Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2000. [Vol. 6.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 26)

Book reviews - László Dányi: The First Hit for "Multicultural Hemingway Hungary ": Lehel Vadon. Ed. Multicultural Challenge in American Culture—Hemingway Centennial

LÁSZLÓ DÁNYI THE FIRST HIT FOR "MULTICULTURAL HEMINGWAY HUNGARY" Lehel Vadon ed. Multicultural Challenge in American Culture — Hemingway Centennial. Eger: Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola, 1999. 339 pp. How can such seemingly unrelated notions as multicultural and Hemingway and Hungary be connected? Well, if you daringly decide to punch those words on your keyboard and seek hits on a search engine, and then you sit back and relax thinking that such terms should never match, you will be astonished to see the results. More than 700 hits will pop up, and the first reference out of those will be to the volume in the title. The Hungarian Association for American Studies held its biannual conference in Eger in 1998, and the proceedings of the event were published in a substantial volume in 1999. The conference and the volume tried to achieve a threefold task. Firstly, at the end of the 20th century which is frequently referred to as the "American century" scholars of American studies felt obliged to explore those issues that had shaped the non-American awareness concerning American social consciousness. (Out of the 17 essays only one was written by an American, Donald E. Morse, the rest were from the pen of Hungarian Americanists.) The volume addresses significant concepts and theorists bearing on current understandings of ethnicity and gender as culturally constructed "others" and the mechanisms by which these understandings are maintained, eg. by binary oppositions that derive from dualistic linguistic structures and totalizing monocentric habits of thought. It also includes essays on poly203