Our colleague Dr. Dobrota Pucherová, D. Phil. has been awarded a prize by the Slovak Academy of Sciences for her monograph FEMINISM AND MODERNITY IN ANGLOPHONE AFRICAN WOMEN’S WRITING: A 21ST-CENTURY GLOBAL CONTEXT (Routledge, 2022). She accepted the prize at the prize ceremony on Sept. 18, 2023 from the hands of Prof. RNDr. Pavol Šajgalík, DrSc., President of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and Prof. RNDr. Peter Samuely, DrSc., Vice-President for sience, research and innovations. Congratulations!
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Invitation to the third conference on translation studies
Bratislava, Slovakia
20 – 22 September 2023
For more information about the conference visit the webpage.
Read full-texts of the journal World Literature Studies based on the previous conferences here:
The image of Persian women in Russian travelogues in the 19th century
Dr. Elaheh Karimi Riabi
(Asst. Prof. in University of Tehran, NSP scholarship holder in Slovak Academy of Science)
13 September 2023 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institut of World Literature SAS + online
Travelogues are significant sources of knowledge about the culture, rituals, customs, geography, and climate of nations. Although travelogues contain valuable information about nations, countries, and civilizations, they are at times affected by the hegemon’s viewpoints about the status of the concerned society, turning them into strategic tools for the purposeful study of that society. Although the 19th century is marked by the rivalry of Western powers over winning the Persian kings and usurpation of their natural resources, Persia has never been formally colonized. The fact has led to the Western indirect intervention in the country in the disguise of visitors, merchants, orientalists, and spies, giving way to a plethora of travelogues we have today on Persia. The postcolonial literature with its significant figures including Edward Said indicates that texts are not void of meaning. As such, travelogues carry a general message about the colonies that label them with backward, primitive, feudal, and pre-industrial badges. In these texts, the colonized is characterized by passivity rather than agency. Here, the East is framed within a Western perspective and the resulting generalization leaves the colonized bereft of human dignity. The present research is an analysis of Persian women’s images in literary texts (travelogues) of the 19th century with an imagological approach. As a postcolonial investigation, it is the first of its kind to deal with women’s images in Persia. The purpose of the case study of the travelogues by Stanislav Yulyevic Lomnitskii (1854 – 1916) and Egor Ivanovich Cherikov (1804 – 1862) is to shed a critical light on his postcolonial discourse that presents Persia and the Persians as the “other” to the Russian “self”.
Link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83093995890?pwd=S040elpKTit6OStzdmJxNEZQZytodz09
Meeting ID: 830 9399 5890
Passcode: 322674
CfP World Literature Studies 2/2024 Interdiscursive communication between literature and bioethics
Editors: Bogumiła Suwara (The Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava), Jana Tomašovičová (The Faculty of Arts, University of Ss. Cyril and Methodius in Trnava)
On the background of the concept of interdiscursive relations and the concept of narrative bioethics, we are currently witnessing a gradual dissolution and opening of the boundaries between different scientific and artistic discourses. The topic of this monothematic issue is to explore these shifts through the example of interdisciplinary communication between literature and bioethics. The relationship between literature and bioethics has largely been reflected from the point of the traditional biomedical relationship between doctor and patient. In the present day, however, bioethics is an interdisciplinary field that actively engages with the studies of culture, art, and the humanities, but also with the natural sciences and biomedicine. In contrast to the common ethical issues in medicine, modern biomedical technologies reveal entirely new topics to literature, such as preimplantation genetic diagnostics, regenerative medicine, gene editing, or human enhancement, which are becoming increasingly recurring motifs in contemporary literature, film, and visual arts. They are also examples of the mutual opening of discourses and the emergence of a new interdisciplinary area, which includes narrative bioethics. The moral dilemmas emerging in the context of accelerated technological development affect not only the individual but also the society. These dilemmas need to be captured in their complexity, and that is why the approach of extending purely rational ethical discourse and logical argumentation to include humanistic perspectives and narrative aspects is proving to be particularly fruitful.
Please email your abstracts (maximum 3,600 characters) to the volume editors at bsuwara@gmail.com, jana.tomasovicova@ucm.sk and a copy to usvlwlit@savba.sk
by 8 October 2023.
Read more HERE.
Róbert Gáfrik´s guest lecture at the first world literature centre in India
Our colleague, the comparatist Róbert Gáfrik, visited the Centre for the Study of World Literature at the International Institute of Information Technology Bhubaneswar in the Indian state of Urisa in August 2023. This is the first centre dedicated to world literature in India, it was founded by Dr. Lipika Das in 2022. Róbert Gafrik is a member of its advisory board. On August 23, he delivered a guest lecture titled “The Concept and Objectives of World Literature”. The lecture organized in collaboration between IIIT Bhubaneswar and the Centre for Asian Studies was introduced by Professor Jatindra Kumar Nayak.
The local newspaper, The Political and Business Daily, reported on this comparative event. Read here: http://pbdodisha.in/Bhubaneswar-25th-August-Friday-2023.
A new publication on translation studies in Ukraine in the European context
The violence and inhumanity of Russia’s war in Ukraine, with hospitals under fire, innocent civilians mercilessly killed, and a possible threat of nuclear war, put a definitive end to the false feeling of security enjoyed by Europe since the Yugoslav wars. A war of such scale, taking place in the twenty-first century and on the European continent, cannot be perceived as anything other than a direct assault on core values of democracy, freedom, and human rights. Thus, maintaining a friendly dialog with people around the world is now more important than ever to prevent further tragedies. Translation in all its forms is the key practice that can facilitate mutual understanding, which is vital if we are to hand down the planet to further generations in a habitable state.
The collection of studies entitled Translation Studies in Ukraine as an Integral Part of the European Context contains fifteen studies in English and German and is divided into five thematic parts: Thoughts and Reflections; On Historical Justice in Translation Studies; On Methodological Aspects of Translation; On Linguistic Aspects of Translation; On Trauma and Manipulation. The sections open with papers by leading academics in the field of translation studies. This volume is a collection of papers from the eponymous conference held in Bratislava on May 12–13, 2022. It was attended by scholars with immediate ties with Ukraine, and numerous representatives from all major translation schools in Ukraine and also translation studies experts from all around the world.
We found it our duty to help disseminate the knowledge about translation research in Ukraine and, by doing so, reinforce our deepest conviction that Ukraine shares European values and is – and has always been – an integral part of Europe.
The publication was produced within the project VEGA 2/0166/19 Preklad ako súčasť dejín
kultúrneho procesu III. Preklad a prekladanie – texty, osobnosti, inštitúcie v interdiscipli-
nárnych a transdisciplinárnych vzťahoch/Translation as part of the cultural process history III. Translation and translating – texts, personalities, institutions in inter- and transdisciplinary relations.
Full text is HERE.
World Literature Studies 2/2023: The Many Faces of Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Narratives
ed. by Ana María Fraile-Marcos, Universidad de Salamanca
Resilience, the capacity to adapt to adversity and rebound, has become a ubiquitous and contested concept, yet approaches to it from the field of literary criticism are still scarce. This issue contributes to filling in this gap by probing current narratives, from which resilience emerges as a central multifaceted paradigm allowing to apprehend contemporary reality and subjectivity. The ten articles gathered here interrogate the global currency of notions of resilience, while mapping an aesthetics of critical resilience that opens new paths to knowledge, hope, and positive agency.
BELÉN MARTÍN-LUCAS
Resilience and healing in the slums of Manila: Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn
Lantern Maker
MARISOL MORALES-LADRÓN
Embodying the mother, disembodying the icon: Female resistance
in Colm Tóibín’s The Testament of Mary
MIRIAM BORHAM-PUYAL
Nurses, mothers, sisters: Relational resilience and healing vulnerability
in Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder and The Pull of the Stars
LUCÍA LÓPEZ-SERRANO
Subverting resilience in the psychiatric ward: Finding the good death
in Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows
PETER ARNDS
From defeat to resilience: The human cockroach in world literature after Kafka
SARA CASCO-SOLÍS
Socio-ecological resilience in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People
VICENT CUCARELLA-RAMON
Resilience and ethics of care against racial capitalism in David Chariandy’s Brother
MARTINA HORÁKOVÁ
Words that matter: Yindyamarra, Wiradjuri resilience and the settler-colonial
project in Tara June Winch’s The Yield
SILVIA MARTÍNEZ-FALQUINA
Violence, relation and beauty in Toni Jensen’s “Women in the Fracklands”
KENDRA REYNOLDS
Re-examining the “Hero’s Journey”: A critical reflection on literature selection
for affective bibliotherapy programs on resilience
CHARLES SABATOS
Robert B. Pynsent’s contributions to the study of Slovak literature
The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.
Guest Lecture: Peripherocentrism – Geopolitics of Comparative Literatures between Ethnocentrism and Cosmopolitanism
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
New poetics and Russian prose of the early 21st century
Mária Kusá
Ivan Posokhin
(eds.)
Russian prose of the early 21st century, as one of the last refuges for freedom of expression in Putin’s militant Russia, has gone through several poetological and thematological transformations. The studies in this issue, originating from the post-socialist cultural spaces, present a “sideways glance” at the key names and works of this period, reflect changes in literary paradigms, approach traditional categories such as literary space or plot in the framework of existential poetics, (re)interpret ways of presenting one’s own identity and images of the Other, and present the reception of Russian prose in the current wartime circumstances.
JAKUB KAPIČIAK – HELENA ULBRECHTOVÁ
Postmemorial sincerity in the writing of Sergei Lebedev and Maria Stepanova
MAXIM DULEBA – IRINA DULEBOVÁ
Metamodern urban experience in the anthology of topophilic prose V Pitere zhit’
TÜNDE SZABÓ
The symbolization of the fragmented plot structure in Ludmila Ulitskaya’s novels
MONIKA SIDOR
From Kyiv to Brisbane: Evgenii Vodolazkin’s reflections on spiritual identity in the context
of space
GANNA MEREZHYNSKA – OLENA VASYLEVYCH
The image of the Other as a reflection of cultural identity (a case study of Russian postmodern prose and dramaturgy)
IVAN POSOKHIN
Transformations in the perception of Russian literature after February 24, 2022
ANNA ZELENKOVÁ – AGNIESZKA JANIEC-NYITRAI
The Central European path to worldliness from the point of view of so-called
small literatures
The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.
“Literature and Knowledge” in the Context of Literary Interdiscourse Analysis
Roman Mikuláš
Ján Jambor
(eds.)
This issue responds to current key research questions on the literature-science nexus, opening up two basic lines of thinking: how literature transforms the complex contents of scientific knowledge and how distinctively literary modes shape scientific discourse. Conceptually the articles focus on this research through the literary theory of interdiscursivity, that is, the analysis of interdiscourses. One block of articles is devoted to the theoretical, methodological and literary-didactic aspects of interdiscursivity, while the other presents case studies on the work of authors whose poetics are characterized by elements of special scientific discourses.
Articles
ROMAN MIKULÁŠ
Od topológií k typológiám a späť: K problematike štruktúrovania korelácií literatúry,
vedy a poznania
MONIKA SCHMITZ-EMANS
Apotheke, Baukasten, Randgang, Exkursion ins Imaginäre: Lexikographien wissenschaftlicher. Begriffe und Theorien als Beiträge zum literarisch-wissenschaftlichen Interdiskurs
MARKO JUVAN
The essay and interdiscursivity: Knowledge between singularity and sensus communis
NATHALIE KÓNYA-JOBS
Literarhistorisches Verstehen auf Grundlage der Interdiskursanalyse fördern? Didaktische
Überlegungen zum Text-Kontext-Problem
ALINA BAKO
Cognitive cartographies in Liviu Rebreanu’s “Forest of the Hanged”
MARTA SOUČKOVÁ
Medzi literatúrou a vedou – na materiáli textov Stanislava Rakúsa
CAROLA HEINRICH
Theater und Wissen. Pflanzenphilosophie auf der Bühne
SANTIAGO SEVILLA-VALLEJO
Science fiction, ecology of mind and the uncanny in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick
The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.