KULTURÁLIS IDENTITÁS ÉS TÁRSADALOMKÉP A RENDSZERVÁLTÁS ELŐTTI ERDÉLYI LÍRÁBAN
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL IDENTITY IN TRANSYLVANIAN HUNGARIAN POETRY BEFORE THE REGIME CHANGE

Author(s): László Szilárd Szilveszter
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Philology
Published by: Scientia Kiadó
Keywords: cultural identity; dictatorship; the image of society; Hungarian poetry in Transylvania;
Summary/Abstract: Presenting the relationship between the individual and power, the Transylvanian Hungarian poetry of the 1980s focuses increasingly on the language game, ironic/allegoric self-reflection, and on allusions to real events and persons. From a stylistic/poetic point of view, this orientation can be considered important not only because in the ideological/political context of the 80s the progressively efficient censorship prevented a growing number of writers from publishing their works or actively participating in public cultural forums, but because this change of perspective in Transylvanian Hungarian literature indicates theappearance of a form of discourse which requires less and less social engagement and moves away from the forms of attitude that wish to address all members of a particular community. In these poems, self-irony, rhetorical game, the mutilated or deformed words, and the nonsense serve the same purpose as the increasingly incomprehensible allegorization, viz. the exposure of the machinery of power whose activity insidiously undermines culture, language, and identity, but at the same time, in a certain socio-political context, it highlights the morally disputable character of the petty compromises of literary life functioning in the shadow of the communist dictatorship. The presentation seeks those tendencies of self-representation and identity of the Transylvanian Hungarian poetry that could be connected to the changes of the social-political context and communist power control before the 1989 regime change.

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