About HJEAS Books, New Series
The Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies (HJEAS) has launched a series of books to be published by Debrecen University Press that reflects scholarship in the areas covered by the Journal, which include but are not limited to the literature, film, art, history, and religion of the United States, Canada, Ireland, England, Scotland, Australia, and New Zealand. All books will be published as Open Access ebooks and as printed using Print on Demand. They will be kept in print. All HJEAS Books are peer reviewed.
PROPOSALS for either RESEARCH MONOGRAPHS or EDITED COLLECTIONS are welcome.
2022 PUBLICATIONS
It’s Time: What Living in Time Is Like by Donald E. Morse, Oakland University, USA and University of Debrecen
Open access copy available for download at DUPress: https://dupress.unideb.hu/hu/termek/its-time-e-book
Why is it so hard to discuss time? A good part of the difficulty arises from what contemporary philosopher Nathaniel Lawrence terms “the uniqueness of temporality,” which, while “[i]t submits to useful analogy, … is different, essentially different, from anything else” [because] “temporality permeates … [human] experience.” When we try and reduce this experience to a concept of time, we necessarily pick and chose certain aspects and ignore others. This becomes a “no win” game. Jorge Luis Borges cautioned against trying to “solve” this intractable problem. Instead he recommended attempting to describe and, where possible, to illuminate it through story, for “[o]ur existence in time … can only be comprehended through narrative.” Rather than attempting to define time or to theorize about it, It’s Time tries to report on what living in time is like not through abstractions but through imaginative literature with its special insights into our experience of time. Narrative remains the ideal medium for presenting the events upon which our real experience of time depends. It’s Time discusses a variety of works in many different genres in the hope not of being definitive but of creating a mosaic that will reflect what it is like to live in time.
“A wretchedness to defend”: Reading Beckett’s Letters by Erika Mihálycsa, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania
Open access copy available for download at DUPress: https://dupress.unideb.hu/hu/termek/a-wrechedness-to-defend-e-book/
“A wretchedness to defend”: Reading Beckett’s Letters is an in-depth study of the correspondence of Samuel Beckett, selected and published by Cambridge University Press between 2009 and 2016. The volume treats the letters as inroads to Beckett’s poetics, stressing that, apart from their value as key documents to the Beckett canon, these are of a literary quality consubstantial with the output of one of the most radical modern writers. Reading Beckett’s pronouncements on works of literature and art, his first-hand accounts of grappling with his own writerly material, as well as his—invariably reserved—clarifications to theater-makers, translators, and interpreters of his work, in the context of his published fiction and plays and in light of recent advances in archival Beckett studies, the present book focuses on Beckett’s sustained self-education in literature, the visual arts, and philosophy, which imbricates his writerly choices, his lifelong commitment to critical reading, as well as his dilemmas in the practice of writing, self-translating, and theatrical performance. It points at the multiple ways in which this vast and manyfaceted correspondence reveals previously unknown contexts, over- and undertones of the work, and illuminates the processes of knowledge and “unknowing” on which Beckett’s singular aesthetics of impoverishment, of the low, of finitude, of ethical blank writing and achievementlessness is premised. Given its multiple foci on Beckett the reader, the self-translator, and the selfdirector, the book is of potential interest to Beckett researchers, scholars working in the field of modernism and translation studies, as well as readers of Beckett.