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City versus Village: Central European and American Perspectives

As part of its framework research programme The Intellectual History of the City conducted by its director, Ferenc Hörcher (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest), an international conference took place at the Institute of Philosophy of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in October 2017 with the title Modern Capitals and Historical Peripheries – Central Europe from the Perspective of Contested Modernities .1 It was organized by Gábor Kovács (Hungarian academy of Sciences, Budapest) and Tomas Kačerauskas (Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Vilnius) within a bilateral project supported by the Lithuanian and Hungarian Academies of Sciences, entitled Conceptions of ‘Creative City’ within Central Europe. Historical Images and Empirical Indices, in cooperation also with the Anglo-American Institute of the University of Debrecen represented by Ágnes Györke . In its Call for Papers, the aim of the Conference was formulated in the following way: ‘The planned conference is going to deal with the philosophical, historical, literary, and visual representations of the classical cultural dichotomy of urban centre versus the forgotten countryside in twentieth-century art, culture, and the humanities within an interdisciplinary framework .’ The accepted speakers’ papers tackled this issue from a variety of perspectives, ranging from the history of philosophy, the history of political thought to the different cultural studies, including literary and film studies. Here we present only two samples of these papers, revised for the present printed publication, offered as tasters in a somewhat random way of these exchanges of the exciting recapitulations and (re)constructions of the region’s past and present debates on modern urbanization processes and their advantages and/or misgivings . As the Conference took place in Budapest, the papers published below deal particularly with the intellectual history of Hungary, one concentrating on the Communist period of the country, while the other one is a comparative exercise, analysing a Hungarian and a contemporary North American author from the interwar period, in the context of the Spengler-inspired style of cultural criticism .