Comparative Imagology
ÖSSZEHASONLÍTÓ IMAGOLÓGIA
Keywords: imagology; alterity; comparative literature; social psychology;
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Keywords: imagology; alterity; comparative literature; social psychology;
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Keywords: image of Romanians; German literature; Ottoman Empire;
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Keywords: history of imagology; Hungarian-Romanian relationship; ethnic stereotypes; ethnic image;
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Keywords: George Enescu; Balkanism; music;
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Keywords: censorship; Áron Tamási; 1970s;
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Keywords: hatred; Umberto Eco; cultural criticism essay
Imagological Features in Two Works by Umberto Eco
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Keywords: language programme; adaptation; bilingualism; social-cultural and linguistic assimilation;
The unique life of Ferenc Herczeg, who was a forbidden author between 1945 and 1980, can be summed up in a nutshell as follows: how the German-speaking boy from the Banat Swabian region becomes the Hungarian playwright who put Hungarian drama on the path to European success, a committed writer of national endeavours, and the creator of a successful Hungarian prose and dramatic oeuvre. The subject of the research is to explain where and how Ferenc Herczeg’s “language programme” became so successful, since “There was no other native speaker who learned Hungarian so well as Ferenc Herczeg” (Hegedűs). Examining the language path, the research may explain the adaptation considered to be the key to success and the contribution of the author’s bilingualism to the foundation of success. In the case of Herczeg, social, cultural, and linguistic assimilation is so successful that it gives rise to countless speculations. The majority of criticism seeks the social adaptation and reflects less on linguistic assimilation. My aim is to prove that Herczeg, a German-speaking boy of Swabian descent, became Hungarian because of literature-centric Hungarian culture.
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Keywords: book; reading; Serbia; Hungarian literature; crisis; change;
The dynamic development of the book publishing network, the institutional background of Hungarian literature in Yugoslavia/Serbia was gaining momentum in the second half of the 20th century. The intention to educate the working strata as readers was the dividend of a state-run, socialist-based book culture. This endeavour was aided by appropriate book publishing or distribution structures and reader event movements (book months, literary evenings, book presentations). The social crisis of the turn of the century and the crisis of the 1990s shook the position of both books and reading. The structure of Hungarian book publishers in Serbia was largely supported by subsidies from the motherland, and the development and sustainability of reading habits wavered. The digital “prosperity” of the turn of the century has also weakened the position of books and reading in this region. The question arises, should one talk about the crisis of the book, or perhaps of a slowly changing environment, due to the fact that, e.g., the e-book has appeared, albeit sporadically, as opposed to the more expensive, cumbersome, and less easily accessible printed document. The aim of the study is to provide an answer to the question posed in the title.
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Keywords: the poetics of rust; critical fiction; François Bon;
In this paper, I examine the significance and meaning of rust motifs in the so-called “critical fiction” segment of contemporary French literature, and more specifically in the novels of François Bon. Without following through the appearances of rust in literary history exhaustively, some previous instances are briefly mentioned, since rust is one of the most frequently used images of the fragility and transience of the man-made world. In extreme contemporary literature, the poetics of rust expresses the nostalgia for a past industrial society in strange configurations, without remaining within the narrow confines of realistic presentation. Despite its apparent stasis, rust always presupposes an earlier pre-rust time horizon, that of the brand new state of the man-made object, machinery, or bridge. Recently, François Bon published a study of László Moholy-Nagy’s photo series of the transporter bridge of the Old Port of Marseille, blown up in 1944. The pedestal of the transporter bridge, as a rusting memento, from time to time awakens the desire in the French to reconstruct this peak of engineering and industrial achievement.
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Keywords: science fiction; biology; dystopia; ethics; transhumanism;
In science-fiction (SF) literature, the numerous biological themed works now represent a subgenre. The main structuring motive of the story in these works – or “novum”, using the phrase adapted by Darko Suvin SF theoretician – is biological in nature – such a natural or artificial, partially or completely fictional element (virus, gene manipulation, divergent evolution, etc.) that has a fundamental effect on the biology, development, degeneration, mutation, or hybridization of the human race or other races. In this study expounding a chapter of my thesis, I compare two SF novels, the Blood Music by Greg Bear and Brain Plague by Joan Sloczewski. The text is interdisciplinary in its nature and mostly discusses narratological and philosophical connections. The works of the genre covered here also raise the question of ethical responsibility. Through my study, I have arrived at the conclusion that while Bear was a writer “by trade” and not a scientist or researcher, he wrote his above-mentioned work with scientific precision, adapting many contemporary relevant theories during the creative process – like the Grey Goo hypothesis, the collective unconscious of Jung, the anthropic principle, or determinism – and organically integrating elements of these into the narrative. Primarily, he studies existential philosophical questions and also tries to present and compare how the individual and collective consciousness, the complex nervous system-like existence function. The narrative also brings up posthuman or post-anthropocentric viewpoints. In this way, the novel matches the requirements of hard SF. While being a biologist, Joan Slonczewski deviated far more from reality. In her space opera, she depicts anthropomorphic microbes living in the brains of people, building the mirror image of human society. Despite their miniature nature, they have a far greater complexity than what could be realistically possible. They create belief systems, can communicate in articulate languages, invent new things, etc. Thereby, the story is a classic social SF, a parable studying social philosophical questions grounded on a novum – such as the existence of microbes with the complexity of the homo sapiens – hard to explain even by pseudo-scientific or fictional arguments.
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Keywords: Kim Stanley Robinson; New York 2140; capitalism; crisis;
Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140 was published in 2017. It presents a unique vision of endless expansion, global warming, climate along with a dystopian capitalism and the entailing humanitarian disasters. The main villain is the capitalist system itself, while the scene is set amid rhetorical structures of rising sea levels and floods. Beneath the surface of the novel, there are underlying murky waters in the form of financial-economic exchange processes, driven exclusively by the quest for maximum profit. The benefit of studying this work lies in a more complete understanding of the current socio-economic system, especially given the criticism of mass production and mass consumption. Indirectly, the novel contributes to the ongoing process of raising the readers’ awareness of the importance of eco-politics and its implementation in the real world.
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Keywords: web theory; Internet philosophy; Internet use
The Internet philosophy we envision is not merely an abstract characterization of the Internet as a self-contained entity since the Internet exists and exists as a component of a complex world populated by natural, social, and cultural entities, and this context is also a crucial part of its philosophical description. The “embeddedness” of the Internet in the world makes it easier to understand the consequences of its use. Since the nature of the Internet is not “naturally given” but has been and is being shaped by conscious choices, in pursuit of specific social and cultural aspirations, intentions, interests, and values, consideration of the social and cultural factors that determine the nature of the Internet and are involved inshaping it clearly helps to identify the social and cultural effects of Internet use. In this way, it seems useful to include some social and cultural context in the analysis of the nature of the Internet. In examining the likely social and cultural consequences of Internet use,it is worth drawing on two “cultural-historical” analogies, the “reformation of knowledge”, and the “formation of gratitude”. By drawing on them in our understanding of the impact of Internet use on the human world, we can conclude that it is possible and worthwhile to focus our research on the emergence and the process of the emergence of gratitude and its emerging characteristics. The world of the Internet user is fundamentally changing: the former world, built up from the natural and social spheres of existence in a familiar way, is being supplemented by a third human sphere of existence, which is built on top of the previous ones and is inextricably intertwined with them.
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Keywords: Hermann Bausinger; people and machine;
In this article, I revisit Hermann Bausinger’s reflections. In the Germanethnographer’s view, the multiplicity of machines is integrated into popular society from the very beginning, i.e. from the first period of their appearance: the latter cannot be conceived of as a socio-cultural organization before the machine age. If we observe carefully, we can “encounter in everyday life innumerable forms of natural contact with technology” (Bausinger 1995: p. 7). But it is also true that the encounter was perceived by the popular world as a threat: a play of unleashed forces, a meaningless (because for it it could not be understood) threat. After all,a kind of stability was established that could be observed in the industrial age: “a ritualized self-evidence of the relationship with technology” (ibid.). In my presentation, I will discuss what I imagine this means.
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Keywords: identity construction; social networking sites; visual self-representation;
For newer generations, social networking sites play a significant role in both experiencing aspects of social behaviour and in shaping personality – whether it is the construction of a persona as presented to others or as a real person. In the following paper, I would like to list the factors that are decisive in the visual representation of personality. From this perspective, I have previously studied selfies, and in the autumn of 2018 I analysed with some of my students the visual self-representational qualities of images uploaded to Instagram. The research revealed that several factors are well separated in the visual self-presentation. Elements that reflect real personality traits and are intentionally self-revealing are strongly related to users’ offline lives, while those that indicatea desired personality (e.g. to achieve greater acceptance or popularity) reflectmore of an online, to some extent virtual, personality. Also close to the latter aresome of the paradigmatic, standardized or normative traits that can be extracted from the creation of images and which many people prefer to use. But is the usual distinction between offline and online personas real? Some of the literature on the subject sees selfies and other forms of digital persona as specific to the virtual world. However, in the light of these findings, itseems worthwhile to move away from an isolated view of visual representations and place them in the context of overall social behaviour and self-presentation. Itis also important to note that the representation of personality has both technical and social preconditions. But in the same way, it is also important to consider the central interrelationships between online and offline personification.
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Keywords: Hungarians in Berlin; communication platforms; emergence of social media;
My study briefly presents the results of a research project comparing two communication platforms of the Hungarian diaspora in Berlin. MagyarOnline.net’s forum “Hungarians in Berlin – chatting” was launched in 2004 and was particularly active for about two years, with almost two thirds of the posts being written during this period; from the end of 2006, the number of posts from users had already decreased, but it became clear that the online spaces of the Hungarian diaspora in Berlin had moved to a new platform, Iwiw. After 2012, long before theclosure of Iwiw in 2014, online groups of Hungarians living in Berlin appeared on Facebook, such as “Berlin Calling” in 2012, or the group I analysed, “BerlinHungarians”, which was launched in March 2014. This transformation of the media environment, the emergence of social media, coincides with the period of liberalization of employment in Germany and the sudden increase in migration, from Hungary to Germany (Blaskó–Gödri 2014). My analysis is part of a research project that aims to explore the interconnections between the city, migration and media through the example of the Hungarian diaspora in Berlin. Zsolt Szijártó’s study emphasizes, based on his empirical research among Hungarians in Berlin, that social and political changes have led to changes in each of the three aspects mentioned above every 10-12 years or so: new media have appeared, urban culture and its representation have changed, and migration has affected new groups due to changes in the political environment (Szijártó 2018). At the beginning of the investigation of these two online communication platforms, I was primarily interested in whether, in the specific cultural context of the Hungarian diaspora in Berlin, the migration of user-generated content from one platform to another could be observed or whether different content, although related to the diaspora, could be created on the different platforms.
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Keywords: life hacks; self-development; self-help; ICT tools;
One of the most interesting features of late modernity in cultural studies is the identity project of the individual. As the role of grand identity-affirming narratives and institutions diminishes and disintegrates, the individual is increasingly left to his or her own devices to construct his or her own identity. This active process takes place largely through the consumption, use, and transformation of various material and immaterial goods. At the same time, it is not only the outside world but the individual him-/herself that has become the object of everyday consumption and transformation – the body, the shaping of habits, the planning of lifestyle have all become importantin contemporary Western societies. The most active period in the long history of self-development, with self-help (personal development, personal growth) literature, began in the first half of the 1900s, but its real golden age began in the second half of the 20th century. Self-development, which is a kind of self-differentiation, turns to the individual with the concepts and ideas of traditional industrial production (e.g. productivity, efficiency, measurability) and tries to make the complexity of everyday life manageable for him/her. And in addressing the social and professional challenges of everyday life, innovations that provided information, tools (and, of course, commodities) to the individual in the hope of achieving abetter life, have played an increasing role. In my presentation, I will explore the phenomenon of the “life hack”. I want to show how self-improvement has changed with the wider diffusion and social embedding of computing and networked communication technologies. The focus of the presentation will be on the turn that can be linked to the paradigm shift of web 2.0, which started in the first half of the 2000s, which has given ICT tools an increasingly wide scope in self-improvement practices. I aim to present the practice of life hack as a social practice that has emerged with the commodification of ICTs and the domestication of tools.
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Keywords: Twitch; YouTube; Google; Facebook;
Alongside YouTube, Twitch has become one of the most popular social content sharing and streaming services. The media platform, which has been in operation since 2011, became the 26th most visited website in 2019, with an average of more than 1.2 million viewers consuming content every second. It still lags behind its biggest competitor, YouTube, in the statistics, but it has emerged as the leader in user experience for streaming media thanks to its innovative solutions and community-building features. Its success in a short period of time has been driven by e-sports streaming, which has become synonymous with the platform. It is now clear that Twitch represents the definitive streaming experience for the average e-sports content consumer, making it much more difficult for other players to expand in this dynamic and growing industry. Over the past three years, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have all tried to carve out a slice of the e-sports streamingmarket, but viewers are reluctant to move away from Twitch because it would mean giving up their established consumer habits, Twitch’s unique features, and the social experience they have come to expect. This situation is also making it increasingly difficult for event organizers to operate, as Twitch’s dominance and viewer inflexibility reduces the possibility of selling exclusive streaming rights, which will be the industry’s most important source of revenue in the near future. In my presentation, I will explore this dilemma by looking at the success of Twitch, the consumer habits of e-sports broadcasting, and the attempts of competing streaming media platforms to link e-sports broadcasting to their own.
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