National Literature and World Literature in the 21st Century

Szegedy-Maszak, Mihaly

In the nineteenth century biographies of writers and poets were the main task of the literary historian, and the texts themselves were read as biographical sources. They stuck to the idea of the homogeneity of an oeuvre and the tradition of character studies. Often the aspect of national identity decided what was important. In science and technology phases of development are superseded constantly and previous certainties soon become dated and irrelevant. This is not so in art: what appears as a setback from one perspective, may be seen as development from another.
With the obsolescence of the idea of self-identifiable closed works, nowadays the historic life of works and problems of reception and interpretation have come to the fore of literary science. Instead of researching the original meaning of a work, the examination of how the texts affected their readers in various times and places seems more suitable.
The literary historian has to narrate not one but many stories. Literary texts are living formations with a multitude of meanings that are continuously re-created by the readers. This interpretation is equally true of the Hungarian literary heritage.

About the lecturer