The Utopian Vision of Sándor Szathmári:

http://www.thinktwiceradio.com/dumain/dumain.html

Hello everyone!  Here are some resources in preparation for Thursday’s seminar:

Ralph Dumain on the “two cultures” and “warring dichotomies” of the mid-twentieth century:

http://gxirafo.blogspot.com/2013/02/transhumanism-in-1930s-szathmari-bernal.html

Dumain’s bibliography: “Futurology, Science Fiction, Utopia, and Alienation in the Work of Imre Madách, György Lukács, and Other Hungarian Writers”:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/bib/utopia_hungarian.html

Sándor Szathmári’s epilogue to Voyage to Kazohinia, translated by Ralph Dumain:

http://www.autodidactproject.org/my/szathmari_epilogue.html

Join us on Thursday, March 7 for a discussion with Ralph Dumain on Voyage to Kazohinia!

Ralph Dumain will be leading a discussion on Sándor Szathmári‘s Hungarian utopian novel Voyage to Kazohinia— a novel written in the tradition of Swift and Gulliver’s Travels. Voyage to Kazohinia is a cult classic that has only recently been made available in English.

We will be meeting at the CUNY Graduate Center at 4:15 on Thursday, March 7, in room 3209. 

There’s a copy on reserve at the GC library or you can purchase your own copy on Amazon here: http://www.amazon.com/Voyage-to-Kazohinia-ebook/dp/B0076PGN6C/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1362018192&sr=1-1&keywords=voyage+to+kazohinia

Some information about our speaker, Ralph Dumain:

Ralph Dumain is a librarian and independent researcher, living in Washington, DC. In 1991 he became librarian/archivist of the C.L.R. James Institute in New York, founded by Jim Murray (1949-2003) to document James’s life and work. Murray’s roots were in the political and cultural activism of the ’60s and ’70s, and the Institute continued in the same spirit, with the aim of making James’s work available to all researchers and the wider public, remaining outside and independent of academia and other traditional institutional forms. This ideal is also reflected in Dumain’s unusual website, The Autodidact Project, which publishes original bibliographies, research guides, and varied writings by Dumain himself, as well as a wide range of writings by others, famous, obscure, or forgotten, providing study material and perspectives that might not otherwise come to the attention of both formally and self-educated readers. Dumain began to teach himself Esperanto as a high school student; a year and a half later he translated Sándor Szathmári’s novella “Vincenzo” into English. In 1987, Esperanto’s centennial, Dumain co-founded the World Atheist Esperanto Organisation (Ateista Tutmonda Esperanto-Organizo; ATEO). Dumain has published in both Esperanto and English, has translated here and there, and has lectured and been interviewed both on C.L.R. James and the social history of Esperanto.