jewish Renaissance in Post-1989 Hungary -- Aspects of Contemporary Hungarian Literature and Cinema.

Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies

Louise O. Vasvári

The studies presented in the collected volume Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies -- edited by Steven Totosy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvari -- are intended as an addition to scholarship in (comparative) cultural studies. More specifically, the articles represent scholarship about Central and East European culture with special attention to Hungarian culture, literature, cinema, new media, and other areas of cultural expression. On the landscape of scholarship in Central and East Europe (including Hungary), cultural studies has acquired at best spotty interest and studies in the volume aim at forging interest in the field. The volume's articles are in five parts: part one, "History Theory and Methodology of Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies," include studies on the prehistory of multicultural and multilingual Central Europe, where vernacular literatures were first institutionalized for developing a sense of national identity. Part two, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Literature and Culture" is about the re-evaluation of canonical works, as well as Jewish studies which has been explored inadequately in Central European scholarship. Part three, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Other Arts," includes articles on race, jazz, operetta, and art, fin-de-siecle architecture, communist-era female fashion, and cinema. In part four, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Gender," articles are about aspects of gender and sex(uality) with examples from fin-de-siecle transvestism, current media depictions of heterodox sexualities, and gendered language in the workplace. The volume's last section, part five, "Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Contemporary Hungary," includes articles about post-1989 issues of race and ethnic relations, citizenship and public life, and new media.

This book serves several purposes, all very much needed in today's embattled situation of the humanities and the study of literature. First, in Chapter One, the author proposes that the discipline of Comparative Literature is a most advantageous approach for the study of literature and culture as it is a priori a discipline of cross-disciplinarity and of international dimensions. After a "Manifesto" for a New Comparative Literature, he proceeds to offer several related theoretical frameworks as a composite method for the study of literature and culture he designates and explicates as the "systemic and empirical approach." Following the introduction of the proposed New Comparative Literature, the author applies his method to a wide variety of literary and cultural areas of inquiry such as "Literature and Cultural Participation" where he discusses several aspects of reading and readership (Chapter Two), "Comparative Literature as/and Interdisciplinarity" (Chapter Three) where he deals with theory and application for film and literature and medicine and literature, "Cultures, Peripheralities, and Comparative Literature" (Chapter Four) where he proposes a theoretical designation he terms "inbetween peripherality" for the study of East Central European literatures and cultures as well as ethnic minority writing, "Women's Literature and Men Writing about Women"(Chapter Five) where he analyses texts written by women and texts about women written by men in the theoretical context of Ethical Constructivism, "The Study of Translation and Comparative Literature" (Chapter Six) where after a theoretical introduction he presents a new version of Anton Popovic's dictionary for literary translation as a taxonomy for the study of translation, and "The Study of Literature and the Electronic Age" (Chapter Seven), where he discusses the impact of new technologies on the study of literature and culture. The analyses in their various applications of the proposed New Comparative Literature involve modern and contemporary authors and their works such as Dorothy Richardson, Margit Kaffka, Mircea Cartarescu, Robert Musil, Alfred Döblin, Hermann Hesse, Péter Esterházy, Dezsö Kosztolányi, Michael Ondaatje, Endre Kukorelly, Else Seel, and others.

Theory, Method, Application

Comparative Literature

Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature

A Zepetneki Tötösy Család Adattára

The work presented in the volume in fields of the humanities and social sciences is based on 1) the notion of the existence and the "describability" and analysis of a culture (including, e.g., history, literature, society, the arts, etc.) specific of/to the region designated as Central Europe, 2) the relevance of a field designated as Central European Holocaust studies, and 3) the relevance, in the study of culture, of the "comparative" and "contextual" approach designated as "comparative cultural studies." Papers in the volume are by scholars working in Holocaust Studies in Australia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Serbia, the United Kingdom, and the US.

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek

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