Gárdos, Bálint - Péter, Ágnes - Pikli, Natália and Máté Vince : Confrontations and Interactions - Essays on Cultural Memory

The majority of these twenty-four essays began as presentations at an international conference in Budapest, organized by the Department of English Studies at Eötvös Lórand Tudományegyetem (ELTE), at which faculty and students, past and present, participated along with their British guests. As the editors elaborate in the nuanced “Preface,” the articles in this volume deal in one way or another with “confrontation” - defined as the boundary between two different cultures or between past and present - as well as with “interactions” between two (or among more) cultures and between the collective and personal memories of the past.

The most striking feature of this collection is the sheer diversity in subject matter and critical approaches. Nevertheless, to this reader, the essays fall into two groups. One continues the interdisciplinary and theoretical traditions of comparative literature and comparative studies. The other group tackles the catastrophic events of the twentieth century in Central and Eastern Europe: the two world wars, the 1944 Nazi occupation, the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, along with decades of state censorship and repression under the Soviets. It is no wonder the essays in this group deal mostly with trauma and its long-lasting effects.