New publications by IAS CEU alumna Ágnes Györke
IAS CEU congratulates its 2012/13 alumna Ágnes Györke on a series of publications in 2021 which are directly related to the project that Ágnes pursued while being a fellow at IAS.
The article On the periphery: Contemporary exile fiction and Hungary (Journal of Postcolonial Writing, Vol. 57, N3, 316-329) explores the concept of the periphery as a geopolitical and aesthetic category in the works of three exilic writers of Hungarian origin, Agota Kristof, Tibor Fischer, and Zsuzsa Bánk. These three novels, which have not previously been studied in a comparative framework, explore resistance, terror, and trauma in post-war Eastern Europe, mobilizing a set of tropes that portray the limits of everyday life in Hungary during and after the Second World War. Relying on the concept of “peripheral aesthetics”, it argues that a close reading of Kristof’s The Notebook (Le Grand Cahier [1986]), Fischer’s Under the Frog (1992), and Bánk’s The Swimmer (Der Schwimmer [2002]) reveals that the peripheral spaces these novels depict are associated both with the geopolitical location of Hungary and with the traumas of the post-war period. The three novels make use of various strategies of peripheral aesthetics which reflect different stages of coping with the collective traumas of the region.
The piece Feeling the city: Migrant narratives and urban space (Subjectivity, Vol. 14, N. 3, 95-103) opens the journal special issue in that discusses the role and place of space in migrants' experiences and scrutinizes the impact of colonialism and displacement on the formation of subjectivities in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender, among other factors.
Finally, IAS is delighted to congratulate Györke Ágnes on the publication of an edited volume titled Geographies of Affect in Contemporary Literature and Visual Culture: Central Europe and the West (Brill, 2021). The volume opens a dialogue between the literary and filmic works produced in Central Europe and in the Anglophone world. It relies on the concept of translocality to explore this corpus, offering new readings of contemporary Hungarian films as well as urban fiction and poetry in English. Calling attention to the role of affect in imagining city space, the volume investigates György Pálfi’s Taxidermia, Béla Tarr’s Family Nest, Teju Cole’s Open City, Toni Morrison’s Jazz, China Miéville’s Un Lun Dun, Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah, and Patrick Neate’sCity of Tiny Lights, among many other urban narratives. Contributors examine both widely explored emotions and under-researched affects, such as shame, fascination, and the role of withdrawal in contemporary literature and culture.