News

The English Department is proud to invite you to

two public lectures

by

Judit Pieldner, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Department of Human Sciences
Faculty of Economics, Socio-Human Sciences and Engineering
Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania

Literature on Screen: An Introduction to Film Adaptations through Shakespeare's Hamlet

November 26, 2024, 8.50 am, P002

This presentation proposes to familiarize the audience with the relationship between literature and film. It will survey the major theories of screen adaptation. Various adaptation typologies will be exemplified through screen adaptations of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Postcolonial Rewritings of the Classics

November 28, 2024, 6.00 pm, P005

This presentation provides an introduction to strategies of rewriting, why writers resort to this practice in contemporary literature, what changes are effected and how they reinterpret the original works. The theory of rewriting will be discussed especially in connection with postcolonialism, exploring how colonial patterns are shifted by their critical treatment and by giving voice to the Other.

Judit Pieldner is associate professor at Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania, Miercurea Ciuc, Romania. Her research interests are related to intermediality, remediation, experimental cinema and screen adaptation. She is executive editor of the journal Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica. Her latest volume entitled Adaptation, Remediation and Intermediality: Forms of In-Betweenness in Cinema was published by Cluj University Press (2020).

The English Department is proud to invite you to

two public lectures

by

Júlia Vallasek, Ph.D.

Associate Professor
Department of Journalism and Digital Media
Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences
Babeş-Bolyai University

"They Are Warriors Too": Media Representation of Disabled and Injured Soldiers in World War I

November 26, 2024, 12.30 pm, P103

This lecture is based on dr. Vallasek's research of the contemporary newspaper coverage of the First World War, discussing the representation of disabled and injured soldiers in the daily press.

The Art and Craft of Literary Translation: An Informal Discussion (with dr. Maxmilian Rhys)

November 28, 2024, 12.30 pm, H35

An informal, informative discussion on the beauties, challenges and intricacies of being a literary translator

Júlia Vallasek is translator, literary historian, and associate professor at the Department of Journalism and Digital Media of Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca. She has translated the works of such figures as Jane Austen, Mircea Eliade or Julian Barnes. Her research interests include 20th-century Transylvanian literature, the history of 20th-century journalism in Transylvania, as well as contemporary English literature and Jane Austen.

The English Department is proud to invite you to

a book launch and a public lecture

by

Anna Zsubori, B.A., M.A., M.Litt., PhD.

British Academiy Postdoctoral Fellow in Communication and Media
Loughborough University (UK)

Children’s Conceptualisation of Gender and LGBTQ+ Adults' Reactions to Being Framed as Threat in Anti-gender, Anti-LGBTQ+ ‘Illiberal’ Hungary

November 19, 2024, 8.50 am, P300

This interdisciplinary talk examines Hungarian tweenagers’ negotiation of gender on the basis of audience research conducted with Hungarian informants. It does so by investigating the concept of ‘the’ princess, including, but not limited to, Disney Princesses, while offering unique theoretical contributions and discussing the complexities of the academically-overlooked Princess Phenomenon. This talk gives an overview of the links between fairy tales and animation, followed by a brief history on audience research with children. Further, it covers the historical, social, and political context in contemporary Hungary and analyzes Hungarian children’s notions of gender by discussing their ideas about ‘the’ princess as a concept.

Book Launch of the Monograph Disney Princesses and Tween Identity: The Franchise in Hungary (with Dávid Levente Palatinus)

November 20, 2024, 2.20 pm, P005

Disney Princesses and Tween Identity: The Franchise in Illiberal Hungary examines how tweens in illiberal Hungary construct verbal and visual identities through engagement with Disney princess animations. Presenting and analyzing ethnographic research in the form of interviews with Hungarian tweens around the time of the populist government’s winning the general elections in 2018, Anna Zsubori reveals the importance of social and cultural context in establishing the Disney princess phenomenon as a heterogeneous cultural force. The ambivalent and sometimes even contradictory ideas of identity expressed by the tweens highlight the role that diverse audiences, local negotiations, and dynamic discourses play in the reception of the Disney princess animations. Combining thematic and semiotic textual analyses of the conversations, tweens’ drawings and building blocks, and broader contextual examinations of the sessions with Hungarian children, this book offers original contributions on both theoretical and methodological levels.

Anna Zsubori is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, an ambitious media sociologist specialising in conducting audience research with marginalised communities, and a scholar with several years of experience in teaching at University level. She received her PhD at the University of Leicester under its Graduate Teaching Assistantship Scheme at the School of Media, Communication, and Sociology (4 years of full support, equivalent value to AHRC funding), and has published several journal articles as well as a monograph. Anna is also a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, and a media expert with management experience in film distribution. She earned her BA in Media Studies and MA in Teaching Literature and Grammar in Hungary, and her MLitt in Film Studies from the University of Dundee, Scotland.

The English Department

would like to invite you to the Public Lecture

No Salvation: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and the Eventless World

Mgr. Ondřej Váša, Ph.D.
Vice-dean for Public Relations
Faculty of Humanities, Charles University

Assistant Professor
Department of Theory of Art and Atworks, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University

Building P, Room P200, 4.10 pm, October 24, 2024

The S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game franchise, itself a mutant born from the marriage of the Strugatsky brothers' novel Roadside Picnic and Tarkovsky's movie adaptation, introduces a very strange world. Its uncanniness lies not so much in the fact that the mysterious Zone, in which the game is set, is teeming with monsters and littered with anomalies that defy the laws of nature; the strangest thing about the Zone is that it is as much a space of hope as it is a space in which the world has already happened. That is, it is whthout ceasing to exist, and so the NPCs, as well as the player, move through this world like souls through a cancelled limb. With some hyperbole (and with the help of contemporary event philosophy), the talk will focus on this very aspect: is it possible to think of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. game series as a case study of a world where everyone is doomed to persist without catharsis, completion or redemption?

Mgr. Ondřej Váša, Ph.D. has long focused on the interdisciplinary intertwining of philosophy, art and science, and he is particularly interested in modern utopian/dystopian visions of "man's place in the universe." He is the author of a number of scholarly studies and co-author of five books. In 2023, he edited a special issue of the Philosophical Journal, devoted to the ideas of a "world without people," and co-edited a special section of the American journal, Semiotica, dedicated to the phenomenon of inhumanity.