Search results for ""Author Tamas Juhasz""

Book SynopsisThis book treats Joseph Conrad''s simultaneous interests in exchange, contracts, and the condition of displacement. The central hypothesis is that the novelist''s characters face the option of signing or rejecting what might, with some generalization, be called a social covenant. These individuals conduct a lonely or marginal existence and, to ease their isolation, they would like to (re)enter a community. For this reason, they are ready to contribute to larger collective causes and comply with those restrictions that social life, in its contractual aspect, requires. As Julia Kristeva puts it, The foreigner is the one who works, yet engagement in transactions in order to earn a social position is fraught with difficulties. In return for their contribution, these hard-working characters do not always receive the compensation that they had in mind, especially when their definition of companionship violates the boundaries of legality and social propriety. Their private, illicit interests Trade ReviewCritical interest in Joseph Conrad has been dominated in recent years by postcolonial critics and some very good work has come from those quarters, but this book has the potential to open a new and much wider critical conversation about Conrad. The sensitive deployment of the concepts of contract and exchange yields incisive insights that will enrich Conrad studies in the future. . . . Conrad is one of the giants of English fiction in the twentieth century and Tamás Juhász has made a notable contribution to our understanding of an important body of work. -- John Xiros Cooper, University of British ColumbiaThe book presents a plausible, carefully reasoned, well illustrated thesis explaining how displaced characters in Conrad’s works seek communal recognition, psychological security, companionship, love, and honor through economic transactions even though their efforts are rewarded only on a conditional basis. To support this thesis, the author calls upon a wide range of theorists, including Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Karl Polanyi, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Wieslaw Krajka. -- Leonard Moss, Professor Emeritus, SUNY GeneseoFresh, eloquent, exciting, and original, Conradian Contracts is perhaps the finest synoptic study we have of the broad relationship in Conrad between trade and social identity, between the spheres of economic transaction and of socio-cultural and psychological integration. Engaging wide reaches of Conrad’s writings through a sophisticated interweave of contemporary psychoanalytic, anthropological, and economic theoretical registers, Juhász exposes the 'business' of literature in Conrad, and the horizons of 'commerce' Conrad’s work addresses and interpenetrates, in the fullest and most seductive senses of those terms. A most impressive book of first-order thought and literary criticism. -- Peter Mallios, University of MarylandJuhász (Károli Gápár Univ., Budapest, Hungary) focuses on a previously unstudied aspect of Conrad's works: contracts and exchange. Examining nine of Conrad's fictional works--Almayer's Folly, Typhoon, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Chance, and two short stories--Juhász considers such issues as social contracts, changes in established orders of trade, and gender contracts. He considers how exile, isolation, and other forms of displacement are strongly tied to exchange and contracts. He concludes by looking at three texts by other authors to show that the relationship between exile and transactions is not unique to Conrad's fiction. A valuable contribution to Conrad studies. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty. * CHOICE *With Conradian Contracts, the author has produced a valuable contribution to Conrad studies both nationally and internationally. It is important for scholarship coming from Hungary to have an international presence, and Juhász's study is one of those books that will very likely make their presence felt outside the borders as well. It will do so mainly by virtue of its boldly interdisciplinary approach and its strong readings of individual Conrad works. ... The overall impression is of a carefully argued and rigorous exploration of complex and as yet hardly studied inter-relationships in the fiction of this great novelist. * Book Reviews *Table of ContentsChapter 1: Commerce and Return in Almayer's Folly Chapter 2: "Trans-Ports of Love": Exchange as Practice and Narrative Chapter 3: Never Keeping to Oneself: A Total Social Fact in "Typhoon" and "The Secret Sharer" Chapter 4: Paternal Discourse and Contractual Revision in Under Western Eyes Chapter 5: "The Duel": Rules and Reciprocities, or Blows for Sheer Love Chapter 6: A "Supreme Illusion": Acts of Recognition in The Secret Agent Chapter 7: Trade, Meaning and the Prospects of Self-Transformation in Lord Jim Chapter 8: The End of Potlatching: Gift and Prestige in Nostromo Chapter 9: Sympathy, Generosity and the Business of Womanhood in Chance Chapter 10: Conclusions and Words after Conrad's

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Book SynopsisHungarian urban culture in the 20th and the 21st centuries.When consulting key works on urban studies, the absence of Central and Eastern European towns is striking. Cities such as Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and Trieste, where such notable figures as Freud, Ferenczi, Kafka, and Joyce lived and worked, are rarely studied in a translocal framework, as if Central and Eastern Europe were still a blind spot of European modernity. This volume expands the scope of literary urban studies by focusing on Budapest and Hungarian small towns, offering in-depth analyses of the intriguing link between literature, the arts, and material culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. The case studies situate Hungarian urban culture within the global flow of ideas as they explore the period of modernism, the mid-century, and the post-1989 era in a context that moves well beyond the borders of the country.Contributors: Árpád Bak (University of Leeds), Éva Federmayer (Eötvös Loránd University), Magdolna Gucsa (Eötvös Loránd University / ÉHESS), Ágnes Györke (Károli Gáspár University), Ferenc Hörcher (Eötvös József Research Centre), Tamás Juhász (Károli Gáspár University), György Kalmár (University of Debrecen), László Munteán (Radboud University), Ágnes Klára Papp (Károli Gáspár University), Márta Pellérdi (Pázmány Péter Catholic University), Eszter Ureczky (University of Debrecen).This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).This book will be made open access within three years of publication thanks to Path to Open, a program developed in partnership between JSTOR, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), University of Michigan Press, and The University of North Carolina Press to bring about equitable access and impact for the entire scholarly community, including authors, researchers, libraries, and university presses around the world. Learn more at https://about.jstor.org/path-to-open/Trade ReviewTaken together, the chapters in this book provide a coherent overview of representations of the Hungarian city in literature, theater, and cinema. This book will act as an important future reference work for scholars working on the 20th and 21st century Hungarian city. And it reminds scholars unfamiliar with Hungarian urban culture of the vast range of urban phenomena that remain underrepresented in academic literature in English.Lieven Ameel, Tampere University

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