Th™is article analyses Imre Bartók’ Jerikó épül (“Jericho is being built”, 2018) in the context of contemporary Hungarian and international autofiction. Using the distinction established by Hannah Arendt and Giorgio Agamben between the notions of “bios” and “zoe” as a starting point, I argue that the novel deconstructs the logic of autobiographic narration via its expansion of the semantics of the term “life”, playing upon its evolutionary, biological and material connotations. Furthermore, identifying “theš” as one of the book’s central, self-reflexive motifs, I explore its links to the most significant autobiographic tradition of European literature (hallmarked by the names of St. Augustine and Rousseau) and interpret it in the light of the text’s affective and performative functioning.

A kortárs magyar irodalom folyamatait elsősorban a műkritika legkülönfélébb szakmai orgánumai követik nyomon, s bár több irodalmi és művészeti folyóirat rendszeresen megjelentet összegző áttekintéseket a történő magyar irodalom legaktuálisabb tendenciáiról, ezen folyamatok átfogó, tudományos igényű leírására viszonylag ritkán kerül sor. Éppen ez utóbbira vállalkozik jelenlegi lapszámunk, amely a kortárs magyar líra és próza aktuális folyamatainak széleskörű feltérképezését és mélyebbre ható vizsgálatát ígéri.

My essay offers a reading of János Térey’s Jeremiás avagy az Isten hidege that focuses on the play’s embeddedness in the cultural memory of Debrecen, a city of undeniable significance in Hungarian literary history. I investigate the play’s strategies to re-interpret the topoi of other Debrecen-related texts, including seventeenth-century Calvinist sermons, the poems of Endre Ady or contemporary pop songs. Thus, I interpret the ways Térey’s rhetoric undermines the stability of dichotomies that traditionally characterise the literary representations of the city, such as the opposition between nature and urban space or the clash of intellectual openness and provincial isolation. The paper also analyses Biblical and religious allusions in order to reveal the various links between Prophet Jeremiah and Térey’s fictional, hypermodern figure of Jeremiás, a disillusioned politician from Debrecen.