Önéletírás, emlékezet, elbeszélés : az emlékező próza hermeneutikai aspektusai az önéletírás-kutatás újabb eredményei tükrében

Abstract

My thesis analyzes the ontological and narrative aspects of personal self-narrative on the border of two approaches to remembrance: between the philosophy of hermeneutic tradition and literary criticism. I adopt this consideration to the analysis of Hungarian autobiographical novels of the 20th century, drawing on concrete examples, where the generic problems present themselves as aesthetic and rhetorical-poetic questions. The first and second chapters of the thesis present the theoretical basis of my approach. First I summarize the most important results of the phenomenological and hermeneutical explications on remembering in the 20th century. The next chapter analyses the most significant questions and discussions on the research of autobiography, and tries to point out the explicit and implicit hermeneutical preconceptions in these theories. In the third chapter, I examine how the special hermeneutical aspects of autobiography can operate as aesthetic and rhetorical-poetic dilemmas in the case of a concrete literary text. With the close reading of Lajos Kassak's novel, Egy ember élete (A Man's Life, 1927-1935), I investigate the relationship of the self, as it is constructed by the remembering perspective, with de Man's figures and masks, which are created as the "memorial" of the biographical person by the consciously operated memory work. I study Emlékiratok könyve (Book of Memories, 1986) by Péter Nádas, which is linked to Kassak's novel in significant paratextual aspects. This rhetorical-poetic universe is similar to that of Kassak, since the connections between the various aspects of the lived reality and the artistic reflections on it undermine the preconception of the separateness of documentary and fiction. My other example of a text drawing on Kassak's poetics is Fehérlófia (The Son of the White Horse, 1978) by Laszló Kemenes Géfin. In my reading, Kemenes' s stream of texts contains a specific narrative of self-knowledge that disseminates the self of remembering to narrated selves, constructing different masks, similarly to the method of subject creation in Kassak's novel. My analysis examines the special figures of remembering, which construct the self, and which set the language of obscenity and textual practices of pornography into action on the level of the procedures of self-creation.