A töredezett (kulturális) test írása Polcz Alaine "Asszony a fronton" című művében

Authors

  • Louise O. Vasvári Stony Brook University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/ahea.2010.20

Abstract

In this paper I will discuss Alaine Polcz’s Asszony a fronton (1991) ‘ Woman on the Front,’ subtitled Egy fejezet az életemb?l ‘A Chapter from My Life,’ as an extreme example of self-contradictory life writing, offering a fragmented self-representation of the author’s subjectivity through the narrative itineraries of both her privatized and publicized body through the last year of the Second World War. The term life writing is a particularly useful categorization for this text, since Hungarian critics have referred to it variously, sometimes in the same article, as ‘memoir, novel, autobiographical novel, documentary novel, memorial records’(memoár, regény, önéletrajzi regény, dokumentum regény, emlékiratok). I will consider how Polcz narrativizes her identity in the two parts of her story. In the first, writing about her young married life with an abusive alcoholic husband during wartime Transylvania in 1944-45 she is unable to step outside the conventional romance plot, narrating her life in terms of the most conservative conceptualization of heterosexual femininity and wifehood, premised on self-renunciation. At the same time, she subverts her surface story of masochistic other-centeredness with manipulation of gaps and secrets, creating an ongoing tension between the concealed and revealed.

Author Biography

Louise O. Vasvári, Stony Brook University

Louise O. Vasvári, who received her M.A. and Ph.D. at the University of California in Berkeley, is Professor Emerita of Comparative Literature and of Linguistics at Stony Brook University. She has also taught in various visiting capacities, including at the University of California, Berkeley, at the Eotvos Lorand University and at the Central European University, the University of Connecticut (Storrs), and the Université de Jules Verne (Amiens). Currently she teaches one course yearly in the linguistics department at New York University and is also Affiliated Professor in American and English Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She works in medieval studies, historical and socio-linguistics, translation theory, Holocaust studies, and Hungarian Studies, all informed by gender theory within a broader framework of comparative cultural studies. She has published widely in these areas, ranging from medieval Spanish, Italian, German, English, and Hungarian, to queer theory. Related to Hungarian Cultural Studies she has published with Steven Tötösy, Imre Kertész and Holocaust Literature (Purdue UP, 2005) and Comparative Central European Holocaust Studies (Purdue UP, 2009). She has also published a monograph-length work in Hungarian on memoirs of Hungarian women survivors (Mult és Jövö, 2009).

Downloads

Published

2010-01-01

Issue

Vol. 3 (2010)

Section

General Articles

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

  1. The Author retains copyright in the Work, where the term “Work” shall include all digital objects that may result in subsequent electronic publication or distribution.
  2. Upon acceptance of the Work, the author shall grant to the Publisher the right of first publication of the Work.
  3. The Author shall grant to the Publisher and its agents the nonexclusive perpetual right and license to publish, archive, and make accessible the Work in whole or in part in all forms of media now or hereafter known under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License or its equivalent, which, for the avoidance of doubt, allows others to copy, distribute, and transmit the Work under the following conditions:
    1. Attribution—other users must attribute the Work in the manner specified by the author as indicated on the journal Web site;
    with the understanding that the above condition can be waived with permission from the Author and that where the Work or any of its elements is in the public domain under applicable law, that status is in no way affected by the license.
  4. The Author is able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the nonexclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the Work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), as long as there is provided in the document an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
  5. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post online a prepublication manuscript (but not the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version of the Work) in institutional repositories or on their Websites prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work. Any such posting made before acceptance and publication of the Work shall be updated upon publication to include a reference to the Publisher-assigned DOI (Digital Object Identifier) and a link to the online abstract for the final published Work in the Journal.
  6. Upon Publisher’s request, the Author agrees to furnish promptly to Publisher, at the Author’s own expense, written evidence of the permissions, licenses, and consents for use of third-party material included within the Work, except as determined by Publisher to be covered by the principles of Fair Use.
  7. The Author represents and warrants that:
    1. the Work is the Author’s original work;
    2. the Author has not transferred, and will not transfer, exclusive rights in the Work to any third party;
    3. the Work is not pending review or under consideration by another publisher;
    4. the Work has not previously been published;
    5. the Work contains no misrepresentation or infringement of the Work or property of other authors or third parties; and
    6. the Work contains no libel, invasion of privacy, or other unlawful matter.
  8. The Author agrees to indemnify and hold Publisher harmless from Author’s breach of the representations and warranties contained in Paragraph 6 above, as well as any claim or proceeding relating to Publisher’s use and publication of any content contained in the Work, including third-party content.

Revised 7/16/2018. Revision Description: Removed outdated link.