9

The Cultural (Un)Turn in Hungarian Literary Scholarship in the 1990s

Strategies of Inclusion and Exclusion

Györgyi Horváth

The fall of the Berlin Wall allowed Hungarian literary scholarship to access current trends and developments in mainstream transnational literary scholarship, which itself was by that time already largely affected by the “cultural turn,”1 especially at North American institutions.2 Theories and methodologies (some with an already long history) that political circumstances made unavailable earlier were gradually introduced into the study of Hungarian literature. As they finally began to appear in the works of Hungarian scholars, and to enter into dialogue with local critical discourses, these critical trends provoked intensive negotiations between the “global” and the “local” in the study of literature. But unlike other theories adopted by Hungarian scholarship, the efforts to politicize the aesthetic, efforts often labeled as “cultural studies-like criticism” or “theories connected to the cultural turn” encountered considerable resistance in the field of literary studies. In this chapter, I will reflect on this difference and indicate how it resulted in the persistence of a depoliticizing impulse even as such theories were gaining ground in Hungarian scholarship.

The Past and Its Ghosts: Antipolitics and the Cultural Turn

While it is a longstanding tradition to conceptualize Eastern Europe as a borderland or as a peripheral space,3 the idea that the Eastern European region is a borderland space also in its relation to the cultural turn emerged only after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Since the end of the 1990s scholars living in this region (at least those who published in English) began to urge the application of approaches that participate in the cultural turn, so far absent from cultural analysis here.4 But while Hungarian literary scholarship in the 1990s could in many respects be characterized as a kind of freshly opened up theoretical borderland “crisscrossed with a variety of languages, experiences, and voices,”5 where theories coming from different cultures could finally meet and merge, this image needs some correction to explain why theories at that time dominant in Anglo-American literary scholarship were accepted so slowly in Hungary, especially in comparison to the relatively quick reception of theories arriving from other major Western cultures like German or French.

A reflective awareness of the differences between “global” and “local” practices has started to appear. The 2000s saw something of a boom in the use of such perspectives, at least in the English-language literary scholarship.6 However, what happened at the level of the practices and discourses of local literary scholarships, specifically of Hungarian literary scholarship, is still an unmapped issue—and I find Ien Ang’s influential approach to the nature of borderlands of “global” humanities helpful in this context.

In countries of a borderland, the cultural turn is definitely a cultural transfer, or, to borrow Edward Said’s term, a “traveling theory” in the sense that it is inevitably subject to changes before arriving to its destination and finding its place within local practices.7 For the most part, the notion of the borderland is seen as the space of discursive openness, yet this view cannot account for the Saidian dynamics between the resistant locality and the theories newly settling within it. This is where Ang’s focus on the processes of negotiation between theories as they appear in “global” humanities and the application of these theories to the “local” appears illuminating. She stresses that in contrast to romanticizing approaches, borderlands are not “utopian site[s] of transgressive intermixture, hybridity and multiplicity,” or “site[s] of radical openness”; they are, in fact, “generally heavily policed and patrolled [. . .], pervaded by power structures of their own. Indeed, it is precisely because the borderland is a site for potentially conflicting juxtapositions and collisions between incompatible or illegitimate types that the operation of regulatory and classificatory powers is intensified here.”8 Ang, therefore, argues that borderlands, especially those at the periphery of theories and trends of global mainstream humanities, have their own internal power relations. “The cultural studies borderland, then, is [. . .] a contested terrain where concrete, differentially positioned subjects have to forge particular strategies to speak and to be heard. At play here is a politics of (mis)communication where the transfer of meaning cannot be taken for granted.”9 Hence, borderlands (and in terms of the cultural turn, the Eastern European region is such a space) are not spaces of free discussion. The example of the arrival of insights and methodologies of the cultural turn in Hungary highlights how discourses appear alongside one another, how they clash and produce amalgamated meanings, how they change and are subjected to misinterpretations and to attempts of recontextualization.

Such misinterpretations and recontextualizations are rooted in historically specific experiences. It is such experiences that account for the fact that theories which we may characterize as “politicizing” theories (such as New Historicism, Cultural Materialism, Gender Studies, Postcolonialism, and certain Post-Structuralisms that overtly relied on Marxist insights) and that were by the 1990s in a dominant position in Anglo-American academia,10 proved especially difficult to adapt to the study of Hungarian literature. In a 1993 report to the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA), Bernheimer described the work undertaken by American literary departments as a discursive space where “the very identity of literature as an object of study is no longer clear” and is no longer limited to “literariness and the literary phenomenon,” since such a limitation would imply “a questionable ideological position.”11 By a telling contrast, literary studies in Hungary were at this time still broadly “focusing on the literariness of literature, its textuality, and the artifact as an artifact.”12 The reason behind this difference cannot be explained simply by belatedness; rather, we need to take into consideration the historical and political experience of Hungarian scholars.

Under state socialism literary activity, including the study of literature, was under political control, and in the 1990s, the memory of political intrusions into literature (and the received ways of opposing them) was still fresh and alive, even if these intrusions had significantly and gradually weakened from the 1960s and 1970s on. In the socialist era, Hungarian literary scholarship was characterized by a tension between two polarities. On the one hand, there was the literary perspective of those in power, which meant a Marxist literary theory, more specifically a simplified version of Lukácsian “reflection theory” or “mimetic aesthetics.” On the other hand, there also existed a counter-discourse that went against Marxist ideology under the aegis of a nonpolitical attitude that dedicated itself to professionalism.13 Professionalism here meant an effort to keep a strict and definite distance from the politics and ideology of those in power. After a period of the complete dominance of Marxism during the 1950s and the early 1960s, the first theoretical imports that appeared in Hungarian literary scholarship, such as structuralism, semiotics, (historical) poetics, narratology and hermeneutics, reader response criticism, or the theory of possible worlds gradually came to be tolerated and by the 1980s even accepted by the academic establishment.14

Since these imports significantly differed from the officially enforced Marxist approach to literature, their application amounted to a kind of political opposition; but this opposition meant an opposition to politics in general. This was the main form of political resistance within in the Eastern bloc at that time, embedded in a discourse that permeated the whole of society, an attitude György Konrád called “antipolitics.”15 According to the discourse of antipolitics, politics (and ideology) were only for “those” in power, who continuously encroached on the personal matters of everyday life from “up there”; conversely, according to this discourse, the civil sphere offered the possibility of keeping a moral distance from politics, as it enabled ignoring it. This fostered the illusion of the existence of a space free of ideology and politics, where people finally could “push the state [and politics] out of their nightmares.”16 The study of literature (and culture) was necessarily confined within this “depoliticized” sphere: this is where it had to belong if it was to abstain from openly taking a stand on the dubious business of “those” in power, or if it simply wanted to think in terms of personal and moral autonomy and freedom of thought.

The selective reception of theories arriving in Hungary in the 1990s had to do with this effort of keeping a strict and definite distance from politics, ideology, and especially from Marxism; it is also this attitude that led to a boom in interest in hermeneutics, deconstruction, and an apolitical post-structuralism. These approaches, just as those that had arrived in Hungary already from the 1960s onward, left underlying assumptions about the function of literature intact: they narrowed the definition of the object of literary theory to the “the literariness of literature, its textuality, and the artifact as an artifact.” Such a narrow definition of literature was useful inasmuch as it enabled scholars to resist the efforts of state socialism to politicize literature successfully, and it contributed to “the reinforcement of the autonomy and independence of literary scholarship” against political interference.17 But with the change of the political system and the disappearance of political control over the literary, such a narrow definition of literature became simply too rigid, especially when it came to the theories connected to the cultural turn. These theories would have thrown off balance precisely that academic understanding which developed under the former regime, an understanding that was, ultimately, the expression of a political commitment to nonpolitics.

It must be stressed that keeping a distance from politics was often the only way for literary scholars and academics to continue working on the study of culture; they sought to specialize in fields that were as neutral in terms of politics as possible, and thus to avoid having to commit career suicide and either engage in openly criticizing current politics and ideology, or to emigrate. This was the price of a relative freedom of thought, and of the possibility of gaining (relative) academic credibility and respectability,18 but it resulted in the dissociation of literary issues from political ones, and thus from the very mode of existence of culture and cultural practices that theories connected to the cultural turn recognized as primary, and the critical study of which was bound to a different form of professional credibility and intellectual freedom. Thus, the encounter between theories connected to the cultural turn and East-European antipolitical discourses brought about not only a clash between two understandings of culture, but also a collision between lifestyles, between ideas about the role of intellectuals in the humanities, and between accumulated moral capitals and strategies of opposition and criticism of existing regimes.

The greatest difference between East-European and Anglo-American conceptualizations of politics and ideology in the early 1990s may have to do with the fact that trends and theories of the cultural turn “found” politics and ideology in precisely those spaces, which had been constituted by Eastern European academia as spaces free of ideology and politics, including the spaces for most of literary (and cultural) studies. While during the years of state socialism the presence of politics and ideology in literature (and, generally, in civil society) was obvious and palpable, under a democratic regime the ways in which politics and ideology permeate the different layers of civil society and literature are less readily visible. They are “much more akin to the flexible, complicated, and even contradictory discourses that are the object of most cultural studies.”19 Given that the discourse of antipolitics so heavily influenced the methods of East-European cultural and literary scholarship, in a post-socialist context it is difficult to interpret one of the most basic concepts of cultural studies, the Gramscian understanding of the organic intellectual, or even the concept of the committed intellectual. Or, as Enikő Bollobás put it, “this kind of intellectual commitment is different [from what East Europeans are familiar with]: it brings politics into the class-room and into research in a more direct way, since it goes beyond true understanding: it seeks to generate personal change.”20

This difference in understanding was perpetuated by the persistence of memories from the past. Theories connected to the cultural turn and arriving from the West during the 1990s could be assessed by Hungarian literary scholars—with a few exceptions—on the basis of the experience of state socialism, hence politicizing critical literary analyses were regularly identified with the previously mandatory, simplified East-European Marxist approach to literature. The situation in Hungary was similar to the Czech example described by Jiřina Šmejkalová in 2001, who claimed that “since 1989, much of the cultural studies methodology has been seen as ‘Marxist,’ and therefore far from being attractive for the newly ‘liberated’ and ‘anti-dogmatic’ social sciences and humanities.”21 This was aggravated by the fact that a variety of theories connected to the cultural turn that had been in existence and in dialogue with one another in the West, arrived in the East and in Hungary all at once when the Berlin Wall came down. As a result of this simultaneous reception, Hungarian scholars had a narrower perspective on how these theories are situated and related to each other historically in their original context, or, indeed, had no sense at all of their history. Furthermore, the methodology of some of these theories was clearly connected to the legacy of Western Marxism (i.e., to the impact of Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, or Louis Althusser), and in the eyes of Hungarian scholars, this made them problematic and unprofessional from the start. In Eastern Europe, as opposed to the West, Marxism was not seen as a critique of ideology, that is, it was not part of historical experiences as such, but was rather an official and dogmatic ideology enforced from above, which after 1989 even turned into an accusatory term in itself—after 1989 there was a “general suspicion towards Marxism as such.” Marxism “produced wide-spread indifference, boredom and utter negativism,” and thus “in the post-communist world reference to any leftist tendency will be negatively regarded.”22 These observations are regularly cited throughout the literature on the Eastern European reception of the cultural turn and critical cultural studies, a fine example for which is Almira Ousmanova’s expressive statement that in Russia “to ‘be left’ meant, first of all, to remain terribly backward with respect to theory, and secondly, it meant political association with the Communist Party.”23

One of the results of this situation was scholars’ confusion of different “Eastern” and “Western” conceptualizations of politics and ideology. This is evident in some Hungarian academic literature of the 1990s, which attempted to situate Anglo-American politicizing approaches, specifically, feminist literary criticism and New Historicism, among known literary theories in Hungary. This resulted in a labeling of these approaches as “unacademic,” “Marxist,” or “remaining within the scope of mimetic [at that time strongly associated with Marxist] aesthetics.”

When discussing feminist literary criticism in general, Gábor Bednanics, for instance, pays special attention to its relation to Marxism and concludes that feminist critics “must reckon with the fact that no matter how thoroughly they clarify their relations to various social formations, they will still remain within the scope of that mimetic aesthetics that is most comparable to Marxist interpretive particularities.”24 But neither feminism’s assumed affinity with Marxism, nor Marxism itself receive any explanatory treatment in Bednanics’s text. Instead, Marxism serves as a rather self-evident sign of unprofessionalism. The relations to Marxism have an equally central role in András Bernáth’s work on New Historicism, inasmuch as Bernáth reduces politicizing theory, in this case New Historicism, entirely to the problem of Marxism. For him, the relation between social context and literature can only be conceptualized as base and superstructure, as notions of “reality” in contrast with works that reflect this reality. Accordingly, for Bernáth, “all efforts [of scholars in New Historicism] are directed to situate literary texts within social history and thus place them into a predetermined, subordinate position.”25 Bernáth argues that

[i]n a typical and for Hungarian readers not unfamiliar way, Greenblatt is challenging religion as one of the main pillars of the oppressive power; [. . .] New Historicism that relies on a Marxist paradigm always says the same thing, since it reduces everything to the same thing; [. . .] Marxist, structuralist and post-structuralist theories [. . .] dismiss the principle of the self-conscious individual, who is capable of making moral choices. According to Marxist discourse, moral discourse is a bourgeois phenomenon, which has to be replaced by revolutionary politics.26

It would seem that Bernáth bases his arguments primarily on his own sense of Marxism, which is linked not so much to Lukácsian aesthetics, as to the East-European history of Marxism (specifically to its more totalitarian forms) and to its antireligiousness, its attack on “bourgeois morality,” and to communist textbooks on literature. Bernáth’s article was published in the review section of the prestigious journal Helikon that is associated with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, lending his judgments an air of institutional prestige.

There were practically no debates about politicizing theories on visible academic forums until 2001, when Csaba Csapó published a short survey on gay and lesbian studies in the only Hungarian weekly about literature, Élet és Irodalom.27 This triggered a response by Sándor Radnóti, who argued against “gay, or recently, queer studies,” and in some of his conclusions he formulated his claims on a more general level about politicizing theories connected to the cultural turn as a whole. According to him, “ethnic, post-colonialist and gay critics [. . .] have propagandistic, content-based and combative expectations that mobilize the hermeneutics of suspicion,” and they “evoke the official literary criticism of the communist regime (that had been weakened and had lost its confidence since the 1970s).”28 In his piece, Radnóti continuously contrasts “universality” to “propaganda”: for him, the former is the peculiarity of literature, while the latter is an idiosyncrasy of politicizing theories. Characteristically, he declares that “[l]iterature—high literature—is not an education brochure, from which it logically follows that there is no such thing as gay literature (for instance), only literature.”29 It is apparent that Radnóti, too, confuses theories connected to the cultural turn with the official Marxist approach to literature under the socialist regime; that is, he confuses the cultural criticism of ideology with political propaganda and intrusion into literature from above. Thus, he can be said to have regarded politicizing criticism arriving in Hungary as a ghost from the past when a simplified Marxist approach was reigning.

The Appearance of Politicizing Theories in the 1990s

Theories connected to the cultural turn began to gain some ground in Hungary from the beginning of the 1990s. They first began to be disseminated by scholars who spent some time in US literature departments, and who, upon their return to Hungary, shared their experiences with the Hungarian-speaking academic audience.30 However, the accounts they offered were either partial and based on a limited understanding of the intellectual context, or, if theoretically well-grounded, remained isolated. Of these, Mihály Szegedy-Maszák’s paper stands out for its impact due to the author’s academic position and prestige. He first presented this paper at an important annual national conference devoted the study of Hungarian literature in 1994, discussing an important paradigm shift taking place in US literature departments. Characteristically, though, throughout his talk he conflated “cultural studies” with the comparative study of canonical art forms: “interarts studies” that “demand a complex analysis of companion arts.”31 His account was also an early example of what I will discuss below as the process of depoliticization. As a result, the Hungarian audience could not readily associate Szegedy-Maszák’s stress on the importance of “inter-disciplinarity” with those accounts—written by Eszter Babarczy and Zsolt Farkas and published in nearly the same year—that surveyed politicizing interpretive practices and the canon debates in America.

The reception of politicizing theories did not originate with scholars of Hungarian literature, but rather from those Hungarian researchers and academics who were working in the fields of Anglo-American literatures and cultures, or from scholars working outside literary studies. Through the work of such scholars, the reception of politicizing theories gained momentum in the 1990s, even if only on the margins of the discipline. More and more translations of key theoretical texts appeared, and an increasing number of academic papers and critical commentaries employing their insights were published; as a result, by around 2000 to 2005 these theories gained significant visibility in the field of the study of Hungarian literature as well.32 Already during the 1990s, many important “politicizing” texts written by English, American, and French scholars became available in Hungarian, albeit often without accompanying explanatory studies that would situate them within their theoretical context. Book chapters and individual articles by Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha, Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Shoshana Felman, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Luce Irigaray, Elaine Showalter, and Judith Butler, among others, were translated and published in Hungarian. A growing number of texts dealing with post-structuralist theories of the subject, with cultural anthropology, with rhetorical theories of historiography, and even with the problem of cultural narratives were also published, clearing the ground for a later extensive academic recognition of the importance of interdisciplinarity, and of the cultural conditioning of the “literary,” as well as of its place within a multilayered cultural field.

The publication of thematic issues of the Hungarian academic periodical Helikon meant significant steps in this process. This journal took up the task of presenting imported methodologies of literary scholarship, and it published a sequence of thematic issues on feminist literary scholarship, edited by Judit Kádár in 1994; on postcolonialist cultural theory edited by Gertrúd Szamos in 1996; and on New Historicism, edited by Attila Kiss and György Endre Szőnyi. It must be noted that all of these scholars specialize in Anglo-American literature. After some delay, a Helikon issue about “kritikai kultúra kutatás” (cultural studies) was published in 2005 with the title, “The Critical Study of Culture,” edited by László B. Sári, another scholar of Anglo-American cultures. Thus, initial surveys on politicizing theories (along with the translations of a number of essays by foreign scholars) existed and were available very early on, and, significantly, they appeared in an important forum of Hungarian literary scholarship. Similarly, Jefferson-Robey’s reference book, Bevezetés a modern irodalomelméletbe (Introduction to Modern Literary Theory),33 which came out in Hungarian in 1995, contained a number of short, if not very up-to-date reviews of Marxist and feminist literary theories. In 1997, Gabriella Hima published an essay in the important literary monthly Alföld, in which she touched briefly upon New Historicism and some other then-current approaches, while a year later, within a surprisingly short period of time, Gábor Zoltán Kiss published three articles on the same school, one of which appeared in the prestigious literary-theoretical quarterly Literatura. Papers on cultural studies were also published in Hungarian, though they appeared in a journal in sociology, Replika, and therefore remained distant from the discipline of Hungarian literary studies. The relevant issue of this journal contained an introductory piece by Miklós Vörös and Zsolt Nagy, and a short selection of translations of key texts. In 1998 Anna Wessely’s reader on “the sociology of culture,” containing two short essays from Raymond Williams, was also well outside the discipline of literary studies, and so was Margit Feischmidt’s reader on multiculturalism that appeared in 1997 and contained, among others, a paper from Stuart Hall.34

While such documents from the 1990s indicate a growing awareness of theories connected to the cultural turn, these theories did not at the time gain ground in Hungarian literary scholarship. For any theory to become domesticated, it is not enough to publish and translate its foundational texts: it also requires applying the theory to Hungarian issues.

The Strategy of Depoliticization

When the application of theories connected to the cultural turn did start in Hungary in the late 1990s, it did so with significant modification in the politicizing character of these theories. Furthermore, these applications first appeared outside or at the margins of literary scholarship; their emergence on literary forums with higher academic prestige was slow and gradual. But a shift did occur, and one of the main factors in this was connected to the capability of such theories to enter into a dialogue with already established theories within the study of Hungarian literature. Politicizing approaches began to be translated into the language of these established theories. Among the most accepted ones at that time were hermeneutics, deconstruction, and an apolitical post-structuralism. For politicizing theories to be accepted and recontextualized within this local context, they had to engage in an interactive relation, enter into discourse with locally dominant theories of literature, with the existing presuppositions of methodology and interpretive practices. Theories of the cultural turn entered into dialogue with local Hungarian theories via open debate, instances of which I have mentioned in the previous section. But there was another strategy also at work in this encounter, one that also results from the historical situatedness of Hungarian scholarship and that I will discuss as the strategy of depoliticization.

Depoliticization means the need for a general distancing of political issues from literary scholarship. The examples of introductory survey papers as well as analyses that used methodologies of the cultural turn are the best examples to demonstrate the point: in survey papers, authors typically tried to reduce the importance of the given theory’s relations to the political left, while scholars relying on methodologies of the cultural turn sought to select the least political methods. This latter method is clearly apparent in the application of theories of feminism and gender studies in Hungarian analyses during the 1990s: they tended to select feminist methodologies that would accommodate well-established local practices of literary scholarship, which were careful to separate literary works from their nonliterary context. They also carefully avoided political applications of the literary analysis or the upsetting of the status quo between the sexes. This reveals how politicizing theories, once radical in their original contexts, underwent significant changes when appearing in Hungary as “traveling theories.” Depoliticization here can be conceived of as a “translation” of the original methodologies and understandings into the language of a literary academic discourse that occupies a dominant position within the recipient context. This is the very “point” at which the political substance of the theory becomes lost in the process. I will discuss instances of depoliticization here as discursive mimicries because while they tend to imitate the given discourse on a superficial level, they simultaneously also oppose it on deeper levels; as such, they come about at the discursive intersection of the “sayable” and “unsayable.”35

To demonstrate characteristic instances of depoliticization, I want to discuss two academic texts from the late 1990s and early 2000s, both of which apply insights from gender theories to analyze texts of Hungarian literature. They are strongly connected to the institutional recognition of their writers’ competency in literary scholarship. The first of these is an essay by Eszter Kovács, originally written as senior thesis at the Department of Hungarian Language and Literature at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, the top research university in Hungary. The second is Anna Gács’s book that was based on her doctoral thesis at the same institution. Although senior theses are not usually considered as part of academic production, Kovács was already a well-known young literary scholar, invited to several academic conferences on literature as a speaker, and was at the time an editor of the literary journal Sárkányfű, which was for some years an important forum for writers and scholars of the generation born in the 1970s. Thus, her position in the academic scene is not irrelevant: she was then seen as a promising critic worth attending to, while at the same time she was also in need of (and seeking) the recognition of other players in the field.36 Kovács’s work thus demonstrates how young authors without independent academic authority, whose assumptions therefore reflect what was regarded at that time as established literary academic knowledge, could approach texts from Hungarian literature. It is worth attending to such contexts, because the situation was quite different at English departments of Hungarian universities, or, indeed, in the case of critics with already established positions within academic circles, who were thus less dependent on the evaluation of their work by other academic participants. (The case of Judit Kádár may demonstrate the point: as an associate professor working in Anglo-American studies, her institutional position granted her greater freedom when she employed novel critical approaches in discussing texts of Hungarian literature.37) Kovács’s and Gács’s publications are illuminating examples for borderlands being “generally heavily policed and patrolled.”38 In Ang’s opinion, with their own inner power relations, borderlands are “contested terrain[s] where concrete, differentially positioned subjects have to forge particular strategies to speak and to be heard.”39 Depoliticization and discursive mimicry are signs not only of a resistance against newly arriving theories but also of attempts at speaking, since both reveal how newly arriving theories as well as local theories reposition themselves with respect to each other. This, ultimately, is a self-situating process consisting of the heterogeneous resources of different theories. Apparently, these mechanisms transmit only a limited and filtered set of insights of the “original” theory, but they do transmit something nevertheless.

Kovács published her dissertation in 1999 in Sárkányfű, and attempted a “feminist” analysis of a corpus which is composed of fictional feminine texts of contemporary Hungarian male authors from the second half of the twentieth century, writing under female pseudonyms. Kovács borrowed her main question—“what makes these texts ‘feminine’?”—from feminist literary criticism, yet she visibly struggled with the problem of how femininity can be linked to these texts without making “real” experiences of women a point of reference. Her work thus tends to simply reproduce mainstream ideas of gender roles, which leads to a move of depoliticizing the approach she uses. Specifically, Kovács’s solution the issue of the fictive authors’ gender is to explain it (away) as a question of genre. She accounts for the fictional femininity of one of the authors by stating that the (serialized) romance is a feminine and a dilettante genre.40 The femininity of the other author is explained by the claim that writing autobiography is an act of confession, “which is the most instinctual form of writing, and that is why most dilettante texts are of this kind, and can be related to the feminine, to a traditional sense of feminine nature (viz. instinctual woman—rational man).”41 The femininity of the third fictive female author is explained by the fact that she fits among those Hungarian women poets, who “are not bad poets, but there is something they lack. [. . .] This particular something is what makes a literary text good.”42 However, Kovács fails to raise the very questions that would sway her analysis toward a critical one and prevent it from reproducing traditional gender roles. She does not ask what makes a literary text “good,” what that “something” may be that women poets (as opposed to male ones) lack, or why the genres of the romance and of autobiography are marked simultaneously as feminine and nonliterary. At times, Kovács does tend to frivolously distance herself from these traditional gender divisions, as when she occasionally introduces what seems to appear as irony into her own commentary. Yet she distances herself considerably more often and more explicitly from feminist authors. Kovács is well-versed in the literature of feminist literary criticism that was available in Hungarian at the time, but even when she refers to some of these texts, her references generally end up being apologetic. For example, after quoting and paraphrasing Christa Bürger, she adds: “note that my problem with the world is not that it is ruled by a patriarchal mentality.”43 Generally, Kovács only ventures so far as to argue that a text can be “feminine,” but never because of its theme or the female subject it depicts, and so she fails to raise the ensuing question of how a text then can be feminine. To raise this question she would have had to move away from such metaphysical notions as “the woman” or “literature”—in other words, she would have had to accept that literary texts are shaped by cultural codes (which would require accepting the intrusion of the nonliterary), and likewise accept the meanings encoded in the term “woman,” which would of course be considered a political matter.

Such an intent to keep a distance from feminist literary criticism by depoliticizing it is also evident in the tension between the explicit and the hidden content of Anna Gács’s doctoral dissertation, published as a book in 2002, which received significant critical attention and even became a point of reference in the following years for its statements about feminist literary criticism. Three of the book’s chapters are dedicated to feminist literary criticism (one of them explicitly aiming to give an overview of this kind of criticism, and the other two applying the insights of the first one in the analysis of contemporary Hungarian literature), but the attention the book pays to feminist literary criticism is not acknowledged either by the introduction, nor by the title of the monograph [Why Don’t We Content Ourselves with the Book? The Author in Interpretation, and Notions of Authorship in Contemporary Hungarian Literature]. Gács’s portrayal of feminist literary criticism is reductive; it is based on a selective reading of the pre-1985 landmark texts.44 However, from our point of view the most interesting feature of her work is how she manages to depoliticize feminist authors and feminist literary criticism in general. Gács may have felt necessary to distance herself from such work because she had published essays in previous years in which she discussed gender-related literary topics, and may have wanted to protect herself from her own characterization of feminist criticism. In this description, she uses the tactics of labeling feminist literary criticism unprofessional by challenging its discursive character in various ways, but without considering in any sustained way the issue of political or cultural stakes that this kind of criticism may bring to the study of literature. Accordingly, statements about various problems “undermining feminism as literary criticism”45 are recurrent, along with statements claiming that feminist literary criticism is “strongly antagonistic to methods and theories,” or that this kind of criticism is characterized by “the lack of prescribing valid methods.”46 According to Gács, feminist literary critics “would like to get rid of the barriers imposed on them by authoritative authors and texts,” and she argues that the validity of feminist critical statements “nearly immediately gets nullified” even within feminist literary criticism itself.47 Gács’s verbal maneuvers serve to push feminist literary criticism out of the sphere of potentially legitimate perspectives in the study of literature. She states that this kind of criticism serves as a place where “women critics and women writers can celebrate each other in an unperturbed way,” or that feminist literary critics rigidly seclude themselves from entering into dialogue with other perspectives on literature.48

Gács’s book described the discursive character of feminist literary criticism by presenting it as a haphazard collocation of vague ideas without foundational authors or texts, without academic criteria for the validity of statements, and without knowledge accumulated and challenged through paradigm-shifting ideas. She goes farthest in acknowledging the political stake of feminist literary criticism in those parts of her book where she repeatedly connects this criticism with destruction and “eternal rebellion.”49 But with this, she immediately reduces the political value of this criticism to a meaningless, useless, and uncontrolled activity. All in all, half of her book is dedicated to feminist literary criticism, but it does not consider feminist authors as equal partners in an academic discussion at all. By designating destruction and eternal rebellion as the ultimate aims of feminist criticism, it also plays with and makes use of anxieties and prejudices that most Hungarians shared about feminism at that time. Ironically, and perhaps indicating the author’s hidden sympathies for feminist literary criticism, the two chapters dedicated to analyses of Hungarian literary texts from a gender perspective, do contain insightful and relevant claims about why this perspective would be needed in Hungarian literary scholarship. Unfortunately these claims are always merged with gestures of keeping a distance from her own methods, thereby giving the impression that, on the whole, literary analysis from a gender perspective is worthwhile, provided that we can get rid of the burden of an “unprofessional” feminism.

Later Developments

Despite the persistence of the general depoliticizing attitude that I hoped to exemplify here, politicizing theories did gain increasing visibility after 2000: an increasing number of translated books50 and of collections of translated texts,51 an increasing number of studies by Hungarian scholars, of books applying insights and methodologies of politicizing theories to Hungarian texts,52 as well as of “politicizing” literary theoretical works by Hungarian authors53 were published. Thematic issues were growing in number as well—for instance in 2000, in a single year, the Magyar Lettre Internationale came out with three issues about critical cultural studies and postcolonialism. It was around 2003 to 2005 that a widespread academic discussion began to emerge about possibilities of analyzing literature by taking into account cultural contexts and by employing interdisciplinary analytic tools. The notion of “culture” was linked more visibly to these discourses and came to signify a set of interpretive practices that are far from homogenous or easily defined. Moreover, employing the notion of “culture” came to be an indicator of being up-to-date, its value increased on the stock market of literary scholarship, and similarly to the North American academic scene at the beginning of the 1990s, a semantic explosion of the term “kultúratudomány” (cultural studies)—even if not “Cultural Studies”—came about.54 This explosion is perhaps explained in part by the fact that the main points of reference and the historical background of these theoretical terms derive from approaches that often work with radically different concepts of language, culture, literature, politics, and ideology—it is enough to think of the differences in terminology used by, for instance, cultural anthropology, (German) philosophical anthropology, the Kittlerian Medienkulturwissenschaft, British Cultural Studies, or its American version. Indeed, “cultural anthropology” is confused with philosophical anthropology in several texts,55 “kultúratudomány” (“cultural studies”) sometimes simultaneously relies on the mainly German and less politicizing Kulturwissenschaft, Medienkulturwissenschaft, and philosophical anthropology, yet at the same time it also comes to incorporate New Historicism as well as interpretive practices originating in the “horizon of ideological supervision spanning from Lukács to Adorno.”56 At the same time, the very same term, “cultural studies” is also translated as “művelődéstudomány”57 (cultural historical studies), as “kritikai kultúrakutatás”58 (critical cultural studies), or as “összehasonlító kultúratudomány” (comparative cultural studies). These interpretations, although seemingly oriented in the uniform direction of “culture,” are radically different in terms of their relation to politicizing criticism. The plurality of the terms is characteristic of the confusion surrounding such research. In Helikon’s 2005 issue, A kritikai kultúrakutatás [Critical Cultural Studies], László B. Sári rightly pointed out that a volume edited by leading scholars on history, culture, and mediality, presented itself as strongly connected to the cultural turn, but “pronouncedly ignored the sense of critical cultural studies,” where “critical cultural studies” referred mainly to the British, but also to the American branch of cultural studies.59 The idea that literature and now also culture are beyond politics, apparently, has remained a persistent one.

The emergence of politicizing literary theories became markedly evident in Hungary with the above mentioned Helikon issue of 2005. It is interesting to note that the selected bibliography of this thematic issue already contained items not only by foreign authors, but also by Hungarian scholars, thus retroactively situating such a list of works within the field of Hungarian literary scholarship, as well as within the fields of such co-disciplines as media studies, the study of literary cults (a specifically Hungarian anthropologically oriented approach),60 film theory, cultural anthropology, and youth sociology. This bibliography represents a desire to retroactively rearrange papers under one paradigm, although they had earlier belonged to different disciplines and even to different manifestations of identity politics (beside several Hungarian feminist works, it also contains a book discussing Roma literature, which had until then failed to be theoretically categorized).61 Indeed, the issue also dedicated a whole article to earlier Hungarian practices of critical cultural studies.62 This retrospective look can be considered indicative of the shift that took place between the Helikon issues of the 1990s that sought to introduce politicizing theories to Hungarian academic criticism, and this 2005 issue on critical cultural studies collecting those interpretive practices of Hungarian humanities that had seemed rather divergent earlier. The editorial preface, while strongly emphasizing the Anglo-American character, aimed unconventionally to demonstrate the diversity and extensiveness of critical cultural studies, and attempted to contrast Hungarian and Anglo-American approaches to the relation and possible interconnections between literature and politics. As Sári argued,

the domestic situation is not conducive to the reception of these “partisan” approaches. Accordingly, relations between literature and politics, politics and culture must be subjected to scrutiny, together with the Hungarian reception of critical cultural studies, especially because setting them against one another is a consensual element of Hungarian literary-critical discussion.63

He underlines the “inherently defensive” relation of Hungarian literary academic discourses to politics and argues for the “re-conceptualization of politics as not a space to be normatively defined against literature and culture, but as a medium saturating literary and cultural texts and ensuring a discursive space, as well as the framework conditioning critical discourse.”64 Consequently, in a Hungarian context, Sári’s most important contribution was to argue for the importance of the distinction between politics as a set of norms aiming at “strictly regulating” the “free” sphere of literature, and the conceptualization of politics as a precondition for speaking.

While the Hungarian reception of politicizing theories has undergone a considerable change, those interpretive practices that are either ideologically critical, conducting their readings through leftist identity politics, or that conceptualize the literary as engaging in the reproduction of power relations, have so far had little opportunity to shape Hungarian discourses of literary scholarship. The Hungarian adoption of these politicizing theories is significantly hindered by the absence of the recognition that not even the space of the aesthetics is free of power relations, ideology, and politics—that literature is not beyond politics.

Notes

1. Armstrong, “Who’s Afraid of the Cultural Turn?” 18.

2. Bernheimer, Comparative Literature, 39–48.

3. For an overview reaching back to the era of Enlightenment see Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe; Cornis-Pope and Neubauer, History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, 1: 1–19; Buckler, “What Comes after,” 255–56.

4. See Kelly and Shepherd, Russian Cultural Studies, 3–6; Ousmanova, “Crossing Borders, Shifting Paradigms,” 66; Ousmanova, “On the Ruins of Orthodox Marxism,” 43; Šmejkalová, “Do Czech Women Need Feminism?,” 39 and 41.

5. Ang, “Doing Cultural Studies,” 14.

6. See, for example, Kelly and Shepherd, Russian Cultural Studies; Pearce and Sojka, Mosaics of Change; Forrester et al., Over the Wall; Totosy de Zepetnek et al., The New Central and East European Culture; Totosy de Zepetnek and Vasvári, Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies.

7. Said, “Traveling Theory.”

8. Ang, “Doing Cultural Studies,” 14, 16.

9. Ang, “Doing Cultural Studies,” 20.

10. For the special position of New Historicism within these “politicizing” theories, and on its status as a “conservative anomaly in the cultural turn,” see Hegeman, The Cultural Return, 71. Nevertheless, this special position was hardly registered by Hungarian scholars, therefore, I will treat New Historicism as one of the many theories linked to the cultural turn.

11. Bernheimer, Comparative Literature, 2–3; see also Miller, “The Function of Literary Theory,” 102; Smithson, “Introduction. Institutionalizing Culture Studies,” 4–5.

12. Radnóti, “Műelemzés és műbírálat,” 38.

13. About this bipolar nature of literary theoretical discourses see Radnóti, “Műelemzés és műbírálat”; Mészáros, “A kritika mai idolumai”; Dobos, “A kortárs magyar irodalomtudomány,” 437; on the question of how this bipolarity of literary discourses could be found in other Eastern European countries, see for example Ousmanova, “Crossing Borders,” 72.

14. Dobos, “A kortárs magyar irodalomtudomány,” 434–36; Veres, “Ezredvégi pillanatkép.”

15. Konrád, Antipolitics; for the notion of antipolitics see also Kennedy, Envisioning Eastern Europe.

16. Konrád, Antipolitics. The quote refers to the subtitle of the work, Pushing the state out of our nightmares.

17. Radnóti, “Műelemzés és műbírálat,” 38.

18. Cf. Ousmanova, “Crossing Borders,” 72.

19. Kennedy, Envisioning Eastern Europe, 25.

20. Bollobás, “Politics and Epistemology,” 577.

21. Šmejkalová, “Retailing Words and Images,” 39; for similar insights about the Russian situation see Ousmanova, “Crossing Borders,” 66.

22. Ousmanova, “On the Ruins,” 40; Mineva, “On the Reception of Marxism,” 71; Šmejkalová, “Do Czech Women Need Feminism?” 277.

23. Ousmanova, “Crossing Borders,” 77–78, emphasis added.

24. Bednanics, “A feminizmus nyelve,” 95–96.

25. Bernáth, “Az újhistorizmus bírálata,” 184–85.

26. Bernáth, “Az újhistorizmus bírálata,” 189, 190, 192.

27. Csapó, “Mi a meleg irodalom.”

28. Radnóti, “Adaptáció,” 14.

29. Radnóti, “Adaptáció,” 14.

30. See, for example, Babarczy, “Mikor politika az irodalom?”; Farkas, “Kánonvita és kultúrháború”; Szegedy-Maszák, “Merre tart az irodalom(tudomány)?”

31. Szegedy-Maszák, “Merre tart az irodalom(tudomány)?” especially 10–11.

32. It should be noted, however, that some scholars had been familiar with politicizing theories before 1989 (first and foremost those whose area of specialty was within Anglo-American literature and culture), but this knowledge did not reach Hungarian readers, since these scholars either did not publish anything about these theories or even if they did, they did so in foreign journals and languages. (For an exception to this, see Endre György Szőnyi, “Az ‘új historizmus.’”)

33. This was the only companion-style work on literary theories available in Hungary at that time: Jefferson and Robey, Bevezetés a modern irodalomelméletbe.

34. See Kádár, Feminista nézőpont az irodalomtudományban; Szamosi, A posztkoloniális művelődéselmélet; Kiss and Szőnyi, Az újhistorizmus; Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás; Hima, “Új historizmus”; Kiss, “Az újhistorizmus etikája”; Kiss, “Ördögűzés-kritika”; Kiss, “Inspiratív metahistóriai elegy”; Vörös and Nagy, “A kritikai kultúrakutatás”; Wessely, A kultúra szociológiája; Feischmidt, Multikulturalizmus.

35. For other East European examples for depolitization, see Kelly and Shepherd, Russian Cultural Studies, 12–14; Barchunova, “The Selfish Gender,” 9–10; Zherebkina, “On the Performativity of Gender,” 64; Buckler, “What Comes After,” 257. For more on discursive mimicries, see Ousmanova, “Crossing Borders,” 66.

36. We must also note that in the 1990s, the first degrees at Hungarian universities were awarded after five years, senior theses were the equivalents of MA dissertations written at Anglo-American research universities, and PhDs were not yet an essential prerequisites for a full-time university appointment—the editors.

37. Kádár, “Női írók—férfi irodalomtörténet-írás”; Kádár, “‘A legerotikusabb magyar írónő.’”

38. Ang, “Doing Cultural Studies,” 16.

39. Ang, “Doing Cultural Studies,” 20.

40. Kovács, “Miért nő? Fiktív női szerzők,” 43–47.

41. Kovács, “Miért nő? Fiktív női szerzők,” 49.

42. Kovács, “Miért nő? Fiktív női szerzők,” 51.

43. Kovács, “Miért nő? Fiktív női szerzők,” 45. The work she discusses is: Bürger, “A nők dilettantizmusa.”

44. For a detailed account of such misunderstandings, see my review of Gács’s book: Horváth, “Miért elég és miért nem?”

45. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, 19.

46. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, 66.

47. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, 67, 69.

48. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, 213, 103.

49. Gács, Miért nem elég nekünk a könyv, see 70, 74, 81, 103 and 98, 104 for the quoted phrases.

50. For instance: Wallach Scott, Van-e a nőknek történelmük?; Jagose, Bevezetés a queer-elméletbe; Butler, Problémás nem; Butler, Jelentős testek.

51. For instance Bókay et al., A posztmodern irodalomtudomány kialakulása; Sinfield, Irodalomkutatás és a kultúra materialitása; Séllei, A feminizmus találkozásai a (poszt)modernnel.

52. Sári, A hattyú és a görény; Zsadányi, A másik nő; Borgos, Portrék a Másikról; Séllei, Mért félünk a farkastól?; Séllei, A nő mint szubjektum; Varga and Zsávolya, Nő, tükör, írás.

53. Horváth, Nőidő; Darabos, Nem-játék.

54. See Grossberg, “The Circulation of Cultural Studies,” 178.

55. Perhaps the best example is Biczó and Kiss, Antropológia és irodalom.

56. Kulcsár Szabó, “A különbözés megértése,” see esp. 270.

57. Szegedy-Maszák, “Irodalomtörténeti elképzelések,” 222, 224–25; Szegedy-Maszák, “Magyar irodalomtudomány a huszonegyedik század elején,” 789.

58. See, for example, Takáts, “A kultuszkutatás és az új elméletek,” 1535; Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás.

59. Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás, 3. For the volume under criticism, see Kulcsár Szabó and Szirák, Történelem, kultúra, medialitás.

60. For work reaching the international stage in this field, see the volume of one of its pioneers, Dávidházi, The Romantic Cult of Shakespeare.

61. Beck, A lehetséges cigány irodalom.

62. Havasréti, “A kaleidoszkópon kívül/belül.”

63. Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás, 18–19.

64. Sári, A kritikai kultúrakutatás, 19.

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