Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Mária Kurdi: "Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain." On the Scholarly Heritage of Péter Egri (1932-2002)
The concluding chapter of Törésvonalak proves to be a thoughtprovoking commentary on and intervention in contemporary Hungarian critical debates about the drama, with Tamás Bécsy's theory of identifying the "situation" as a key-element of the genre (.Drámamo-dellek 33-50) in the centre of its attention. Egri stresses the view that the "situation" can be found too general a category for the purpose of theorizing drama, as it is also present in musical genres like the fugue and the sonata. Rather than enhance the status of one undoubtedly important element, he suggests, referring to what he calls György Lukács's "hidden drama theory" (432), that the concept of conflict should be broadened to encompass the latent tension and opposition between characters in plays where there may be no open clash of antithetical intensions or ambitions. As expected, Egri's thoughts in the conclusion generated a continuation of the theoretical debates. Bécsy responded in a review of the book, which misses a more detailed elaboration of a broad and flexible concept of conflict to give shape to the ideas of Lukács. At the same time, he identified the value and originality of the book by pointing out that its author analyzes the generic development of modern drama in relation to style (Bécsy, "A műfaj: stílus" 1575). Challenges of the Drama Egri's many-sided inquiry into modern drama was leading toward and converging into his in-depth study of one giant playwright, Eugene O'Neill's work. By the 1980s he had become an internationally known O'Neill scholar, commissioned to contribute to important and influential collections in the field, which came out in the United States, Canada, Germany and Japan. His work is quoted, for instance, in Virginia Floyd's extended assessment of the palywright's career (52). The same decade saw the publication of three books on O'Neill by Egri, primarily interested in the role of form articulating the American experience as it influenced the playwright's imagination. 1986 was hallmarked by completing the comparative analysis titled Chekhov and O'Neill: The Uses of the Short Story in Chekhov's and O'Neill's Plays , which addresses the interaction between short story and drama in respective works of the two playwrights. Chekhov's apparent influence on O'Neill forms the starting point to placing generic questions, again, in the centre of the 22
