“It Isn't Their Language in Which I Speak Their Stories”: Language, Memory, and “Unforgetting” in Susan Rubin Suleiman's <i>Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook</i> and Anca Vlasopolos's <i>No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement</i>

Haragos, Szidonia

doi:10.1080/08989575.2016.1138356

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 20 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Her quest for documents (birth and marriage certificates) proving the very existence of her family members expresses a real existential anxiety. "She wants tangible evidence of a past that is in danger of being forgotten or erased-a danger that is especially menacing when it comes to documenting the Jewish presence in East-Central Europe," as Szidonia H. Haragos refers to the narrator-protagonist-author's behavior (Haragos 2016). The stories of her two short trips to her parents' birthplaces in the Hungarian and Polish countryside are tinged with a strong melancholy about the disappeared East-Central European Jewish lifestyle, culture, language, religion which once belonged to her ancestors.…”

Section: "It Was As If My Past Had Never Existed": Generic Patterns mentioning

confidence: 99%

Departures and returns: cultural identities, historical traumas and personal paths in Susan R. Suleiman’s Budapest Diary

Varga

2020

Neohelicon

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper studies Budapest Diary (1996), a cross-genre autobiographical work by Susan Suleiman, a renowned Hungarian-born scholar in comparative literature. Suleiman’s life writing offers particularly interesting reading possibilities; it allows us to study recent theoretical issues from historical traumas to multicultural and multi-linguistic identity constructions. My paper focuses on how Suleiman examines her past as a literary critic and expert on the modern novel, how her theoretical background as a comparatist formed and fashioned her autobiographical project. A close reading of her Budapest Diary reveals not only the generic patterns, the narrative and poetical means borrowed from her literary formation but also theories that enable the author to analyze her past, the social, cultural and historical determinations manifested in her life story. My interpretation devotes special attention to the image of Eastern-Europe developed in Suleiman’s autobiographical work. I analyze the way the work of the author, who returned to her homeland as an adult, seeks not only to find the reasons for burying the past burdened with collective historical traumas, but also tries to discover the regional components of identity, of the cultural otherness of East-Central Europe. The paper aims to show how collective and personal stakes are intertwined in the difficult process of reacquiring her Hungarian past in the light of her relationship with her parents (especially with her mother), and that of the history of Jewish people in Eastern Europe during the 20th century.

show abstract

Section: "It Was As If My Past Had Never Existed": Generic Patterns mentioning

confidence: 99%

Departures and returns: cultural identities, historical traumas and personal paths in Susan R. Suleiman’s Budapest Diary

Varga

2020

Neohelicon

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Multilingualism, Trauma, and Liminality in The Bullet Collection: Contact Zones, Checkpoints, and Liminal Points

Hout¹

2021

Arab Studies Quarterly

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Informed by theories of code-switching, memory, and trauma, my reading of Lebanese American Patricia Sarrafian Ward's diasporic novel The Bullet Collection (2003) centers on its multilingual usages to demonstrate how language play makes visible states of liminality or in-betweenness: between Lebanon and the US, the past and the present, the present and the future, childhood and adulthood, and trauma and recovery. I argue that this liminality, laid bare by a creative interpretation of the (mis)- and (dis)uses of multilingualism, is a concept that ties trauma, nostalgia, and homeness together and is fleshed out in three psychodynamic spaces: social contact zones, checkpoints, and liminal points. I zero in on code-switched materials, both overt and covert, to reveal how they are deeply, if often inconspicuously, connected to expressing traumas and (re)negotiating identities. By adopting this approach, I contribute, first, to the field of literary linguistics, relatively under-explored in connection with Arab American and Anglophone Arab fiction, and, second, chart a new pathway towards decolonizing trauma studies by examining its relationships with multilingualism, war, and nostalgia.

show abstract

“It Isn't Their Language in Which I Speak Their Stories”: Language, Memory, and “Unforgetting” in Susan Rubin Suleiman's Budapest Diary: In Search of the Motherbook and Anca Vlasopolos's No Return Address: A Memoir of Displacement

Cited by 2 publications

References 20 publications

Departures and returns: cultural identities, historical traumas and personal paths in Susan R. Suleiman’s Budapest Diary

Departures and returns: cultural identities, historical traumas and personal paths in Susan R. Suleiman’s Budapest Diary

Multilingualism, Trauma, and Liminality in The Bullet Collection: Contact Zones, Checkpoints, and Liminal Points

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About