Abstract:

In twenty-first century Europe the issue of majority/minority conflicts, national identity, and different forms of intercultural communication have become more and more foregrounded. Hungarian identity is a complex problematic in itself because Hungary suffered a serious historical trauma as a result of the 1921 Trianon treaties, in which Székely-Hungarians present an interesting case. This ethnic group had always had an identity of its own in Transylvania. However, the post-Trianon situation differs in that while formerly the Székelys defined themselves and claimed self-determination within (Hungarian) culture, they now found themselves in a multicultural world, in which no permissive multiculturality was allowed in the sense we conceive multiculturalism today. They were trapped in an antagonistic intercultural situation, where the borders were redrawn around them so that without leaving their homeland they nevertheless became beyond-the-borders citizens, which has led them to the need to apply various identitymanagement strategies. Post-Trianon Székely literature documents this very struggle of intercultural communication and identity-management strategies. Paradoxically, Transylvanian literature owes its existence as an autonomous entity to Trianon. It is by examining literary texts by Áron Tamási, Rózsa Ignácz, and György Bözödi that I am going to set up a typology of identity-management as reflected in the literature under discussion, a typology which this literature would not yield through traditional critical methods, and one which could be helpful in dealing not only with Székely literature in particular, but with contemporary European intercultural communicative crises in general.

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