Ferenc Zsélyi - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Ferenc Zsélyi

Henry James argued that not telling the story with ease was the essence of Modernist novels in or... more Henry James argued that not telling the story with ease was the essence of Modernist novels in order to depict some momentum, the (en)durance of the moment, when the whole Universe manifests in an insignificant spot on Earth. Woolf considered character, the form of activities to be the key to narrative fiction.
We may be missing the hero and her/his plot, yet what we get, instead, is a wide range of views - of how important and unimportant things make a difference. This difference, then, attracts the strange(r) inside and reveals shades of the Self. Reading novels written in literary Modernism we can meet a/the secret sharer who may just as well have been our long-time companion, the implied author(ity) of our reading Selves. I have traced the the secret sharer of the reading selves in novels written by Butler, Stoker, Conrad, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Isherwood and Waugh. And I have mapped the changes their secret sharers have inflicted on narrative discourse.

Reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), the reader may have some difficulties decidin... more Reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), the reader may have some difficulties deciding "whose" novel this narrative might be. Whose life provides the narrating discursive frame of the narrated plot/s, one might wonder. This enigma makes this book probably the last significant Modernist novel, and, it also turns the narrative into an intensive reading experience.

I have mapped how in Waugh's novel three characters, Sebastian, Charles Ryder and Julia try to "tell the story" - how and why they shape or fail to shape plots. The narrator is a painter - he is good at representing space. His narrative strategies summarize the poetics and the rhetoric of fiction in literary Modernism from Butler to Bram Stoker, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, Isherwood and Waugh.

We follow up how the temporal nature of a story line is displaced - sometimes sublimated - by the memories of a painter's mind. By "painting minds" who ignore temporal sequences and causation and turn narrative discourse into a (filmic) show in prose. Ekphrasis, painting with words replaces giving account of "what has happened".

In this paper we are mapping those segments of Bram Stoker's novel that "hide" behind the strikin... more In this paper we are mapping those segments of Bram Stoker's novel that "hide" behind the strikingly obvious surface plotting of the narrative, yet generate the narrative discourse with a force that indicates that we may consider these "slips of narration" to constitute the narrative structure and discourse with a much greater impact (c.f., "nothing is too small" [146]) than that of the "obvious"- or surface layer/s of the book. This other discourse is the foundation of the house of fiction in which Dracula keeps on putting on various faces (personae). When in the house, we do not necessarily see any mark of this, yet the house would and could not be standing without it.

Joyce Gone Wilde-Character and Plot Interfaces in Ulysses The paper is a guide through the perso... more Joyce Gone Wilde-Character and Plot Interfaces in Ulysses

The paper is a guide through the personae Bloom takes on through the plot of Joyce's 1922 novel, Ulysses. The critic's argument gives a sample of what it feels like to be literally reading an unreadable novel. The argument also traces the many references to Oscar Wilde in the narrative. The critique maps how Ulysses was the endgame of a literary movement: Joyce completed what Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Bram Stoker, Wilde and Conrad had carefully prepared for him.

This is a narrative analysis of Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar (1963). We set up the time lin... more This is a narrative analysis of Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar (1963). We set up the time line of events (the story) and then map the plot or plots that may explain “what may have happened”. The detailed listings of characters, their emblematic activities (masterplots), emblems and enigmas help us learn what has been going on. The list of traumas Esther Greenwood, the heroine and narrator of the novel has gone through mark how Esther’s recollection of her past gains significance. Story, plot, character, symbolism and the network of symbolic oppositions unveil how death and life, father and mother figures generate an interface that ruins Esther’s life so as to rebuild it again. This descent into personal hell and into archaic terrors of the human psyche is completed by an ascent into Lacan’s Symbolic Order where the horror of the flesh and that of the archaic is converted into a(n electro) shocking narrative that carries both character and reader beyond good and evil, to the uncanny realm that looks so strange yet feels so familiar to all of us. This paper attempts to provide a “narrative morphology” with the help of which readers of Sylvia Plath’s novel can walk and/or struggle through this narrative rites of passage the reading of which feels like attending a late twentieth century ritual dense with fashion, media, sexuality, mediocrity and psychiatry.

Patterns, Symbols and Themes in Bram Stoker’s Dracula -by Ferenc Zselyi, Feb 3, 2014

Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula (1897) is a discourse on the visible and the invisible, on the seemi... more Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula (1897) is a discourse on the visible and the invisible, on the seemingly good and the primary evil that is, also, "good"; on the effable and the ineffable. The beautifully written end-of-the-century prose depicts horror and "disgust" and their perception only to show how much of the horror is coming from within the human soul. The long narrative is constituted by a complex of symbolic oppositions that make this novel a good, interesting and/or exciting reading for everyone. This was the first Modernist novel written in English literature - it has nothing to do with "vampires" and ghosts who/that are "only" signifiers and/or symbols or emblems in this discourse. Stoker's novel is the predecessor of Yeats' symbolism and Joyce's time travel in Ulysses.

We start out from the presupposition that it is true for each work of an author's life work that ... more We start out from the presupposition that it is true for each work of an author's life work that it might serve as a model for the interpretation of all the other works' structure. So when we make an attempt to comment on any work of an author -considering both structure and meaning -the other work, which we then consider as "a/the model" (that is, the other discourse) will give an explanation to the particular semantic and semiotic features of the work examined, and, on the other hand, it would open up interpretative choices for the text. Our starting point is based on the assumption that a life work is such an intertext in which each text is virtually an attempt made to name the author.

1. The sign is constituted via the function of the signifier and the signified. This function var... more 1. The sign is constituted via the function of the signifier and the signified. This function varies depending on the modality of the signified. The signified may be there physically -then it is "real" and the function of the signified and the signifier is denotation. Within the denotative sign function the marker points at the signified. Their relation is indexical. The index is a quasi picture of the signified.

We owe to him [Christ] the most diverse things and people. Hugo's Les Misérables, Baudelaire's Fl... more We owe to him [Christ] the most diverse things and people. Hugo's Les Misérables, Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, the note of pity in Russian novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the stained glass and tapestries and the quattrocento work of Burne-Jones and Morris, belong to him no less than the tower of Giotto, Lancelot, and Guinevere, Tannhauser, the troubled romantic marbles of Michael Angelo, pointed architecture, and the love of children and flowers -for both of which, indeed, in classical art there was but little place, hardly enough for them to grow or play in, but which, from the twelvth century down to our own day, have been continually making their appearances in art, under various modes and at various times, coming fitfully and wilfully, as children, as flowers, are apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been in hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that grown-up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the search; and the life of a child being no more than an April day on which there is both rain and sun for the narcissus. Oscar Wilde: De Profundis I have been working on a project, the aim of which is to set up a model of a rather technical nature, with the help of which we may analyze and teach texts in a literature course. The objective of this project is a rhetoric structure, that may be detected at the reception of a particular text. And as we often read so that when we comprehend or explain we pay homage to the name of the/an author, this name itself should be considered as a marker of our hermeneutic game. The name of the author, then, is the name of the game when reading something authorized by this very name.

In the tableaux of Auden's poetry the Darwinian rule of evolutionary chance and inevitability min... more In the tableaux of Auden's poetry the Darwinian rule of evolutionary chance and inevitability mingles with the biblical imagery of Creation resulting in a bittersweet still life, a static picture where everything is there yet there seems to be no reason either to stay or to leave. This paper, on the one hand, examines how this movingly static un/poetic universe derives from Auden's tribute to Freud, and, on the other hand, it also maps the iconography of the dialogue between "Mrs. Nature" and "The Authentic City": the Audenesque transfers the sense of apocalypse from an eschatological trope into loci of the (urban) present. Auden emblematizes the present moment -the very same way Freud did in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) -without inflicting any surplus metaphor or "poeticity" on the world. With this technique he is able to reveal beauty, rational finitude and connectedness in common sense human existence. His words are sad yet happy to open up dead things for (the) living: the Audenesque generates the melancholy of 'the life to come' via photographic images of the present. An iconographic inventory may trace how lost hopes are regained, how stillness becomes moving. Discourses, irrespective of being everyday or poetic ones, are born via the projection of a series of emblems by the help of which they segment, divide, name, structure and territorialize the organic which, in itself, would have stayed at the zero degree level of signification and significance. Words are butchering Nature into possible and impossible worlds so as "to make sense" of natural nonsense. Marking the unmarked, shaping the shapeless, fitting the shameless, connecting the accidental leaves the mind with loss and melancholy. What is done to Mother Nature by humanity, history, science and poetry is a series of attempts to say good-bye to the origin, to the original. Every word loses what the same word would, at the very same moment, want to recall: giving away so as to give way to − to give another way to "the same in a different form". The familiar becomes the strange(r), presence becomes uncanny, the mirror image provides the identity of the self; while, at the same time, the mirror image transfers identity to optical otherness and the self becomes the optical unconscious of its own reflection.

When the critic is in search of the rhetorics and politics of an author the recurrent elements of... more When the critic is in search of the rhetorics and politics of an author the recurrent elements often show the trace for the inquiry. This time I will be mapping the work of two tropes in E. M. Forster's narratives -both of them are transposed from Luca della Robbia's terracotta and frieze works to Forster's narrative poetry. The first one is a topos, the "della Robbia baby" which is there in many of his reliefs. A characteristic remnant of the early Renaissance in Florence. The other one is a trope: the colour "della Robbia blue". Della Robbia's terracotta pieces were featuring human figures outlined in white against the background of the shape of the blue which particularly characterizes the sculptor's method. My scope of reference in the history of literature is between 1860 and 1922. So this is bit later than the two hundred years of the Renaissance. This is the result of a literary collaboration that characterized the aesthetic movements in England after the iconoclasm of the Pre-Raphaelites. Two theorists converted the original early Renaissance features into expressionist and early Imagist features. John Addington Symonds published a Platonic essay, In the Key of Blue in which he developed a correspondence between the erotics and the epistemology of Greek (he called it Dorian) culture and that of the chivalric tradition in the Middle Ages. The other thinker was Walter Pater who published his book The Renaissance in 1873. Here Pater wrote a commentary on 15th-16th century Italian art and provided aesthetic structures with which he was able to reform, generally, the attitude towards mimesis in literary theory. His Renaissance could as well have had the title Expressionism or Decadence or Hermeneutics.

Most people would connect the idea of film to that of theatre. Well, the idea of the cinema has s... more Most people would connect the idea of film to that of theatre. Well, the idea of the cinema has something common with that of the theatre but this difference is mostly superficial: it is about the setting. Both the interior of the cinema and that of the theatre are late simulacra of the cave Plato was describing in his simile of the cave in his Republic Book VII which part we have already mentioned above. There in Plato's simile people are bound down to the earth with chains inside a cave. Each person is chained so that she faces the inside wall of the cave and she cannot see in any other direction. At the mouth of the cave -that is at the back of the chained

The corpus of iconology and the inventory of "stock images" traffic an enormous amount of informa... more The corpus of iconology and the inventory of "stock images" traffic an enormous amount of information merged in pictures and tableaux. Cognitive media iconology arranges "stock figures" (both in the visual and in the mathematical sense of the word, figure) that have been obviously arranging and processing representative possible worlds into informative tableaux: it has been depicting and/or mapping the interface of the mind and that of representation. In our paper we are going to test Dunaújváros via the paradigms and allegories of iconology.

I examine the psychosocial structure of locations online, that is, when cities cease to be concre... more I examine the psychosocial structure of locations online, that is, when cities cease to be concrete in either sense of the notion, concrete. My thesis proposes that every communal place online does something to its offline 'twin'. The starting point in their relatedness is a kind of 'mirror phase' when either after I have been to a place I go online and 'revisit' the site in its digital form as a sight; or, the other way round, I study possible Internet platforms of a city, and, then, I visit the 'same' 'place' real time, offline. The Image and the Real merge in my consciousness when the offline tableau, the site, meets with her online mirror image which is a digital tableau. Offline I visit and see, smell analogically; online I 'do' the same things via digital applications − I simulate, or, recall, experiencing. Two different medium modalities, the Real and the Imaginary claim the same status: that of being (at) the same place. What's happening when I go real time offline in a place where I have 'already' 'been' online? What do the stones of her houses do to my sight? What do her odors do to my smelling? The online sight covers and represses real time site and physical experience. And real time city becomes the offline repressed optical unconscious of the guiding, digitally informative − super egotistic − online sight. The emblems of the offline site and the emblems of the online sight, however, are recognizable both ways. I will suggest in my conclusion that since the online platform of a town necessarily represses the real time offline Real of/at the place, both surfing online on the platform and walking real time in the streets − in both cases watching, tracing, recognizing the same images − are psychoanalytically consubstantial: it is like dreaming online and day-dreaming offline, in both cases letting go of (m)any images in place. The question is who profits from our preconscious visits either way?

Henry James argued that not telling the story with ease was the essence of Modernist novels in or... more Henry James argued that not telling the story with ease was the essence of Modernist novels in order to depict some momentum, the (en)durance of the moment, when the whole Universe manifests in an insignificant spot on Earth. Woolf considered character, the form of activities to be the key to narrative fiction.
We may be missing the hero and her/his plot, yet what we get, instead, is a wide range of views - of how important and unimportant things make a difference. This difference, then, attracts the strange(r) inside and reveals shades of the Self. Reading novels written in literary Modernism we can meet a/the secret sharer who may just as well have been our long-time companion, the implied author(ity) of our reading Selves. I have traced the the secret sharer of the reading selves in novels written by Butler, Stoker, Conrad, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce, Isherwood and Waugh. And I have mapped the changes their secret sharers have inflicted on narrative discourse.

Reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), the reader may have some difficulties decidin... more Reading Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited (1945), the reader may have some difficulties deciding "whose" novel this narrative might be. Whose life provides the narrating discursive frame of the narrated plot/s, one might wonder. This enigma makes this book probably the last significant Modernist novel, and, it also turns the narrative into an intensive reading experience.

I have mapped how in Waugh's novel three characters, Sebastian, Charles Ryder and Julia try to "tell the story" - how and why they shape or fail to shape plots. The narrator is a painter - he is good at representing space. His narrative strategies summarize the poetics and the rhetoric of fiction in literary Modernism from Butler to Bram Stoker, Forster, Joyce, Woolf, Isherwood and Waugh.

We follow up how the temporal nature of a story line is displaced - sometimes sublimated - by the memories of a painter's mind. By "painting minds" who ignore temporal sequences and causation and turn narrative discourse into a (filmic) show in prose. Ekphrasis, painting with words replaces giving account of "what has happened".

In this paper we are mapping those segments of Bram Stoker's novel that "hide" behind the strikin... more In this paper we are mapping those segments of Bram Stoker's novel that "hide" behind the strikingly obvious surface plotting of the narrative, yet generate the narrative discourse with a force that indicates that we may consider these "slips of narration" to constitute the narrative structure and discourse with a much greater impact (c.f., "nothing is too small" [146]) than that of the "obvious"- or surface layer/s of the book. This other discourse is the foundation of the house of fiction in which Dracula keeps on putting on various faces (personae). When in the house, we do not necessarily see any mark of this, yet the house would and could not be standing without it.

Joyce Gone Wilde-Character and Plot Interfaces in Ulysses The paper is a guide through the perso... more Joyce Gone Wilde-Character and Plot Interfaces in Ulysses

The paper is a guide through the personae Bloom takes on through the plot of Joyce's 1922 novel, Ulysses. The critic's argument gives a sample of what it feels like to be literally reading an unreadable novel. The argument also traces the many references to Oscar Wilde in the narrative. The critique maps how Ulysses was the endgame of a literary movement: Joyce completed what Ruskin, Samuel Butler, Bram Stoker, Wilde and Conrad had carefully prepared for him.

This is a narrative analysis of Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar (1963). We set up the time lin... more This is a narrative analysis of Sylvia Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar (1963). We set up the time line of events (the story) and then map the plot or plots that may explain “what may have happened”. The detailed listings of characters, their emblematic activities (masterplots), emblems and enigmas help us learn what has been going on. The list of traumas Esther Greenwood, the heroine and narrator of the novel has gone through mark how Esther’s recollection of her past gains significance. Story, plot, character, symbolism and the network of symbolic oppositions unveil how death and life, father and mother figures generate an interface that ruins Esther’s life so as to rebuild it again. This descent into personal hell and into archaic terrors of the human psyche is completed by an ascent into Lacan’s Symbolic Order where the horror of the flesh and that of the archaic is converted into a(n electro) shocking narrative that carries both character and reader beyond good and evil, to the uncanny realm that looks so strange yet feels so familiar to all of us. This paper attempts to provide a “narrative morphology” with the help of which readers of Sylvia Plath’s novel can walk and/or struggle through this narrative rites of passage the reading of which feels like attending a late twentieth century ritual dense with fashion, media, sexuality, mediocrity and psychiatry.

Patterns, Symbols and Themes in Bram Stoker’s Dracula -by Ferenc Zselyi, Feb 3, 2014

Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula (1897) is a discourse on the visible and the invisible, on the seemi... more Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula (1897) is a discourse on the visible and the invisible, on the seemingly good and the primary evil that is, also, "good"; on the effable and the ineffable. The beautifully written end-of-the-century prose depicts horror and "disgust" and their perception only to show how much of the horror is coming from within the human soul. The long narrative is constituted by a complex of symbolic oppositions that make this novel a good, interesting and/or exciting reading for everyone. This was the first Modernist novel written in English literature - it has nothing to do with "vampires" and ghosts who/that are "only" signifiers and/or symbols or emblems in this discourse. Stoker's novel is the predecessor of Yeats' symbolism and Joyce's time travel in Ulysses.

We start out from the presupposition that it is true for each work of an author's life work that ... more We start out from the presupposition that it is true for each work of an author's life work that it might serve as a model for the interpretation of all the other works' structure. So when we make an attempt to comment on any work of an author -considering both structure and meaning -the other work, which we then consider as "a/the model" (that is, the other discourse) will give an explanation to the particular semantic and semiotic features of the work examined, and, on the other hand, it would open up interpretative choices for the text. Our starting point is based on the assumption that a life work is such an intertext in which each text is virtually an attempt made to name the author.

1. The sign is constituted via the function of the signifier and the signified. This function var... more 1. The sign is constituted via the function of the signifier and the signified. This function varies depending on the modality of the signified. The signified may be there physically -then it is "real" and the function of the signified and the signifier is denotation. Within the denotative sign function the marker points at the signified. Their relation is indexical. The index is a quasi picture of the signified.

We owe to him [Christ] the most diverse things and people. Hugo's Les Misérables, Baudelaire's Fl... more We owe to him [Christ] the most diverse things and people. Hugo's Les Misérables, Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, the note of pity in Russian novels, Verlaine and Verlaine's poems, the stained glass and tapestries and the quattrocento work of Burne-Jones and Morris, belong to him no less than the tower of Giotto, Lancelot, and Guinevere, Tannhauser, the troubled romantic marbles of Michael Angelo, pointed architecture, and the love of children and flowers -for both of which, indeed, in classical art there was but little place, hardly enough for them to grow or play in, but which, from the twelvth century down to our own day, have been continually making their appearances in art, under various modes and at various times, coming fitfully and wilfully, as children, as flowers, are apt to do: spring always seeming to one as if the flowers had been in hiding, and only came out into the sun because they were afraid that grown-up people would grow tired of looking for them and give up the search; and the life of a child being no more than an April day on which there is both rain and sun for the narcissus. Oscar Wilde: De Profundis I have been working on a project, the aim of which is to set up a model of a rather technical nature, with the help of which we may analyze and teach texts in a literature course. The objective of this project is a rhetoric structure, that may be detected at the reception of a particular text. And as we often read so that when we comprehend or explain we pay homage to the name of the/an author, this name itself should be considered as a marker of our hermeneutic game. The name of the author, then, is the name of the game when reading something authorized by this very name.

In the tableaux of Auden's poetry the Darwinian rule of evolutionary chance and inevitability min... more In the tableaux of Auden's poetry the Darwinian rule of evolutionary chance and inevitability mingles with the biblical imagery of Creation resulting in a bittersweet still life, a static picture where everything is there yet there seems to be no reason either to stay or to leave. This paper, on the one hand, examines how this movingly static un/poetic universe derives from Auden's tribute to Freud, and, on the other hand, it also maps the iconography of the dialogue between "Mrs. Nature" and "The Authentic City": the Audenesque transfers the sense of apocalypse from an eschatological trope into loci of the (urban) present. Auden emblematizes the present moment -the very same way Freud did in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) -without inflicting any surplus metaphor or "poeticity" on the world. With this technique he is able to reveal beauty, rational finitude and connectedness in common sense human existence. His words are sad yet happy to open up dead things for (the) living: the Audenesque generates the melancholy of 'the life to come' via photographic images of the present. An iconographic inventory may trace how lost hopes are regained, how stillness becomes moving. Discourses, irrespective of being everyday or poetic ones, are born via the projection of a series of emblems by the help of which they segment, divide, name, structure and territorialize the organic which, in itself, would have stayed at the zero degree level of signification and significance. Words are butchering Nature into possible and impossible worlds so as "to make sense" of natural nonsense. Marking the unmarked, shaping the shapeless, fitting the shameless, connecting the accidental leaves the mind with loss and melancholy. What is done to Mother Nature by humanity, history, science and poetry is a series of attempts to say good-bye to the origin, to the original. Every word loses what the same word would, at the very same moment, want to recall: giving away so as to give way to − to give another way to "the same in a different form". The familiar becomes the strange(r), presence becomes uncanny, the mirror image provides the identity of the self; while, at the same time, the mirror image transfers identity to optical otherness and the self becomes the optical unconscious of its own reflection.

When the critic is in search of the rhetorics and politics of an author the recurrent elements of... more When the critic is in search of the rhetorics and politics of an author the recurrent elements often show the trace for the inquiry. This time I will be mapping the work of two tropes in E. M. Forster's narratives -both of them are transposed from Luca della Robbia's terracotta and frieze works to Forster's narrative poetry. The first one is a topos, the "della Robbia baby" which is there in many of his reliefs. A characteristic remnant of the early Renaissance in Florence. The other one is a trope: the colour "della Robbia blue". Della Robbia's terracotta pieces were featuring human figures outlined in white against the background of the shape of the blue which particularly characterizes the sculptor's method. My scope of reference in the history of literature is between 1860 and 1922. So this is bit later than the two hundred years of the Renaissance. This is the result of a literary collaboration that characterized the aesthetic movements in England after the iconoclasm of the Pre-Raphaelites. Two theorists converted the original early Renaissance features into expressionist and early Imagist features. John Addington Symonds published a Platonic essay, In the Key of Blue in which he developed a correspondence between the erotics and the epistemology of Greek (he called it Dorian) culture and that of the chivalric tradition in the Middle Ages. The other thinker was Walter Pater who published his book The Renaissance in 1873. Here Pater wrote a commentary on 15th-16th century Italian art and provided aesthetic structures with which he was able to reform, generally, the attitude towards mimesis in literary theory. His Renaissance could as well have had the title Expressionism or Decadence or Hermeneutics.

Most people would connect the idea of film to that of theatre. Well, the idea of the cinema has s... more Most people would connect the idea of film to that of theatre. Well, the idea of the cinema has something common with that of the theatre but this difference is mostly superficial: it is about the setting. Both the interior of the cinema and that of the theatre are late simulacra of the cave Plato was describing in his simile of the cave in his Republic Book VII which part we have already mentioned above. There in Plato's simile people are bound down to the earth with chains inside a cave. Each person is chained so that she faces the inside wall of the cave and she cannot see in any other direction. At the mouth of the cave -that is at the back of the chained

The corpus of iconology and the inventory of "stock images" traffic an enormous amount of informa... more The corpus of iconology and the inventory of "stock images" traffic an enormous amount of information merged in pictures and tableaux. Cognitive media iconology arranges "stock figures" (both in the visual and in the mathematical sense of the word, figure) that have been obviously arranging and processing representative possible worlds into informative tableaux: it has been depicting and/or mapping the interface of the mind and that of representation. In our paper we are going to test Dunaújváros via the paradigms and allegories of iconology.

I examine the psychosocial structure of locations online, that is, when cities cease to be concre... more I examine the psychosocial structure of locations online, that is, when cities cease to be concrete in either sense of the notion, concrete. My thesis proposes that every communal place online does something to its offline 'twin'. The starting point in their relatedness is a kind of 'mirror phase' when either after I have been to a place I go online and 'revisit' the site in its digital form as a sight; or, the other way round, I study possible Internet platforms of a city, and, then, I visit the 'same' 'place' real time, offline. The Image and the Real merge in my consciousness when the offline tableau, the site, meets with her online mirror image which is a digital tableau. Offline I visit and see, smell analogically; online I 'do' the same things via digital applications − I simulate, or, recall, experiencing. Two different medium modalities, the Real and the Imaginary claim the same status: that of being (at) the same place. What's happening when I go real time offline in a place where I have 'already' 'been' online? What do the stones of her houses do to my sight? What do her odors do to my smelling? The online sight covers and represses real time site and physical experience. And real time city becomes the offline repressed optical unconscious of the guiding, digitally informative − super egotistic − online sight. The emblems of the offline site and the emblems of the online sight, however, are recognizable both ways. I will suggest in my conclusion that since the online platform of a town necessarily represses the real time offline Real of/at the place, both surfing online on the platform and walking real time in the streets − in both cases watching, tracing, recognizing the same images − are psychoanalytically consubstantial: it is like dreaming online and day-dreaming offline, in both cases letting go of (m)any images in place. The question is who profits from our preconscious visits either way?