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In the article, Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses the history of the discipline of comparative literature in the context of other fields in the humanities such as the history of literature, world literatures, cultural studies, comparative cultural studies, and digital humanities. Tötösy de Zepetnek argues that comparative literature as a discipline is experiencing a revival in some parts of the world outside of Europe and Anglophone scholarship and that this suggests a corrective measure regarding the historical Euro-US-American hegemony of the discipline. Tötösy de Zepetnek’s principal argument is that the comparative and contextual approach practiced in interdisciplinarity, employing new media technology, and following tenets of comparative cultural studies could achieve the social relevance of the humanities today.

In their article \"Electronic Journals, Prestige, and the Economics of Academic Journal Publishing\" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Joshua Jia discuss the current state of the academic journal publishing industry. The current state of the industry is an oligopoly based on a double appropriation model where academics produce work for at no cost only to have publishers earn significant profit margins by selling the work back to academics. Publishers are able to do this given the price inelasticity and weak bargaining power of its main consumer, university libraries. Publishers' ability to increase prices is also supported by what the authors term as the \"prestige multiplier effect\" and the \"prestige crowd-out effect\" which means the tendency for libraries to cut small publishers as large publishers raise prices because large publishers are more prestigious. To date, the usage of electronic journals has not changed this general model. Tötösy de Zepetnek and Jia argue that in order to progress towards a more equitable model of knowledge management allowing for the dissemination of knowledge globally and against the \"colonialism of knowledge\" a change in attitude and practices is required not only by publishers, but also by academics. Once perception changes and electronic journals obtain prestige, the publishing of scholarship electronically will replace or will be at least parallel to the prestige of print journals.

In his article \"Digital Humanities and Publishing a Learned Journal\" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses digital humanities and the publishing scholarship online in the context of the politics of publishing scholarship specifically as it pertains to humanities. Funding for the publishing of humanities scholarship remains constricted worldwide whether in print or digital and the standard remains to publish journals by subscription fees. Based on his argumentation against the \"colonialism of knowledge,\" Tötösy de Zepetnek argues for the publishing of humanities scholarship against subscription-based or author-pay models. Further, he presents suggestions as to the how-s of the founding of a digital humanities journal and suggestions to authors to consider when submitting a paper for publication in a digital journal.

In his article \"Kaffka's (1880-1918) Life Writing and Objection to the War\" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses the Hungarian author's poems, diary entries, and fictional texts. While Kaffka's importance as one of the most influential writers in modern Hungarian literature is recognized, her oeuvre as proto-feminist writing has only been studied only since the 1990s. Further, Kaffka's anti-war writing has not been explored except in a few isolated instances. Tötösy de Zepetnek elaborates Kaffka's objection to the war as seen in her poetry published in 1914 and in her diaries and correspondence and argues that Kaffka's objection to the war as early as in August 1914 is significant because in most instances the war was embraced by Hungary's educated strata including its leftist circles. Thus Kaffka's modernist writing including her proto-feminist, anti-war, and in a few instances erotic writing is an exception in modern Hungarian literature.

In his article \"Nádas's A Book of Memories and Central European Journeys\" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek discusses theoretical, literary, political, social, etc., aspects of travel in Péter Nádas's novel. \"Travel\" in the novel represents both a conceptual and lived experience at a time when travel between the East and the West in Europe was restricted and when a person hailing from the \"East\" considered a journey to the West a complex and ideological matter. Further, the aspect of urbanity, that is, cultural and social spaces and the journey and what such entails in terms of ideology, points of origin, knowledge, and the individual's perceptions of \"locus\" are also discussed in the context of Hungarian, East German, and Hungarian Jewish literature. While in today's postcommunist 1989 order of Europe Nádas's text would be read in the context of history, the theme of travel by Hungarians to cities such as Vienna, Paris, Rome, or Berlin has been and remains a prominent genre in Hungarian, as well as Central European literature in general.

In his article \"A Case Study of (Inter)medial Participation\" Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek presents survey data followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis about the daily intake of media in cultural participation. The survey data of the study are the result of questionnaires conducted 2001-2002 with advanced undergraduate students enrolled in media and communication studies at Northeastern University and with advanced undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Halle-Wittenberg. As the survey was conducted in 2001-2002, the data and the analysis have \"historical\" relevance with regard to (inter)medial cultural participation in the digital age. The data are from a mid-size urban setting (Boston, USA) and from a provincial urban setting of the then just over ten-year old former East Germany (Halle, Germany). The data and the analysis suggest that (inter)medial participation and practices in the two different settings do not differ significantly.

The studies presented in the collected volume Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies -- edited by Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek and Louise O. Vasvári -- are intended as an addition to scholarship in (comparative) cultural studies. More specifically, the articles represent scholarship about Central and East European culture with special attention to Hungarian culture, literature, cinema, new media, and other areas of cultural expression. On the landscape of scholarship in Central and East Europe (including Hungary), cultural studies has acquired at best spotty interest and studies in the volume aim at forging interest in the field. The volume's articles are in five parts: part one, \"History Theory and Methodology of Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies,\" include studies on the prehistory of multicultural and multilingual Central Europe, where vernacular literatures were first institutionalized for developing a sense of national identity. Part two, \"Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Literature and Culture\" is about the re-evaluation of canonical works, as well as Jewish studies which has been explored inadequately in Central European scholarship. Part three, \"Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Other Arts,\" includes articles on race, jazz, operetta, and art, fin-de-siècle architecture, communist-era female fashion, and cinema. In part four, \"Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies and Gender,\" articles are about aspects of gender and sex(uality) with examples from fin-de-siècle transvestism, current media depictions of heterodox sexualities, and gendered language in the workplace. The volume's last section, part five, \"Comparative Hungarian Cultural Studies of Contemporary Hungary,\" includes articles about post-1989 issues of race and ethnic relations, citizenship and public life, and new media.

“Systems Theories and the Study of Literature and Culture” introduces the ACLA Forum on systemic and empirical approaches for the study of literature and culture. While both micro- and macro-systemic approaches have been prominent in the study of literature and culture in European scholarship since at least the 1980s, these approaches remain under-utilized in humanities scholarship in the U.S. This essay provides definitions or tenets of systemic and empirical frameworks for the study of literature and culture and aims to show how these approaches highlight the social relevance of the study of literature.