CERES is pleased to welcome Prof. Sándor Hites, who is a Visiting Lecturer in our Hungarian Studies Program for the 2015-2016 academic year. Support for his visit comes from the Balassi Institute in Budapest. Prof. Hites is a senior member of the Institute for Literary Studies at the Research Center for the Humanities of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He will be teaching a full-year undergraduate course in Hungarian literature and, during the winter semester, a graduate course on East European exiles (course description below). Welcome, Prof. Hites!
“East European Exiles: Political and Intellectual Migration in the Twentieth Century”
Separation from one’s native culture through physical dislocation (as a refugee, migrant, émigré, exile, or expatriate) has been one of the most formative experiences in European history. Due to the cataclysmic political changes the region went through, East-Central Europe has given rise to several consecutive waves of migration in the 20th century (1917-1919, 1933-1939, 1945-1948, 1956, 1968).
By giving a survey of these waves the course will study some key examples of how intellectuals fleeing the region (Gy. Lukács, Jakobson, Wellek, Karl Mannheim, the Polányi brothers, B. Balázs, Todorov, Kristeva) contributed to the establishment of new disciplines or the redefinition of traditional ones (film aesthetics, literary theory, comparative literature, sociology of knowledge, history of economy). (In addition to the usual focus on Westward movements, the course also deals with the Eastward direction of exile in the interwar period, that is, the fate of East-Central European politicians and intellectuals looking for shelter in the Soviet Union.)
We’ll be also concerned with how literary works by exiled writers (Crnjanski, Gombrowicz, A. Kristof, Márai, G. Mikes, Nabokov, Skvorecky) reflected on the trauma of displacement, how they used migration as a metaphor for the modern consciousness of alienation and restlessness, and how they witnessed their own identities to be maintained, suspended or lost, multiplied or hybridized in exile’s dynamic of longing and belonging.
