iASK podcast - Enikő Polyák: Connections between Kőszeg and Agota Kristof’s works

Podcast with Enikő Polyák, PhD student in the Doctoral School of Literary Studies, PhD Program in Hungarian and Comparative Literature at the University of Debrecen.
This episode invastigates the connections between Kőszeg and Agota Kristof’s works. The city played an important part in the writer’s life and also in her novels. In the Trilogy, the city is only referred to as K. or Little Town, however it can be identified with the help of the geological descriptions in the text. Also, as the morals and ethics play significant roles in the novels the talk explores how it might relate to Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation and also to the trauma caused by the war and crises the narrators were faced with. The participants discuss the issues of language barrier, translations and the different experiences one can have reading the texts in Serbian, English, Hungarian or French. The Trilogy also raises an important question in connection with identity, which it seems can only constructed by wrinting and rewriting ones self over and over.