József Szili - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
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Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies
Institute of History of Hungarian Academy of Sciences
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New Literary History, 1970
Neohelicon, 2007
attributed a constitutive trait of Plato's philosophy to the literary qualities of the dialogues,... more attributed a constitutive trait of Plato's philosophy to the literary qualities of the dialogues, and claimed that in the transition of Greek philosophy from mythological appreciation to conceptualization (from mythos to logos) fictionalization ranked high as a genuine structural element of philosophical speculation. Meanwhile Gadamer's reconstruction of pre-Socratic philosophy in view of its Platonic reception seems to be subordinate to his conviction that Heidegger's revolution was unprecedented in the history of philosophy. "…Platon, der ein ganz großer Schriftsteller vom Range eines Sophokles beziehungsweise eines Shakespeare war…" (Gadamer: Der Anfang der Philosophie) "…Daß der Platonische Dialog, diese entsetzlich selbstgefällige und kindliche Art Dialektik, als Reiz wirken könne, dazu muß man nie gute Französen gelesen haben-Fontanelle zum Beispiel. Plato ist langweilig. " (Nietzsche: Götzen-Dämmerung oder wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert) Plato's oeuvre as we have it raises the problem of "literariness", "literarization", "poetization" or "fictionalization" in several ways. Any encounter with the traditional Platonic text-corps compels the student to posit a "whole" and this cannot be done without forming an idea of what a whole is and, consequently, without fictionalization. Any work attributed to Plato involves distinction between a canon of "authentic" works and the "apocrypha". 1 Any discussion of Plato's works involves conjectures on their sequence and chronology. Fiction One is the Canon of Authentic
Neohelicon, 2009
In view of recent studies on the avant-garde, the modern and the postmodern, the essay deals with... more In view of recent studies on the avant-garde, the modern and the postmodern, the essay deals with the chance of visualizing a unified epochal stream of modernism as part of the humanistic tradition, contrasted with examples of its "formulaic" postmodernist criticism. Defining "modernism" has been a pastime of literary critics and historians ever since the early decades of the last century. Especially in France the idea of modernity was in the focus of artistic endeavour from the mid-nineteenth century, yet literary schools or movements were not called "modern" or "modernist". These terms were widely used, they occurred even in titles of books of poetry (e. g. Poèmes modernes by François Coppée in 1869). Names for schools of poets or titles for their periodicals were matters of meticulous choice with an intention to avoid mere generalities. This was the case with the two volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain (1866 and 1869) as the founders hesitated over a choice of denominations like "formists", "stylists" or "impassibles". For the description of the modern a rich stock of varieties was applicable from "parnassiens" to "decadents" and "symbolists". Some groupings were labeled by the titles of the short-lived reviews they were associated with. In the 70s and 80s of the nineteenth century dozens of small reviews were published in Paris. Memorable titles include Renaissance,
Neohelicon, 2007
The "Fall" was inaugurated by René Wellek at the Bordeaux Congress of the AILC/ICLA in 1970. Post... more The "Fall" was inaugurated by René Wellek at the Bordeaux Congress of the AILC/ICLA in 1970. Postmodern theory of literature was concerned first with radical criticism of conventional historical approaches for their lack of "literariness". Then Hayden White exposed the "literariness" of historiography. According to Writing Literary History: Selected Perspectives from Central Europe (eds. Darko Dolinar and Marko Juvan) national literary histories do not necessarily play their former emancipatory role and eventually they may serve nationalist purposes. This is underlined by Hungarian experience as classics of Hungarian literary history created a continuous past of ten centuries for "Hungarian literature" veiling substantial changes in the concepts of "literature" and "Hungarian". An answer to the problem might be the decomposition of "grands récits" by "micro-histories" and temporal "nodes". Meanwhile recent comparative histories-Literary Cultures of Latin America (eds. Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir) and History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer)-seem to have an innate disposition to deconstruct "great stories" of nationalism and regionalism. A forthcoming history of Hungarian literature (ed. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák) is based on nodal dates and problems to make tractable confronting literary canons. Világirodalom (World Literature, ed. József Pál) published in 2005 surveys nearly forty literatures from the point of view of an East-Central European variety of the "Western Canon". The "Fall" is of course what René Wellek inaugurated in a paper he read at the 6 th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in Bordeaux in 1970. "Fall" may stand for the Fall of Man in the biblical story, the occupation of a city (the fall of Troy), or "autumn" (in American English). In the context of Wellek's thought "autumn" is the least plausible meaning. He had no hope in an Indian summer or in a spring which cannot be far behind "If Winter comes…" He bid farewell to an illusion for good, the illusion that literary history was not past recovery. The "original sin" was the dubious union of literature and history. And the fall of a city or a citadel? Wellek was engaged in the theoretical solution of the problem from the mid 30s of the last century. When I met him at Yale in 1965/1966 as a "visiting fellow" (coming, as he put it gently, from "Utopia"), his theory of perspectivism seemed to me a mas-0324-4652/$20.
New Literary History, 1970
Neohelicon, 2007
attributed a constitutive trait of Plato's philosophy to the literary qualities of the dialogues,... more attributed a constitutive trait of Plato's philosophy to the literary qualities of the dialogues, and claimed that in the transition of Greek philosophy from mythological appreciation to conceptualization (from mythos to logos) fictionalization ranked high as a genuine structural element of philosophical speculation. Meanwhile Gadamer's reconstruction of pre-Socratic philosophy in view of its Platonic reception seems to be subordinate to his conviction that Heidegger's revolution was unprecedented in the history of philosophy. "…Platon, der ein ganz großer Schriftsteller vom Range eines Sophokles beziehungsweise eines Shakespeare war…" (Gadamer: Der Anfang der Philosophie) "…Daß der Platonische Dialog, diese entsetzlich selbstgefällige und kindliche Art Dialektik, als Reiz wirken könne, dazu muß man nie gute Französen gelesen haben-Fontanelle zum Beispiel. Plato ist langweilig. " (Nietzsche: Götzen-Dämmerung oder wie man mit dem Hammer philosophiert) Plato's oeuvre as we have it raises the problem of "literariness", "literarization", "poetization" or "fictionalization" in several ways. Any encounter with the traditional Platonic text-corps compels the student to posit a "whole" and this cannot be done without forming an idea of what a whole is and, consequently, without fictionalization. Any work attributed to Plato involves distinction between a canon of "authentic" works and the "apocrypha". 1 Any discussion of Plato's works involves conjectures on their sequence and chronology. Fiction One is the Canon of Authentic
Neohelicon, 2009
In view of recent studies on the avant-garde, the modern and the postmodern, the essay deals with... more In view of recent studies on the avant-garde, the modern and the postmodern, the essay deals with the chance of visualizing a unified epochal stream of modernism as part of the humanistic tradition, contrasted with examples of its "formulaic" postmodernist criticism. Defining "modernism" has been a pastime of literary critics and historians ever since the early decades of the last century. Especially in France the idea of modernity was in the focus of artistic endeavour from the mid-nineteenth century, yet literary schools or movements were not called "modern" or "modernist". These terms were widely used, they occurred even in titles of books of poetry (e. g. Poèmes modernes by François Coppée in 1869). Names for schools of poets or titles for their periodicals were matters of meticulous choice with an intention to avoid mere generalities. This was the case with the two volumes of Le Parnasse contemporain (1866 and 1869) as the founders hesitated over a choice of denominations like "formists", "stylists" or "impassibles". For the description of the modern a rich stock of varieties was applicable from "parnassiens" to "decadents" and "symbolists". Some groupings were labeled by the titles of the short-lived reviews they were associated with. In the 70s and 80s of the nineteenth century dozens of small reviews were published in Paris. Memorable titles include Renaissance,
Neohelicon, 2007
The "Fall" was inaugurated by René Wellek at the Bordeaux Congress of the AILC/ICLA in 1970. Post... more The "Fall" was inaugurated by René Wellek at the Bordeaux Congress of the AILC/ICLA in 1970. Postmodern theory of literature was concerned first with radical criticism of conventional historical approaches for their lack of "literariness". Then Hayden White exposed the "literariness" of historiography. According to Writing Literary History: Selected Perspectives from Central Europe (eds. Darko Dolinar and Marko Juvan) national literary histories do not necessarily play their former emancipatory role and eventually they may serve nationalist purposes. This is underlined by Hungarian experience as classics of Hungarian literary history created a continuous past of ten centuries for "Hungarian literature" veiling substantial changes in the concepts of "literature" and "Hungarian". An answer to the problem might be the decomposition of "grands récits" by "micro-histories" and temporal "nodes". Meanwhile recent comparative histories-Literary Cultures of Latin America (eds. Mario J. Valdés and Djelal Kadir) and History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe (eds. Marcel Cornis-Pope and John Neubauer)-seem to have an innate disposition to deconstruct "great stories" of nationalism and regionalism. A forthcoming history of Hungarian literature (ed. Mihály Szegedy-Maszák) is based on nodal dates and problems to make tractable confronting literary canons. Világirodalom (World Literature, ed. József Pál) published in 2005 surveys nearly forty literatures from the point of view of an East-Central European variety of the "Western Canon". The "Fall" is of course what René Wellek inaugurated in a paper he read at the 6 th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in Bordeaux in 1970. "Fall" may stand for the Fall of Man in the biblical story, the occupation of a city (the fall of Troy), or "autumn" (in American English). In the context of Wellek's thought "autumn" is the least plausible meaning. He had no hope in an Indian summer or in a spring which cannot be far behind "If Winter comes…" He bid farewell to an illusion for good, the illusion that literary history was not past recovery. The "original sin" was the dubious union of literature and history. And the fall of a city or a citadel? Wellek was engaged in the theoretical solution of the problem from the mid 30s of the last century. When I met him at Yale in 1965/1966 as a "visiting fellow" (coming, as he put it gently, from "Utopia"), his theory of perspectivism seemed to me a mas-0324-4652/$20.