1. Explanation: This panel is aligned with the Presidential Theme and pursues questions of liberation and justice in Hungarian literature and film.

2. Rationale: The Hungarian LLC decided to organize a session on this topic because we felt that current conversations in the US regarding the notion of justice are equally relevant in the context of Hungarian culture. While the speakers cover a wide range of historical eras, they are all concerned with the same questions regarding affective agency, the limits of personal justice, as well as national identity and social justice.

3. Existing scholarship: As a response to the charge that Hungary functions as an illiberal democracy, there are active debates in Hungarian scholarship regarding the role of counter-narratives and transformative reading and writing practices. Our panel joins this conversation and expands it to consider literature and film as liberatory praxis.

4. Session organization: We designed the panel with three speakers only to make sure that all presenters will have 18 minutes while also allowing for at least 15 minutes of unstructured discussion. We value open dialogue and will make sure to preserve time for audience members to join the conversation.

5. Presentations: Dr. Haragos’s presentation, titled “Women’s Affective Transactions and the Memory of Hungarian (Historical) Affairs: Istvan Szabo’s The Door (2012)” joins the topic of our other, guaranteed session on Milestones in Hungarian Cinema while also expanding it towards questions of justice. The presentation highlights the cinematic portrayal of a woman’s exceptional affective agency against the backdrop of historical trauma, more specifically, of the Holocaust in Hungary, in Hungarian director Istvan Szabo’s The Door (Az ajto 2012) based on Hungarian writer Magda Szabo’s eponymous novel The Door (Az ajto 1987). Through a juxtaposition of the cinematic and the literary text, the article discusses central protagonist Emerenc Szeredas’s affective transaction to save the life of a little Jewish girl in Nazi-occupied Budapest. Emerenc’s “affective bargain” through which she sustains the “cruel optimism” (Lauren Berlant) of love and compassion pits her gendered capital against devalued Jewish life. The film conveys the costs of such an affective transaction and its repercussions upon the lived materiality of Emerenc’s life as a young woman and her ultimate failure to achieve “the good life” (Sara Ahmed) of societal expectations.

Atticus Doherty’s presentation, titled Orphean Masks: Rendering Historical Justice in Miklós Szentkuthy’s Black Renaissance, explores the limits of personal justice. By taking grammatical and factual liberties in his fiction, Szentkuthy’s novel of historiographic fantasy renders the unknown and unknowable back into the lives of people who have been reduced to mere historical figures, allowing for what may be termed a ‘historical justice,’ a re-personization of those who are least able to speak for themselves—the dead. The paper seeks to explore the mechanisms, both rhetorical and narratological, that Szentkuthy employs through his animation of Monteverdi and his reading of other historical figures. Szentkuthy’s justice becomes not just the concept of rendering that which is lawful or proper but is returned to its etymological meaning of individual or subjective right, the reinstatement of personhood.

Dr. Basa’s presentation, titled “National Goals and Social Justice”, covers an earlier era with the same questions in mind. Hungarian writers of the early 19^th century Reform Era were pathbreakers in advocating both for Hungarian nationhood and for universal rights. At first the emphasis was on the revitalization of the language and the emphasis on Hungarian history, and of course folklore and legend. Jószef Katona’s Bánk Bán created a hero opposed to foreign rule, Ferenc Kölcsey and Mihály Vörösmarty glorified the past, and course Sándor Petőfi (whose bicentenary we celebrate in 2022) is the embodiment of the most revolutionary ideas of the March movement. In contrast, Endre Ady castigated the social structure of late 19^th century Hungary which had failed to live up to the liberal ideals of the Revolution. These poets were all in the forefront of the battle for both national independence and social justice and they posed urgent questions about individual responsibility in the face of systemic injustices.