DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES
SCHOOL OF ENGLISH AND AMERICAN STUDIES
EÖTVÖS LORÁND UNIVERSITY
FACULTY OF HUMANITIES
BUDAPEST
______
KULTÚRDIPLOMÁCIA: KULTÚRAKÖZVETÍTÉS
KÖZÉP-EURÓPA ÉS AZ ANGOL NYELVŰ ORSZÁGOK KÖZÖTT
Rövidtávú képzési program külföldi hallgatók részére
CULTURAL DIPLOMACY: MEDIATING BETWEEN THE CULTURES
OF CENTRAL EUROPE AND THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD
Short-term program for international students
Cultural Diplomacy is an interdisciplinary MA program coordinated by the Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.
Language of instruction: English
Length of program: three semesters (fall, spring, fall)
The Program has been designed for
(a) ELTE MA students in English and American Studies and
(b) international students.
(a) ELTE students have the option to enroll either for
(i) the whole 50 credit program, or for
(ii) individual courses.
However, when more students register to the courses than can be admitted, priority is given to those who do the whole specialization. For this reason, ELTE students are encouraged to register for the whole 50 credit specialization.
(b) International students have the option to enroll either for
(i) single semesters, in which case they need to take all the four courses (for a total of 17 credits) offered in that particular semester, or for
(ii) the whole 50 credit program, in which case they are required to spend three, preferably consecutive, semesters at ELTE.
Cultural diplomacy is the art of mediating between cultures. In our Cultural Diplomacy Specialization Program, students will learn basic facts, skills, and vocabularies, drawn from several disciplines in the humanities, which they can use when they professionally interpret cultures. The program is geared toward teaching cultural mediation between Europe (primarily Central Europe) and the English speaking countries (primarily the U.S.). This involves the writing and speaking to an American audience about social, historical, political, literary, or other issues that relate to some part of Europe and, vice versa, presenting American topics to European audiences.
The program qualifies the students for very particular jobs and endeavors, such as
- cultural diplomacy (diplomats working in embassies or international cultural centers);
- international journalism (foreign correspondents, or journalists assigned internationally);
- international literary or art agency (agents marketing cultural goods and carrying out an import-export activity of sorts within the realm of culture);
- professional, academic, or literary translation (translators of professional, academic, and literary texts);
- or simply fine conversationalists (who want to understand, and be understood by, foreign friends).
PROGRAM COORDINATOR:
ENIKŐ BOLLOBÁS, DLitt, PhD, habil., Professor, Chair (Dept American St)
TEACHING FACULTY:
ZSÓFIA BÁN, PhD, Associate Professor (Dept American St)
RÉKA BENCZES, PhD, Assistant Professor (Dept American St)
ÉVA FEDERMAYER, PhD, Associate Professor (Dept American St)
TIBOR FRANK, PhD, DLitt, habil., Professor (Dept American St)
RYAN JAMES, PhD, Native Language Instructor (Dept of American Studies)
ZOLTÁN KÖVECSES, PhD, DLitt, habil., Professor (Dept American St)
ÉVA SZABÓ, PhD, Assistant Professor (Dept American St)
STANLEY WARD, Native Language Instructor (Dept of American Studies)
EDIT ZSADÁNYI, PhD, habil., Associate Professor (Dept Comp Lit)
LIST OF COURSES
Semester #1 (Fall semester) (17 credits)
1. Introduction to Cultural Diplomacy (Enikő Bollobás), 5 credits
2. The War for the “Hearts and Minds of the People”: the Role of Ideology in the Cold War (Tibor Frank), 5 credits
3. Comparative Ecocriticism: American and Hungarian Perspectives on Nature, Culture, and the Environment (Éva Federmayer), 5 credits
4. Tutorial seminar, 2 credits
Semester #2 (Spring semester) (17 credits)
1. Comparative (European-American) Visual Culture Studies: Visual Acts of Historical Memory (Zsófia Bán), 5 credits
2. Reading (Post)Communism from Queer Perspectives (Edit Zsadányi) or Narrative subjectivity and Women in the Literatures of Central Europe (Edit Zsadányi)
3. Cognitive Linguistics and Political Discourse in Central Europe and the U.S. (Réka Benczes), 5 credits
4. Tutorial seminar, 2 credits
Semester #3 (Fall semester) (17 credits)
1. Understanding Central Europe: An American Perspective (Stanley Ward), 5 credits
2. Cognitive Aspects of History after World War Two (Zoltán Kövecses), 5 credits
3. Terms and Concepts in the Study of the History of Central Europe (Éva Szabó), 5 credits
4. Tutorial seminar, 2 credits
Further optional courses
Fictional Representations of the Cold War: A U.S.-Central European perspective (Enikő Bollobás), 5 credits, (spring semesters)
Changing Borders, Diaspora Nationalism and Transnationalism in Central Europe and the Americas (Éva Szabó), 5 credits (spring semesters)
Comparative (European-American) Cultural Studies (Éva Federmayer), 5 credits
COURSE DESCRIPTIONS
Introduction to Cultural Diplomacy (Enikő Bollobás) 5 credits
This is an introductory course into the general claims and methods of cultural diplomacy. In the first part of the course we will explore the area through readings about comparativism, global culture, cultural pluralism, and cultural relativism, wile in the second part students conduct their own research into a particular scholarly topic, approaching it from both the (Central-)European and American perspective. Ultimately, we will contribute to setting up an internet database of comparative global culture.
The War for the ’Hearts and Minds’ of the People: the Role of Ideology in the Cold War (Tibor Frank) 5 credits
The course focuses on conflicting ideologies in the Cold War era. Primary attention is to be given to the conflict of capitalism versus Communism/Socialism, Liberalism versus Marxism-Leninism, market based versus planned economy. Special attention will be given to the classics of Liberal and Marxist thinking, leading British and American as well as Soviet philosophers and political scientists, and their impact on political strategy and political thought worldwide. The rise and fall of Marxist egalitarian ideas can be also documented by the Hungarian example, 1945-2009.
Comparative Ecocriticism: American and Hungarian Perspectives on Nature, Culture and the Environment (Federmayer Éva) 5 credits
A recent effort to redraw the boundaries of literary studies and cultural studies in the age of environmental crisis, ecocriticsm seeks to rethink the human place in nature, positing a new category, place/environment, as a viable perspective on how human culture is connected to the physical world, hence how culture affects nature and how it is affected by it. This course will be concerned with discourses on places and spaces in a selection of American and Hungarian texts (in English translation), teasing out how the concept of eden, wilderness, land, nature, pastoralism, country and city, apocalypse and pollution has changed over time in the respective local/national culture/literature. Drawing on these (mostly) literary texts, we will also attempt to read them comparatively, in a cross-cultural perspective, seeking to tie our literary/cultural analyses to a green moral and political agenda.
Comparative (European-American) Visual Culture Studies: Visual Acts of Historical Memory (Zsófia Bán) 5 credits
This course intends to investigate different techniques in the construction of historical memory, discussing examples from both sides of the Atlantic. We will be looking at how East-Central European and American art reflects culture-specific, as well as national or regional attitudes towards historical events and historical trauma. It is especially relevant to investigate the changes in these attitudes after the fall of the Berlin wall, i.e. after the political transition in East-Central Europe. The course will focus on works produced in different media, i.e. literature, art, film, photography, architecture and museums. Besides discussing the different techniques these works use for the construction of historical narratives, we will also look into how these narratives reflect contemporary public discourse related to the events in question.
Reading (Post)Communism from Queer Perspectives (Zsadányi Edit) 5 credits
The course focuses on the issues of marginality (what has been set aside as not “normal”, perverse and “other”) to analyze the cultural construction of heterosexual normativity. Using the works of Eve Sedgwick (The Epistemology of the Closet), Judith Butler (Gender Troubles) and Nikki Sullivan (Critical Introduction to Queer Theory ) as course materials, we will challenge established dichotomies such as normal and perverse, mainstream and marginal. Studying in literary works the extensive appearance of the “closet” metaphor we wish to come up (and out) with new interpretations addressing issues of homosexuality. In the second part of the course, we intend to translate the American theory into Hungarian culture and try to understand why it is such a sensitive issue that raises controversies and violence. We will analyze works such as the film Crying Game by Neil Jordan, Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, the novels of Erzsébet Galgóczi, Péter Nádas and Agáta Gordon; the poems by Ádám Nádasdy and Mátyás Dunajcsik.
Narrative subjectivity and Women in the Literatures of Central Europe (Zsadányi Edit) 5 credits
The course will survey Hungarian women writers in the twentieth century. Having learned the theoretical consequences of distinguishing between the cultural construct of gender and biological sex, the class will put more emphasis on the historical and regional differences of women’s movement.
We will approach the issue of female subjectivity from literary historical point of view, and will focus on Hungarian woman writers in the interwar period. Most of these authors are forgotten by now as happened with many of their European contemporaries. In the second half of the twentieth century some names appeared here and there in Hungarian literary historical works without any context. The aim of the class is to create a possible context both for these forgotten women writers and both for the Hungarian feminist studies that investigate them. The course wishes to create new and fresh environment for these works and wants to make them accessible for the present reader. Not forgetting about the historical differences, we would like to dialogue with Hungarian women writers from our present point of view. We are looking for the answers for those questions that excite us now in the united Europe at the turn of the 21st century. The present construction of European female identity is deeply influenced by the events at the turn of the 21st century: recent Balkan war, the end of the iron curtain and the united Europe.
We will characterize narrative discourse by Hungarian women writers with some typical examples. The course will focus on works of Margit Kaffka, Cecile Tormay, Jolán Földes, Emma Ritoók, Magda Szabó, Erzsébet Galgóczi, Krisztina Tóth, Agáta Gordon and Kriszta Bódis. Most of the works by them are translated into English, and they function as cultural bridge to make the unique East-European female experience accessible to foreign readers.
Cognitive Linguistics and Political Discourse in Central Europe and the U.S. (Réka Benczes) 5 credits
Conceptual metaphors and metonymies permeate political discourse. Either explicitly or implicitly, these conceptual metaphors and metonymies not only impose a certain structure on politics in general but also shape it to a great extent. The course will demonstrate how a cognitive linguistic analysis of the conceptual metaphors and metonymies used within political discourse can provide a better understanding of politics and political ideology.
Understanding Central Europe: An American Perspective (Stanley Ward) 5 credits
The first serious attempt to understand Central Europe in depth was made by the authors of The Inquiry during the First World War. The analyses prepared by an eminent group of geographers, historians, demographers, etc. tried to intepret the complex ethnic, linguistic, etc. conditions in the region as part of the Wilson Administration’s preparation for the Paris Peace Conference. A similar endeavor took place during the Second World War within the State Department dealing with a range of issues from creating confederacies in Central Europe to establishing an independent Transylvania. The Cold War initially brought about the concept of a ’monolithic Communist bloc’, but this view gradually gave way to a more nuanced approach to the countries in the region in the 1960s. The post-Cold War era brought about an oscillation between a ’group-approach’ (Visegrad 3/4) and a more pronounced bilateral relationship between the U.S. and the individual Central European states.
Cognitive Aspects of History after World War Two (Zoltán Kövecses) 5 credits
In this course, we take history to be a series of “projected,” or “imagined,” worlds that are produced by historians as conceptualizers by means of a variety of cognitive processes. Chief among these are metaphor, metonymy, conceptual framing, and conceptual integration. We look at the particular cognitive mechanisms that gave rise to the rhetoric of the cold war; we study the creation and influence of ideologies and philosophical views; we compare the liberal and conservative worldviews in the US and Hungary; and we deal with some “sensitive” issues in Hungary in the post-World War Two period, including the so-called “Jewish question.”
Terms and Concepts in the Study of the History of Central Europe (Éva Szabó)
5 credits
The concept of Central Europe — emerging from the 19th century economic interests of Germany directed at its sphere of influence — has been the object of various modifications to date. The course follows the development of the concept from the appearance of Mitteleuropa, its disappearance after World War I, its reappearance in the interwar period, its melting within the Eastern bloc concept of the Cold War, and its rebirth in the post-Cold War world, which have all reflected the changing geopolitical systems and power constellations within a local and global political arena.
Fictional and Filmic Representations of the Cold War: A U.S.-Central European perspective (Enikő Bollobás) 5 credits
The 1950s were a particular decade on both sides of the Iron Curtain, when the political became directly personal indeed. This course will investigate works of fiction and film dealing with the ways the Cold War—and its home reverberations like Stalinism and McCarthyism—affected the individual. We will read authors from both Central Europe (among them, Tibor Déry, Erzsébet Galgóczi, Lajos Grendel, Miklós Mészöly, István Örkény, Milan Kundera) and the U.S. (Cheever, Updike, Nabokov) in order to have a comparative perspective on the general spleen of the 50s.
Changing Borders, Diaspora Nationalism and Transnationalism in Central Europe and the Americas (Szabó Éva) 5 credits
The border changes effected by the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo (1848) between the United States and Mexico and the Treaty of Trianon (1920) between Hungary and the Allies constituted watersheds in the life of the nations involved. The course compares and contrasts the political, economic, cultural, demographic and migratory consequences of the border changes that explain the current phenomena of diaspora nationalism and transnationalism emerging in these regions.