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Enikő Bollobás

Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, School of English and American Studies, Faculty Member

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Professor of Literature at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, I work in American and Hungarian Studies informed by theories of gender, performativity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity. I have written several books, including monographs on the poets Charles Olson (Twayne, 1992) and Emily Dickinson (Balassi, 2015), two histories of American literature (Osiris, 2005 and 2015), and two theoretical inquiries into performativity and subjectivity (Peter Lang, 2010 and Balassi, 2015). My essays have come out in Hungarian and international scholarly journals, among them, Alföld, Americana, Filológiai Közlöny, Holmi, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, Irodalomtörténet, Irodalomtörténeti Közlemények, Jelenkor, Literatura, Magyar Tudomány, Műút, Nagyvilág, Pompeji, Rubicon, as well as American Quarterly, Arcade, Emily Dickinson Journal, Journal of Pragmatics, Language and Style, Modern Philology, Paideuma, and Word and Image.
email: bollobas.eniko@btk.elte.hu
home page: www.bollobaseniko.com

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Papers by Enikő Bollobás

WITHDRAWN: The Flouting of Point of View in Faulkner and Durrell

Journal of Pragmatics, 2006

The publisher regrets that this article is an accidental duplication of an article that has alrea... more

Ami szép, az nehéz

Akadémiai Kiadó eBooks, 2021

Chapter Three: Performing Gender 97

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

In this chapter I will explore the discursive constructions of gender: its normative performance ... more In this chapter I will explore the discursive constructions of gender: its normative performance and its subversive performative constructions. The institutional rules of gender, I will show, include woman positioned as Other (especially woman as object of speech, vision, and act), woman as body inscribed by various controlling discourses (including costume and the general stylization of the body), and woman as body to be surveyed. Applying Searle's basic formula concerning the constitutive rules of institutions, "X counts as Y in context C" (Speech Acts 52), to the construction of the gendered subject, one can say that when positioned as the Other, an object, whose inscriptive body is foregrounded and put forth as spectacle, the person is constructed as a woman. Indeed, womanhood came to be naturalized in the position of the marked Other (of the dichotomy of man/woman), which society has declared as "natural" and "normal" for her. This means that woman has typically been the object seen (while she herself did not see), the person spoken to or spoken of (while she herself did not speak), and the one acted upon (while she herself did not act). Only around the turn of the 20th century did the new female character appear in the subject position: empowered now to see, speak, and act, the modern woman appropriates for herself the possibility of self-construction as subject and agent (a possibility to be called into question by postmodernism later). Both are discursive processes producing social-cultural constructs; but while the first scenarioillustrated here by pre-modernist texts, where woman is produced, through performance, as an object-is the replaying of existing social scripts, the second-illustrated here by texts taken from modernist women writers-ignores, resists, and subverts normative expectations when, by applying radicalontological performative processes, it produces woman as a speaking and seeing subject, as well as acting agent. Moreover, woman's construction in the object position runs parallel with the similar naturalization of colored and gay persons as cultural Others. As members of culturally imperialized groups, they have followed similar trajectories of disempowerment (excluded from the category of the human, the "rights of man," and deprived of subjecthood and agency) and empowerment (claiming inclusion into the human and appropriating subjecthood and agency). Indeed, the persons constructed into objects along axes gender, race, and

The Flouting of Point of View in Faulkner and Durrell

Journal of Pragmatics, Jun 1, 2006

This is a compact, focused study of point of view as a narrative-pragmatic technique, as well as ... more This is a compact, focused study of point of view as a narrative-pragmatic technique, as well as how its flouting becomes a trademark of fiction in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. Working out of the space created by narratology, pragmatics, and literary criticism, Dahlgren brings together several propositions. In my reading they are the following: point of view-and its relationship to author and narrator-is expected to be identifiable and interpretable (this is the narratological suggestion); the rules of point of view are much like those of the Gricean maxims in the sense that texts are expected to be readable and relevant (this is the pragmatic assumption); as such, point of view can be flouted too in the literary text, where such violations are meaningful and require readerly involvement (this is the claim of literary criticism). Indeed, the whole structure of the book follows this tripartite arrangement of being equally rooted in narratology, pragmatics, and literary criticism. In the first part of the book Dahlgren gives an overview of what point of view has meant in narratology. Understood as a form of mediation among author, narrator, story, character, and reader, point of view is linked to vision and voice, to the Genettean problem of ''who sees?'' and ''who speaks?''. Otherwise, point of view is also linked to reflector and focus, but is different from both in more directly provoking author and narrator presence. While authorial meaning might be elusive, the author himself/ herself is not: authorial intrusions bring about what Dahlgren calls the ''interactive give-andtake'' of reading; without such intrusions the text would not become ''discourse in a creative act carried out by the reader'' (43). General narrator presence is similarly assumed in fiction: different as the various narrator types may be, the narrator never totally disappears without at least leaving an imprint on the reader's mind. Point of view, then, will much depend on whether the narrator is a first-, second-, or third-person narrator, a framing narrator, a teller-character, one of the multiple narrators, holding an inside or an outside view, an overt narrator or the character whose subconscious is brought to the surface by free indirect style or stream-of-consciousness techniques. Dahlgren invokes speech act theory in the middle section of her book, insisting that speech acts are performed in literature both on the level of what she calls superstructure (where authors and readers move) and macrostructure (the fictional world, where characters interact). It is especially clear on the level of superstructure that the text is a communicative event, including ''some kind of exchange between author and reader'' (72). But speech acts function within a work of fiction as well, where characters are engaged in communication, whether in pragmatically acceptable dialogues or more covert emotional exchanges. As a communicative

[Mask and Self - and the Illness: Injuries of the Soul in Sylvia Plath's Poetry]

PubMed, 2019

The study focuses on two features of Sylvia Plath's poetry that may be directly linked to her ill... more The study focuses on two features of Sylvia Plath's poetry that may be directly linked to her illness, her mask poetry and her female Bildung, where the former is informed by her sense of plural selfhood, while the latter gives account of the failures of her creative self-constructions. Although no direct connection can be set up between life and work even in the case of a confessional poet, it is probably safe to claim that multiple personality may manifest in a plural poetic self, while the Self developing in Bildung narratives contradicts the idea of a split personality. Enikô Bollobás explores the heteroclite diversity of artistic vision through discussing the pluralism of poetic masks and identities, insisting that, in the spirit of late modernism, no self-interpretive frame exists for Plath, one that would hold together the diverse identities. The long poems and poem cycles give narratives of female Bildung, portraying the woman's diverse attempts to break out of the traps of patriarchy; some of these are failed attempts, yet others offer allegories of the poet's creative self-constructions.

They Aren’t, Until I Call Them

The new kid on the block of binary thinking: conceptualizing the homosexual The resisting narrati... more

Our Visitor from Infinitude—Emily Dickinson's Poetry by Enikő Bollobás

The Emily Dickinson Journal, 2020

Háromszögek az irodalomban – Vágyszerkezetek Máraitól Nádasig

Magyar tudomány, May 1, 2018

A háromszögséma meglehetősen gyakori az irodalomban: ketten ugyanazt a személyt szeretik, vagy eg... more A háromszögséma meglehetősen gyakori az irodalomban: ketten ugyanazt a személyt szeretik, vagy egy ember szeret kettőt – egy időben vagy egymás után. Első látásra egyszerűnek tűnik ez a képlet, ám mélyebb elemzések a vágyháromszögek nem várt változatosságát és összetettségét mutatják. Bollobás ezt a variabilitást és komplexitást tárja föl, tágabb elméleti és összehasonlító irodalmi kontextusba helyezve a háromszögeket. Vizsgálódásait a patriarchátus- és az interszubjektivitás-elméletek által keretezett elméleti térben folytatja, s a Claude Lévi-Strauss, René Girard, Gayle Rubin, Heidi Hartman, Mary Jacobus, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick és Gerda Lerner, valamint Edmund Husserl, Martin Buber, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas és Judith Butler által szolgáltatott kritériumok segítségével és az európai és amerikai irodalom képviselőinek – Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Stefan Zweig, Szerb Antal, Márai Sándor, Harsányi Zsolt, Carson McCullers, Nádas Péter – néhány alkotása elemzése alapján írja le a háromszögek szerkezetét.

Chapter Two: Extending the Performative 71

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

Chapter Four: Performing Sexuality 151

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

Now I would like to turn to texts where I depict, by extending the binary logic of metaphysical t... more Now I would like to turn to texts where I depict, by extending the binary logic of metaphysical thinking, the naturalization of the homosexual in the position of the cultural Other. Born around the turn of the 20th century; these texts foreground homosexuality in a radical way by making the homosexual visible. Although it is possible, as I have already pointed out, to detect a certain parallelism between the texts performing gender on the one hand and those performing sexuality on the other, there is one fundamental difference, which concerns the normative presuppositions informing gender and sexual performance and performativity. As I argued in the earlier chapters, the social script replayed in the performance of womanhood was the construction of woman as object-other-body, while new subjectivities were being constructed by way of radical performative processes. But the construction of the gay person into object-other-body was a little different: this in itself already represented a form of resistance-one against the all pervasive invisibility of the homosexual that characterized earlier texts. The trajectory of gender performativity spans from performances of gender compliance (replaying the heterocentric patriarchal scripts) to radical performative revisions of gender normativity. But the model made up of these two stages-normative performance of object-other-body, performative construction of woman as subject-agent-cannot be applied exactly to sexuality: in these latter cases invisibility constitutes the script of normative performance, and visibility constitutes the background making possible new performative constructions (even if, indeed, the gay person is objectified and otherized into spectacle). Ultimately, this second stage is to be followed by a third, where the gay person is constructed as subject and agent, one who sees, speaks, and acts. An additional point must be emphasized in connection with the objectification and otherization of the subordinated elements of metaphysical binaries of man/woman and homosexual/heterosexual: a comparable disenfranchisement lies at the bottom of woman's construction as object-other-body and the naturalization of gay persons as otherized objects. Given the fact that the "Cartesian gesture," as Shoshana Felman rightly claims, is symptomatic of oppressive order (Claims 54), these metaphysical binaries are indeed expressive of power relations. Although the visibility attained by both (after centuries of in

Performing texts/performing readings: A pragmatic understanding of the revisionist interpretation of American literature

Journal of Pragmatics, Dec 1, 2007

The performative has become a generative concept in the study of literature. As a textual process... more The performative has become a generative concept in the study of literature. As a textual process negotiating between mimesis and ontologization, it has allowed the construction of identity to be conceptualized in nonessentialist thinking. In addition, it captures the double aspect of language in the text: its expressive/dramatic aspect, of revealing an existing reality, and its self-producing/self-referential aspect, of creating a new reality. Moreover, not only the text but also reading can be considered performative, since reading brings into existence interpretations that did not exist before. The pragmatic understanding of reading can help explain recent revisionary interpretations of the canon of American literature. Two texts by Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle and In the Cage, are offered as examples for how identity is discursively produced and then read performatively, in dialogue with presuppositions, or frame assumptions, brought to the texts by readers. In The Beast in the Jungle the ghost of homosexuality makes its performance around the silence of the empty signifier. In the Cage presents the telegraphist who lives in a world she has constructed out of the telegraphs that pass through her hands. Her reading of the telegraphs is fictioned by her own assumptions, while James helps his readers to construct a different reading of the events by allowing a different set of frame assumptions to emerge.

Troping the Unthought: Catachresis in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

The Emily Dickinson Journal, 2012

in the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can... more in the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertionlyn Hejinian C atachresis is an outstanding trope within Emily Dickinson's regime of innovation, although little attention has been paid to it. 1 in particular, catachresis contributes formidably to meaning making in what Margaret H. Freeman calls Dickinson's "conceptual universe" (645). As one of the poetic devices used by this poet in favor of "polytropy" (see Hagenbüchle, "Poetic Covenant" 28), it stands out as the trope that gave Dickinson ample linguistic space, a "Capacious[ness]" within language, to use her own term (Fr713). she could thus play with her "loved Philology" and her "lexicon," her "only companion," without having to leave the realm of language (Fr1715, l261). As Wendy Martin points out, Dickinson believed that words are crucial to making "perceptions palpable" and that language "made emotion and thought possible" (117). Through catachresis, Dickinson can access the knowledge that has been accumulated into language. in addition, catachresis enables her to accommodate language's ambiguities and undecidabilities. Catachresis fits into the linguistic, poetic, and rhetorical "patents" on poetic invention identified by Roland Hagenbüchle, lynn keller and Cristanne Miller, Brita lindberg-seyersted, sharon Cameron, Josef Raab, and shira Wolosky in their various discussions of Dickinson's poetic language. 2 What these critics focus on-and also defines catachresis-is a process of creating connections between signifiers without anchoring signs in the realm of the signified, thus making room for startling innovations and the creation of concepts formerly unthought. indeed,

Louise Glück, a személyesség fegyelmezett költője • Louise Glück, Restrained Poet of the Personal

Magyar tudomány, 2021

A 2020-as év irodalmi Nobel-díjasa Louise Glück amerikai költő. Glück az autentikus jelenlét késő... more A 2020-as év irodalmi Nobel-díjasa Louise Glück amerikai költő. Glück az autentikus jelenlét késő modernista lírikusa, aki önkifejező verseiben a jelen gyakran fájdalmas pillanatait helyezi a fókuszba, fegyelmezetten, szinte érzéketlenül keresve a személyes kapcsolódási pontjait az univerzálissal, a természetivel és a mitológiaival. Költészetének jegyei között említhető a jelenségek mögött megbúvó absztrakt rendben való bizonyosság (mely rendet a költészet és általában a művészet hivatott megteremteni, vagy legalábbis előhívni), a megfigyelt jelenségek közötti megfelelések feltárása és a szubjektum autonóm és önmagával azonos entitásként való felfogása. Glück a nehéz emberi, elsősorban családi kapcsolatok krónikása, aki egyszerre konfesszio nalista lírikus és figyelemköltő, és megfigyeléseit gyakran keretezi mitológiai történetekkel, melyek révén értelem világlik át a hétköznapok élménytöredékein.

Chapter Five: Performing Passing 167

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

Although the logic of the paradigm I have established and followed would prompt the discussion of... more Although the logic of the paradigm I have established and followed would prompt the discussion of race next-and for a while I did indeed contemplate writing about how black becomes black and white becomes white-I have decided after all not to continue with a chapter titled "Performing Race." My abandoning this plan has been necessitated in part by the enormity of the topic and in part by my own resistance to totalizing structures. So, rather than just scratching the surface of the problematics of race performativity, I turn now to a particular aspect of performative subjectivities, passing, where I demonstrate the subversion of the inflections of gender, sexuality, and race alike. Passing is a term originally used in the context of race, but has been recently extended to cover other forms of boundary crossings. As a general term, it involves various-often multiple-transgressions between such binary oppositions as man/woman, white/black, or heterosexual/homosexual. A dramatic or theatrical replaying of existing social scripts, passing is predominantly performance. Gender and race passing, for example, are performances which uncover the purely imitative and constructed nature of gender and race by ignoring, transforming, or literally redressing the "biological": gender performance overwrites "true" sex, while race performance goes counter to skin color defined by law or lineage. In other words, these are performances where the binaries of feminine/masculine and black/white leave the body marked as their "natural" site and become staged or acted out. In such instances of passing, gender and race are visibly constructed in a catachrestic manner, lacking both a literal referent where ontologies might be located and an "original" which might be copied and cited. Dislodged from the body, race and gender will be seen as constructed through institutions and discourses; foregrounded as both product and process, passing will reveal itself as series of performance acts of oscillation and transgression between boundaries, categories, and subjectivities. As an instance of transgression, passing often appears as a threat: it threatens the order believed to have been solid; it threatens identity categories thought to have been securely planted in our bodies; threatens positions of domination and hegemony, with all their rights and privileges, which are now "usurped," as Lynn Friedli puts it (qtd. in Ginsberg 13), by the passer.

“Totalitarian Lib”: The Legacy of Communism for Hungarian Women

International Scholarship

American Literary Scholarship, 2016

Introduction to the Cluster. Inside and Outside the Patriarchal Box: On Hungarian Historical, Literary, and Filmic Constructions of Gender

Hungarian Cultural Studies, Aug 1, 2019

Arany, Zsuzsanna. Kosztolányi Dezső élete [‘The Life of Dezső Kosztolányi’]. Budapest: Osiris, 2017. 692 pp. Illus

Hungarian Cultural Studies, Aug 6, 2018

Versions of Triangular Desire in Hungarian Literature: Reading Sándor Márai and Péter Nádas

Hungarian Cultural Studies, Aug 6, 2018

Two Hungarian authors, Sándor Márai and Péter Nádas, seem to have one thing in common: their attr... more Two Hungarian authors, Sándor Márai and Péter Nádas, seem to have one thing in common: their attraction to triangular relationships. Written between 1935 and 1942 and portraying human relations in pre-World War II Hungary, Márai's two novels and one drama all turn on a very specific triangular structure between two close friends and the woman whom they both love(d). Now they conduct a painful tête-à-tête to decide on the final ownership (or simply fate) of the woman. Written in 1979 and portraying human relations in communist Hungary, Nádas's play has only two actors on stage, a woman of aristocratic descent and a young man, the son of a high-ranking communist official, the woman's long dead lover. This exchange between the two characters opens into an encounter of three, where the woman and the young man each use the other as a mediator to reach the third, the lover/father. Bollobás argues that the triangles displayed by the two authors represent two distinct types: the former is informed by fixed, hierarchical, subjectobject power relations, while the latter by fluid, non-hierarchical, subject-subject relations.

Chapter One: The Strong Performative 25

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

The belief that the spoken word is charged with magical power-that language can influence reality... more The belief that the spoken word is charged with magical power-that language can influence reality and words can bring about change-goes back to primitive origins. Incantations, invocations, enchantments, spells, and prayers are all ritual and institutional acts relying on word magic, or, what I will later call strong performativity; they are efforts believed to control natural (and supernatural) forces by words. Since ancient times poets and seers have been known as not only seeing and conveying their vision, but also using language as such magic. This belief in the power of the uttered word underlies the everyday custom of wishing good luck, wishing good health when taking a drink or sneezing. One still hopes that the word can influence the management of the world. Of course, word magic is not just an element of the imaginative paraphernalia of poetry, religion, or shamanism, but a significant topic-under the name performative-in the philosophy of language too. The potential of the word as action came to be seriously theorized in the first decades of the 20th century, some time before J. L. Austin, whose complex elaboration of the performative and the speech act in the 1950s provided the foundation for later pragmaticist as well as poststructuralist theories. The performative: early history The first phase of the history of the concept of the performative embraces roughly the period between the 1910s and the 1970s, with its heyday probably from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Coinciding with the time of the modern episteme in philosophy, linguistics, and literary theory, this early conceptualization of performativity exhibits several traits of the formalist-structuralist paradigm. Taking for granted the centrality of the binary between the signifier and the signified, or the sign anchored in reality, the period is marked by a search for comparable conceptual binaries underlying social and cultural formations, an interest in universal patterns in everyday language, as well as a pragmatic understanding of meaning, whose stability has not been questioned yet. Exhibiting the "power of the word," the performative was understood in this epistemic framework as a language structure capable of creating something outside lan

WITHDRAWN: The Flouting of Point of View in Faulkner and Durrell

Journal of Pragmatics, 2006

The publisher regrets that this article is an accidental duplication of an article that has alrea... more

Ami szép, az nehéz

Akadémiai Kiadó eBooks, 2021

Chapter Three: Performing Gender 97

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

In this chapter I will explore the discursive constructions of gender: its normative performance ... more In this chapter I will explore the discursive constructions of gender: its normative performance and its subversive performative constructions. The institutional rules of gender, I will show, include woman positioned as Other (especially woman as object of speech, vision, and act), woman as body inscribed by various controlling discourses (including costume and the general stylization of the body), and woman as body to be surveyed. Applying Searle's basic formula concerning the constitutive rules of institutions, "X counts as Y in context C" (Speech Acts 52), to the construction of the gendered subject, one can say that when positioned as the Other, an object, whose inscriptive body is foregrounded and put forth as spectacle, the person is constructed as a woman. Indeed, womanhood came to be naturalized in the position of the marked Other (of the dichotomy of man/woman), which society has declared as "natural" and "normal" for her. This means that woman has typically been the object seen (while she herself did not see), the person spoken to or spoken of (while she herself did not speak), and the one acted upon (while she herself did not act). Only around the turn of the 20th century did the new female character appear in the subject position: empowered now to see, speak, and act, the modern woman appropriates for herself the possibility of self-construction as subject and agent (a possibility to be called into question by postmodernism later). Both are discursive processes producing social-cultural constructs; but while the first scenarioillustrated here by pre-modernist texts, where woman is produced, through performance, as an object-is the replaying of existing social scripts, the second-illustrated here by texts taken from modernist women writers-ignores, resists, and subverts normative expectations when, by applying radicalontological performative processes, it produces woman as a speaking and seeing subject, as well as acting agent. Moreover, woman's construction in the object position runs parallel with the similar naturalization of colored and gay persons as cultural Others. As members of culturally imperialized groups, they have followed similar trajectories of disempowerment (excluded from the category of the human, the "rights of man," and deprived of subjecthood and agency) and empowerment (claiming inclusion into the human and appropriating subjecthood and agency). Indeed, the persons constructed into objects along axes gender, race, and

The Flouting of Point of View in Faulkner and Durrell

Journal of Pragmatics, Jun 1, 2006

This is a compact, focused study of point of view as a narrative-pragmatic technique, as well as ... more This is a compact, focused study of point of view as a narrative-pragmatic technique, as well as how its flouting becomes a trademark of fiction in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! and Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet. Working out of the space created by narratology, pragmatics, and literary criticism, Dahlgren brings together several propositions. In my reading they are the following: point of view-and its relationship to author and narrator-is expected to be identifiable and interpretable (this is the narratological suggestion); the rules of point of view are much like those of the Gricean maxims in the sense that texts are expected to be readable and relevant (this is the pragmatic assumption); as such, point of view can be flouted too in the literary text, where such violations are meaningful and require readerly involvement (this is the claim of literary criticism). Indeed, the whole structure of the book follows this tripartite arrangement of being equally rooted in narratology, pragmatics, and literary criticism. In the first part of the book Dahlgren gives an overview of what point of view has meant in narratology. Understood as a form of mediation among author, narrator, story, character, and reader, point of view is linked to vision and voice, to the Genettean problem of ''who sees?'' and ''who speaks?''. Otherwise, point of view is also linked to reflector and focus, but is different from both in more directly provoking author and narrator presence. While authorial meaning might be elusive, the author himself/ herself is not: authorial intrusions bring about what Dahlgren calls the ''interactive give-andtake'' of reading; without such intrusions the text would not become ''discourse in a creative act carried out by the reader'' (43). General narrator presence is similarly assumed in fiction: different as the various narrator types may be, the narrator never totally disappears without at least leaving an imprint on the reader's mind. Point of view, then, will much depend on whether the narrator is a first-, second-, or third-person narrator, a framing narrator, a teller-character, one of the multiple narrators, holding an inside or an outside view, an overt narrator or the character whose subconscious is brought to the surface by free indirect style or stream-of-consciousness techniques. Dahlgren invokes speech act theory in the middle section of her book, insisting that speech acts are performed in literature both on the level of what she calls superstructure (where authors and readers move) and macrostructure (the fictional world, where characters interact). It is especially clear on the level of superstructure that the text is a communicative event, including ''some kind of exchange between author and reader'' (72). But speech acts function within a work of fiction as well, where characters are engaged in communication, whether in pragmatically acceptable dialogues or more covert emotional exchanges. As a communicative

[Mask and Self - and the Illness: Injuries of the Soul in Sylvia Plath's Poetry]

PubMed, 2019

The study focuses on two features of Sylvia Plath's poetry that may be directly linked to her ill... more The study focuses on two features of Sylvia Plath's poetry that may be directly linked to her illness, her mask poetry and her female Bildung, where the former is informed by her sense of plural selfhood, while the latter gives account of the failures of her creative self-constructions. Although no direct connection can be set up between life and work even in the case of a confessional poet, it is probably safe to claim that multiple personality may manifest in a plural poetic self, while the Self developing in Bildung narratives contradicts the idea of a split personality. Enikô Bollobás explores the heteroclite diversity of artistic vision through discussing the pluralism of poetic masks and identities, insisting that, in the spirit of late modernism, no self-interpretive frame exists for Plath, one that would hold together the diverse identities. The long poems and poem cycles give narratives of female Bildung, portraying the woman's diverse attempts to break out of the traps of patriarchy; some of these are failed attempts, yet others offer allegories of the poet's creative self-constructions.

They Aren’t, Until I Call Them

The new kid on the block of binary thinking: conceptualizing the homosexual The resisting narrati... more

Our Visitor from Infinitude—Emily Dickinson's Poetry by Enikő Bollobás

The Emily Dickinson Journal, 2020

Háromszögek az irodalomban – Vágyszerkezetek Máraitól Nádasig

Magyar tudomány, May 1, 2018

A háromszögséma meglehetősen gyakori az irodalomban: ketten ugyanazt a személyt szeretik, vagy eg... more A háromszögséma meglehetősen gyakori az irodalomban: ketten ugyanazt a személyt szeretik, vagy egy ember szeret kettőt – egy időben vagy egymás után. Első látásra egyszerűnek tűnik ez a képlet, ám mélyebb elemzések a vágyháromszögek nem várt változatosságát és összetettségét mutatják. Bollobás ezt a variabilitást és komplexitást tárja föl, tágabb elméleti és összehasonlító irodalmi kontextusba helyezve a háromszögeket. Vizsgálódásait a patriarchátus- és az interszubjektivitás-elméletek által keretezett elméleti térben folytatja, s a Claude Lévi-Strauss, René Girard, Gayle Rubin, Heidi Hartman, Mary Jacobus, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick és Gerda Lerner, valamint Edmund Husserl, Martin Buber, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas és Judith Butler által szolgáltatott kritériumok segítségével és az európai és amerikai irodalom képviselőinek – Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Stefan Zweig, Szerb Antal, Márai Sándor, Harsányi Zsolt, Carson McCullers, Nádas Péter – néhány alkotása elemzése alapján írja le a háromszögek szerkezetét.

Chapter Two: Extending the Performative 71

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

Chapter Four: Performing Sexuality 151

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

Now I would like to turn to texts where I depict, by extending the binary logic of metaphysical t... more Now I would like to turn to texts where I depict, by extending the binary logic of metaphysical thinking, the naturalization of the homosexual in the position of the cultural Other. Born around the turn of the 20th century; these texts foreground homosexuality in a radical way by making the homosexual visible. Although it is possible, as I have already pointed out, to detect a certain parallelism between the texts performing gender on the one hand and those performing sexuality on the other, there is one fundamental difference, which concerns the normative presuppositions informing gender and sexual performance and performativity. As I argued in the earlier chapters, the social script replayed in the performance of womanhood was the construction of woman as object-other-body, while new subjectivities were being constructed by way of radical performative processes. But the construction of the gay person into object-other-body was a little different: this in itself already represented a form of resistance-one against the all pervasive invisibility of the homosexual that characterized earlier texts. The trajectory of gender performativity spans from performances of gender compliance (replaying the heterocentric patriarchal scripts) to radical performative revisions of gender normativity. But the model made up of these two stages-normative performance of object-other-body, performative construction of woman as subject-agent-cannot be applied exactly to sexuality: in these latter cases invisibility constitutes the script of normative performance, and visibility constitutes the background making possible new performative constructions (even if, indeed, the gay person is objectified and otherized into spectacle). Ultimately, this second stage is to be followed by a third, where the gay person is constructed as subject and agent, one who sees, speaks, and acts. An additional point must be emphasized in connection with the objectification and otherization of the subordinated elements of metaphysical binaries of man/woman and homosexual/heterosexual: a comparable disenfranchisement lies at the bottom of woman's construction as object-other-body and the naturalization of gay persons as otherized objects. Given the fact that the "Cartesian gesture," as Shoshana Felman rightly claims, is symptomatic of oppressive order (Claims 54), these metaphysical binaries are indeed expressive of power relations. Although the visibility attained by both (after centuries of in

Performing texts/performing readings: A pragmatic understanding of the revisionist interpretation of American literature

Journal of Pragmatics, Dec 1, 2007

The performative has become a generative concept in the study of literature. As a textual process... more The performative has become a generative concept in the study of literature. As a textual process negotiating between mimesis and ontologization, it has allowed the construction of identity to be conceptualized in nonessentialist thinking. In addition, it captures the double aspect of language in the text: its expressive/dramatic aspect, of revealing an existing reality, and its self-producing/self-referential aspect, of creating a new reality. Moreover, not only the text but also reading can be considered performative, since reading brings into existence interpretations that did not exist before. The pragmatic understanding of reading can help explain recent revisionary interpretations of the canon of American literature. Two texts by Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle and In the Cage, are offered as examples for how identity is discursively produced and then read performatively, in dialogue with presuppositions, or frame assumptions, brought to the texts by readers. In The Beast in the Jungle the ghost of homosexuality makes its performance around the silence of the empty signifier. In the Cage presents the telegraphist who lives in a world she has constructed out of the telegraphs that pass through her hands. Her reading of the telegraphs is fictioned by her own assumptions, while James helps his readers to construct a different reading of the events by allowing a different set of frame assumptions to emerge.

Troping the Unthought: Catachresis in Emily Dickinson’s Poetry

The Emily Dickinson Journal, 2012

in the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can... more in the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertionlyn Hejinian C atachresis is an outstanding trope within Emily Dickinson's regime of innovation, although little attention has been paid to it. 1 in particular, catachresis contributes formidably to meaning making in what Margaret H. Freeman calls Dickinson's "conceptual universe" (645). As one of the poetic devices used by this poet in favor of "polytropy" (see Hagenbüchle, "Poetic Covenant" 28), it stands out as the trope that gave Dickinson ample linguistic space, a "Capacious[ness]" within language, to use her own term (Fr713). she could thus play with her "loved Philology" and her "lexicon," her "only companion," without having to leave the realm of language (Fr1715, l261). As Wendy Martin points out, Dickinson believed that words are crucial to making "perceptions palpable" and that language "made emotion and thought possible" (117). Through catachresis, Dickinson can access the knowledge that has been accumulated into language. in addition, catachresis enables her to accommodate language's ambiguities and undecidabilities. Catachresis fits into the linguistic, poetic, and rhetorical "patents" on poetic invention identified by Roland Hagenbüchle, lynn keller and Cristanne Miller, Brita lindberg-seyersted, sharon Cameron, Josef Raab, and shira Wolosky in their various discussions of Dickinson's poetic language. 2 What these critics focus on-and also defines catachresis-is a process of creating connections between signifiers without anchoring signs in the realm of the signified, thus making room for startling innovations and the creation of concepts formerly unthought. indeed,

Louise Glück, a személyesség fegyelmezett költője • Louise Glück, Restrained Poet of the Personal

Magyar tudomány, 2021

A 2020-as év irodalmi Nobel-díjasa Louise Glück amerikai költő. Glück az autentikus jelenlét késő... more A 2020-as év irodalmi Nobel-díjasa Louise Glück amerikai költő. Glück az autentikus jelenlét késő modernista lírikusa, aki önkifejező verseiben a jelen gyakran fájdalmas pillanatait helyezi a fókuszba, fegyelmezetten, szinte érzéketlenül keresve a személyes kapcsolódási pontjait az univerzálissal, a természetivel és a mitológiaival. Költészetének jegyei között említhető a jelenségek mögött megbúvó absztrakt rendben való bizonyosság (mely rendet a költészet és általában a művészet hivatott megteremteni, vagy legalábbis előhívni), a megfigyelt jelenségek közötti megfelelések feltárása és a szubjektum autonóm és önmagával azonos entitásként való felfogása. Glück a nehéz emberi, elsősorban családi kapcsolatok krónikása, aki egyszerre konfesszio nalista lírikus és figyelemköltő, és megfigyeléseit gyakran keretezi mitológiai történetekkel, melyek révén értelem világlik át a hétköznapok élménytöredékein.

Chapter Five: Performing Passing 167

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

Although the logic of the paradigm I have established and followed would prompt the discussion of... more Although the logic of the paradigm I have established and followed would prompt the discussion of race next-and for a while I did indeed contemplate writing about how black becomes black and white becomes white-I have decided after all not to continue with a chapter titled "Performing Race." My abandoning this plan has been necessitated in part by the enormity of the topic and in part by my own resistance to totalizing structures. So, rather than just scratching the surface of the problematics of race performativity, I turn now to a particular aspect of performative subjectivities, passing, where I demonstrate the subversion of the inflections of gender, sexuality, and race alike. Passing is a term originally used in the context of race, but has been recently extended to cover other forms of boundary crossings. As a general term, it involves various-often multiple-transgressions between such binary oppositions as man/woman, white/black, or heterosexual/homosexual. A dramatic or theatrical replaying of existing social scripts, passing is predominantly performance. Gender and race passing, for example, are performances which uncover the purely imitative and constructed nature of gender and race by ignoring, transforming, or literally redressing the "biological": gender performance overwrites "true" sex, while race performance goes counter to skin color defined by law or lineage. In other words, these are performances where the binaries of feminine/masculine and black/white leave the body marked as their "natural" site and become staged or acted out. In such instances of passing, gender and race are visibly constructed in a catachrestic manner, lacking both a literal referent where ontologies might be located and an "original" which might be copied and cited. Dislodged from the body, race and gender will be seen as constructed through institutions and discourses; foregrounded as both product and process, passing will reveal itself as series of performance acts of oscillation and transgression between boundaries, categories, and subjectivities. As an instance of transgression, passing often appears as a threat: it threatens the order believed to have been solid; it threatens identity categories thought to have been securely planted in our bodies; threatens positions of domination and hegemony, with all their rights and privileges, which are now "usurped," as Lynn Friedli puts it (qtd. in Ginsberg 13), by the passer.

“Totalitarian Lib”: The Legacy of Communism for Hungarian Women

International Scholarship

American Literary Scholarship, 2016

Introduction to the Cluster. Inside and Outside the Patriarchal Box: On Hungarian Historical, Literary, and Filmic Constructions of Gender

Hungarian Cultural Studies, Aug 1, 2019

Arany, Zsuzsanna. Kosztolányi Dezső élete [‘The Life of Dezső Kosztolányi’]. Budapest: Osiris, 2017. 692 pp. Illus

Hungarian Cultural Studies, Aug 6, 2018

Versions of Triangular Desire in Hungarian Literature: Reading Sándor Márai and Péter Nádas

Hungarian Cultural Studies, Aug 6, 2018

Two Hungarian authors, Sándor Márai and Péter Nádas, seem to have one thing in common: their attr... more Two Hungarian authors, Sándor Márai and Péter Nádas, seem to have one thing in common: their attraction to triangular relationships. Written between 1935 and 1942 and portraying human relations in pre-World War II Hungary, Márai's two novels and one drama all turn on a very specific triangular structure between two close friends and the woman whom they both love(d). Now they conduct a painful tête-à-tête to decide on the final ownership (or simply fate) of the woman. Written in 1979 and portraying human relations in communist Hungary, Nádas's play has only two actors on stage, a woman of aristocratic descent and a young man, the son of a high-ranking communist official, the woman's long dead lover. This exchange between the two characters opens into an encounter of three, where the woman and the young man each use the other as a mediator to reach the third, the lover/father. Bollobás argues that the triangles displayed by the two authors represent two distinct types: the former is informed by fixed, hierarchical, subjectobject power relations, while the latter by fluid, non-hierarchical, subject-subject relations.

Chapter One: The Strong Performative 25

Peter Lang eBooks, Jul 14, 2016

The belief that the spoken word is charged with magical power-that language can influence reality... more The belief that the spoken word is charged with magical power-that language can influence reality and words can bring about change-goes back to primitive origins. Incantations, invocations, enchantments, spells, and prayers are all ritual and institutional acts relying on word magic, or, what I will later call strong performativity; they are efforts believed to control natural (and supernatural) forces by words. Since ancient times poets and seers have been known as not only seeing and conveying their vision, but also using language as such magic. This belief in the power of the uttered word underlies the everyday custom of wishing good luck, wishing good health when taking a drink or sneezing. One still hopes that the word can influence the management of the world. Of course, word magic is not just an element of the imaginative paraphernalia of poetry, religion, or shamanism, but a significant topic-under the name performative-in the philosophy of language too. The potential of the word as action came to be seriously theorized in the first decades of the 20th century, some time before J. L. Austin, whose complex elaboration of the performative and the speech act in the 1950s provided the foundation for later pragmaticist as well as poststructuralist theories. The performative: early history The first phase of the history of the concept of the performative embraces roughly the period between the 1910s and the 1970s, with its heyday probably from the early 1950s to the mid-1970s. Coinciding with the time of the modern episteme in philosophy, linguistics, and literary theory, this early conceptualization of performativity exhibits several traits of the formalist-structuralist paradigm. Taking for granted the centrality of the binary between the signifier and the signified, or the sign anchored in reality, the period is marked by a search for comparable conceptual binaries underlying social and cultural formations, an interest in universal patterns in everyday language, as well as a pragmatic understanding of meaning, whose stability has not been questioned yet. Exhibiting the "power of the word," the performative was understood in this epistemic framework as a language structure capable of creating something outside lan

81-96_Kalligram-APRILIS.pdf

Recenzió Arany Zsuzsanna Kosztolányi-életrajzáról.

Reading Through Theory – Studies in Theory-framed Interpretation of the Literary Text. Budapest: Eötvös Kiadó, 2021. http://www.eltereader.hu/kiadvanyok/eniko-bollobas-reading-through-theory/

Reading Through Theory – Studies in Theory-framed Interpretation of the Literary Text, 2021

This collection brings together critical studies framed by several theoretical perspectives, incl... more This collection brings together critical studies framed by several theoretical perspectives, including performative, intersubjective, postmodern, feminist, tropological, and rhetorical. In some essays the author discusses the theoretical frameworks themselves, delineating the various paradigms and giving historical overviews of how these paradigms evolved, while also demonstrating how they can be applied in literary interpretation. In other studies, Bollobás puts the literary text into the center, and performs readings informed by particular theories. The prose texts have been selected in such a way that they are best interpreted through these theoretical approaches; specifically, they turn on processes whereby the (gendered) subjects are performatively constructed, while characters, often informed by rhetorical processes and structures, are formed via their interactions with others. That is, performative and rhetorical constructions of the subject and interactions of characters are foregrounded in these narratives; they “stick out” to such an extent that they call for specific theoretical readings. The poetic texts are interpreted within the frames of poetological paradigms that problematize referentiality, self-expressivity, and performativity; among these paradigms, tropization, language-centered approaches, and anti-lyric models are foregrounded in the essays. Studies on performativity, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, H.D., the fantastic (Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce), Carson McCullers, David Hwang, Sándor Márai, Péter Nádas, Péter Esterházy, Charles Bernstein, Augusto de Campos, Susan Howe.

Kölcsönösségek – Irodalomelmélet, szövegolvasás, kultúraközvetítés. Budapest: Balassi, 2020.

Kölcsönösségek – Irodalomelmélet, szövegolvasás, kultúraközvetítés, 2020

A tanulmánykötetben egybegyűjtött írások több tekintetben is kölcsönös egymásra hatások termékei.... more A tanulmánykötetben egybegyűjtött írások több tekintetben is kölcsönös egymásra hatások termékei. Nemcsak az elméletek – mint például a strukturalizmus, a performatív vagy interszubjektív paradigmák – történeti aspektusait és legfőbb téziseit mutatják be, de nyomon követik az irodalom- és kultúraelméletek különböző – alaktani, performatív, interszubjektív – vonulatainak kölcsönösen megtermékenyítő találkozásait is. Egyszersmind megvilágítják az elméletek és a szövegértelmezés közötti reciprocitások nyomait, amennyiben a tanulmányok kiindulópontja rendre egy vagy több elméleti irányzat, amelyek keretezik és irányítják a szövegolvasási gyakorlatot. Ugyanakkor az elméleti megközelítések kapcsolódásokat létesítenek az elmélet és a befogadás, valamint az egymás felé nyitó nemzeti irodalmi hagyományok között. Vagyis míg az elméleti, elmélettörténeti tanulmányok a különböző elméleti keretezések – és e keretezések változatos összjátékának – termékei, addig az elméleti fókuszú szövegértelmezések amerikai, angol és magyar irodalmi szövegeken végzett olvasási gyakorlattá fordítják a szövegek diktálta irodalomelméleti megközelítéseket. Végül a tanulmányok a kultúraközi befogadás példái, amennyiben hozzájárulnak az amerikai szerzők magyarországi befogadásához és a magyar műveknek az angolszász világban elterjedt elméletek alapján történő feldolgozásához. Így nemcsak az irodalomelméletek egymás közti kapcsolódásait világítják meg, és nemcsak az elméletek szövegolvasásban való alkalmazásait példázzák, de bemutatják a kultúrák közötti kritikai diszkurzusok módszertanát és változatosságát is.

Vendégünk a végtelenből -- Emily Dickinson költészete

Vendégünk a végtelenből -- Emily Dickinson költészete, 2015

Emily Dickinsont joggal tekintik a legfontosabb 19. századi amerikai költőnek, aki az angol metaf... more Emily Dickinsont joggal tekintik a legfontosabb 19. századi amerikai költőnek, aki az angol metafizikus hagyományok folytatójaként jeleníti meg a költészet egyetemes és elvont, helyhez és időhöz nem kötött, örök értékeit. Whitmannal együtt az amerikai radikális modernizmus előfutárja és egyúttal a posztmodern vonulatok megelőlegezője. Nyelvi kísérletezései révén Rimbaud és Mallarmé egyenrangú társa. A figyelem esztétikája szervezte költészetében a múló pillanatot és annak utóélményét ragadja meg, miközben minden érzékszervét mozgósítja. Elsősorban a belső folyamatok érdeklik. Szigorú introspekciót gyakorolva tanulmányozza a belső folyamatok anatómiáját, rögzítve a fájdalom, a trauma és a krízis, valamint azok utóhatása, utótudása minden mozzanatát. Dickinson elsősorban arra kíváncsi, amit nem tudunk, s a nem-tudás elfogadása Keats-szel rokonítja. Rimbaud-t megelőzve pedig azt állítja, hogy a költészetnek le kell vetnie az érzés és a gondolkodás bilincseit, hogy ne csak úgy érezzünk és gondolkodjunk, ahogyan arra a nyelv megtanított bennünket. Különben – mint Goethe mondta – csak azt látjuk meg, amit már tudunk és értünk. Dickinson költészetének meghatározó élménye a megértésből való kizárattatás, amelynek újabb és újabb allegóriáit írja meg verseiben. A megismerés lehetetlenségére alkotott nagy dickinsoni metafora a sötétben botorkáló ember, aki nem is tehet mást, mint hogy elfogadja a sötétséget, és bízik a belső látás lassú kialakulásában. Míg az óvatos ember örökre vak marad, addig az, aki szembe mer nézni a lelki válságokkal, látóvá lesz – álítja Dickinson. (Budapest: Balassi, 2015.)

Vendégünk a végtelenből: Emily Dickinson költészete. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2015. 247 p.

Emily Dickinsont joggal tekintik a legfontosabb 19. századi amerikai költőnek, aki az angol metaf... more Emily Dickinsont joggal tekintik a legfontosabb 19. századi amerikai költőnek, aki az angol metafizikus hagyományok folytatójaként jeleníti meg a költészet egyetemes és elvont, helyhez és időhöz nem kötött, örök értékeit. Whitmannal együtt az amerikai radikális modernizmus előfutárja és egyúttal a posztmodern vonulatok megelőlegezője. Nyelvi kísérletezései révén Rimbaud és Mallarmé egyenrangú társa.