Szövegek között XIII. [antikvár]

Foreword In lectures and seminars ofthe Department of Comparative Literature, University of Szeged the discipline of traditional comparative literature is moulding, step by step, into another one, which, originating from encounters of literary and cultural studies, harmonizes with those (mostly interpretative) "turns" that urges us teachers, graduate and postgraduate students to rethink, even to redefme borders of literature. The consequence is that, besides studies thought of as traditional, other projects earn more and more significance: the question of seeing together "popular" and "elite" culture, the confrontation of fields of culture and mentality with historical-literary processes, and in the place of the mutually illuminating investigation of literature and other arts (wechselseilige Erhellung der Künste) arrived the "complex confrontation" indicating the Integrative aspirations of both sides: so-called filmlike nature of literary works; "narrative" approach of films. However, none of these projects leave the field of comparative literature in a sense that the textuality of analysed works remains the centre of interpretation: whether the interpretation is about social movements spreading culture, about their "culturality", or about the subcultural proceeds of new developments of technical-civilisatoric modernity. This many-layered work of experimenting new methods fundamentally determines research projects and seminars of the department; partial results of this research can be read in this volume. These studies testify that postgraduate and graduate students react and reflect challenges ofthe discipline; signs of crisis are reinterpreted in a way that their stimulating force may turn up. In this volume of various content you can read about those research fields that are among the prior tasks of the department, and which hopefully gain their monographic forms as dissertations. Szeged January 2009 István Fried