Category Archives: Events

Events, Invitations

BCLT Book Launch

Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages

Monday 11 December 2023
4 – 6pm (GMT)
Online (Hybrid) and UEA Campus: JSC 1.03

Register to watch the event ONLINE

In this hybrid (in-person / online) book launch seminar, co-authors Matthew Reynolds (St Anne’s, Oxford), Eugenia Kelbert (UEA), Jernej Habjan (Ljubljana) and Kayvan Tahmasebian (SOAS, London) will be discussing Prismatic Jane Eyre, which is available as an open access download from Open Book Publishers.

Hear about the interesting book and meet one of its co-authors, our new colleague Eugenia Kelbert Rudan. She joined our institute on November 1, 2023, to work on the project TRANSLATION AND CROSS-LINGUAL STYLISTIC TRANSFER: TOWARDS A THEORY OF LANGUAGE CONTACT IN LITERATURE (funded by the grant scheme IMPULZ of SAS).

The event is co-hosted by BCLT, UEA East Centre, Institute of World Literature (Slovak Academy of Sciences) and Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation.

Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and first published in 1847, has been translated more than six hundred times into over sixty languages. Prismatic Jane Eyre argues that we should see these many re-writings, not as simple replications of the novel, but as a release of its multiple interpretative possibilities: in other words, as a prism.

Prismatic Jane Eyre develops the theoretical ramifications of this idea, and reads Brontë’s novel in the light of them: together, the English text and the many translations form one vast entity, a multilingual world-work, spanning many times and places, from Cuba in 1850 to 21st-century China; from Calcutta to Bologna, Argentina to Iran. Co-written by many scholars, Prismatic Jane Eyre traces the receptions of the novel across cultures Continue reading →

Presidium of the SAS awarded personalities of the Institute of World Literature

Events

Our colleagues Jana Cviková and Roman Mikuláš have been awarded distinguished academic awards from the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

On Wednesday, October 25, 2023, our colleagues Jana Cviková and Roman Mikuláš accepted  distinguished academic awards from the SAS Vice-President Miroslav T. Morovics. Jana Cviková, the editor of the journal World Literature Studies and scientific secretary of the Institute of World Literature, was awarded the SAS Memorial Plaque by the SAS Equal Opportunity Committee. Roman Mikuláš, head of the Department of Literary Theory and editor of the Hyperlexicon of Concepts and Categories in Literary Studies, received the Ľudovít Štúr Plaque of Honour SAS for his contribution to the humanities and social sciences. Congratulations!

Read more here.

Guest Lecture: Peripherocentrism – Geopolitics of Comparative Literatures between Ethnocentrism and Cosmopolitanism

Events, Invitations

Prof. Dr. Marko Juvan
(Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)

26 April 2023 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS (conference room + online)

Organisers:
Institute of World Literature SAS in cooperation with Czech and Slovak Association of Comparative Literature 

Regardless of its actual position in the world-system, each national literary ecology typically perceives its position as the cognitive center. In this respect, peripheral literatures fall into what might be called “peripherocentrism.” As a narrative discourse that shapes collective memory, national literary history is essentially ethnocentric, but it is, especially in so-called small literatures, a gesture of worlding, that is, of imagined self-location in the literary world-system. Comparative literature emerged at a time when ethnocentric literary histories dominated both global centers and peripheries. In its early and classical phase, comparative literature aimed to overcome national parochialism. Nevertheless, recent research has exposed the Eurocentric and ethnocentric orientation of cosmopolitan concepts, including Goethe’s idea of world literature. The literary world-system channels interliterary exchange in ways that correspond to the economic inequality between centers and perihepries. In addition to writers, literary historians themselves depend on the global status of their language and literature. Consequently, comparatists tend to incorporate their cosmopolitan perspectives and methods into ethnocentric, even nationalist agendas: they world their home literature through cross-national comparisons and argue for their geopolitical prestige. The comparatists of the core countries  consolidate the world-systemic dominance of their literatures, while the comparatists of the periphery attempt to place the internationally lesser-known literary production of their homelands – which they nonetheless consider central in their peripherocentrism – in the virtuality of world literature.

Marko Juvan is  a member of Academia Europaea, a senior researcher at the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, a professor of literary theory and Slovenian literature at the University of Ljubljana, and a member of the ICLA Executive Committee. His recent publications on genre theory, intertextuality, literary geography, Slovenian Romanticism, and world literature include History and Poetics of Intertextuality (Purdue University Press, 2008), Literary Studies in Reconstruction (Peter Lang, 2011), Prostori slovenske književnosti (ed., Založba ZRC, 2016), Hibridni žanri (LUD Literatura, 2017; Serbian translation 2019), Worlding a Peripheral Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Med majem ’68 in novembrom ’89: Transformacije sveta, literature in teorije (ed., Založba ZRC, 2021).

Link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82801435424?pwd=MThxbkRDc1pWUFM3ZHB3YzJHR294dz09
Meeting ID: 828 0143 5424
Passcode: 483164

Guest Lecture: Born to Write Another Language. Between Cognitive Constraint and Translingual Aesthetics

Events
Eugenia Kelbert Rudan. FOTO - ARCHÍV
Eugenia Kelbert Rudan. FOTO – ARCHÍV

Dr. Eugenia Kelbert
(University of East Anglia)

21 September 2022 (Wednesday) at 14:00
Institut of World Literature SAS + online

Link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84450735380?pwd=Nk1RaW5iTjQ3cjNjblEzSUpQYmRQUT09
Meeting ID: 844 5073 5380
Passcode: 321895

Literature written on the margins of linguistic proficiency has, paradoxically, served as a catalyst for debates on issues of minor literature, postmonolingualism, untranslatability, and world literature for some decades. Translingualism, or literature written in a non-native language, is an extreme embodiment of this trend that has already provoked several prize committees into awarding highest institutional honours to authors writing in a language not their own.

Yet what is the secret to the work of Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Romain Gary, Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera and, more recently, Andreï Makine, Eva Hoffman and numerous others? If mastery of a second language is achieved through imitation of native speakers, how can the pinnacle of such a process possibly amount to an original style?

This talk considers this question in conjunction with a related one – why now? Translingual literature has a very long history, but it is only starting with the twentieth century that it has become a literary phenomenon, allegedly marginal yet, increasingly, both recognised and emulated. With the advent of modernism, a changed attitude to language has made translingualism, it argues, into one of the more prominent strands within a new aesthetic, which has continued to develop steadily to this day.

Translation Studies in Ukraine as an Integral Part of European Context

Events, Invitations

logaInternational Scientific Conference
(12 – 13 May 2022)
Venue:
Filozofická fakulta UK, Bratislava + online

On the 24 February 5,00 am, the whole world was shocked and shattered by the unimaginably cruel Russian aggression in Ukraine. Such war – in the 21st century and on the European continent – is a direct assault on core European values of democracy, freedom, and the respect for human rights. In the light of the current situation, the organizers of this event as researchers in Translation Studies and practicing translators and interpreters find it their duty to help disseminate the results of research into translation done in Ukraine and by doing so support their deep conviction that Ukraine shares European values and is – and has always been – an integral part of Europe.
The goal of this event is to present the current state of Translation Studies in Ukraine so as to make clear the fact that its culture – literature, art, research, education – is an inherent part of the European context.

Read more HERE.
The conference programme can be found HERE.
Participation in the conference is free, all participants must register here: https://forms.gle/8PE4oayFh5zeA6eK9.

Anders Pettersson: On the Concept of World Literature

Events

anderspetterssonOn the Concept of World Literature
Anders Pettersson
online guest lecture
6 April 2022 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET

The expression “world literature” is currently being used in several ways: about various culturally and temporally inclusive bodies of literature and about various ways of studying such literature. In the lecture, special attention will be devoted to the editorial concept of world literature in The Cambridge History of World Literature (2021) edited by Debjani Ganguly. Formulations about world literature sometimes cast it as a mind-independent entity, sometimes as a scholarly construction. Anders Pettersson will argue that the choice between these alternatives is important, since it has significant consequences for the logic of thinking and reasoning about world literature.

knihyAnders Pettersson is an emeritus professor of Swedish and comparative literature at Umeå University, Sweden. Continue reading Anders Pettersson: On the Concept of World Literature →

International conference: Translation, Interpreting and Culture

Events

Bez názvu22–24 September 

 

 

We invite you to the international conference Translation, Interpreting and Culture 2: Rehumanising Translation and Interpreting Studies, which will take place from Wednesday 22 to Friday 24 September 2021 in Banská Bystrica – with in-person and online participation (youtube without registration in program).

Keynote speakers: Jan Pedersen Rehumanising Subtitling – Why humans make better subtitles than machines / Susan Bassnett The Translational Imagination / Lawrence Venuti On a Universal Tendency to Debase Retranslations; or, The Instrumentalism of a Translation Fixation / Nadja Grbić “The rigid, the fuzzy, and the flexible” Perceptions of the interpreter (not only) in the digital age

The detailed conference program can be found HERE.

For further information, please visit the conference website.

Fascism through the lens of translation: a comparative study of four regimes

Events

Christopher Rundle_(500x500)_BWChristopher Rundle
(University of Bologna and University of Manchester)
Online guest lecture
Wednesday 9th June 2021 at 14.00

In this guest lecture I shall compare four fascist regimes through the lens of translation: Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, Francoist Spain and Salazarist Portugal. The comparison will focus on books, because this is the field in which significant differences emerge; while policies concerning cinema and theatre, for example, tend to resemble each other more and so do not provide such an illuminating point of comparison. My analysis will be made around key themes which I consider to be particularly revealing and significant; these are: censorship policies, the role of popular literature and racism. My aim will be to show how the role that translation played within each regime can be seen as an indicator of how genuinely fascist it actually was; I intend to show that policies specifically aimed at restricting translations (as opposed to monitoring literature in general) only occurred in those regimes which adopted official racism; also that where restrictions against translation were put in place these were at least in part prompted by hostility towards popular fiction which was widely perceived as a foreign (and corrupting) import.

To conclude, I will reflect on the relationship between translation history and history, as it emerges from this case study on fascism, and consider some of the methodological implications.

Connection: https://zoom.us/j/95948500391?pwd=TnVDSVJRUTZ0WWtlOWcvZjM0TzVjZz09
Meeting ID: 959 4850 0391
Passcode: 861947

Christopher Rundle is associate professor in Translation Studies at the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna, Italy. Continue reading Fascism through the lens of translation: a comparative study of four regimes →

Eugenia Kelbert Rudan: Romain Gary’s Collaborative Self-Translation and the Translational

Events

kelbertOnline talk
Dr. Eugenia Kelbert Rudan, University of East Anglia
Wednesday 26th May 2021 at 14.00

This talk focuses on the possibility of translational processes beyond translation through a genetic editing approach to an understudied phenomenon in translation studies, which I call collaborative self-translation (CST), i.e. a self-translator’s practice of involving a hired translator to provide an initial translation of an entire work, later to be revised extensively by the author. With a focus on Romain Gary and to a lesser extent Vladimir Nabokov as its case studies, it argues that an inductive extension of our notion of the translational can shed light on the ways in which our notions of the translational may meaningfully extend beyond translation and thus offer a pathway to distinguishing between literal and metaphorical use of translation in literary theory. It thus suggests a potential alternative to existing translational discourse in interdisciplinary settings, as well as presenting a view of collaborative self-translation as a practice that can be fruitfully theorized within multiple paradigms in translation studies.

Dr. Eugenia Kelbert Rudan is Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at British Centre for Literary Translation at University of East Anglia and Assistant Professor of Philology at HSE University, Moscow (currently on leave). She studied philosophy and translation studies at the Sorbonne, French and German at University of Oxford, and comparative literature at Yale. Her PhD dissertation, „Acquiring a Second Language Literature: Patterns in Translingual Writing from Modernism to the Moderns“ (2015) under the supervision of Haun Saussy and Vladimir Alexandrov, was awarded the Charles Bernheimer Prize by the American Comparative Literature Association. She is an active member of the Centre for Multilingualism at University of Oslo (MultiLing), DARIAH Belgrade Centre for Digital Humanities (CDH), and ITEM CNRS (Institut de textes et manuscripts modernes, team Multilinguisme, traduction, création) in Paris. She co-developed Bukvik, an original collaborative tool for Digital Humanities research and cross-lingual stylistic analysis, http://bukvik.litterra.net/.

FOTO – https://complit.yale.edu/

Lit_cast Slowakei with Adam Bžoch

Adam BžochLit_cast Slowakei is the first podcast about Slovak literature in German hosted by Michal Hvorecký. This podcast is designed
for people who are interested in the life
of Slovak books in German speaking countries. In the 14th edition of Lit_cast Slowakei Michal Hvorecký talks with Adam Bžoch, literary scholar, Germanist, Dutch language scholar and translator from German and Dutch literature who currently works at the Institue of World Literature at SAS. He taught at universities
in Bratislava, Ružomberok and Trnava. In 2020, he was a visiting scholar at the Viennese International Research Center for Cultural Studies. You can listen to it here.