Charlotte Szilágyi

In residence Academic Year 2007-2008

Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts

COLLEGE

Address: 104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R

Telephone:  617.384.8349

Email: szilagyi@fas.harvard.edu

Biography

Charlotte Szilágyi is currently completing her dissertation as a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University and in the secondary field of Film Studies at Harvard’s Visual and Environmental Studies, specializing in issues of ethnicity, post-colonialism, otherness, and narratology, as well as literary and filmic representations of Blackness, Jewishness and Germanness. She received her BA and two MA degrees from Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania, where she had a double major in German Language and Literature and English Language and Literature. She spent a year as a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard University, where she was attached to the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations. She received her MA in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. She is the recipient of grants and awards from Soros Foundation for an Open Society (1993), Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (1993), Fulbright (1999), YIVO Institute for Jewish Research (2002, 2005), Harvard Center for Jewish Studies (2002, 2005), Congress for Jewish Culture (2005), Harvard University Comparative Literature (2005), Harvard Graduate Society (2007). She is also the multiple recipient of the Derek Bok Award for Excellence in Teaching at Harvard University (2004-2007). During her residence at the Du Bois Institute, she will be working on her manuscript entitled Framed! Storytelling and the Encounter with the “Other”, in which she examines literary and filmic representations of Blackness by Jewish-American and German authors, as well as depictions of the German and Jewish-American “Other” in African-American fiction and film.

Project

“Framed! The ‘Other’ Subject in Jewish-American, African American, and German Fiction and the Narrative War for Direct Discourse”

Debates of writers like Irving Howe and Ralph Ellison on the notions of the exact moral and literary dimensions of “speaking for another” have galvanized a vast body of literary output. Not only are the questions they raised still valid today—but they have also long been at the core of literary representations of encounters with the “Other”, both before and outside the immediate geo-political reverberations of famous debate. This project brings under a comparative lens the literary works by African-American, Jewish-American, and German authors that consciously take on the task of representing characters and positions recognizably (and often visibly) different from their own, particularly across cultural, ethnic, and racial lines. By focusing on the figure of the “Other”, against the background of the cultural and political phenomena of slavery, (post-) colonialism, and the Civil Rights movement, this project examines the intersection of frame narratives, on the one hand, and the fiction of racial and ethnic encounters, on the other. Works by Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E.W. Harper, William Wells Brown are considered along with those by Jewish-American writers (Bellow, Malamud and Paley), and German authors (Keller, Hauptmann and Grimm), to investigate questions about the relationship between the figure of the ethnic other, literacy among Negroes, Hebrews, or Germans as access to the text, and literacy as reading and interpretive practices. Finally, the project opens up to works in other media, such as film. By examining frame narratives across the realm of verbal and visual language—or language in general—this project points to conclusions that are much more fundamental to the human experience in and with Literature as well as with Art.