Genre, Narration, and Authorial Presence in the Novel of Miklós Mészöly Az atléta halála [Death of an Athlete]

Dániel Mizsur

IN: Partitúra Irodalomtudományi folyóirat, Volume: XII. , Issue 1, 2017, p. 65-92., ISSN 1336-7307

DOI: 10.17846/PA.2017.12.1.65-92

Abstract:

The research endevaours to construct such a reading of Death of an Athlete, which reads the fictitious biography of the novel in a a non-fictitious way, and thus examines the functioning of narrative activity based upon its reality, with particular emphasis on the ownership of the author of the memoir, the author’s language competencies, and the question of text structuring. As this reading method and method of interpretation is not inevitably given, the research creates it through an adaption of the well-known autobiographical pact of Philippe Lejeune. According to the norms of realist reading the main problematic points of the novel are the biography’s focus personality’s cited monologue, the narrator’s condensed, philosophic-poetic language – so characteristic to Meszöly’s art – and the usage of the central metaphor of the Death of an Athlete, the Butterfly, as a compositional metaphor. The paper addresses these questions by acknowledging authorial presence and with an interpretation shifting from realistic methods.

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Partitúra is a Hungarian literary journal published in Slovakia twice a year. The first edition was issued in 2006. From 2007 to 2014 its publishers were the Faculty of Central European Studies at The Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra in cooperation with Sambucus Literary Society. Since 2014 the Faculty of Central European Studies at the CPU in Nitra became the sole publisher.

The journal releases peer-reviewed scientific articles, literary studies and art reviews of both Hungarian as well as world literature. It is also a forum for essays on several other arts and intercultural relations. Furthermore, special attention is devoted to the Central European literature and literary studies; the magazine not only publishes the reviews of such studies, but also provides the arena for reflections about them. The journal aims to give an account of the contemporary Hungarian literature of the Hungarian minorities as well as to serve as a cluster for discourses.

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