On the afternoon of Nov. 7th, Péter Hajdu, Editor-in-Chief of Nelhelicon and professor from Faculty of Humanities, the University of Pécs, guested on Foreign Language Forum and gave a lecture entitled Cityscape and Literature. Gao Chi, vice president of HZAU, participated in the lecture, together with students and teachers from the College of Foreign Languages.
Prof. Hajdu focused on ideological codes in cityscapes and their representation and restoration in literary works, disclosing their rich political, religious and poetic connotation. First of all, Prof. Hajdu explained how the ancient city architecture and literary works weaken and gloss over Rome Empire’s invasion of Athens. This is shown through the example of different descriptions about Athens Acropolis in realist and literary works in the classical period. Then he pointed out three literary genres with this regard: travel writing, satire and novel. He illustrated the description of the literary map in fiction studies with the representation of Dublin in Joyce James' Ulysses as an example. In the end, Prof. Hajdu analyzed the influence of political ideology, people's religious belief and literary works in different political power period (the Austro Hungarian Empire, the Hungarian Soviet Republic, the Republic of Hungary and the Hungarian) on the abolishment and replacement of Budapest cityscape (includes buildings, monuments and statues, etc.). This was demonstrated through the construction and reconstruction of sculptures and monuments in Budapest, Hungarian capital, during modern times.
In the Q&A section, Prof. Hajdu answered questions about genres of cityscape literature, research approaches to urban and rural landscapes in literature, urban landscape culture in Hungary as well as paper writing and submission to international literary journals. Yang Gexin, vice dean of the College of Foreign Languages, made a summary of Prof. Hajdu's lecture. He also encouraged teachers and students to expand new ideas for literary research, to think actively and write creative papers, and to initiate a new prospect for literature research and teaching.
Péter Hajdu’s Profile: Proficient in English, German, French and Latin, Péter Hajdu is a Hungarian scholar studying comparative literature and classical philology and the editor-in-chief of Neohelicon, a leading international journal on comparative literature studies. He is also a fellow of International Comparative Literature Association Executive Council. He has served as senior research fellow in the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences since 2001 and chair professor at the University of Pécs Faculty of Humanities since 2011. His academic research mainly focuses on contemporary literary theories and classical poetics. He has published several books and more than 100 papers.
http://news.hzau.edu.cn/2016/1110/47376.shtml
(By Yu Xiaohong)
