CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Berecz, Ágoston |
|---|---|
| Title | Chapter from the Political Life of Names: The Nationalisation of Names and Naming in Dualist Hungary |
| Summary | The thesis investigates conflicting nationalisation projects, visions of national histories and state Magyarisation policies in Dualist Hungary (1867–1918) from the perspective of proper names, naming and renaming. Transylvania, the Banat and the eastern confines of historical Hungary proper make up the narrower focus of research, where dominant or non-dominant national elites jockeyed to popularise Romanian, Hungarian and German historical imaginaries, set to come into collision with one another. The thesis makes a case for proper names as ideal objects of research in the quest for such imaginaries and their social pathways. Since proper names lack lexical meaning, they have served as privileged projection screens for historical visions and as ideal sites for negotiating, affirming and representing identifications with the nation. My scope here is analogous to that of a whole spate of recent research that has interrogated public monuments, ceremonies and holidays from the perspective of nation formation, and the thesis even intersects with this research paradigm at the study of commemorative street names, which can be understood as verbal public monuments. Like the best recent crop of this paradigm, it also engages with popular responses, and the sources have in many a case allowed to assess how far the related imaginaries resonated with broader publics. The analysis is undertaken at three levels, which alternate in the course of the thesis: practices, usages, processes and acts of naming as the second-order social; discourses, perceptions, fantasies and myths related to names as the third-order social and policies of renaming. The basic structure follows the historical subject matter, the thesis also offers more generally valid considerations and research designs for the socio-historical study of names. |
| Supervisor | Trencsényi, Balázs; Janowski, Maciej |
| Department | History PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/berecz_agoston.pdf |
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