At the end of February, Literary Magazine organized a conference entitled Literature and Science at ELTE, in which Márton Falusi, Senior Research Fellow at MMA MMKI, gave a lecture entitled Perspectives of Contemporary Literary History Writing.
The event started with a Round Table, where János Péter Kondor talked to Ernő Kulcsár, Attila Simon, Jolán Orbán and Andrea Parádi about the theoretical and practical challenges of literary and cultural studies and the possible answers to them.
The first section reviewed the role of biography in literary studies, the history and theoretical issues of literary history writing, and the methodological trend following the change of regime. In his lecture, Márton Falusi, a senior researcher at the MMA MMKI, briefly listed the theoretical framework in which the various scientific workshops examined the history of literature after the change of regime. He studied two approaches in more detail: the history of ideas and the work-centricity of the Hungarian literary works 1956–2016. He showed the theoretical considerations behind the recently published literary lexicon and what motivated editors and authors to produce it. In his presentation, he asked questions such as whether the history of literature could be told at all, filtering out the experiences of modern history and intellectual history. Can teleology be eliminated through a consistent approach to storytelling and evaluative norm formation, and what conceptual system should be chosen after structuralism and poststructuralist schools?
The second part of the meeting dealt with the theoretical and methodological issues of the interaction between literary and cultural sciences, as well as the development of the subject science of literature and the literary theoretical and philological aspects of the cultural sciences. The third section examined the psychoanalytic and philosophical aspects of literary and cultural studies, their interactions, interdependencies, and terminological overlaps, as well as the phenomenological specificity of the reading operation. The fourth part focused on the possibility of the scientific independence of narrative theory, the challenges of philology in the 21st century, the effects of the digital revolution, the latest literary phenomena in mass culture, and the possibilities and responsibilities of disseminating scientific knowledge.
Written versions of the lectures at the conference will be available in the Literature and Science issue of Literary Magazine in early June.
