1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910781325303321

Autore

Teleky Richard <1946->

Titolo

Hungarian rhapsodies : essays on ethnicity, identity, and culture / / Richard Teleky

Pubbl/distr/stampa

[Seattle], : University of Washington Press, c1997

ISBN

0-295-80017-8

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (241 p.)

Collana

Donald R. Ellegood International Publications

Disciplina

943.9

Soggetti

Hungarians - Foreign countries - Ethnic identity

Hungarian Americans - History

Hungary Civilization

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

Contents; Preface; A Note on Hungarian Names; Playtime: Adult Language Learning, Edmund Wilson, and Me; ""What the Moment Told Me"": The Photographs of Andre Kertesz; The Archives of St. Elizabeth of Hungary; Without Words: Hungarians in North American Fiction; The Empty Box: Hollywood Ethnicity and Joe Eszterhas; A Short Dictionary of Hungarian Stereotypes and Kitsch; Visiting Pannonia; Toward a Course on Central European Literature in Translation; The Poet as Translator: Margaret Avison's ""Hungarian Snap""; Introducing Peter Esterhazy ; ""What Comes After"": Hungarian Voices, Summer 1993

The Third Generation and the ""Problem"" of Ethnicity Notes ; Bibliography; Credits; Index

Sommario/riassunto

Like the renowned American writer Edmund Wilson, who began to learn Hungarian at the age of 65, Richard Teleky started his study of that difficult language as an adult. Unlike Wilson, he is a third-generation Hungarian American with a strong desire to understand how his ethnic background has affected the course of his life. He writes with clarity, perception, and humor about a subject of importance to many North Americans - reconciling their contemporary identity with a heritage from another country. But more than a collection of essays on ethnicity by a talented writer, the book is structured to share with the reader insights on language, literature, art, and community from a cultural perspective. The book is also unified by the author's attention to



certain concerns, including the meaning of multiculturalism, the power of a language to shape one's thinking, the persistence of anti-Semitism, the significance of displacement and nostalgia in emigration, the importance of understanding the past, the need for a narrative tradition in the writing of fiction, and the power of books in Central Europe. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the book makes a contribution to several fields: Central European and Hungarian studies; North American immigrant and ethnic studies; contemporary literature; comparative literature; and popular culture.