Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies ed. by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvári (review)

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...