Anna Kerchy

The essay focuses on the proto-museum as a major leitmotif and narrative engine of Angela Carter’s fiction. I explore how hybrid collections of uncategorizable, monstrous– marvelous objects take a variety of forms, from the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities to the Victorian freak show or surrealist exhibitions of found object composites—each fictionalized in Carter’s oeuvre. My contention is that Carter’s interest in proto-museal assemblages reveals her curiosity about the secret life of things. Her agenda is to represent human subjects and inanimate objects enmeshed on equal planes of reciprocal interactions that hijack the ideologically invested male gaze that aims at a possessive, tyrannical ownership over the objectified othered. The “queering of the look” implied in this radically democratizing revision project ties in with Carter’s socialist feminist politics to which she has remained committed throughout her life

One of the most remarkable features of fairy tales is their affective narratological potential to stimulate wonder, to activate the “unconscious, intuitive, imaginative aspects of the mind” ( Lüthi 1982 , 12), to engage audiences in a fantastic vision of a fictional alternate universe that enchants by suspending natural physical laws and rational logic of ordinary consensus reality. Tales can nevertheless provide pragmatic assistance in understanding the perplexing complexity of human existence and the diverse thought systems attempting to make sense thereof. According to Maria Tatar, while reading fairy tales, imagination can be put in the service of crafting a relational model of identity and sharing communal practices of crisis management: “less a refuge from life than a quiet sanctuary, [tales offer] a chance to meet characters worth observing and to witness how they manage conflict, peril, and adventure” (1987 , 18). Jack Zipes and Marina Warner highlight the ideology-critical,...

The feminist project has radicalised text/image relationships in myriad ways, disrupting the contours of discipline and medium. The multifaceted recyclings of a transdisciplinary methodology remind us that although in the past decades text/image studies has become an established academic research field in the first decades of the twenty-first century, its subversive potential to challenge cultural hegemonies has not diminished. On the contrary, intermedial fusions remain loaded with political and ethical issues that are in search of sites of resistance for marginalised, othered social subjects and meanings. The introduction explains how this special journal issue emerges from and is addressed to the politically significant network of feminist researchers -- artists, theoreticians, activists -- we believe we share ties with on account of putting the study of intermediality in the service of 'constructing a radically new understanding of our world in all its horror and hope' (...

In my paper, I explore the significance of solidarity that reaches beyond human society’s anthropocentric framework. I focus on interspecies relationalities and feminist interpretations of “mess mates’ co-dependence” in contemporary arts and popular culture. I draw on Donna Haraway’s ecofeminist ideas to analyze contemporary Hungarian political journalism, tabloids, and legal regulations as well as seminal international pieces of feminist performance arts, including Jaqueline Traide’s controversial PETA/LUSH carnal endurance art performance that simultaneously fights for women’s and animals’ rights.Tanulmányomban a szolidaritás jelentőségét az emberi társadalom antropocentrikus fogalmi keretein túllépve, a fajok közti életközösség tágabb vetületében vizsgálom, az egymásrautaltság tapasztalatának feminista aspektusaira és olvasataira fókuszálva kortárs művészeti alkotásokban és populáris kulturális jelenségekben. Donna Haraway ökokritikai elméleti felvetéseiből kiindulva elemzek szem...

The essay provides a brief overview of the changing literary critical definitions and cultural evaluation of fairy tales. I argue that the most remarkable feature of this heterogeneous textual corpus resides in the affective narratological potential to stimulate wonder, to activate the imaginative aspect of the mind. The fantastic vision of a fictional alternate universe enchants readers by suspending the natural physical laws and rational logic of ordinary consensus reality. But it also provides pragmatic assistance in understanding the perplexing complexity of human existence and the diverse thought systems attempting to make sense of it. Postmillennial transmediation tendencies expand the fairy-tale web with a dizzying variety of new forms, yet the genre’s traditional merits prevail in the celebration of empathy, solidarity, social justice, and a relentless optimism against all odds.

The output is an exhibition featuring a large body of work which directly engages with the legacies of Louise Bourgeois, exploring the iconography of the spider and the fairy tale practice of spinning. Zsófia Jakab is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is closely informed by research into narrative, art history and folklore. This output, as Jakab’s first solo show, offered the opportunity for an early career artist to be shown alongside mid-career artists in whose work Jakab has sought particular nourishment, especially Tessa Farmer and Eleanor Morgan. A portrait of Jakab by Chloe Briggs also teased and queried notions of artistic identity. Artwork by Bourgeois, meanwhile, was necessarily absent. The term “beckoning” has was borrowed from Mieke Bal’s study ‘Louise Bourgeois: The Architecture of Art Writing’ (2001) as a way of characterising Jakab’s encounter with her forbearers. An interpretation text by the Hungarian cultural historian Anna Kérchy accompanied the exhibition

Anna Kérchy, in her article “Changing Media of Enchantment: Tracking the Transition from Verbal to Visual Nonsense in Tim Burton’s Cinematic Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland,” examines how/whether the intermedial shifts accompanying the transmission of a literary text to a visual medium, – and (progressing from image to moving image to 3D CGI live-action animation) to a predictably unreliable computerized/digitalized visual medium that depicts mimetically ‘what has never been’ – bring about changes in our predominant modalities of experience that affect our perception of reality, as well as our strategies of make-believing, the dynamic interaction of our imaginative willingness and reluctance, and our interactive ways of making sense, and making up nonsense. The focus lies on Tim Burton’s 2010 cinematic adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s Alice-tales with the aim to explore the different modes of dis/enchantment that media change – the adaptation’s transition from verbal to visual (means of effecting) nonsense – effectuate.

Dr. Andrea Zittlau kultúrakutató, tanár, költő, előadóművész egyetemi adjunktusként tanít a Rostocki Egyetem Amerikanisztika Tanszékén. A kritikai kultúrakutatáson belül főbb szakterületei a társadalmi nemek tudománya, a fogyatékosságtudomány, a kulturális antropológia és a muzeológia testábrázolásait érintik. Különös Exotica (Curious Exotica) című monográfiája a faji másság, a rassz különbözőségének etnográfiai tárgyiasításait és az önálló, autentikus ’őslakos’ hang megjelenítésének lehetőségeit vette számba az etnográfiai múzeumi kiállítások változatos formáiban. Kérchy Annával közösen szerkesztett nemzetközi tanulmánykötete Exploring the Cultural History of Continental European Freak Shows a kontinentális európai szörny-showk kultúrtörténeti vizsgálatát tűzte ki célul. Emilio Leonardi fotográfussal közösen készített, jelenleg is futó, verses akt fotó képeslapsorozatuk évente tizenkét alkotásban reflektál kurrens feminista poétikai, politikai dilemmákra. Multimediális testművészet...

This essay explores representations of the disabled male body in today’s popular visual media. Its focus is on whether and how the ”potently vulnerable” embodiments cherished by normative fan communities’ fantasies can personify alternative masculinities that reject hegemonic gender hierarchies. The ultimate concern is to see if they allow for a greater degree of imaginative, erotic agency for female spectators. These masculinites are specific in that they let male viewers intimately relate to a non-domineering, imperfectly re-embodied, demythologized mode of manliness. The complex negotiation of naturalized interconnections of engendered and dis/abled bodily identities along with daring associations of virility with weakness and vulnerability coincides with an attempt to undo oppressive patriarchal power relations. However, the examples – primarily taken from the popular television series House M.D., The Big Bang Theory, Game of Thrones and the related fan(fictional) reactions to e...

Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills series consists of 69 photos, shots from imaginary black and white B grade films of the 1950s, framing heroines-the one and the same single young woman, Sherman herselfinto frozen images of the myth of femininity, mto projections of ...

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby was first published in Hungarian in 1962 in a collection entitled Újra Babilonban (Babylon Revisited) that included a selection of short stories. The translation was by Elek Máthé, who had also translated into Hungarian fiction by Hemingway, Harper Lee, and Irving Stone, among others. Máthé’s Gatsby was republished on its own, in a separate volume, first in 1968 and numerous times afterwards, most recently in 2012, by a smaller Hungarian publisher, Alinea, which primarily specializes in issuing books related to the themes of “Money, Economics, and Business”—a niche that reveals a great deal about the firm’s interpretation of the primacy of finance in the novel. Two thousand twelve also saw the long-awaited new translation of Gatsby appearing courtesy of perhaps the most prestigious Hungarian publishing house of belles lettres, Európa Kiadó. This imprint had been responsible for publishing Máthé’s translation of Gatsby as a separate novel in 1968. More recently, it had issued a new series of the complete collected and retranslated works of F. Scott Fitzgerald fancily advertised with an art deco design, an independent logo, and huge banners and posters. The translator in charge was the publisher’s prominent in-house translator István Bart, who has produced about 80 percent of his literary translations (from Walter Scott to Cormac McCarthy) for Európa Kiadó, and who has excelled in recent years in the praxis, theory, and meta-levels of translation. Bart has also written and edited volumes like an American-to-Hungarian Cross-Cultural Dictionary (followed by French and German equivalents), exercises for students for translation from/into English, essays about contemporary American cultural life, and even a book about the The Challenges of Retranslating The Great Gatsby into Hungarian

""This study fills a major gap of Carter’s reception and enters into dialogue with current post-semiotical theories of the embodied subject by virtue of focusing on the dynamics of the meaning-in-process concomitant with the subject-in-process (Kristeva 1985) and the body-in-process. Through a corporeal narratological method—a close-reading interfacing of semioticized bodies in the text and of the somatized text on the body— it deciphers how the ideologically disciplined, normativized-neutralized, ‘cultural’ body and its repressed yet haunting transgressive, corporeal, material ‘reality’ (are) (de)compose(d by) the Carterian fiction’s destabilizing discursive subversions and vibrations surfacing in narrative blind-spots, overwritings, textual ruptures or rhetorical manoeuvres. Reviews “Kérchy’s “body-text interpretive model” offers an innovative approach that manages to illustrate how a feminist body-text sounds like and why it sounds the way it does. Certainly, this nexus of phenomena and narrative strategies is the most original aspect of Kérchy’s interpretation of Carter’s trilogy. The connection between the freaks that structure her reading (Eve/lyn, Fevvers, Dora and Nora) and the process of “self-freaking” becomes obvious in the reading chapters. Shedding light on textual ruptures, overwritings, palimpsestic strategies and rhetorical manoeuvres – “counter-performances,” as Kérchy calls them, this study forms an important re-evaluation of Carter’s final trilogy as an empowering feminist revision of “culturally ready-made” myths of femininity – standing within women’s literary tradition whilst subverting it internally and outlining “an alternative body- and identity-politics that starts out on the side of the othered freak.” - Prof. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner Universität Salzburg “Ms. Kérchy’s monograph also contributes to contemporary critical debates on body and identity in their relation to textuality/sexuality, boundaries, difference and power. The author’s focus upon the (re)embodied identity's discursive (de)construction and corporeal (de)formations, its patriarchal marginalization and subversively gender-bendingfeminist pleasures is particularly challenging.” – Prof. György E. Szönyi, University of Szeged, Hungary “. . . engages at a high level of sophistication with an interdisciplinary conversation about female embodiment and power relations. . . Her reading of Carter illustrates how power relations are undermined, inverted, mocked and reimagined. She makes this point not through what is becoming, in my opinion, a tired form of analysis of “everyday practices” in feminist studies (very popular in cultural studies and anthropological work on the body). But rather she shows how gender is also subverted and reinvented in powerful ways at the level of the imagination. This manuscript reminds us that being able to imagine and revel in the kind of sensuality provided by the artist (in this case, fictional writer) is a powerful means of re/un/doing gender.” - Prof. Allaine Cerwonka, Central European University ""

This paper proposes to examine major art works by the internationally-acclaimed contemporary Hungarian postmodernist (post/concept) woman-artist Drozdik Orshi. The focus of my paper is on Drozdik’s artistic strategies that balance intermedial representational means, Eastern cultural obstacles and Western egalitarian promises in the process of experimenting with the gendered body’s dislocations within physical, psychic, artistic, discursive/performative spaces. The paper critically reflects on the Drozdik’s aim to provoke and record the process of ‘queering of the male museal gaze’ and to subvert the authorial-spectatorial interpretive agency that pertains to it. A tanulmány Drozdik Orsolya munkásságára koncentrálva vizsgálja a rendszerváltás előtti és utáni női(művész) létélményt s annak reprezentációs lehetőségeit, miközben feltárja, hogy a „Nyugat” és „Kelet” metszéspontjában artikulálódó „feminista misszió” mennyiben tekinthető posztfeministának illetve nőközpontúnak, valami...

A dolgozat a Gótikus műfaj folytonosságát és folyamatos megújulási képességét vizsgálja a kortárs gyermek- illetve tinédzser-gótikus regény példáin keresztül. E két írásmód feminista lehetőségeire kérdezünk rá, Neil Gaiman Coraline-jában a heteronormatív családi románcos történet fikcionális felforgatását, a Twilight-jelenség kapcsán pedig a női(es) olvasói szokások kanonizált marginalizációját illetve ellenszegülő női olvasói stratégiákat vizsgálva

In 1962 James Baldwin writes Another Country, which narrates the tragic life and impossible loves of a bisexual jazz drummer, Rufus Scott, who—confused by jealousy, sexual disorientation, and racial inhibitions—tortures and maddens his white beloved, Leona; then, half-mad himself, he commits suicide. Thirty years later Toni Morrison’s Jazz tells the sinister story of a love triangle in which middle-aged, married Joe Trace, bewildered by his neurotic wife, Violet, and a never-ending nostalgia for his long-lost mother, falls in love with eighteen-year-old Dorcas and murders her so as not to lose hex. In Another Country the horn of a terrific saxophone player keeps screaming: “Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?” (16), and characters wonder: “How can you live if you can’t love? And how can you live if you do?” (327), while the crucial question2 of Jazz remains: “Who is the Beloved?” (Naylor 208), For Baldwin and Morrison alike nursing to the tune of jazz, longing itself seems to predominate over the potential for fulfillment. Both novels are tales of love, jealousy, and death that take place in the symbolic City—place of (re)birth and death, source of the jazz music inciting, fueling, and soothing all inherently unappeasable and unspeakable loves and fugitive desires constantly displaced in narratives of quest for the self? the other, and love. However, the aim of this chapter is not so much to analyze the thematic points of intersection between the two texts, but rather to highlight the stylistic parallels in their ingeniously subversive language.

This collection offers cultural historical analyses of enfreakment and freak shows, examining the social construction and spectacular display of wondrous, monstrous, or curious Otherness in the formerly relatively neglected region of Continental Europe. Forgotten stories are uncovered about freak-show celebrities, medical specimen, and philosophical fantasies presenting the anatomically unusual in a wide range of sites, including curiosity cabinets, anatomical museums, and traveling circus acts. The essays explore the locally specific dimensions of the exhibition of extraordinary bodies within their particular historical, cultural and political context. Thus the impact of the Nazi eugenics programs, state Socialism, or the Chernobyl catastrophe is observed closely and yet the transnational dimensions of enfreakment are made obvious through topics ranging from Jesuit missionaries' diabolization of American Indians, to translations of Continental European teratology in British med...

BOOKS Alice in Transmedia Wonderland. Curiouser and Curio ser New Forms of a Children’s Classic. Jefferson: McFarland, 2016. (forthcoming) Body-Texts in the Novels of Angela Carter. Writing from a Corporeagraphic Point of View . Lewiston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2008. ( pp. 372, ISBN10: 0-7734-48926 ISBN13: 978-0-7734-4892-6) EDITORIAL WORK 5. Co-editor of EJES special journal issue Feminist Interventions in Intermedial Studies (forthcoming in 2017) with Dr Catriona McAra 4. Exploring the Cultural History of Continental Europ ean Freak Shows and Enfreakment. Eds. Anna Kérchy and Andrea Zittlau. Newcastle Upon Ty e: Cambridge Scholars Press. 2012. (Isbn13: 978-1-4438-4134-4 Isbn: 1-443 8-4134-X) 3. Postmodern Reinterpretations of Fairy Tales: How Ap plying New Methods Generates New Meanings. Ed. Anna Kérchy. Lewiston, Lampeter: The Edwin Me llen Press, 2011. (pp. 520, ISBN10: 0-7734-1519-X ISBN13: 978-0-7734-151 9-5) 2. The Iconology of Law and Order . Legal and Cosmic . (P...

This paper examines performativity in its relation to textuality, corporeality and femininity in Angela Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984). I wish to reveal parallel spectacular, seductive and tricky performances of bodies and texts. My reading of spectacular corporeal and textual performances focuses on the heroine, revealing how Fevvers' parading deconstructive performances of ideologically prescribed femininity, and its limiting representations, coincide with the narrative's spectacular revisions of literary genres and writing styles, identified by discursive technologies of power with femininity and thus conventionally canonized as sentimentally kitsch or incomprehensibly hysterical modes of writing. My gender sensitive, reader-response approach also highlights the bifocal pleasures, tender irony and sisterly burlesque of the self-mockingly silly and histrionic hysteric "feminine" textual performance in order to reveal that the conventional concepts of a ...

This article explores how Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's fantasies about Alice's adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass (1865, 1871), published under the pen-name Lewis Carroll, renewed the genre of children's literature by turning the vocal play of literary nonsense into the organising principle of child-centric, non-didactic, ludic narratives. 1 It shows how his language games strategically undermine tyrannical ideological structures, whether in the form of discursive ‘regimes of truth’ (Foucault 80), the institution of monarchy, the adult–child hierarchy maintained by a pedagogy of fear, or speciesist supremacy of human over animal.

This collection offers cultural historical analyses of enfreakment and freak shows, examining the social construction and spectacular display of wondrous, monstrous, or curious Otherness in the formerly relatively neglected region of Continental Europe. Forgotten stories are uncovered about freak-show celebrities, medical specimen, and philosophical fantasies presenting the anatomically unusual in a wide range of sites, including curiosity cabinets, anatomical museums, and traveling circus acts. The essays explore the locally specific dimensions of the exhibition of extraordinary bodies within their particular historical, cultural and political context. Thus the impact of the Nazi eugenics programs, state Socialism, or the Chernobyl catastrophe is observed closely and yet the transnational dimensions of enfreakment are made obvious through topics ranging from Jesuit missionaries’ diabolization of American Indians, to translations of Continental European teratology in British medical journals, and the Hollywood silver screen’s colonization of European fantasies about deformity. Although Continental European freaks are introduced as products of ideologically-infiltrated representations, they also emerge as embodied subjects endowed with their own voice, view, and subversive agency.