Hungarian Perspectives on the Western Canon

Book excerpt: In this collection, Hungarian literature is read together with canonical works of the Western literary tradition. The book studies the distinction between “major” and “minor” literatures, showing that such parallel readings may highlight previously unknown components of the literary tradition. The book does not hold traditional comparative methods, based on verifiable mediations or transactions between national philologies and national literary narratives, to be the exclusive standard of interpretation; readings can concentrate on common surfaces and textual events instead. This is what is meant by ‘post-comparative’ perspectives, a term to indicate that the conditions of a comparative reading never precede the reading itself. On this basis, the present volume points at several possibilities of how a common ground between texts can be created, especially because the chapters within it perform parallel readings in highly different ways.