Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Slawistik und Hungarologie

Dr. Róbert Smid (Budapest)

Figurations of Immersion and the Representation of Nature in Late-Modernist Hungarian Fiction and Poetry

One of the main aporias of ecocriticism is posed by the following question: On what grounds can the experience of immersion staged and/or represented in/by literary texts be approached? While in the Anglo-American tradition nature writing is a genre which has existed for centuries, in Hungarian literature, landscape was often substituted for nature in order to communicate philosophical ideas as well as create symbols that could be interpreted for ethical truths, depict the disposition of the lyrical subject, or articulate the feeling of longing for and familiarity with a place that could be called ‘homeland,’ etc. The so-called “late-modernist threshold” of the 1930’s, however, brought along a definite shift in discourse by prioritizing the perception of nature with regard to those figurations in language that inscribe the immersion of the subject into the very environment of which s/he is giving an account.

In the first part of my lecture, I will briefly summarize my own ecocritical approach to reading literary texts while covering themes, such as Timothy Morton’s conceptualization of eco-mimesis, or the see-saw logic of the nature/culture dichotomy. In the second part of my lecture, I will focus on the above-mentioned shift in Hungarian literary discourse with the help of two examples. As my first example, I will produce a reading of the poem “Winter Night” (Téli éjszaka, 1933) by Attila József which scrutinizes how surfaces in the text simultaneously reflect back natural formations and disintegrate the image of the human. My other example encompasses a few pages from Adam Bodor’s novel “The Sinistra District” (Sinistra körzet, 1992) in which the translation of sensations triggered by the contemplation of nature is enacted by narrative gestures, on the one hand, and nature is depicted as an inherently verbal environment consisting of zoopoetical tropes, on the other.