East-Central Europe in comparative literature studies: introduction
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East‑Central Europe in comparative literature studies: introduction Péter Hajdu1
© Akadémiai Kiadó, Budapest, Hungary 2020
The Neohelicon mini-cluster “East-Central Europe in comparative literature studies” brings together a small selection of articles based on papers that were presented in the October 2018 conference of the Hungarian Comparative Literature Association, hosted by the Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, Budapest.1 As a pale reflection on the ideal of unlimitedly polyglot discourse championed by Hugó Meltzl and Sámuel Brassai, the annual meetings of the Hungarian Comparative Literature Association are traditionally bilingual (Hungarian and English), and usually attract participants from several countries, in the case of the 2018 conference: Hungary, France, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Serbia, Slovenia, and the USA. When Meltzl and Brassai published the world’s first journal on comparative literature studies, their ideal was an unlimitedly polyglot periodical. The title was printed in eleven languages, and Neohelicon still uses its Latin version Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum as subtitle to pay tribute to that pioneering enterprise originating from East-Central Europe, from the multicultural Transylvanian city of Kolozsvár/Klausenburg/Cluj-Napoca.2 Even if the ideal of unlimited polyglotism cannot be sustained today, the Hungarian Comparative Literature Association at least tries to avoid monolingual comparative literature conferences and engage in dialogue with comparatists of the broader region and those interested in its cultural history. The problems that the 2018 Budapest meeting sought to address, and that became relevant to the present selection were “The memory of the AustroHungarian Empire, the Balkan question, and East-Central Europe,” “Complexities of religious and cultural identity in the Central-European literatures,” “defining Central Europe from different perspectives,” and “Between East and West: questions of in-betweenness, mediation, and cultural translation.” 1
Special thanks must be expressed to the chief organisers Ágnes Klára Papp and Csaba Horváth. For Neohelicon’s commitment to cherish the local-regional traditions of comparative literature see Hajdu (2008). For the importance of Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum for the formation of the discipline see Damrosch (2006). The journal’s achievement tends to be attributed to Hugó Meltzl alone, but for the crucial role the other editor Sámuel Brassai played in its history see T. Szabó (2013). 2
* Péter Hajdu [email protected] 1
School of Foreign Languages, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, People’s Republic of China
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P. Hajdu
The present mini-cluster is not the first and hopefully not the last time Neohelicon has provided a forum for discussions of the East-Central-European cultural space. For example the first issue of the year 2005 published the proceedings of a conference on national stereotypes, sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Associ
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