NEOHELICON最新文献

From 1970 to 1988 the small spa town of Mátrafüred and the holiday home of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences were the setting for six meetings devoted to “Enlightenment in Hungary, Central and Eastern Europe.” It is to Béla Köpeczi, member of the Academy of Sciences, that this great initiative belongs. The article reports on the major orientations of these meetings organized in a comparative, interdisciplinary, and cosmopolitan spirit.

Long focused primarily on the literature of a few major European powers, comparative studies have increasingly been giving substantial attention to writers in smaller countries and using less widely diffused languages. The rich and varied literatures of the Balkans are ideal candidates for renewed attention, but perhaps because of the number and variety of languages involved, there has been little broadly comparative work on Balkan literature, especially across the region’s language families. This essay proposes that we can learn a great deal, even when working mostly in translation, when we open out a wider perspective to explore the literary commonalities and discontinuities that have emerged across the region’s languages, countries, religions, and imperial histories. Taking examples from Bosnia’s Ivo Andrić, Albania’s Ismail Kadare, and Romania’s Ion Budai-Deleanu and Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, I argue that their works interfuse Balkan epic traditions and broader European models to contribute powerfully to what can be called a distinctive Balkan world literature.

The paper “Black Monasteries”: Hungarian and Italian Literature and Popular Writing in the First World War analyzes War literature and the directly related literature about internment camps, both relating to the First World War, which had a different development in Hungary and Italy; however, similar features can be found in them. Regarding these aspects, this essay examines some works, starting from the Black Monastery [Fekete kolostor] by Aladár Kuncz and other novels and “reportage novels” (Siberian garrison [Szibériai garnizon], by Rodion Markovits) of the same period. Their characteristic traits are peculiar and common with Italian works (i.e. Un anno sull’altipiano, by Emilio Lussu, Taccuino di Caporetto, by Carlo Emilio Gadda), while the final part of the essay concerns popular writing and its role in the literature, based on the experience in internment camps and war literature through studies and research that focus on the correspondence with families and friends of soldiers and internees from many European countries.

This contribution aims to analyse the postmemory of the origins through the work of an Italian author of Armenian descent, Antonia Arslan, and stems from an ongoing research project about “Narrating the Trauma in European Literatures and Cultures” based at La Sapienza University of Rome. I will therefore focus on the link between this research project, which serves as a theoretical framework, and the specific case study concerning Antonia Arslan. The project originates from two concerns: the first one being the awareness of the loss of poets and writers’ long-lived faith in the creative power of the artistic gesture, a widespread belief before the two world wars, and the second one consisting in a reflection on a general change of the theoretic framework of literature, especially in the case of the narration of traumatic experiences such as wars, genocides, migrations and displacements of people, which have taken place in Europe during the 20th Century [Neohelicon, 2004(1), Migratio et litterae].