Eger Journal of American Studies
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EGER JOURNAL OF AMERICAN STUDIES VOLUME IX. 2005 EDITOR: LEHEL VADON DEPARTMENT OF AMERICAN STUDIES ESZTERHÁZY KÁROLY COLLEGE EGER ISSN 1786-2337 HU ISSN 1786-2337 A kiadásért felelős az Eszterházy Károly Főiskola rektora Megjelent az EKF Líceum Kiadó gondozásában Igazgató: Kis-Tóth Lajos Felelős szerkesztő: Zimányi Árpád Műszaki szerkesztő: Nagy Sándorné Megjelent: 2006. Példányszám: 100 CONTENTS STUDIES Thomas Cooper: Readings of the Translations of Ezra Pound................ 11 Jason M. Dew: Filling the “Silence” and Co-Authorship: Steinbeck’s Agapic Invitation in Of Mice and Man .................... 31 Katalin G. Kállay: A Long Row of Books “Read and Reread”: The Significance of By Heart Quotations in Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night ................................... 47 Ágnes Zsófia Kovács: Remapping the Jamesian Legacy: Toni Morrison’s Literary Theory in Context................................ 61 Katalin Bíróné Nagy: Native North America As Reflected in Theories of Colonialism and Postcolonialism: An Overview ................................................................................. 75 Zoltán Peterecz: Text and Pretext: American War. Rationales in 1917. The First World War and American Neutrality ............. 93 Judit Szathmári: Wisconsin: A Microcosm of Federal Indian Policy .... 125 András Tarnóc: “troubles of a deeper dye than are commonly experienced by mortals”: The Definition of the Self and Other in three Indian Captivity Narratives ................................ 151 Gabriella Varró: The Figure of the Salesman in American Drama ...... 169 István Kornél Vida: Not Only the “Genie” of the Lamp Can Help: Genealogy and Researching the “Lost” Two Decades of Hungarian Emigration to the United States, 1850–1870........... 179 BOOK REVIEWS Tibor Glant: András Tarnóc: The Dynamics of American Multiculturalism: A Model-Based Study. Eger: EKF Líceum Kiadó, 2005. 186 pp. ................................................................. 195 Judit Ágnes Kádár: The 1950s. Proceedings of the 2003 Biennial Conference of the Hungarian Association for American Studies. Edited by Enikő Bollobás and Szilvia Nagy. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University, Department of American Studies, 2005. 233 pp. ............................................................................. 203 3 Lenke Mária Németh: Vadon, Lehel: Walt Whitman: A Hungarian Bibliography. Eger: Department of American Studies, Eszterházy Károly College, Líceum Kiadó, 2005. 244 pp. ....... 207 Edina Szalay: Vadon, Lehel: American Renaissance: A Hungarian Bibliography. Eger: Department of American Studies, Eszterházy Károly College, Líceum Kiadó, 2005. 230 pp. ....... 211 András Tarnóc: Samuel P. Huntington: Kik vagyunk mi? Az amerikai nemzeti identitás dilemmái. (Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.) Budapest: Európa Könyvkiadó, 2005. 682 pp. ....................................................... 215 András Tarnóc: Virágos Zsolt—Varró Gabriella: Jim Crow örökösei: Mítosz és sztereotípia az amerikai társadalmi tudatban és kultúrában. [The Legacy of Jim Crow: Myth and Stereotypy in the American Social Consciousness and Culture.] Budapest: Eötvös József Könyvkiadó, 2002. 370 pp. ....................................................... 223 Gabriella Vöő: Borbély Judit: The Reality of the Unreal: The City as Metaphor in Henry James and His Contemporaries. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2005. 175, [1] pp. ....................................... 231 4 CONTRIBUTORS Thomas Cooper, Associate Professor at the Department of American Studies, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary Jason M. Dew, Professor at the Department of English Studies, Georgia Perimeter College, Georgia, USA Tibor Glant, Associate Professor at the North American Department, University of Debrecen, Hungary Judit Ágnes Kádár, Associate Professor at the Department of American Studies, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary Katalin G. Kállay, Associate Professor at the Department of English Literatures and Cultures, Károli Gáspár Protestant University, Budapest, Hungary Ágnes Zsófia Kovács, Assistant Professor at the American Studies Department, University of Szeged, Hungary Katalin Bíróné Nagy, Instructor at the North American Department, University of Debrecen, Hungary Lenke Mária Németh, Assistant Professor at the North American Department, University of Debrecen, Hungary Zoltán Peterecz, Ph.D. Student at the Department of American Studies, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary Edina Szalay, Assistant Professor at the North American Department, University of Debrecen, Hungary Judit Szathmári, Associate Professor at the Department of American Studies, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary András Tarnóc, Associate Professor at the Department of American Studies, Eszterházy Károly College, Eger, Hungary Gabriella Varró, Assistant Professor at the North American Department, University of Debrecen, Hungary 5 István Kornél Vida, Instructor at the North American Department, University of Debrecen, Hungary Gabriella Vöő, Assistant Professor at the Department of English Literature and Culture, University of Pécs, Hungary 6 EDITORIAL NOTE The Department of American Studies at Eszterházy Károly College is pleased to present Volume IX of the Eger Journal of American Studies. The Eger Journal of American Studies is the first scholarly journal published in Hungary devoted solely to the publication of articles investigating and exploring various aspects of American Culture. We intend to cover all major and minor areas of interest ranging from American literature, history, and society to language, popular culture, bibliography etc. The journal welcomes original articles, essays, and book reviews in English by scholars in Hungary and abroad. Manuscripts should be sent to the editor of the Eger Journal of American Studies, Eszterházy Károly Főiskola, Amerikanisztika Tanszék, Eger, Egészségház u. 4., 3300, Hungary. They should conform to the latest edition of the MLA Handbook in all matters of style and be sent together with a disk copy of the article in Microsoft Office 2003. 7 IN HONOR OF THOMAS COOPER READINGS OF THE TRANSLATIONS OF EZRA POUND The prevalence or even dominance of the translated text in the study of the humanities in institutions of secondary and higher education in the United States and Europe notwithstanding, the practices of translation through which these texts come into being are rarely made the subject of scrutiny. On the contrary the translated text is often presented as equal or at least adequate to the original, even or perhaps especially when the original remains inaccessible to instructors and students alike. This tacit assertion of the parity of translation and original is not merely a matter of convenience or necessity. It is rather an instrument of ideology through which conditions of (mis)appropriation and narcissistic cultural reproduc- tion are obscured and the self-evidence of the unproblematic and ulti- mately retrievable subject is (disingenuously) confirmed. Yet read as a translation, as an articulation of difference instead of sameness, the translated text, far from assuring the stability of the uncontested original, foregrounds its absence and exposes critical discourse as a discourse of values, rendering visible strategic practices through which the figure of the unitary subject is (often surreptitiously) constructed. Disengaged from the putative original, the translated text is freed from the dogmatism of allegorical reading (the interpretation of literary texts as figural statements about a literal reality) and allowed to open as a primarily figural articula- tion (not a figural elocution of literal language) that posits—rather than corresponds to—its own notions of literality. As subject of ongoing dispute, Ezra Pound’s Cathay offers occasion to interrogate ideological underpinnings of critical approaches to the reading of translations. The 20th century saw the birth or development of numerous theories of translation, but of the diverse and sometimes mutually exclusive tendencies two in particular are salient in evaluations 11 of Pound’s work. These are an untheorized opposition between translation proper (to use Roman Jakobson’s term1) and a literary text of value “in its own right” (to use an often invoked formula) and an insistence on the value of fidelity to the original, however defined, or not defined in many cases. Both approaches presume the (admittedly always unrealized) potential for equivalence, but while the first reads divergence from the putative original (the difference on which the classification adaptation instead of translation proper is founded) as improvement through which the text is made to correspond more closely to purportedly universal aesthetic standards, the second reads difference as a symptom of error or agenda and the mark of the irredeemable inferiority of the translated text. Both approaches serve the validation of the poetics of the target language, one by proclaiming the irrelevance of the source culture to the extent that it does not correspond to the values of the target culture (posited as transcendent), the other by obscuring the interpretative activity through which the translation came into being and the contingency of the critical practices according to which its alleged fidelity is measured. Attempts in translation theory to move beyond what Susan Bassnett characterizes as the “arid debates about faithfulness and equivalence”2 notwithstanding, the notion of self-evident fidelity remains