About the project
Now consisting of different small nation-states, East Central Europe was for centuries part of the Habsburg Monarchy. The multinational and multilingual Habsburg Monarchy was characterized by fascinating examples of supranational identification, rich transnational literary networks, and multilingual practices. But what happens to these practices when the supranational frame falls apart?
"Probing the Boundaries of the (Trans)National" explored the continuities and discontinuities of the legacy of the Habsburg Monarchy in order to understand current tensions between the ideology of the nation-state, multilingualism, and forms of belonging beyond the nation in Europe today.
The project brought together an international group of historians, linguists, anthropologists, and literary scholars to explore the afterlife of the Habsburg Monarchy from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Objectives
We examined
- how memories of the Habsburg Monarchy have been transmitted in oral narratives and in (post-)Yugoslav literature;
- how transnational literary networks of Hungarian minorities transformed in the interwar and post-1989 periods;
- how formal and informal multilingual practices in East Central Europe developed after the creation of nation-states in 1918 and how the language situation and language policies look like today in the multiethnic regions of Vojvodina (Serbia) and Transylvania (Romania).
The methodological approach varied in each subproject, from the analysis of literary texts and the study of archives, translation and publishing practices, to qualitative ethnographic analysis (semi-structured interviews, participant observation) as used in linguistic anthropology.
Events
Our workshops
Workshop "Transnational Literature in East Central Europe"
Time and place: Sep. 9, 2019 9:00 AM – Sep. 10, 2019 4:30 PM, University of Oslo, Campus Blindern, P.A. Munchs hus room 389
Program
Monday 9 September
- Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary University of London): Travels across Language: Cosmopolitanism Made/Unmade
- Vladimir Zorić (University of Nottingham): The Central European Chalk Circle: Swing Identities In/Between the Habsburg and the South Slav Literature
- Marko Čudić (University of Belgrade): A Comparative Analysis of Some Aspects of Travel Writings by Dezső Kosztolányi and Miloš Crnjanski
- Stijn Vervaet (University of Oslo): Between the Trauma of Empire and the Quagmire of the Eastern European Province: Multilingualism, Transnational Literature, and Cosmopolitanism in Krleža and Manojlović
Tuesday 10 September
- Mihaela Ursa (Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca): Metanational Comparatism and World Literature
- Stephan Krause (Leibniz-Institut für Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Europa, Leipzig): A Poetics of the Literary Transnational in East Central Europe. Suggestions.
- Mónika Dánél (University of Oslo): Shared Event, Common Past, Literatures of Accents and Intersections: 1989 in Hungarian and Romanian Novels
- Guido Snel (European Studies, University of Amsterdam): Levantinizing the Balkans. Literary Encounters of Etel Adnan and Semezdin Mehmedinović
Organizer
Probing the Boundaries of the (Trans)National: Imperial Legacies, Transnational Literary Networks and Multilingualism in East Central Europe
Workshop 1
Memories of Empire: Continuities and Discontinuities of the Habsburg Monarchy’s Transnational and Multilingual Legacy
Time and place: Sep. 17, 2018 9:00 AM – Sep. 18, 2018 3:00 PM, PAM 489
This two day-workshop was the kick-off conference of the project.
Short summary of the project
Recent developments in Europe (Brexit, the polarization of voters during the recent French presidential elections) indicate a resurrected belief in a strong nation-state as a supposed antidote to top-down decision making within a supranational European Union. But strong right-wing reactions to the refugee crisis also point to another resilient characteristic of the nation-state: its ideology of “one nation-one language-one territory” and the resistance against minorities and foreigners that comes with it.
The growing tensions between the monocultural and monolingual paradigm of the nation-state and the increasing variety of forms of belonging beyond the nation based on individual and social multilingualism suggest that Europe faces the challenge of dealing differently with identity and multilingualism. To tackle this challenge, we first need a better understanding of how these tensions are played out on a smaller scale and to what effect.
Post-Habsburg Central Europe offers an ideal case study that can help us understand how modes of thinking and practices of living beyond and below the national function(ed) and a model to observe forms of continuity as well as the transformation of these practices over a longer period. The multinational and multilingual Habsburg Monarchy offers fascinating examples of supranational identification, “national indifference,” transnational (literary) culture, and multilingual practices. This project will focus on the continuities and discontinuities of these aspects of the Habsburg legacy. Drawing on the expertise of historians, literary scholars, linguists, and anthropologists, we will explore the Habsburg Monarchy’s afterlife as recollection, as habitus, and as lived practice.
The project will be organized around three interrelated work packages: WP1 Remembering Habsburg; WP2 Transnational Literary Cultures and WP3 Multilingual Practices. Each of the work packages approaches the post-Habsburg legacy from a different, complementary angle: WP1 examines continuities in terms of the recollection, imagination and reflection upon the Habsburg legacy; WP2 deals with the continuity of a transnational habitus (in the networks of authors and intellectuals); and WP3 explores continuities in terms of multilingual practices.
We will organize three workshops that will discuss the overlaps between different work packages.
Workshop 1: “Memories of Empire”
Invited speakers: Pamela Ballinger, Pieter Judson, Clemens Ruthner, Tamara Scheer
We focus on the following research questions:
- What is left of the cultures of “national indifference” (Judson, Zahra) after the dissolution of the Habsburg Monarchy and how are they related to forms of linguistic expression and multiethnic conviviality that counter the monolingual paradigm of the nation-state?
- How are memories of empire articulated and certain memory templates (e.g. nostalgia for empire, the Habsburg Myth, the myth of Central Europe) revisited or re-activated at important historical junctures (in the interwar and post-1989/1995 period) by whom, and to what effect?
- How are issues of (trans)national identification refracted through memories of empire (or vice versa)?
Program
Monday 17 September
- Keynote: Pieter M. Judson (European University Institute, Florence): Escaping the Nation
- Tamara Scheer (University of Vienna): The Unintended Babel-Identity: Language Diversity and the Habsburg Imperial Army
- Marija Mandić (Humboldt University) & Stijn Vervaet (UiO): The Language Ideology of the Bunyevs in the Dual Monarchy: A Case Study of the Journals Bunjevačke i šokačke novine, Bunjevac, and Neven
- Krisztina Rácz (UiO): Learning the Language, Learning the Nation
Tuesday 18 September
- Keynote: Pamela Ballinger (University of Michigan): On the Shores of Habsburg Memory: A Tale of Two Cities.
- Johan Schimanski (UiO) & Ulrike Spring (UiO): Arctic Southerners: Ethnonyms, Languages and Qualities in the Reception of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedition in the 1870s and Today
- Museum trip to the Ethnographic Museum or Viking Ship Museum for those interested
Project members' talks and conference papers
ASEEES Convention
Time and place: Nov. 25, 2019 8:00 AM – 9:45 AM, San Francisco Marriott Marquis, Floor: 5, Sierra D
The 51st annual convention of the Association of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) had Belief as its central theme. Marija Mandić and Krisztina Rácz participated in a panel organized by Marija Mandić with the title Belief in One Nation, One Language. Marija presented her paper Minority language ideology in Habsburg lands: The case of Serbian ethno-confessional schools, while Krisztina's presentation was called Teaching the language, learning the nation: State language acquisition in Vojvodina, Serbia.
Socialism on the Bench conference
Time and place: Sep. 26, 2019 12:00 PM – Sep. 28, 2019 2:30 PM, University of Pula
The theme of the 4th International Conference Socialism on the Bench that takes place every year in Pula, Croatia, was Continuities and innovations. At the conference, Krisztina Rácz presented the paper she jointly wrote with Marija Mandić entitled : In Search of (Unequal) Symmetries: Hungarian as the Language of the Social Environment in Yugoslavia.
ASN World Convention
Time and place: – , Harriman Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY
Annually held in the spring in New York City, the Association for the Study of Nationalities World Convention brings together over 800 scholars from around the world to examine and push forward research on issues of Nationalism, Ethnicity, Violence, Conflict, Economic Development and many other topics.
Marija Mandić presented the research she and Krisztina Rácz have been conducting on learning Hungarian as the language of the social environment in socialist Yugoslavia. The presentation entitled Remembering Hungarian as the Language of the Social Environment in Socialist Yugoslavia was part of the panel The Politics of Remembering (on Saturday, May 4, 1:40 - 3:40 PM in Room 802).
Conference: Spaces in Between
Time and place: Apr. 26, 2019 9:00 AM – Apr. 27, 2019 5:30 PM, Apáczai Csere János Pedagógusok Háza, Miercurea Ciuc/Csíkszereda
The Intercultural Confluences Research Centre of the Department of Humanities, Faculty of Economics, Socio-Human Sciences and Engineering, Miercurea Ciuc, Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, organized the international conference Köztes terek / Spaţii intermediare / Spaces In Between in three languages.
Project members Stijn Vervaet, Marija Mandić, Krisztina Rácz and Mónika Dánél, together with Ágoston Berecz, took part in the conference with the panel Mapping Multilingualism in East-Central Europe (Friday, 26 April, 12:40 - 2:10 pm).
Talks and seminars in Oslo
Reverse Integration: A Reconstruction of Hungarian as the Language of the Social Environment in Socialist Yugoslavia
Minority language speakers learning the language of the majority is taken for granted in nation states, however, the opposite case is a rare practice. In this talk, Marija Mandić and Krisztina Rácz present such a practice.
Time and place: Sep. 13, 2019 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, Seminar room 3, Sophus Bugges hus
The talk aims to contribute to ongoing discussions about the relation of language and ethnicity, majority/minority power relations, the role of memory, bilingual educational policy and multilingualism as a paradigm.
Minority languages learned by the majority
The school subject Hungarian as the Language of the Social Environment was introduced at the beginning of the 1970s in Vojvodina (Serbia). This happened at the same time when other minority languages were learned by majority (Serbo-Croatian) language speaking students at elementary and secondary schools in Yugoslavia, where members of minority ethno-linguistic groups were living in significant numbers.
The function and ideology behind reverse integration
Hungarian as the Language of the Social Environment was taught in Vojvodina for two decades, being abolished at the beginning of the 1990s when after Milošević’s rise to power policies specific to Vojvodina, including language and educational policies, were “blended into” Serbian central legislation. Through a critical reconstruction of relevant documents of the League of Communists of Yugoslavia, textbooks of Hungarian as the Language of the Social Environment, as well as analyzing interviews conducted with former students and teachers of this subject, we will discuss the functional and the ideological content, and the aims it had.
About the speakers
Marija Mandić is a senior research associate at the Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Belgrade. Her major research interests are in the areas of linguistic anthropology, Balkan studies, nationality, migrations, and social memory. Her monograph Discourse and Ethnic Identity: the Case of the Serbs from Hungary was published for Verlag Otto Sagner in 2014.
Krisztina Rácz has a degree in Sociology and Social Anthropology from the Central European University in Budapest and an interdisciplinary PhD from the University of Ljubljana. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at ILOS. Her research interests and publication topics lie in multilingualism, minorities and language use, as constituted by ethnicity, gender and class.
Organizer
Centre for Slavic and Eastern European Studies
"Kakanien Revisited" Revisited: Post-Colonial and Post-Imperial Perspectives in Central European Studies
In my talk, I will reflect the perspective and results of the research project and network 'kakanien revisited' as a contribution of an exemplary field of area studies in cultural research.
Time and place: Apr. 8, 2019 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, PAM 389
In a first step, I will describe all the tools the group has adapted from postcolonial studies: the subversion of the relation between centre and periphery, heterogeneity and identity, the relation between culture and power, the narrative of culture and civilisation, gender aspects, the construction of the 'own' other.
In a second part, I will discuss the differences between post-colonialism and post-imperialism, also with regard to the process of nation building.
Finally, I will refer to the imperial traces in Austrian literature of the 20th century, e.g. in Roth, Canetti, Musil, Broch, Zweig and others.
Reference
Wolfgang Müller-Funk: The Architecture of Modern Culture. Towards a narrative theory of culture. Boston-Berlin 2012.
About Wolfgang Müller-Funk
Wolfgang Müller-Funk is since 2009 Professor for Cultural Studies at the Dept. of European and Comparative Linguistics and Literature at the University of Vienna and Research Coordinator at the School (Faculty) for Philology and Cultural Studies.
Research interests: Cultural Theory, Narrative Theory, Romanticism, Avant-Garde and Modernism, the Essay. Since 1998, he has led numerous research projects in the field of Central European Studies and Cultural Studies.
Monographs: Joseph Roth (1989/2012), Erfahrung und Experiment (1995), Die Farbe Blau (2000), Die Kultur und ihre Narrative (2002/2008), Kulturtheorie (2006/2010), Komplex Österreich (2009), The Architecture of Modern Culture. Towards a Narrative Cultural Theory (2012), Die Dichter der Philosophen (2013), in addition more than 20 edited volumes.
Romantic Nationalism, Linguistic Diversity, and Today’s Europe
Lecture by Till Dembeck, University of Luxembourg
Time and place: Mar. 12, 2019 12:15 PM – 2:00 PM, P. A. Munchs hus 389
The foundations of today’s European language regimes have in large parts been laid during Romanticism. More particularly, it was Romanticist thinkers who established what is today called the ‘monolingual paradigm’, i.e., the notion that it is natural for a human individual to master one language as his or her mother tongue. The monolingual paradigm has subsequently been put into use by national movements all over the world– with very far-reaching sociocultural effects. Combined with the idea of universal translatability, it is also at the heart of today’s notion of Europe, at least as it is constituted in the European Union and other international institutions.
This lecture is about an alternative politico-cultural strand of Romanticism that runs against the mainstream of monolingual, national thinking and rather aims at fostering forms of linguistic and cultural diversity that cannot be reduced to the simple multiplication of countable language units, i.e., to the notion that multilingualism is nothing but the multiplication of ‘monolingualisms’. This alternative form of Romanticism, often neglected by scholarship, views the multiplicity and fuzziness of the ways in which we use language, as a free-floating resource that can be drawn on to make sense of the modern world. Arguing from a distinctly philological point of view, the lecture proposes a conceptual framework that differs from linguistic descriptions of multilingualism and then develops its main thesis in readings of selected literary works by authors from European Romanticism such as Herder, Goethe, Lord Byron, and Hugo.
“The babbelers with their thangas vain have been” (FW 1.1.15): Translating Joyce’s multilingualism
Lecture by Erika Mihálycsa (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj)
Time and place: Dec. 10, 2018 2:15 PM – 4:00 PM, P.A. Munchs hus 226
The presentation will discuss specific problems related to the translation of multilingualism and heteroglossia in Joyce’s Ulysses, a text which forces the reader to reconceptualize language and the “literary”. Joyce’s modernist experiment, which forces the boundaries of English and is aligned with a transnational language poetics and politics, faces translation with well-nigh insurmountable difficulties and sets it the task of recreating, in the target language, defamiliarizing and foreignizing effects similar to those elicited by the original.
Through a series of case studies of successive translations into Italian, German, Romanian and Hungarian I will gloss the specific difficulties of translating the intertextual and interlingual tapestry of Joyce’s text. Special emphasis will be placed on the work of the translator of the 1974 Hungarian version of Ulysses, Miklós Szentkuthy, on his creative use of multi/interlingual wordplay and portmanteaux in translating Joycean cruxes; this baroque translation, like Szentkuthy’s own modernist metafictional oeuvre, is intrinsically related to a (by now submerged) culture of Central European multilingualism.
In discussing specific textual examples I will also gloss some of the strategies adopted by recent, scholarly retranslations/revisions of Ulyssesto render the text’s polyphony and restore its wealth of (multi)linguistic and cultural allusions.
About Erika Mihálycsa
Erika Mihálycsa is a lecturer in 20thand 21th century British and Irish literature at Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania. Her domains of research include Joyce and Beckett studies, literary theory, Modernism studies, translation studies.
She has published mainly on Joyce’s and Beckett’s language poetics, Joyce in translation, Beckett and the visual arts; her articles and reviews have come out to date in Word and Image, European Joyce Studies, Joyce Studies Annual, Textual Practice, Italian Joyce Studiesand elsewhere. At present she is editing, together with Jolanta Wawrzycka, a volume dedicated to retranslating Joyce in, and for, the 21stcentury (forthcoming 2019).
Mihálycsa translates between Hungarian, Romanian and English; she has translated works by Flann O’Brien, Beckett, Patrick McCabe, Anne Carson, Julian Barnes and others into Hungarian; her translations of contemporary Hungarian prose and poetry have come out to date in World Literature Today, Asymptote, Words Without Borders, Two Lines, Music and Literature, Envoi,The Collagistamong others.
Together with Rainer J. Hanshe she edits Hyperion, a biannual arts and literary journal dedicated tointernational Modernism and contemporary experimental writing, visual arts and philosophy, issued by Contra Mundum Press (New York, http://contramundum.net).
Organizer
Research Group Multilingualism and Multiculturalism in Habsburg Central Europe
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Financing and duration
The project was financed by The Research Council of Norway under the FRIPRO programme 2019-2021.