Hungarian-American Ties

Description

Somewhat more than a century ago an ex-President of the United States came to visit Hungary. While in Budapest, he requested to see a major Hungarian novelist whose work he had read and liked. Do we know the name of this former chief executive and are we prepared to identify which Hungarian prose writer we are talking about? This may call for at least one more legitimate inquiry: when a Hungarian playwright visited the United States in 1927, six of his plays had had runs of more than 100 performances on Broadway in New York City. He received a hero’s welcome in the American metropolis and an audience with President Coolidge. Are we ready, ready in a cultural sense, to pinpoint the identity of this particular playwright? The above bits of cultural inquiry are the spin-offs of larger intercultural issues and themes, or even iconographic representations that are prompted in profusion by the more than two dozen essays and studies included in the present volume. The 26 contributions-by 27 Hungarian and ó American (U.S.A.) authors-thematically pertain to particular objectifications of binational interface: intercultural/cross-cultural ties and contacts within the dual framework of American culture vis à vis Hungarian culture. In inquiries and thematic preoccupations of this nature, the presence of and the centralized focus on the intercultural realm understood here as the in-between of particular demarcations and protocols within two distinctive cultures-is an indispensable formal criterion. Each chapter here-viewed individually as an intercultural or cross-cultural text-seeks to generate new knowledge by identifying and exploring the respective in-between of the two or more given cultural terrains we happen to select for scrutiny. The reader of the present volume is invited to make his or her own personal discoveries. One of these is likely to be the recognition of the cultural reality that a slice of the American pie has a Hungarian filling. And vice versa.