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)

symphony dating back to the same age are found to represent a "panoramic broadness [...] combined with a measure of dramatic quality" (23). In its assessment of the structural correspondences between the Romantic sonnet, landscape painting and sonata, the originality of Egri's investigation is signalled by defining the pictorial phenomenon that is meaningfully termed as "visual enjambment" (80). The chapter on modern artists, on the other hand, makes a convincing distinction between types of the caricature, terming them occasional, trend and universal. The last of these, so forcefully and memorably practised by the major artists of the twentieth century, the author claims to be directed against no less than "the human predicament" (191). Modern Games with Renaissance Forms: From Leonardo and Shakespeare to Warhol and Stoppard (1996), and Text in Context: Literature and the Sister Arts (2001), the last two books by Egri, reveal axiological parallels in literature and the other art forms with increasing complexity. In both, though not equally, there appears an interest in contemporary drama which is a relatively new field of interest in the scholarly oeuvre. An isolated essay, "American Variations on a British Theme: Giles Cooper and Edward Albee" from 1994 can be seen as introducing it, included in Forked Tongues?: Comparing Twentieth-Century British and American Literature, a collection published by Longman. The main question explored by Egri here is the fate of the absurd in the American theatre, its origins and originality in the work of Albee, the acknowledged American representative of the form, whose rewriting of a play by the AngloIrish Cooper serves as an example for the theoretical discussion. A comparison with Beckett, the European father of the absurd appears to be unavoidable. Different from the latter's creation of an "openly absurdist universe," Albee's art is found to unite "realistic and absurdist aspects, [continuing] this achievement of modern American drama, and places his dramatic art in the mainstream of the dramatic movement." This is "a characteristically American fusion," Egri continues, which can be traced back to O'Neill (145). Only a few years apart from the publication of Egri's essay, American drama critic Linda Ben-Zvi examined O'Neill and absurdity as part of another collection featuring international scholarship (33-55). 28