John Neubauer's Cultural Geographies

Abstract

I met János almost half a century ago at Amherst College Massachusetts, my memory now being that I was the more frightened of two young men at the tail-end of the great American wave of Macarthyism. The Sixties (we didn't yet know they would be blazing) thrust us into an Anglo-Saxon collegiate environment flourishing in the then pristine Connecticut Valley. János now approaches seventy, a distinguished literary historian whose work is known on both sides of the big pond and, more recently, further east to the Balkans. It is difficult for me to think of him apart from the thread of our lives and – more specifically – outside the friendship we have enjoyed over five decades. The point is also central to his notion of literary history as something occurring within specific cultural geographies or set of transcultural migrations.