postmodernity and ethicsCurrent research:
This research project tracks significant changes in the artistic representation and memorialization of atrocities and genocide, the holocaust in particular, in the last two decades. Connecting the fields of literary and art history, film studies, cultural studies, and trauma studies, this research focuses on works that are parasitical on certain established and canonized genres of atrocity memorialization and that are transgressive and controversial as cases of re-writing and revision. This includes works of literature and feature films as well as autobiographies of disputed authenticity, re-edited found footage in home movies, and installation art that revises atrocity-related museum exhibits. The project analyzes how these works position themselves in relation to expectations of witnessing, documentarism, and realism and in relation to rhetorics of irony and play.
"Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman's Comic Books about the Holocaust and 9/11." Representations 97 (2006) 57-89.
"Kép, képtelenség és trauma: a Maustól a World Trade Centerig." Beszélõ. May 2005.
"Láthatatlanná tett képek Art Spiegelman holokauszt-képregényében." [Invisible Images in Art Spiegelman's Holocaust Comic Book.] Enigma. 11:42 (2005): 69-81.
"Trauma and Visuality: Art Spiegelman's Maus and In the Shadow of No Towers." Humanities Center (Literature, Politics, and the Arts), Harvard University. 2005.
"Emlékmû: mártírium vagy dialógus?" [Monuments: martyrdom or dialogue?] Interview with James E. Young. Mûértõ. 7:6 (2004): 8.
"Swallowed Futures, Indigestible Pasts: Post-apocalyptic narratives of rights in Kleist and Doctorow." Comparative American Studies 1(3): 327-350.
"Mauschwitz: An Aesthetics and Ethics of Hybridity in Art Spiegelman's Comic Book Maus." CROSSOVER: Ethnicity, gender, and ethics in literary and visual worlds. Ed. Therese Steffen. Tübingen: Stauffenburg Discussions, 2000. 61-72.
"A tûzzel játszani: a holocaust mint játék és botrány." [Playing with Fire: The Holocaust as Play and Scandal] Café Babel, 1999:2. 59-69.
"Domestic Guilt, or the Use of History in DeLillo's White Noise." Values in American Society. Ed. Tibor Frank. Budapest: Eötvös Loránd University, 1995. 219-227.
"Dominant and Submerged Discourses in The Life of Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa?)" African American Review 1993 Winter, 27:4, 655-664.
"'The Rest is Foreplay': The Staging of Death and Ethical Engagement in Gravity's Rainbow." Ceremonies and Spectacles: America and the Staging of Collective Identities, Biennial conference of the European Association for American Studies, Lisbon, 1998.
"Tactics of the Self in Gravity's Rainbow: An Ethical Investigation." HUSSE Papers 1995: Proceedings of the Second Conference of the Hungarian Society for the Study of English. Ed. György Novák. Szeged: József Attila University, 1995. 135-141.
These essays about Pynchon's encyclopedic novel, Gravity's Rainbow, draw for inspiration ontheories of alterity
use of the animal in postmodern explorations of the human and post-human"Mauschwitz: Alterity and Memory." Ethics After the Holocaust, international conference on Emmanuel Levinas, Oregon Humanities Center, 1996.
"Andalusia in the Month of May: On the Rhetoric of Sameness and Difference in Columbus' Diario." Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies, Norman, Oklahoma, 1993.
"Werebeavers of the World, Unite? Animals on the Verge of Readability in Thomas Pynchon's Novels." Animal Magic: Essays on Animals in the American Imagination. Ed. Jopi Nyman and Carol Smith. University of Joensuu Studies in Literature and Culture. Joensuu, 2004. 96-111.
"Curious Creatures in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon." 'Nature's Nation' Revisited: American Concepts of Nature from Wonder to Ecological Crisis, Biennial conference of the European Association for American Studies, Graz, 2000.