Category Archives: News

World Literature Studies 3/2024: Translation, Censorship, and Marginalized Voices

eds. Ivana Hostová ‒ Mária Kusá

This issue with a focus on translation studies explores the intersection of translation with power, censorship, and marginalized identities. The articles investigate how translation can reinforce or resist oppressive structures, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. Themes include the curation of cultural exports, censorship in literary translation, and the political economy of reception. The issue also highlights the role of translators in shaping theoretical works, and advocates for the decolonization of knowledge and greater inclusivity in global cultural production.

The journal was published within the project VEGA 2/0092/23 Translation and translating in the history and present of the Slovak cultural space. Transformations of forms, status and functions: texts, personalities, institutions.

World Literature Studies is an open access and print scholarly journal published quarterly by Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0. Subscriptions: Slovak Academic Press, s. r. o., Bazová 2, 821 08 Bratislava, sap@sappress.sk. Annual subscription: 24 €

Articles:

IVANA HOSTOVÁ ‒ MÁRIA KUSÁ
Translation, censorship, and marginalized voices: Challenging power and
economic barriers
IRYNA ODREKHIVSKA
Decolonial analytics in translation history: Ukrainian literature in the contested
space of English translation
NATALIIA RUDNYTSKA
Soviet ideological and puritanical censorship of Ukrainian literary translations
MARIE KRAPPMANN
Individual decisions in a collectivist ideology: Two Czech translations of I. L. Peretz’s
short story Bontshe shvayg
MERVE ÖZENÇ KASIMOĞLU
Words in time: Inclusive reading and rewriting in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
KATARÍNA BEDNÁROVÁ
Translation as a scholarly dialogue
IVANA HOSTOVÁ
Translated, transgressed, transported: A century of Whitman in Slovakia
JÁN GAVURA
Publishing poetry in translation in Slovakia 2013–2023
IVANA HOSTOVÁ ‒ DANIELE MONTICELLI ‒ OLEKSANDR KALNYCHENKO
‒ MARTIN DJOVČOŠ
Addressing power imbalances in research and translation studies
EVA VEREBOVÁ ‒ EMÍLIA PEREZ
Theater performances and their accessibility in Slovakia: Insights from the Deaf
community

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

The outstanding publication award from SAS for Johannes D. Kaminsky


Congratulations to our colleague Johannes D. Kaminsky for the outstanding publication award from SAS for his monograph Lives and Deaths of Werther. Interpretation, Translation, and Adaptation in Europe and East Asia (Oxford University Press, 2023). On September 18, he accepted this special award together with the other SAS researchers from the SAS President Prof. Pavol Šajgalík and the Vice-President for research and innovation, Prof. Peter Samuely.

The monograph’s original research contribution is based on the author’s exceptional linguistic competence and an uncommon comparison of European and Asian reception of Goethe’s novel, analysing non-Eurocentric assessment of one of the most famous works of Western literary culture.

Open access HERE

Video of Zsolt Czigányik´s talk “Utopia in Central Europe”

Zsolt Czigányik is Associate Professor in the English Department at ELTE, Budapest, and the leader of the research group Democracy in East Central European utopianism funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation at Central European University. He is the secretary of the Utopian Studies Society. His research focus is modern utopian and dystopian literature.

Zsolt Czigányik about his talk: Utopia is situated in no-man’s land between literature, social philosophy and the social sciences, where literary and socio-political factors interact. Historian Péter Hanák has argued that Central Europe is a region where reality and utopia have always mingled. In my presentation I reflect on both concepts: how utopian literary works reflect the social and political reality, and how this genre that stemmed from Western Europe was received and developed in our region. I intend to outline briefly how I understand the concept of utopia and the changing concept of Central Europe in its liminal position between East and West. Based on my studies in English and Hungarian utopian literature, I present our ongoing project as the leader of the Democracy in East Central European utopianism research group that aims to outline the specific features of Central European utopias, such as their national character.

See the video of Zsolt Czigányik´s lecture in English HERE.

World Literature Studies 2/2024: The Interdiscursive Communication between Literature and Bioethics

eds. Bogumiła Suwara ‒ Jana Tomašovičová

The interdiscursive communication between literature and bioethics has gone through significant changes under the influence of dynamic bio-scientific advancements. The articles in this issue document the shift from the traditional portrayal of the doctor-patient relationship to new themes inspired by contemporary bioethical challenges, including regenerative medicine, gene editing, cloning, human enhancement, and euthanasia, thus demonstrating the reciprocal transfer of literary and bioethical discourses. Through the emergence of this new interdiscursive space, literary and artistic representations are enriching the rationalist ethical rhetoric and normative argumentation with many humanistic aspects, including a narrative approach to ethics, specifically bioethics.

Articles:

BOGUMIŁA SUWARA ‒ JANA TOMAŠOVIČOVÁ
The interdiscursive communication between literature and bioethics
SAJJAD GHEYTASI
Unveiling the subversive potential: Challenging dominant ideological discourses
in selected literary texts
IVAN LACKO
Dignity, healing, and virtue: Bioethical concerns in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never let me go
TOMÁŠ KÁROLY
The bioethics of coexistence with robots today and in the sci-fi future
ADAM ŠKROVAN
Bioethics and genetic engineering in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
MARIUSZ PISARSKI
Ripperdocs and game makers: Bioethics in the dystopian future of (post)cyberpunk
fiction
PETER SÝKORA
Bioethics of the human body in Michael Crichton’s Next and Rebecca Skloot’s
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
JANA TOMAŠOVIČOVÁ
Význam naratívneho prístupu v bioetike
BOGUMIŁA SUWARA
Rozmanitosť života, a najmä jeho konečnosti, na príklade vybraných diel
CLAUS-MICHAEL ORT
Text – poznanie – prax: Za možnosť literárnej vedy vychádzať z vedomostnej sociológie

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

World Literature Studies 1/2024: Derrida and Literature

eds. Marcel Forgáč ‒ Milan Kendra ‒ Alžbeta Kuchtová

This journal issue, devoted to Derrida’s thinking about literature, addresses a number of questions raised by deconstruction with regard to literariness. In the terms set by deconstruction, the study of the relationship between Derrida and literature leads to an interdisciplinary textual analysis. The studies gathered here therefore deal with issues such as the death of the author, autobiographical writing, the marginality or singularity of literature (and in literature), as well as the difference between philosophy and literature or the transgressiveness of literature. At the same time, they reflect on the problems of democracy, politics, law, ethics or economics, which in Derrida’s approach are associated with the effects of literature.

Articles:

MILAN KENDRA ‒ ALŽBETA KUCHTOVÁ
Derrida and Literature
MARCEL FORGÁČ
Hry záhybov: Habermas, Derrida, Mukařovský
JACQUELINE HAMRIT
Derrida et la littérature : une relation passionnelle
JUAN EVARISTO VALLS BOIX
This strange institution called performativity: Jacques Derrida, the anarchy of literature,
and the counterinstitution of democracy
DARIN TENEV
Derrida and the potentiality of literature: Notes on Derrida’ s “The Law of Genre”
MANUEL RAMOS DO Ó
La question de la littérature chez Jacques Derrida : le droit fondamental et l’ ouverture
du parergon
ERNESTO FEUERHAKE
L’ unique et le texte. Derrida, Valéry, entre autres
SALIM HAFFAS
La mort de l’ auteur entre Barthes, Derrida et Foucault
MIROSLAV KOTÁSEK
How many deaths? Auto-bio-graphy as death-writing

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

World Literature Studies 4/2023: Autobiographical Writing and Autofiction: Contemporary Approaches

eds. Ján Jambor ‒ Zuzana Malinovská

This journal issue is devoted to the forms of authorial self-expression in prose works of world literature since 2000. The relevance of the topic is explained by the significant changes that affect lives nowadays. By means of different methodological approaches, the authors of the nine studies in five languages confirm that autobiographical writing and autofiction do not result
in straightforward life documentations, but in unique literary constructions of reality, coping with personal and collective experience, with liminal life situations, with the process of writing and literary tradition, as well as with the past or present of a given country.

Articles:

JÁN JAMBOR ‒ ZUZANA MALINOVSKÁ
Autobiografické písanie a autofikcia v súčasnej próze
ZUZANA MALINOVSKÁ
Écriture du deuil comme interrogation de soi : Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques
de Catherine Mavrikakis
JÁN JAMBOR
Melitta Brezniks Prosawerk zwischen faktualem und fiktionalem Erzählen
ROMAN MIKULÁŠ ‒ ANDREA MIKULÁŠOVÁ
Von der Auflösung der Person: Das seltsame Problem der personalen Identität
in neueren deutschsprachigen Autopathographien
NADEŽDA ZEMANÍKOVÁ
Autobiografie ‒ Metaautobiografie ‒ Autosoziobiografie: Ostdeutsches autobiografisches
Erinnern im neuen Jahrtausend
JAN TLUSTÝ
Život, který se stal románem: Autofikční Životopisy Oty Filipa
MAGDOLNA BALOGH
Genre hybridity, self-discovery and trauma: Andrea Tompa’s The Hangman’s House
JUDIT GÖRÖZDI
„Problémy so žánrom v pažeráku smrti“: Vlastná smrť Pétera Nádasa a Pankreasník
Pétera Esterházyho ako hraničné prípady autobiografie
ROMAN DZYK ‒ LILIIA SHUTIAK
The Secret by Yuri Andrukhovych: An autobiographical novel in the form
of an interview
MARTA SOUČKOVÁ
K rôznym podobám autobiografického písania v slovenskej próze po roku 2000

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.

 

 

Job Offer: Researcher – Translation and Language Contact in Literature Project

Join an exciting 5-year IMPULZ research project entitled Translation and Cross-Lingual Stylistic Transfer: Towards a Theory of Language Contact in Literature (PI Eugenia Kelbert). This transdisciplinary project explores the dynamics of fields such as multilingualism, postcolonial literature, translation, influence, and international literary movements to analyse the stylistic and cognitive mechanisms of languages coming into contact in various literary contexts. It then builds on this research to consider ways in which it can help vulnerable groups and feed back into the literary process, including through the development of innovative digital humanities tools.

Location: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava, Slovakia.
The successful candidates will be required to either relocate to Bratislava or commute on a regular basis.

How to Apply:
Submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, and a sample of relevant academic work to eugenia.kelbert@savba.sk. The cover letter should include a short statement on a potential case study (or case studies) you propose to pursue within the project. Please indicate whether you are applying for the full-time or part-time position, and whether you would be interested in being considered for both.

Deadline for Applications: 7th of January 2024.

Shortlisted candidates who submit their applications by the deadline will be invited to an interview (in person or online) in the following week. Late applications may continue to be accepted until the positions are filled.

Positions Available:
1 Full-Time Researcher
• 1 Part-Time Researcher (exact fraction subject to negotiation)
To enquire about these positions, please contact Eugenia Kelbert at eugenia.kelbert@savba.sk.

Anticipated Start Date: 1st February 2024.

Duration: 1 year, with the expectation to extend up to 5 years

Key Responsibilities: 
1. Conduct in-depth research on language contact phenomena in literature Continue reading Job Offer: Researcher – Translation and Language Contact in Literature Project

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.

“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.

 

Transculturalism and narratives of literary history in East-Central Europe

wls3_2022_obalkaJudit Görözdi
Zoltán Németh
Magdalena Roguska-Németh

(eds.)

This issue explores East-Central European literary and literary historical narratives from the perspective of the phenomena and networks of transculturalism, following the concepts of globalism, heterotopia, extraterritoriality, translocality, deterritorialization and border crossing. By examining the role of transculturalism in the specific literary formations of the region, the articles show the effect of multi- and translingualism as well as cultural hybridity in texts, microliteratures and minority literatures. The aim is to contribute to the development of more diversified approaches in the writing of national literary history in East-Central Europe.

You can read the editorial HERE.

Articles

WOLFGANG WELSCH
Transculturality in literature: A phenomenon as old as it is current
ANDERS PETTERSSON
On the concept of world literature
KATARZYNA DEJA
The problems with delimiting the notion of transculturality in literary studies
MAGDALENA ROGUSKA-NÉMETH
Transculturalism in literature as reflected in the works of translingual writers from the Hungarian cultural context
BEÁTA THOMKA
Fiction: heritage, choice, creation
KAROLINA POSPISZIL-HOFMAŃSKA
Confluences: On the possibility of describing a transcultural history of (micro)literature – the Upper Silesian perspective
EVA KENDERESSY
Transculturality in Romanian literary histories: The case of literature from Moldova
ZOLTÁN NÉMETH
The transcultural levels of minority literary history writing: Hungarian literature in Slovakia
ANIKÓ DUŠÍKOVÁ
The possibilities of a transcultural narrative in 19th-century Central Europe: Ján Chalupka and Gusztáv Szontagh

The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be found HERE.