Is it the viewpoint that matters? „local” and „global” in the reception of a Mora volume

Abstract

Terézia Mora’s volume of short stories, Különös anyag (Strange Matter), presented at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1999 (where Hungary was the guest of honor and Hungarian literature was the central theme), was very intensively received. The German reception was enthusiastic about the work and defined its problems as a local theme (concretely the theme of the Austro-Hungarian border region), while the more restrained Hungarian reception interpreted it as a global theme. On a semiotic-literary sociological basis it is examined in this paper, how those perceptual and thinking patterns are organized that show „strange matter” as either local or global.