Memoria come dissenso, memoria del dissenso. Zsófia Bán tra scrittura letteraria e saggistica critica

My work discusses the two concepts of memory as dissent and memory of dissent. They are hereby proposed as conceptual tools suitable to describe one of the tendencies – perhaps the main one – of contemporary Hungarian literature, that aims to present itself as the bearer of a discourse that gives voice to the other, to the subaltern, to the not-(yet)-said, in an attempt to process the traumas of the 20th century through literary language. The literary thematization and representation of (individual and collective) memory processes and (communicative and cultural) memory practices, the question of the representation of time and of the free presence of the individual in time are all aspects that characterised the Hungarian literary production of the second half of the 20th century (and specifically Hungarian postmodern writing) as a dissenting reaction to the dictates imposed by the cultural ideology of real socialism. While identifying these aspects as recurrent in Hungarian contemporary literary production, I propose as a fruitful case study the work of Zsófia Bán (b. 1957). Writer and intellectual who expresses though her writing a committed conception of literature, Bán is representative of the efforts of contemporary literature to question Hungary’s collective memory. This work proposes a textual analysis divided into three thematic blocks: memory and photography; memory and the body; memory of literature (intertextuality and intermediality). The analysis conducted in my work accepts the implicit imposition of Bán’s texts to pay special attention to the visual sphere, which in fact proved to be a heuristic source for understanding the mechanisms of memory represented through and in the literary language. This work lays the foundation for a monograph on Zsófia Bán, but also for the development of further paths of comparative as well as translation research which have as their starting point the observation of recent trends in contemporary Hungarian literature.