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)
Few people would today accept a comparative analysis of Joyce and Mann the upshot of which is that Mann succeeded where Joyce failed. We would say, rather, that Joyce succeeded where Mann succeeded, only they succeeded in different ways. Still, in more senses than one, Avantgardism and Modernity is an exemplary book: it rests on sound scholarship, presents its case in a lucid and lively manner, and most of all, because even if you do not always agree with the lessons it draws you cannot but acknowledge the perspicacity and the insight with which it explores the ways in which avantgard techniques operate in fiction. The most eloquent proof of this latter is that Professor Egri's analysis of stylistic variety in "Circe" is now part and parcel of any aspiring Joyce-scholar's education. Though Avantgardism and Modernity can be regarded as a closure to the first period, the difference of the modernist narrative from its realist predecessors and also from its postmodern followers, at least in the case of Joyce, continued to be a challenge in some of Egri's later writings. In the 1973 essay "Natura Naturans: an Approach to the Poetic Reflection of Reality. The Aspect of Poetry in the 'Proteus' Episode of James Joyce's Ulysses ," the scholar analyzes the poetic language of Joyce's modernist fiction as exemplified in the selected episode. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Caricaturist: Picasso, Joyce, Britten," first published in the journal Comparative Literature Studies in 1982, draws a parallel between different art works to chart strategies of parody and caricature. The part on Joyce probes into the double-edged nature of the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of Ulysses as it keeps an ironic distance from both its source, Homer's epic, and the 19 t h century style of Charles Dickens. According to Egri, some elements of Chapter LIII of David Copperfield become playfully displaced and thoroughly caricatured in the Joycean text (107-09). Extending his comments on the shift between forms and styles further, in a 2001 essay under the title "(Per)chance: Joyce and Cage" Egri discusses how John Cage's postmodern composition The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs (1961), which adapts a passage from page 556 of Finnegans Wake , increases the musical quality of Joyce's modernist text. The rhythmic ambiguities of the composer's work, achieved through the act of transposing Joyce's linguistic bravura, were even demonstrated by Egri to his professional audience when he was playing some of the music on the piano as an accompaniment to ESZTERHÁZY KÁROLY FŐISKOL' KÖNYVTÁRA - EGER 17
