Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies

Area studies can suffer simultaneously from a “tautology of identity” and an “anxiety of specificity” (Móricz et al., “Colloquy: Jewish Studies and Music,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 2 [2012]: 560, 581). On the one hand we find scholars who are invested in a particular sliver of the world's population, whether by ethnic affiliation or chosen affinity, who assume the uniqueness of that sliver, and whose focus on that sliver, according to the editors of the present volume, has led to a scholarship “filled with lacunae, because of [a] self-referential perspective as well as an implicit or explicit perspective of exclusion” (1). On the other hand, many outside this invested group may assume, explicitly or implicitly, that insiders are incapable of dispassionate scholarship, particularly in the humanities, that can speak to a broad audience. Such insiders and outsiders may find themselves talking at cross-purposes and dismissing one another's work before actually seeing it.Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise Vasvári's introduction and opening essay in their edited volume Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies act as an answer both to the tautology of identity and the anxiety of specificity. They push for comparative cultural studies as “a global and inclusive discipline of global humanities [that] acts against the paradox of globalization versus localization” (17). The inclusiveness of the volume is apparent at a glance: it contains twenty-seven essays on a wide array of topics and from a broad range of disciplines, including anthropology, American studies, architecture, art history, communication and media studies, cultural studies, film studies, ethnology and folklore, gender studies, history, linguistics, various branches of literary criticism, Jewish studies, minority studies, political science, psychology, and sociology. Some contributors are of Hungarian background, others are not; most are members of university faculties, whether in Hungary, Germany, Israel, or the United States. The essays deal various with periods from the mid-nineteenth century to the present and are arranged under five headings: “History, Theory, and Methodology for Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies”; “Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Literature and Culture”; “Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and the Other Arts”; “Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Gender Studies”; and “Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Contemporary Hungary.” A sixth part consists of a selected bibliography of works in English on Hungarian culture, chiefly those published since 1989.The question provoked by the volume's title, given the contents, is where the “comparative” is in Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies. In their very name, comparative literature departments and associations emphasize comparison; they study cultural expression “across linguistic and cultural boundaries” (http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Comparative_Literature/). The volume is the latest in a series of works written or edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek on what he terms comparative cultural studies, “the theoretical as well as methodological postulate to move and dialogue between cultures, languages, literatures, and disciplines” (Comparative Literature and Comparative Cultural Studies [West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2003], 259). Sometimes “comparison” is interpreted strictly, as faculty members find themselves told they may not teach courses designed around one country, no matter how multicultural the country, in a department of comparative literature. What does it mean to write on the comparative cultural studies of a single country?Within the present volume, certain essays in fact position Hungarian topics explicitly in a comparative international context, drawing as they do on issues of translation, migration, postcolonial theory, and comparative political, artistic, media, and gender discourses, among others. For example, Peter Sherwood's comparison of versions of Sándor Márai's A gyertyák csonkig égnek, a German translation from the Hungarian original (Die Glut) and an English translation from the German translation (Embers), not only illustrates ways that certain “key mannerisms” of the author are diminished in its successive translations, but argues persuasively how those changes allowed “the conventional but undoubtedly well-crafted architecture of the original to emerge uncluttered for its new readers” (113). David Mandler provides a brief biography of Arminius Vámbéry, a Hungarian-born scholar of central Asia who became well known in Victorian England as a public intellectual, points out references to Vámbéry in Bram Stoker's Dracula, and makes a persuasive case for the parallels between this now-forgotten figure and the title character of Stoker's novel. Louise Vasvári places Asszony a fronton (Woman on the front), the memoir of a Hungarian woman survivor of an abusive marriage and wartime sexual violence, in the context of genres of women's life writing and memoirs of trauma, concluding that the author's “fragmented self-representation of her private versus public body ... speak[s] only the inherited language of female victimhood and not of agency,” and thus that the work fits better “in the tradition of spiritual autobiography ... rather than as an example of feminist life writing” (82). Tötösy de Zepetnek himself compares and contrasts the uses of ethnic essentialisms in neighboring countries in his essay “The Anti-Other in Post-1989 Austria and Hungary,” as well as reporting on the xenophobia and violent acts that emerge from such ideologies.Two of the essays examine dialogues between cultures by placing the Hungarian capital city in the context of “transcultural flows of popular culture” that “inspire new forms of global consciousness and cultural competency” (Henry Jenkins, Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture [New York: NYU Press, 2006], 156). Lajos Császi and Mary Gluck's “The Budapest Cow Parade and the Construction of Cultural Citizenship” investigates how a playful public-art exhibit known as the “cow parade” based on a model that had started in Switzerland “ultimately represented a challenge to the self-esteem” of both nationalists and intellectuals, by “us[ing] the vocabulary of [global] popular, rather than high, culture” (313), while Agata Anna Lisiak's “Urbanities of Budapest and Prague as Communicated in New Municipal Media” analyzes the way municipal governments in those cities use the World Wide Web to develop their “brands,” highlighting interesting parallels not only in the cities' aspirations for international prominence but also in their view of their own history—in particular their near-erasure of the state socialist period.A handful of essays explore the cultural role of Hungary's Others. Looking at the key artistic role of Hungarian Jews in the past are Ivan Sanders's “Jewish (Over)tones in Viennese and Budapest Operetta,” on the roles of Jewish composers, librettists, and sensibilities in this international theatrical genre; Debra Pfister's “Lost Dreams and Sacred Visions in the Art of [Imre] Ámos,” on the gifted expressionist/surrealist painter who perished in the Holocaust; and Catherine Portuges's “Curtiz, Hungarian Cinema, and Hollywood,” on the Hungarian-born director not only of Hollywood hits like Casablanca but also of what is considered the first Hungarian feature film in 1912. Kata Zsófia Vincze's takes present-day Hungarian–Jewish culture as her subject in “About the Jewish Renaissance in Post-1989 Hungary.” Some of these essays are more straightforward biography than “comparative,” but even in those cases, they illustrate the too-often-ignored ethnic diversity of Hungarian culture, “high” and “low.” These contributions on Hungarian–Jewish topics are particularly important, as the editors are correct in their assessment that “there has traditionally been an inadequate overlap between Jewish studies and studies on Hungarian culture and history, with the latter failing to take into consideration issues relating to Hungarian Jews and the Holocaust” (22). There has traditionally been even less overlap between Romani studies and Hungarian studies. The absence of more work on Hungarian Roma topics is unfortunate, but the number of scholars working in that area is exceedingly small; Kürti's critique of the problematics of racial stereotyping, both in fictional and “reality” television, in his “Images of Roma in Post-1989 Hungarian Media” is thus also particularly appreciated. Meanwhile, Éva Federmayer's “Nation, Gender, and Race in the Ragtime Culture of Millennial Budapest,” excavating the significance of “African American inflections ... in various interrelated arenas of mass entertainment” at the turn of the twentieth century (139), reveals a fascinating and almost entirely unknown aspect of intercultural contact in Hungary.This reviewer is not entirely sure of the need for the justification for comparative cultural studies that Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári put forward in this volume. The catholicity of its contents seems not entirely unlike what the journal Critical Inquiry set out as its mission in 1974; as Sheldon Sacks, one of its founding editors, wrote (in “A Chimera for a Breakfast,” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 [1974]), the journal “value[s] examination of the assumptions underlying particular discriminations” and is “interested in criticism that aspires to be a special kind of ‘learning’—not in any sense dispassionate or impersonal but something akin to that fusion of human commitment with objectivity that [Hungarian polymath] Michael Polanyi characterizes as ‘personal knowledge’” (iii). Sacks and his colleagues formulated “an editorial policy that insists on the widest diversity of subject made generally interesting to advocates of disciplined criticism by our authors' concern for theory, method, and the exploration of critical principles,” while specifically “eschew[ing] terms like ‘interdisciplinary’ or ‘comparative’” (idem.). Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári are right to call for an expansion of the narrow boundaries that some (though certainly not all) have constructed around Hungarian studies topics, and are to be commended for assembling a wide diversity of contributions on interesting topics relating to Hungary and Hungarians, broadly construed. Beneath the elaborate rubric of comparative cultural studies that Tötösy de Zepetnek and Vasvári propose, the reader may find here (again quoting Sacks) “those who formulate fruitful and exciting questions” “and who attempt to find the best possible answers to those questions” (idem.). Despite their brevity, the individual essays found in Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies do just that

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