Pázmány Papers – Journal of Languages and Cultures

The Game of Metaphysics and the Sign. Sign – Writing – Origin. (Con)texts of Deconstruction by Anikó Radvánszky, Kijárat, Budapest, 2015.

Eszter Horváth — 2023-12-18

The book Sign – Writing – Origin by Anikó Radvánszky draws attention to the early period of Jacques Derrida’s work, to the fundamental texts that elaborate the basic concepts and logic of deconstruction, as well as its intellectual strategy.

Dons et résistances: Études sur Jacques Derrida, edited by Jolán Orbán and Anikó Radvánszky, L’Harmattan, Paris, Budapest, 2019.

Bence Matuz — 2023-12-18

As Jacques Derrida does not use theorems and axioms in the traditional sense, his thinking appears to be rather difficult to approach. His concepts, such as différance, trace or writing, do not primarily intend to facilitate positive statements, but rather the observation of internal contradictions within philosophical premises. Hence the paradoxical position of the Derridean thought, in which a completely free attitude towards concepts in fact does not exclude the basic assumption that “there is nothing outside the text”.

Seeing a Face, Reading a Face, edited by François Soulages, Anikó Ádám and Anikó Radvánszky, L’Harmattan, Paris, 2023.

Bence Matuz — 2023-12-18

The human face, as a subject of reflection since Antiquity, has raised questions in a wide variety of fields. The face has been in the focus of interest of art, philosophy, anthropology, psychology, and numerous other disciplines. Seeing a Face, Reading a Face is a collection of scholarly essays that takes a pluridisciplinary approach to the representability of the face in art and literature, while considering the links between the face and subjectivity, and between identity and mutability. In other words, the problem of the face is rooted in the fact that its subject is the most general and the most particular of human qualities at the same time.

On Hospitality Here and Now

Anikó Radvánszky — 2023-12-18

The ancient custom of hospitality – hospitium – was already an organic part of life in Ancient Greece. They believed that strangers are under the protection of Zeus, and whoever is kind to newcomers will be well liked by men and the gods. The traditionally obligatory friendly attitude dictated that the host welcomes the stranger, the wanderer coming to his home as a guest, providing shelter, protection, and help, and the mutual friendship and alliance that came of this act applied and was passed on to their children, too.

Hospitality and Ontology

Lóránt Kicsák — 2023-12-18

Open to the arrival of the other, ready to receive the other unconditionally, the responsibility is born as a response to the eventful arrival of the other. Hospitality, understood in this way, is thus an unconditional condition of possibility for meeting the other, even before any legal institution. In this sense, ethics is more original than law, and the hospitality relationship is more fundamental than any social, political, or legal relationship.

This primordiality also means that Derrida reinterprets hospitality as an ontological relation, which now becomes an openness to the arrival of the arrivant, and a readiness to encounter the other. In coexistence, the absolute presence always poses a question to all beings and expects an answer from all beings. Still, in a certain sense, our ontological relation to all beings is also a responsive and responsible
relationship.

On Hospitality, or “The Power to Rise above one’s Life”

Joanny Moulin — 2023-12-18

What habitat does the notion of hospitality find in the philosophy of life? First terminological snag: “philosophy of life” is a vocable silted up in history, for one hears Lebensphilosophie, vitalism, Bergson, Simmel, Dilthey, etc. Further upstream, of course, Hegel, his distinction between the life of nature and the life of spirit (from which were derived the Geisteswissenschaften, in the time of Wilhelm Dilthey, long before they became the human sciences, and what in several points of his oeuvre Derrida said about it, more particularly in La vie la mort, and twenty years later in Hospitalité. But from the very start, even before any reference to what anyone may have said about it, life demands hospitality in some place, to live is to inhabit, and in this uniqueness, this identity of the living and of the inhabiting we understand, immediately, the ambivalence of the notion that Derrida signals by the portmanteau word ‘hostipitalité’, that he links to the notion of enclave ‘that a general typology of the enclave must organize any theory of ipseity as hospitality or hostipitality’. Naturally, ‘enclave’ must be understood in the sense of inclusion, but while remembering that etymologically enclave derives from the Latin inclavatus, locked up, under lock and key.

The Poetics and Politics of Hospitality and Hostility

János Boros — 2023-12-18

The conceptual pair of hospitality and hostility can be analyzed by means of the two classical ethical paradigms that we owe to Aristotle and Kant. Strangely enough, although ethics is considered normative, neither of the two tendencies is normative: instead, one is descriptive, the other rational, insofar as it is based on the fundamental features of rationality. Most contemporary ethical trends can be classified under one of the original paradigms or interpreted as a combination of them. Where does Derrida’s ethics fit in, or does it represent a new way of thinking? I will attempt to put forward some considerations that might help us to understand Derrida’s ethics as a third ethical paradigm.

Hospitality – Who is the guest?

Mónika Míra Pigler — 2023-12-18

In this article I explore Derrida’s concept of the host-boundary-customer at the three Kantian levels (between states, communities and persons). The relational difference and essential unity of the persons of the Trinity illuminate the need to distinguish the “other” and the “self” even when it comes to the human person created in the image of God and living in community, in order to create a non-merging unity. God, entering the created world comes as a ‘holy guest’, while we realise that even we ourselves belong to the divine world and are in fact only guests in this world, that is to say, our essence is one of “ontological strangeness.”

Deconstruction, Right against the Body of Hospitality

Giustino De Michele — 2023-12-18

The title of this article, “Deconstruction, Right against the Body of Hospitality”, contains a quotation from Jacques Derrida’s Hospitality seminar. Here Derrida, while exposing the impossibility to distinguish a host from a guest (hôte from hôte, in French), and a friendly from a hostile one (a hospes from a hostis) – and therefore hospitality from hostility – says: “this is not here a contingent accident. It is a destiny, it is an essential law, inscribed right against the body of hospitality, it is the space and time of hospitality”.

To Dream Europe

Fernanda Bernardo — 2023-12-18

At his last conference in France, on 8 June 2004, in Strasbourg, under the title “Le souverain bien – ou l’ Europe en mal de souveraineté”, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), always very concerned about Europe and the future of Europe, dared to admit that he dreamed of “a Europe whose universal hospitality and new laws of hospitality or the right of asylum would make it the Noah’s Ark of the 21st century”. Through the question of unconditional hospitality – which, as I try to point out, emphasizes the singularity of Deconstruction as a philosophical idiom and through which Derrida rethinks, with a very different amplitude and justice, the “universal hospitality” of Kantian inspiration – it is the silhouette of hope and of responsibility of Europe, shaped by this dream of Derrida, that I try to sketch here.

On the Haunting of Hospitality

Francesca Manzari — 2023-12-18

Marcabru noted that Jaufré Rudel calls ‘inn of the afar / alberc de lohn’ both the remote place where his beloved lady of Tripoli resides, and the locus where the poets situates himself: an ideal place that Giorgio Agamben calls topos outopos. In the N voice or difficult voice of the trobar, this figures the contradiction on which the troubadour lives: at once the desire for the inaccessible body of his beloved, and the desire never to reach it. This issue is addressed here as a medieval instance of Derrida’s ‘hostipitality’, with the ungraspable as the most precious good ever hosted in the rooms or stanze of the poem, and it is argued that this is primarily a question of translation. As a case in point, this article presents the Magna Curia of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen as a magisterial example of the alberc de lohn topos, where the Emperor became his guests’ guest in a deliberate cultural transference policy that translated Aristotle and his Muslim and Jewish commentators, thus setting in motion a process of reciprocal acclimatization. The article further argues with Walter Benjamin and Antoine Berman, that translation as hostipitality or ‘auberge de loin’ inscribes itself in futurity and reaches beyond the linguistic being of man.

A Poetic Revolution of the Political

János Barcsák — 2023-12-18

In this paper I attempt to give a reading of Jacques Derrida’s second extended interpretation of Paul Celan’s “Meridian.” This second interpretation can be found in Derrida’s “seminar,” The Beast and the Sovereign, and differs from the first – which appeared in Shibboleth: For Paul Celan – in that it is placed in the broader context of the seminar: the deconstruction of sovereignty. In this context Celan’s “Meridian” acquires a special status because Derrida can identify in it a “step,” an act of freedom, a way, which can perhaps take us beyond all sovereignty by bringing about what Derrida calls “a poetic revolution of the political.” In my reading of Derrida’s reading of Celan I try to spell out the “structure” of this step as Derrida conceives it. I argue that it is ultimately in the difference between two poetic gestures, two equally necessary but still distinct acts, that the poetic revolution of the political and thus the step beyond all sovereignty becomes perhaps possible.

Exceeding Humanism

Eszter Horváth — 2023-12-18

The paper introduces Jean-Luc Nancy and Michel Serres as two philosophers of the perpetual and spontaneous rebeginning of philosophy: always in the process of inventing itself, branching off, mutating, and escaping, spurring the spirit towards continuous renewal. Nancy and Serres, two whimsically energetic, creative, innovative thinkers, both take into account, even rely in their philosophies on the parasitic procedures that tend to reorganize the structures of western culture. In this paper, these parasitic procedures come to the fore, as one of the most important aspects of innovation and creation.

Foreword

Nándor Máté Birher — 2023-12-18

The past year marked the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, and we are proud to celebrate this occasion with a renewed commitment to strengthening our presence in all academic fields represented at the Faculty. With this intention, we have decided to launch a new journal, Pázmány Papers: Journal of Languages and Literatures, dedicated to the fields of literary studies and linguistics, to be published in English, to complement the Faculty’s already established selection of publications with a more internationally visible and accessible scholarly forum. With the help of this journal, we wish to create a platform for scholars from our own university and collaborating institutions both in Hungary and abroad, a platform where they can share their insights, questions and new discoveries, contributing to the ever-evolving landscape of the humanities.

Lectori salutem

Kinga Földváry — 2023-12-18

It is with great pleasure and with a humble heart that we offer the inaugural issue of Pázmány Papers: Journal of Languages and Cultures to its readers. We believe that the greatest strength of the arts and humanities lies in their ability to inspire critical thinking, and it is precisely this critical reflection that powers our research, born out of an insight discovered in an in-depth engagement with our subjects, sharpened through dialogue with students, colleagues and readers. That is why we find it vital to have forums for the dissemination of new ideas that can incite new conversations and in this way inspire new research questions, hopefully followed by even more innovative answers. It is with these intentions that we have established the newest scholarly journal published by the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, dedicated to the fields of literature and linguistics, open to publications on all aspects of these broad and constantly evolving disciplines. We hope that this journal will soon be recognised for an excellence manifested in the diversity and quality of research represented on its pages, and it is with this desire that we invite contributions from researchers to our future issues.

Postcolonial Studies

Attila Tárnok — 2023-12-18

Postcolonial theory over the years has become an inflated term. The field of study that initially dealt with literatures originating in regions with a colonial past gradually grew to encompass broad social, political or cultural aspects arising in diverse societies with no colonial history. In my article I am concentrating on the original use of the term and going to argue that the research area has turned from being a TOPIC of investigation to a general METHOD. What led to this transformation was the commodification of a post/colonial heritage: during the 1990s the exotic became a marketable cultural product. As primary texts appeared to be profitable ventures on the international publishing scene, postcolonial theory has flourished with key figures occupying cushioned academic positions and creating a body of secondary literature detached from the original mandate of postcolonialism in the original sense of the term.

Family in the Woods

Károly Pintér — 2023-12-18

Captain Fantastic, an independent drama written and directed by Matt Ross in 2016, and starring Viggo Mortensen, addresses several themes that are central to utopian studies: the viability of an intentional community removed from mainstream civilization, the possibility of living in harmony with nature, as well as the ambition to inculcate alternative cultural values by a radical educational program. The main character, Ben Cash, decided to raise his entire family of 6 kids in the dense forests of Washington state. While training them to survive under extreme circumstances in the wilderness, he also undertakes their entire education, encouraging individual thinking and a strongly critical attitude to mainstream American society and culture. The sudden suicide of his wife forces Ben to return to ‘normal America’, confronting him with both the consequences of his parental decisions and his potential responsibility in his wife’s death.

The essay interprets the movie in the context of the American utopian tradition, particularly its individualist variety exemplified by the myth of the American Adam and the ideas of Thoreau's Walden (1854). Captain Fantastic fulfils a crucial generic criterion by skillfully satirizing some of the characteristic features and attitudes of mainstream American culture through the eyes of the children who experience it for the first time, subjecting the conventional ‘American utopia’ to a trenchant criticism. At the same time, it also questions the possibility of radical alterity: can a single family defy society by re-enacting a mythical American pattern and abandoning civilization to raise their kids in the woods? Do parents have the right to experiment on their children after their utopian hopes of opposing American capitalist society have been dashed? The clash of utopias is ultimately resolved by Ben's decision to admit his responsibility for his wife's mental illness and death and to give up the backwoods utopia and settle on a farm, conforming to another fundamental American symbol: the pastoral ideal of the garden.

Peter Carey’s “Homo Australiensis” in A Long Way from Home

Gábor Török — 2023-12-18

The paper examines Peter Carey’s first book about Indigenous Australians, a topic which he had neglected for decades. Until A Long Way from Home (2017) was written, the two-time Booker Prize winner renowned for portraying Australian identity had yet to confront this crucial matter which he believed was a fundamental issue of the country. Reasons behind this seemingly contradictory and lengthy absence are highlighted along with certain methods with which the author gradually exposes Australia’s shameful past in the treatment of First Nations people. Carey’s approach stays true to his body of work, namely the Aboriginal subject is complemented or intertwined with his portrayal of another layer of Australia’s history: the pan-European heritage of non-Indigenous Australians. But why and in what manner does he integrate European topics into a novel aiming to shed light on the maltreatment and neglect of First Nations Australians? Does this addition not dilute the original aim of paying homage to Indigenous Australia?

My paper argues that Carey successfully utilises certain European identity themes to help show the gravity of sins committed against Australian Indigenous people. The author’s modus operandi is to piece together seemingly neglected fragments of the European legacy with First Nations Australia to reveal a unified entity. Via Willie Bachhuber, a character who most Australians can connect or identify with, Carey joins together various Australian identities which may not have been connected beforehand. With this technique Carey helps ensure the novel is about and for all Australians. I believe that A Long Way from Home crowns Peter Carey’s career as fully depicting Australianness without including Aboriginal people has up until now meant a quite incomplete oeuvre. An ultimate Australian character so-far elusive to Carey, a Homo Australiensis has come to life via a pseudo-German-Balt-Hungarian-Australian, who is actually a First Nations Australian with a white biological father.

Exploring the Complexities of L2 English Academic Writing

Csilla Sárdi — 2023-12-18

L2 English academic writing, now a well-established field of study, incorporates a large number of interrelated issues from the perspectives of context, participants, process and textual realisation, informing various instructional models of English for academic purposes in university contexts globally. This paper looks at a number of major theoretical traditions and relevant research findings focusing on the characteristics of academic texts, writers, readers and the writing process, and shows how each tradition has inspired the development of particular approaches to teaching L2 English academic writing. Textual features are discussed from the points of view of genre and register analysis, and contextual features are looked at in terms of individual novice L2 writer characteristics, including writing strategies, the relationship between L1 and L2 academic writing, and the cultural background of writers. Related instructional models include product-, process-, and genre-based approaches whose operationalisations are closely linked to particular theoretical traditions. The paper argues that the pedagogical considerations stemming from different theoretical backgrounds and empirical research results can complement each other in a useful way leading to a more comprehensive pedagogical approach, and that the application of a well-informed, carefully selected and carefully sequenced combination of teaching techniques and accompanying materials can contribute to the successful development of L2 English academic writing skills.

Validating a Qualitative Interview Schedule on Multilingualism and Second Language Vocabulary Attrition and Maintenance

Hanae Ezzaouya — 2023-12-18

This paper focuses on the validation process of a qualitative interview schedule designed to investigate the nuanced dynamics of multilingualism and second language vocabulary attrition and maintenance. The interview schedule was developed to gain insights into the complexities of the participants’ language experiences, identities, as well as vocabulary learning and retention strategies. Second language speakers of English with diverse linguistic backgrounds were selected for the study to ensure the reliability and validity of the interview. The piloting stage played a pivotal role in laying the ground for refined interview questions, where data authenticity was ensured through the creation of a comfortable environment that helped participants provide genuine responses and avoid offering socially desirable ones. The interview questions were piloted multiple times to identify and resolve any inconsistencies in the participants’ responses. The validated interview schedule can serve as a dependable data collection tool and prompt researchers to consider the implications of second language vocabulary attrition and maintenance for pedagogical practices.

From Canada to Hungary

Fruzsina Kovács — 2023-12-18

The first Margaret Atwood book appeared in 1984 in Hungarian translation but that does not mean that Európa Publishing House did not follow Atwood’s literary work closely during Communism. Both her prose and poetry were reviewed, often shortly after the original English language publication. The paper examines twenty-two reviewing in-house documents that Európa Publisher used as part of the selection process and an informal censorship procedure. First, the study draws the cultural context for the in-house selection tools and then identifies key themes in the anonymized reviewing documents of the era, such as: possible titles for the books, poetry weighed on scales, the practice of multiple reviewing, social classes in translation, relying on paratexts, the reputation of international success behind the Iron Curtain, and in what way is this literature “Canadian”? The paper tracks the publishing paths of all Atwood books reviewed during and immediately after the political change of 1989, concluding that the tools for selecting books for translation have changed, not only due to the political change, but as a result of the accelerated publishing practices that focus on bestseller lists, literary prizes, pitches of literary agencies and a network of personal contacts.

“Ink and paper”

Valentina Rossi — 2023-12-18

Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra boasts a peculiar typographical and editorial history. Despite the fact that the version contained in the so-called First Folio is “the only authoritative” (Ridley 1954: VII), several variations differentiate the text published in 1623 from the copies that were printed in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Nevertheless, such copies ineluctably affected the English contemporary editions as well the Italian translations of the selected Roman play that were published from the nineteenth century onwards. The present paper aims to reconstruct the history of both the English and the Italian editions of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, in order to understand how the evolution of both the translation theories and the editorial tendencies have shaped the structure as well the stylistic features of the tragedy, consequently affecting its reception.

From the United States (via the Soviet Union) to Hungary

Anikó Sohár — 2023-12-18

Isaac Asimov was the favourite American science-fiction author in the Kádár era due to extraliterary reasons, many of his works were therefore translated when science fiction, a previously prohibited popular genre was introduced to the Hungarian public. This paper analyses the first two Hungarian translations, that of a short story entitled ‘Victory Unintentional’ and that of a collection of short stories entitled I Robot. Both indirect and direct translations exhibit multiple traces of censorship and revision, significantly changing the structure, atmosphere and message of the original works. The paper also calls attention to the need to gather information about the literary translators of the Kádár era as long as some of them are still alive, make use of oral history.

Translating Non-standard Language

Dóra Bodrogai — 2023-12-18

Andrea Camilleri has gained significant success in the last decades with his works written in a special language: by creating a language similar to Sicilian dialect but understandable to other Italian speakers he heavily involved his Sicilian cultural heritage as well and brought it closer not only to an Italian, but a worldwide audience. How are this idiolect and the cultural elements translatable into other languages? There are various approaches, as shown in Quaderni camilleriani 3, and the techniques depend greatly on the target language. In Camilleri’s novels, not only the aforementioned diatopic, but also diastratic and diaphasic variation are characteristic, which is another factor the translator has to take into consideration.

In this paper I would like to examine the translator’s choices in Hungarian regarding this multilingualism. Currently there are seven volumes available in Hungary, four of them translated by Margit Lukácsi, one by Noémi Kovács and Kornél Zaránd, and the last two by Ádám András Kürthy. The paper is also a parallel work to Giulia Magazzù’s, which aims to examine the translations in English of three novels, two of which are in common with this paper: Il cane di terracotta and La forma dell’acqua.

Translating Non-standard Language

Giulia Magazzù — 2023-12-18

With the flowering of literary works written in a non-standard variety, especially in dialect, translation studies have tried to partially delineate theories, methods, and models to apply when translating these kinds of work. Despite this, translating a literary work written in dialect always represents a challenge for a translator. This difficulty is due to the main characteristics of dialects: they are spoken in a very restricted area and depict a specific cultural world. An example is represented by the language of Andrea Camilleri’s novels. In fact, by examining some linguistic features and expressions taken from the English translation of three of Camilleri’s detective novels, this paper offers an analysis of the linguistic choices made by the American translator Stephen Sartarelli, with a particular attention on Sicilian culture.