Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 3 (2001) Issue 1 Article 6 Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture Anikó Imre University of Washington Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Recommended Citation Imre, Anikó. "Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture." 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This journal is covered under the CC BY-NC-ND license. UNIVERSITY PRESS <http://www.thepress.purdue.edu> CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb> Purdue University Press ©Purdue University CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." In addition to the publication of articles, the journal publishes review articles of scholarly books and publishes research material in its Library Series. Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Langua-ge Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monog-raph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <> Volume 3 Issue 1 (March 2001) Article 6 Anikó Imre, "Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture" <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol3/iss1/6> Contents of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 3.1 (2001) <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol3/iss1/> Abstract: In her article, "Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture," Anikó Imre discusses gender, literature, and film in Hungary in the context of East Central European national cultures of the 1980s and 1990s. Anikó Imre analyzes the analogous gender structures that underlie both nation and literature in these transitional cultures. She challenges both social science studies of post-communist transitions and studies of East Central European literatures and cultures for their traditional neglect of gendered desire as a political factor. Thereby, Imre adopts a deconstructionist, feminist, and post-colonial approach to Hungarian "postmodernist" literature and film, which, similar to other East Central European cultures, combine an intense interest in the female and the feminine with the refusal of political commitment conveyed in poetic forms. Imre investigates the interrelationships among these features in order to point to a male intellectual culture emasculated by colonization, whose use of "poetic pornography" disguises an effort to defend patriarchal privileges threatened by the effects of the transition. Anikó Imre, "Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture" page 2 of 13 CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 3.1 (2001): <http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol3/iss1/6> Anikó IMRE Gender, Literature, and Film in Contemporary East Central European Culture There is a conspicuous similarity between the gender structures that underlie the modern nation and the modernist love lyric. Western feminist critics have begun to expose the transcendence and transparence associated with poetry in general, and the gender politics of the love lyric in particular. In her 1994 article, "'Corpses of Poesy': Some Modern Poets and Some Gender Ideologies of Lyric," Rachel Blau DuPlessis identifies the cluster of foundational materials upon which the lyric is traditionally built. Gender is identified as the thread that weaves (through) them: Lyric, love, beauty, and woman -- the four elements of the cluster -- inseparably interweave and naturalize one another: "Certainly poetry is always to be beautiful, and in these beauties linked to the beauties of Woman. And Woman must be beautiful -- soft and peerless and deep, even if raving, angry, hysterical.... Love will be poetic. Poetry will concern love; love will suggest sex, or at least forms of desirous imprisoning, loving predation, capture of richness. To be in love, to possess that beauty, is to be inspired to write. And willy-nilly, the whole cluster is reaffirmed" (72). DuPlessis analyzes how the notional cluster in which modernist poetry is embedded continually reasserts fixed power relations. Desire circulates among the elements according to the rules of the heterosexual, masculine economy, within a male homosocial triangle: An overtly or covertly male "I" speaks, as if overheard, in front of a loosely male "us" about (or to) a Be (...truncated)