Contents – Autumn-Winter 2024

Torbó, Annamária:

Representational Politics and Discourses on Racial Minorities in Contemporary Popculture

Discourses on the representation of different minorities are a daily part of contemporary social debates. In recent years, a number of articles in the online press have dealt with the practice of changing some traits of the main characters in adaptations or sequels of pop-cultural stories. Most of these modifications have to do with skin colour, which provides an opportunity for a more varied and pronounced representation of racial and ethnic minorities than before. This paper presents the representational politics associated with the Netflix series Bridgerton on the basis of a discourse analysis on relevant articles in the Hungarian online media. It reveals the different ways of speaking such as the defence of historical fidelity or the legitimisation of alternative histories. It also shows how pop-cultural works like Bridgerton may be linked to broader social phenomena such as political correctness or racism that dominate contemporary public discourse.

Keywords: discourse, inclusive casting, people of colour, popular culture, representation

Tamás, Ildikó:

Minority identity in a global context

This paper looks into how an emblematic element of Sámi identity is transformed from offline discourses into online folklore and how younger generations use the traditional cultural elements to represent their identity besides the textual multilingualism on social media. It focuses on the content of two Instagram profiles and provides an ethnographic insight into the ethnic-based online discourse that these represent. The repetitive topic of the Instagram posts is the relation to the freezing Arctic winter, which—as a biological and cultural phenomenon—is fit to articulate ethnic differences between the indigenous and the ‘foreign’ peoples. This opposition generates humorous contents that sometimes cross the boundary between political correctness and incorrectness. It also illustrates how oral folklore may conquer contemporary registers and how it survives in the latest modern forms of online communication.

Keywords: cold tolerance, identity, Instagram, meme, Sámi

Dunai, Tamás:

Developmental Disorders

In July 2023, the Government Office of the Capital City Budapest (BFKH) imposed a 12 million forints consumer protection fine on the Líra bookstore network for failing to wrap, as prescribed by law, a young adult graphic novel depicting gay love called Heartstopper. Comics are not the main focus of the discourse on wrapping LGBTQ books in Hungary, yet it is not entirely coincidental that a graphic novel has become the case in point provoking nationwide interest. This paper suggests that this is partly owing to the medial and developmental characteristics of comics as a medium. Medial in that comics is a visual medium and its content is apparent at first sight, so similar attacks have occurred throughout its history, and developmental in that contemporary comics are diverse in terms of genre and content and hence LGBTQ comics have a more marked presence than they did a few decades ago.

Keywords: bookseller, comics, comics publishing, distribution, regulation

Kiss, Gábor Zoltán:

Imperial Ambitions and Ideological Censorship in Modern Board Games

This paper discusses the censorship of historical reality in the medium of board games. The modern board game provides a live and interactive opportunity for the re-enactment of a wide variety of realities and, through re-enactment, for the understanding thereof, which is in many ways threatening. Historical board games often revisit lesser-known events, challenge prevailing narratives, stimulate debate and alternative interpretations, which may lead to strong feelings of resentment. Their sensitive or controversial themes can evoke strong emotions and ethical concerns not only among the audiences, but also the creators of the games (including designers, developers, and translators) who design their games to match their social contexts or adapt the original they translate to the same social environment. Some games also support, wittingly or unwittingly, a particular political position or ideology, which is also problematic in terms of propaganda, biased interpretations, and the suppression or the reinforcement of divisive narratives. This paper addresses the latter possibilities underlying censorship based on a concrete example.

Keywords: 19th century, board games, British Empire, censorship, Russia

Kálai, Sándor:

“...has the Hungarian literature added anything to foreign detective fiction?”

The new international approaches to crime fiction are inspired by a comparative perspective and consequently analyse the coexistence of different regional and national traditions, translations, and logics of the book market. It is not surprising that the history of the genre is also being rewritten retrospectively. Instead of viewing the development of the genre as a straight line from the writings of Edgar Allan Poe on, which could be seen as the establishment of the dominance of the Anglo-American tradition, scholars are increasingly focusing on a complex interplay of different cultures and texts. In 1928, János Hankiss, a professor at the University of Debrecen, published his book The Detective Novel: Theory and History of “Popular Literature”. Its title and subtitle are more than promising: the study addresses the genre and its theoretical and historical issues. This paper seeks to draw attention to the parallel between Hankiss’s comparative approach and contemporary crime fiction criticism, the latter being partly an attempt to deconstruct the classical historical overviews told from an Anglo-American perspective, using the tradition of comparative literary studies.

Keywords: comparative literature, crime fiction, cultural industries, history of genres, literary history

Tisza, Eleonóra:

Possibilities of hybridity in the contemporary young adult literature

This study is to provide a comprehensive insight into the young adult (YA) literature by exploring the multifaceted notion of hybridity in the category. The young adult literature can neither be fully labelled as children’s nor as “adult” literature and can therefore be understood as a hybrid of the two age categories. The notion of hybridity also explains definitional problems. There is still no consensus on whether the phenomenon should be understood as a genre, a marketing category, or an age classification. Hybridity also encompasses genre hybridisation, which is a typical trend of literary and media texts in this field. Finally, the analysis will briefly highlight how hybridity is represented in the narratives of YA fantasy texts, particular as regards female monster characters.

Keywords: fantasy literature, genre hybridization, hybridization, new media, young adult literature

Timár, Borbála:

Reluctant participation

Mobile technology is an excellent example of the “paradox of technology,” i.e. the duality that these devices provide previously unimaginable freedoms and yet they may result in overuse, addiction and many other digital harms (effects and behaviours) (Mick & Fournier 1998, Barnes et al. 2019). The users themselves often consider constant online presence a burden, and their relationship to digital devices and content is ambivalent (Ytre-Arne et al. 2020), described by the concept of “participatory reluctance” on behalf of users (Cassidy 2016). This paper presents a qualitative data collection method called the “love and breakup letter method” (Martin & Hanington 2012) and illustrates it with examples. The “love or breakup letter method” is a relatively open form of qualitative data collection that explores the personal feelings and experiences of the participants.

Keywords: ambivalence, attitude, digital technology, Love and breakup letter, user experiences research

Horváth, Kata:

Who looks after the journalists?

This paper looks into the individual and organisational factors that contribute to or undermine the resilience of Hungarian journalists. During the research, a number of in-depth interviews were conducted with founding and early-career journalists in four independent Hungarian newsrooms on issues undermining journalistic resilience, including burnout, political pressure, online harassment, etc. The findings suggest that internship programmes or universities do not prepare young journalists for the basic stressors practitioners face. Although most of the journalists interviewed admit to having a friendly and supportive atmosphere in the independent newsrooms, there is generally no concrete response to the issues raised, and none of the newsrooms surveyed, except one, have had professional discussions on the issues addressed.

Keywords: burnout, early-career journalists, online harassment, resilience

Varga, Tibor Szabolcs:

(E)sportswashing

It is an emerging practice in sports that states directly buy up clubs, event organisers, media companies and international championships. They transform their control over these into political, cultural and economic capital so that they can achieve their goals of nation branding and economic diversification. The press calls this practice ‘sportswashing’: which expression is a pejorative label for non-Western sportsbased geopolitical activities in countries with a record of human rights violations. However, research on sportswashing remains problematic until it can be put into the context of the known political frameworks and be thus separated from judgments based on Western values. Hence the use of the term ‘politicalcultural funding,’ as opposed to the one burdened by value judgment, may bring useful insights in the analysis of Saudi Arabia’s expansion in the e-sports industry, which began in 2020.

Keywords: e-sports, Saudi Arabia, sportswashing, human rights

Borbíró, Aletta:

„It’s Important That You Network, aha”

This paper interprets the music video Szív (Heart) by Krúbi from the perspective of transmedia and convergence culture. In addition to briefly describing the characteristics of rap, it focuses on how the genre is interconnected with the dominant media outlets, how social media platforms provide space for alterego building and make the networking between rappers more visible. The song and music video Heart represent the networked nature of the music industry and include visual and metareflexive notes that highlight the changing nature of visual media, while also demonstrating the logic of media convergence.

Keywords: convergence culture, Krúbi, networking, rap, transmediality