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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.
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Ecological imperatives in contemporary Hungarian poetry

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The present paper compares the author’s original proposal called ecorhythmology with contemporary ecophilosophies. After briefly outlining the background and results of more than two decades of research, it examines the seminal theses of Object Oriented Ontology (Graham Harman), Action Network Theory (Bruno Latour) and the concept of <italic>being ecological</italic> (Timothy Morton) from an ecorhythmological perspective. Taking stock of interesting similarities and correspondences, this analysis also raises new questions, to which the author proposes different solutions. The paper presents two critiques of the reductionism of string theory and compares Harman’s theory of metaphor with the concept of art based on gestural resonance. Further investigations connect Latour’s redistribution of agency to the intersubjective relationship between the human and non-human, and relate hybridity to proximity. In the second part of the paper, Morton’s different temporalities are juxtaposed with rhythmic dimensions, and finally, the article makes a difference between the casual, political and ethical approaches to the phenomenon of tuning. The stakes are always learning and relearning what kind of contact making can lead to greater peace in difficult human – non-human coexistence.
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Contemporary Ecosophies and Ecorhythmology

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

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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.
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The Oleander Bush at Delphi, The Minotaur in the Bullring

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The purpose of this study is to make a comparative analysis of the interconnections between language, environment and identity from an ecolinguistic point of view. It is meant to analyse the attachment of two Finno-Ugric poets, Demeter Lakatos and Alf Nilsen-Børsskog to their own cultural and natural environment.
Demeter Lakatos was a Csángó folk poet, who consciously adopted the local, popular dialect to express his loyalty to his ancestry, to his roots that lay in the Moldavian Csángó identity. Alf Nilsen-Børsskog was the first writer and poet who wrote in Kven. His literary work has been of great significance in the context of the cultural emancipation of his ethnic minority and the revitalization of their language.
The main things that keep together a minority community – especially an endangered community – are basically language, faith, and certain characteristics of their own local natural surroundings (including the place where – for one reason or another – they had to flee from). This can be practically anything: a mountain, a river, even a tree. And whatever it is, it has a special, almost sacred place in the hearts of the members of the community.
I have chosen these two poets because their poetry has not been much analysed and also because both belong to Finno-Ugric minorities whose languages are highly endangered, and this fact marks their attitude towards their environment.
This study follows a qualitative approach through discourse analysis, and the source of data are the volumes of poems written by Demeter Lakatos and Alf Nilsen- Børsskog.
</abstract>

Interconnection between language, environment and identity in the poems of the Csángó Demeter Lakatos and the Kven Alf Nilsen-Børsskog

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

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Contemporary press networks played a significant role in shaping the literary career-building strategies of Hungarian writers at the fin-de-siècle. Several of these writers served as journalists or maintained ties with numerous newspapers concurrently. The networks involved in the publication of an author’s text reveal valuable information on the operations of the literary institution (the literary establishment) during the era, particularly in the careers of relatively unknown authors like László Cholnoky. During the early years of his career, Cholnoky’s strategies diverged from those of his contemporaries in several ways: he refrained from publishing his first volume for an extended period, withdrew from publishing intermittently, and revised his work more frequently than others. This paper will investigate the publication networks Cholnoky utilised between the years 1900 and 1914, shedding light on the unique aspects of publishing and networking relevant in three periods.
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Rewriting – Republishing – Distribution

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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>

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

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Romanian IT professionals are marketized as young, highly skilled, and full of potential individuals. However, there is a contradiction in their image. In the discourse of international outsourcing, they are presented as cheap labour, while on the national and local level they are considered high earners. Under the privilege of income tax exemption, the IT sector is continuously growing and attracting labour, providing well-paying entry-level jobs and bringing in foreign capital. At the same time, on a symbolic level, it also developed a reputation as a facilitator of social ascension and of importer of European ideas. In this paper I aim to examine what drives people towards professional reorientation to IT. How is the idea of the middle class being used? What is the imaginary that makes people take on the risky and arduous road of re-professionalization and what are its consequences?
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Favoured subjects. The myth of the Middle Class and the imaginary of Cluj IT

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 5 (2023): Issue 1 (November 2023) ed. Edith KÁDÁR, István BERSZÁN, Árpád Töhötöm SZABÓ

Volume 4 (2022): Issue 1 (November 2022) ed. Emese FAZAKAS

Volume 3 (2021): Issue 1 (December 2021) eds. Attila BENŐ, Imre József BALÁZS and Árpád Töhötöm SZABÓ

Volume 2 (2020): Issue 1 (December 2020) eds. Emese FAZAKAS and Levente T. SZABÓ

Volume 1 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019) ed. István BERSZÁN

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, interdisciplinary cultural studies, translation studies, comparative literature based on Hungarian sources, theatre and film studies, etc.). The journal is published by one of the most important international centres of Hungarian studies, the Cluj / Kolozsvár-based scholarly community at the Faculty of Letters of the Babeș-Bolyai University (Romania), and it is supported by a prestigious body of international scholars and peer-reviewers. The HSY acts as an open-access framework for innovative research and aims at attracting a variety of critical approaches and wide-ranging perspectives on contemporary and historical Hungary, including the reception of Hungarian literature, language, and culture in various historical, cultural, geographical and social environments, different media and translations. The HSY focuses mainly on the humanities and social sciences, but periodically also publishes thematic issues that experiment with an interdisciplinary dialogue and widen the traditional perspective of Hungarian studies.    Its publishing policy includes double-blind peer-review to filter the scientifically acceptable papers and improve the quality of the manuscripts. The Hungarian Studies Yearbook is published once per year, every October. The journal adheres to the standards of the Committee on Publication Ethics: publicationethics.org/   The journal has no article processing charges (APCs) nor article submission charges.   In the event the journal is no longer published, Hungarian Studies Yearbook will provide backup and preservation of the content through the Repository of the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (https://real.mtak.hu).       Archiving   Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.   Plagiarism Policy   The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

Volume 5 (2023): Issue 1 (November 2023) - ed. Edith KÁDÁR, István BERSZÁN, Árpád Töhötöm SZABÓ

Hungarian Studies Yearbook

Volume 5 (2023): Issue 1 (November 2023)

ed. Edith KÁDÁR, István BERSZÁN, Árpád Töhötöm SZABÓ