Upcomming issues

The first issue of DENKART is planned for autumn 2023 and will bring together articles on the two topics that the first and second Hungarian Theme Days at the University of Vienna were dedicated to: Unthinkable Thinking (2021) and Variations in Multilingualism (2022).

Unthinkable Thinking – Fantastic Hungary

The present is characterized by events that historical experience always showed us to be possible, but whose repeated occurrence was neither desired nor seriously feared. When it comes to the climate, global health or political turmoil, contemporary society must increasingly deal with the unexpected, the unbelievable, the undesirable. In the first part of the volume, literary, cultural, art-theoretical and historical contributions attempt to show how science fiction and fantasy, especially in Hungary, reacts to these dilemmas. The focus is not on the crises themselves, but on the experienced shock and questioning of common expectations by the historical actors that ensued. The path leads from positive, utopian thinking to radical escape from reality: literary, cultural and artistic strategies of compensatory to catastrophic ‘expansion of consciousness’ are addressed, this time through a national-cultural, Central European lens.

Variations of multilingualism

The second part of the volume is devoted to multilingualism and the presentation of multilingualism in Hungarian literature and literary historiography. Literary texts are a natural medium for the formation, modification and representation of linguistic identity. The change in linguistic identity, the transition between languages, the possibility of language change, and translation are all treated within the framework of literary studies’ approaches to multilingualism that have become influential in the last ten to twenty years. The contributions deal with research questions from the areas of translation theory, regionality studies, imagology, interculturality and, finally, narratology and poetics in relation to the representation of multilingualism. The presentation of the Hungarian language in other literatures is also addressed, which means that – following the objective of the journal – articles from disciplines neighboring Hungarian Studies also appear.