12th Biennial Conference of Husse, 29-31 January, Debrecen

The Hungarian Society for the Study of English (HUSSE) organized its 12th Biennial Conference at the Institute of English and American Studies, University of Debrecen, Hungary on 29–31 January 2015.

The conference has welcome more than two hundred participants from thirty-one institutions in thirteen countries on three continents. There were four plenary lectures and almost one hundred and ninety paper presentations in eight parallel sessions. The topics covered the entirety of English studies in the broadest sense of the word.

 

The English Department of the Partium Christian University was represented by Julianna Borbély, Ottilia Veres, Borbála Bökös, and Titus Pop.

 

Julianna Borbély’s paper entitled: “When in Rome, Do as the Romans Do”: Power Game in Hannibal, discussed Hannibal’s story, arguing that the relationship between the criminal and his persecutor evoked Hannah Arendt’s description of the concept of power, and the strategy applied to catch the criminal brings to mind Plato and his discussion of the Sophist.

 

The paper of Ottilia Veres, “Homo solitarius: Intersubjectivity in Coetzee’s Life and Time of Michael K and Beckett’s Molloy,” looked at the stories of Michael K and Molloy as texts that offer stories of parasitical intersubjectivity of the mother-son relationship which is likened to Sinbad’s adventure with the Old Man of the Sea. Veres argued that the two novels raise the question whether the relationship between the two strangers is in any way different from the relationship between mother and son/child.

 

By looking at Paul Auster’s first novella from The New York Trilogy adapted into graphic novel: City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (1994) by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, the paper of Borbála Bökös (entitled: “Palimpsestuous Intermediality: Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985) and City of Glass: The Graphic Novel (1994)”) proposed to analyze the ways through which the impossibility of creating a coherent (narrative/artistic) identity is reproduced in the graphic adaptation.  In The Graphic Novel both verbal and visual techniques may generate an uncanny effect on the part of the reader, especially through the oppositions between image and text. Thus, as Bökös argued, both intermedial uncanniness and intermedial coexistence are ensured not only through intermedial references, but also via media combinations and transformations.

 

Titus Pop’s paper, “Amitav Gosh’s Ibis Chrestomathy: A Glossary of Migrant Words,” focused on the addendum Gosh equipped his novel with, by digitally charting the diverse etymology of the transliterated coinages appearing in the novel. The paper also discussed the division the author makes between the entries labelled as the + and the rest.

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