<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The article focuses on the analysis of the ideas of Aladár Kuncz, a writer, literary critic and editor who defined Transylvanian Hungarian literature after 1918 in a European context. The concept of Transylvanism is discussed through the debates of the interwar period, and is situated within the context of Hungarian literary modernism. In the light of the Transylvanian literary ideas of the 1920s and 1930s, minority / regional literatures would have been directly related to a new concept of European and world literature beyond national literatures, along a line of thought that acknowledged the deterministic character of regionalism, and prioritized it also at the level of cultural memory, considering it to be primary over linguistic, national, and the changing geographical boundaries. These endeavours sought to revive an emphatic idea of Central Europe with its strict ideals of quality besides strong local, decentralized, yet transnational aspirations, while making them compatible with the preservation of linguistic and cultural ties with the three traditional Transylvanian nations. The article also discusses the reasons why, in the midst of the 1930s, facing political restrictions, the literary form of Transylvanism became outdated in the eye of the younger generations of the Hungarian community.
</abstract>

A Missed Opportunity? Transylvania as a Virtual Central Europe

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In his article “Will to Language, Culture, and Power” Gábor Vaderna investigates different discourses of violence in early 19th-century Hungary. According to Norbert Elias, violence has not disappeared from modern society but the individual has transferred the institution, opportunity, and protocols of violence to the state. There are also aesthetic consequences of this process. The question is whether institutionalized violence was a tool of power to stabilize modern societies or rather it was in fact a threat to aesthetic beauty. From the analysis of a poem by the Hungarian poet, Dániel Berzsenyi (1776–1832), written in wartime, Vaderna concludes that the Central European noble classes perceived a tension between the eternal virtue and real history. The exercise of power, the possession of violence and the nation-building potential of culture were closely intertwined in their political language.
</abstract>

Will to Language, Culture, and Power. Dániel Berzsenyi and his Martial Poetry

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Our paper discusses the methodological implications of an ethnographic linguistic research project in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Starting from pertinent definitions of linguistic ethnography and interpretations of the field, we offer a demonstration of the process in which this particular participatory research project was faced with the fact that the field became unavailable and inaccessible for the non-local participants. We argue that moving the research online in this case does not mean a shift to “virtual ethnography” (Hine) or “digital ethnography” (Varis), but provides an example for the research site as an emerging construct which adds to the complexities of ethnographic research.
</abstract>

Reinventing Linguistic Ethnographic Fieldwork During the COVID-19 Pandemic

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The discourses on 20th century Eastern European regional literatures are predominantly determined by the use of terminology and interrelationships of national and ethnic literatures, which originated in social and state organizational embeddedness. Besides, the majority–minority relation is significantly present in the discourse on these literatures, with this relation representing a – sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit – approach of colonization. If ethnic (or minority) literatures are not only examined as opposed to national (or majority) literatures, it might occur that ethnic literatures themselves often resorted to practices of colonization when describing the literary context. This paper aims at examining the processes of literary history writing of German and Hungarian literatures from Romania, and by looking at them from a transnational perspective, identifying the in-between space where the mutually oppressive spatial practices are eliminated.
</abstract>

Practices of Colonization in Regional Literary Histories

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The topics of the present research are, in a larger sense, two multilingual and multicultural regions: the Tornio Valley in Northern Scandinavia and Transylvania in Eastern Europe. In a narrower sense, I am analysing two novels written in minority languages, a Transylvanian Hungarian novel written by Károly Molter, entitled <italic>Tibold Márton</italic> and a novel written in Meänkieli by Bengt Pohjanen, <italic>Jopparikuninkhaan poika</italic> (The Smuggler King’s Son). I attempt to answer two main research questions: 1. How is the belonging of the two main characters to a different language and ethnic group presented in the analysed Hungarian and Meänkieli novels? 2. How can the borders between “us” and “them” be constructed through inclusion and exclusion and how can they be crossed at the individual level? I will thus concentrate on some aspects of the narratives of inclusion and exclusion, as represented in the above-mentioned novels.
</abstract>

Components of Belonging in Two Finno-Ugric Minority Literatures

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Until about 1985, apart from traditional dialectological research, the study of Hungarian in Hungary focused mostly on the Codified Standard Hungarian variety, whose speakers are powerful in social but not in numerical terms. Sociolinguistic research since 1985 has now resulted in a program which embraces not only the 10 million (largely monolingual) Hungarians in Hungary proper, but also the 3 million bi- or multilingual minority Hungarians in the seven neighboring countries (kin-states). This program was initiated by researchers of the Department of Sociolinguistics in the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. This paper offers linguists who do not read Hungarian an overview of this research carried out between 1985 and 2022.
</abstract>

Hungarian Sociolinguistics in the Carpathian Basin, 1985–2022

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The study reviews from an ecopoetic point of view the tendencies in Hungarian poetry of recent years that emphasise the biopoetic aspects of existence. László Lázár Lövétei’s eclogues, for example, renew the discourse from the perspective of the ancient tradition, while Tamás Korpa and Mátyás Sirokai transform the reader’s mental consciousness by focusing on the plant life, and in doing so, reassess and rethink the concept of being embedded in nature. For example, Gábor Dávid Németh combines the mechanisms of cultural memory, the ecosystems of environmental awareness and the plant metaphor system arising from the organicity of language. Gábor Mezei approaches the question from the perspective of hybridity. Besides blurring the traditional boundaries of body and self, these authors also exploit the subversive, resistant character of ecopoetics, not once asserting the principle of what they call the ecopoetic imperative whose topological, tropological, entropological and ethnological dimensions are worth exploring.
</abstract>

Ecological imperatives in contemporary Hungarian poetry

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
This study treats literature as a reflection of cultural memory and explores how literature mediates between mythical and cultural relations to the natural world. The paper aims to promote interdisciplinary dialogue between cultural memory, ecocriticism, and literary studies and draws on foundational texts from these disciplines and previous research that seeks to link them as a theoretical basis. By analysing the works of Gábor Devecseri, chosen as representative examples, the paper demonstrates how literature reveals the return to the deep layers of cultural memory represented in myths and the defects of the relationship between humans and nature, and how it thus contributes to the understanding of a complex (and interdisciplinary) process.
</abstract>

The Oleander Bush at Delphi, The Minotaur in the Bullring

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The reception of Sándor Petőfi’s poems and the critical discourse on them in German by bilingual German poets and publicists in Hungary began during the poet’s lifetime and ran parallel to the development of his career. In the same period, however, from the mid-1840s, a very intense interest in his person and his poetry, which was even deeper and more diverse than in German, was awakened in southern Slavic, especially Serbian, literature. This paper explores the possible reasons for his integration in Serbian poetry and public poetry. Among the most important factors is the fact that in the 18th and 19th centuries, strong centres of Serbian culture developed in Hungary, including Buda, and that in the northern part of present-day Serbia, in Vojvodina, the population had for centuries been of mixed nationality, including Serbs, Hungarians and Germans. As a result, a large part of the Serbian intelligentsia spoke Hungarian, and many of the Hungarians in Vojvodina had spoken Serbian since the last century, so they could read each other’s literature in the original. Petőfi’s poetry, like much of 19th century Hungarian literature, was translated by renowned authors, sometimes of European quality, and his poetry was an inspiration for Serbian Romanticism in terms of form, theme and poetics (Jovan Jovanović Zmaj, Đura Jakšić). Finally, it is worth mentioning the historical circumstances, the fact that, although the two peoples were on opposite political sides in the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848 and several times later, Petőfi’s figure transcended political differences and his reception remained unbroken even in the most difficult periods. The belief that Petőfi, who originally went by the name Petrovics, was of Serbian origin – a belief that is difficult to verify biographically – and which dates back to Petőfi’s own time, has contributed to this. The layers and trends in the history of Petőfi’s reception in Serbia also shed light on the mechanisms of intellectual relations in the common cultural space of the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe and the Western Balkans.
</abstract>

The “Giant Role Model”: the “Serbian” Petőfi

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In this study, I examine the complex intertwining of the relationship between man and nature through the activities of a typical group of farmers dominated by urban-rural farmers, the artisan cheese makers of Hungary. I focus on a specific issue, raw milk cheese making, where humans and microbes work together on a daily basis to produce a sellable product. In this context, I will describe how the complex, hybrid nature of the knowledge required for this process of cheese making is produced, and then review the different narratives of Hungarian cheesemakers about the method. I will then show how this method and the particular perspective it entails affects the daily practice of farming, and how working with invisible microbes transforms the fundamental way these farmers think about the relationship between humans and non-human actors.
</abstract>

It is Possible to Work with Them and Develop such a Mutually Good Relationship…”

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Historical film – a film genre supported in the Cold War era – has re-emerged in the 21st century in Eastern European cinemas, its success signalled by popularity, dedicated state financing funds or political support. This article frames the phenomenon within the Assmannian model of three communicative generations, suggested to be interlinked on the level of both the creative staff and the audience of Eastern European historical films. Based on box-office data of the Lumiere Database of the European Audiovisual Observatory, and research referring to further elements of canonization, it is argued that titles such as Polish <italic>Katyn</italic> (2007), Romanian <italic>Aferim!</italic> (2015) or Hungarian <italic>Bet on Revenge</italic> (2016) – the first majority production historical films to achieve significant audience, and, consequently, critical success in their domestic markets in the 21st century – signal a successful collective memory-work process. While in the major Polish market this may be inscribed within the three communicative generations of the victims, the forgetters and the mourners doing memory-work – possibly processing collective traumatization too –, the two small national examples fall outside the validity of the Assmannian model. In order to somewhat refine this apparent opposition between 21st century Eastern European major and small national collective memory-work through historical films, further examples from the Polish, Hungarian and Romanian top lists are examined. Poetic-medial features – the actualization of “trauma narratives” (Alexander 2012) or of postmodern irony, the employment of cinematic and/or televisual visuality – seem to facilitate collective memory-work differently for major and small national domestic audiences, activating or not their belonging to the three communicative generations with respect to the historical events represented in the films.
</abstract>

Popular historical films as collective memory-work in Eastern Europe: from Polish <italic>KATYN</italic> to Romanian <italic>AFERIM!</italic> and Hungarian <italic>BET ON REVENGE</italic>

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The focus of this paper is an ecocritical examination of Ádám Bodor’s <italic>The Birds of Verhovina</italic>. The study begins with an introduction to Hubert Zapf ’s theory of sustainable texts and the ecocritical concept of Greg Garrard’s Ecocriticism, and concludes with an interpretation of the chosen work along ecocritical tropes. The paper starts from the premise that Ádám Bodor’s work employs the rhetoric of ecocriticism, thereby closely linking literature to a wider web of discourses on nature and the environment. The hypothesis of the study is that the relationship between human and nature, nature and culture, and power and the individual are emphasised in the work. The inhabitants of Verhovina live in harmony with nature; wild and untamed nature not only provides the community with raw materials, but also creeps into the consciousness of the characters, determining their behaviour, their attitudes towards each other, as well as their way of thinking about life. However, the various signs of this shift of power suggest that a rupture has occurred in the hitherto harmonious relationship between the community and nature, the individual and nature.
</abstract>

There is no Other Air Here, we are Alive With the Air of the Paltinsky Meadow…”

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In this paper the author argues that the Christmas holidays, notwithstanding their international standing as a religious and commercial season, are most productively understood as a <italic>glocal</italic> phenomena, a concept intended to link the local with the global in a dialectics of homogenization and particularism. Juxtaposing data from Hungary and Eastern Europe, the author provides an anthropological analysis that highlights the transformative power Christmas traditions and Santa Claus have played in diverse cultural settings since the late twentieth-century. For even the imposition of communist ideology, conceived as a globalizing force, failed to eradicate images of Santa Claus; both his persona and that of his devilish imp, Krampus, survived such ruthless attempts at indoctrination with only the slightest of modifications. In view of its economic and cultural significance, this paper argues in favor of international recognition of Saint Nicholas day, December 6th, as a glocal civil holiday.
</abstract>

“DO YOU WANT TO BE KRAMPUS?” Santa Claus, globality and locality of Christmas tradition

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
The paper discusses two peculiarities of language use generally taken to be relative contact phenomena in case of Hungarian in bilingual, non-dominant context: the preference of analytical linguistic variants and non-standard plural forms. The data come from two sociolinguistic surveys conducted in Transylvania (in 1996 and 2009). The surveys were carried out with the participation of a representative sample of speakers. The 1996 survey was conducted with a quota sample (N = 216 in Romania and N = 107 in Hungary) and the 2009 sample with a representative sample (N = 4058 in Romania). The hypothesis that Romanian-dominant bilingual speakers tend to exhibit relative contact phenomena to a larger extent was supported with respect to these two issues. The results show that the occurrence of these phenomena is determined both by the language competence of the dominant language and by the regional characteristics of the bilingualism. The results confirm the possibility that the spoken-language properties under discussion are relative contact phenomena.
</abstract>

Two Relative Contact Phenomena in the Language use of Hungarians in Transylvania

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
Our study aimed to assess the level of reading comprehension, one of the cornerstones of education of the Hungarian minority in Slovakia, and to answer the research question of what kind of deficits need to be addressed in the development of reading comprehension. The research was conducted with the participation of students from primary schools with Hungarian as the language of instruction in Slovakia. In our study, we shed light on the problems found in cognitive reasoning, accurate interpretation of information and complex reading comprehension. The extent to which the development of new cognitive schemata caused problems for the studied groups was also investigated. In several cases, the responses were not based on textual information, but only on the respondents’ existing schemas. The results also show that it was a problem for the learners to answer both the multiple-choice questions and the open-ended and explanatory questions.
</abstract>

Difficulties in Reading Comprehension of Hungarian Primary School Students in Slovakia

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
<italic>The Present Tasks of Comparative Literature</italic> (<italic>Vorläufige Aufgaben der Vergleichenden Litteratur</italic>) is the most often-cited essay of the first international journal of comparative literature, the ActaComparationis Litterarum Universarum. The article proposes a revision of the generally established explanations of this pioneering text, and traces back the microcultural genealogy of the idea of freedom and autonomy associated with the emerging modern discipline of comparative literature in the essay. In this new intellectual framework both the essay and its broad horizon are interpreted as a glocal interplay of recycled and enthrallingly reinvented transnational ideas.
</abstract>

The Glocality of the Acta Comparationis Litterarum. Local Interpretations of Educational Freedom, Coercive Innovation and Comparative Literature

<abstract>
<title style='display:none'>Abstract</title>
In his article “Practical Rhythm and Time Projection”, István Berszán presents first a poetic experiment of Wordsworth in order to answer the question how to enter the rhythm of a happening. The argumentation is based on the assumption that Plato’s “allegory” of the cave is an experiment rather than a rhetorical construction and invokes contemporary string theory to show that everything that happens has its kinetic space as a special complementary rhythmic dimension. A second example reveals how Alain Badiou projects Saint Paul’s teaching and practice to the kinetic space of militant leftist struggle. The article concludes that instead of understanding allegory as a replacement based on similarity in the same rhetoric space, we have to take into consideration – or learn how to take into consideration – the multiple rhythmic dimensions of compared happenings.
</abstract>

Practical Rhythm and Time Projection

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Hungarian Studies Yearbook

The Hungarian Studies Yearbook provides an English-language forum for high-quality peer-reviewed research into the Hungarian language, literature, and culture (including ethnography, ethnology,...

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The Hungarian Studies Yearbook provides an English-language forum for high-quality peer-reviewed research into the Hungarian language, literature, and culture...