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)

applied set of critical tools and conventions, but kept on enriching itself, drawing from the thoughts of definitely non-marxist systems as well. Egri's studies of Eliot are also widely cited, for instance in the discussion of the kaleidoscopic method and non-linear progression underlying the structure of The Waste Land, which forms a seminal chapter of the 1986 Tradition and Innovation in American Free Verse: Whitman to Duncan

, written by Enikő Bollobás (173). The books coming from Egri's pen in the latter part of his first creative period broadened the scope of scrutiny by examining further representatives and manifestations of twentieth century fiction. Alom, látomás, valóság (Dream, Vision, Reality) (1969) was the first in the line, which focuses on particular strategies of the modernizing tendency in a remarkable variety of major European novelists' works, expanding and complicating the analytical arsenal by parallels from the domain of music, the compositions of Benjamin Britten for instance. In one of the writer giants, Marcel Proust, Egri discovered yet another exemplary innovator of the novel's technique, whose influence on a range of later practitioners of the genre he found it both worthwhile and fruitful to take account of. Thus Proust, Tibor Déry and Jorges Semprun are treated together in the volume he published in French in 1969, under the title Survie et réinterprétation de la forme proustienne. His closely following 1970 book focuses on Déry alone, discussing aspects of the Hungarian author's modernity he found not only unique but also unorthodox in the context of mid-twentieth century Hungarian literary phenomena which were restricted by politically governed critical norms and expectations. Avantgardism and Modernity appeared in 1972, as a kind of assessment of the several year-long, complex inquiry into what constitutes the modern, reaching back to the comparison of respective works by Joyce and Mann and the idea that it was the latter of the two who achieved modernity in its true essence. But isn't this an evidently dated view, we are inclined to ask thirty years later, when Joyce has become acclaimed as a leading master of modern prose everywhere in the world. In his contribution to " 'Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade': A Discussion Panel in Memory of Péter Egri" at the HUSSE 6 Conference in Debrecen, 2003, Aladár Sarbu gave a succinct summary of what remains as the lasting value of Egri's book: 16