Mónika Dánél
(Univerzita Eötvösa Loránda, Budapešť)

29 January 2025 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

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Meeting ID: 829 0574 5792
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Ádám Bodor’s novels The Sinistra Zone (1992) and Birds of Verhovina (2011) are set somewhere in a Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish, Moldavian border zone that appears to be an interface between real and imaginary worlds. Both novels are examples of “commuting grammars,” and are written with a “multilingual self-awareness” (Beáta Thomka 2018) that transmit and translate the multilingual experience and polyphonic cultural memory of East-Central Europe. Bodor’s Hungarian oeuvre evokes the memory of a multi-ethnic community in the past and preserves a continuous oscillation between the inscribed memory of other languages (for example, Armenian, Yiddish, Hebrew, Ruthenian, Transylvanian Saxon, Zipser German, Romanian, Ukrainian, Polish), which are translated by the texts into a Hungarian linguistic and poetic experience. Continue reading Guest lecture – Multilingual Originals in Translations: The Acoustic Poetics of Invented Names →

Zsolt Cziganyik
(English Department at ELTE, Budapest)

24 April 2024 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

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Meeting ID: 861 2883 6042
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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 would like to 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 Continue reading Guest lecture: Utopia in Central Europe →

Julie Hansen
(Uppsala Universitet, Uppsala)

21 February 2024 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

Co-hosted with the East Centre at the University of East Anglia

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In this book launch seminar, Julie Hansen will present her new monograph Reading Novels Translingually: Twenty-First-Century Case Studies (Academic Studies Press, 2024); soon available in full open access here: https://www.academicstudiespress.com/9781644698778/reading-novels-translingually/

This book analyzes how literary fiction depicts multilingual worlds by incorporating multiple languages into the text. Taking as case studies several contemporary novels as well as Leo Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century classic War and Peace, it explores how reading can become a translingual process. The seminar will focus specifically on the nexus of literary multilingualism, translation and the reading process, exemplified with some of the case studies analyzed in the book.

Julie Hansen is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages at Uppsala University (https://www.katalog.uu.se/profile/?id=N10-225) and a specialist in comparative literature and Slavic literature. She received her PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and has edited special issues and written numerous articles on literary multilingualism and translation.

Dr. Dr. Olha Voznyuk
(International Research Center for Cultural Studies University of Art and Design Linz, Vienna)

15 November 2023 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

Link:
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Meeting ID: 820 9012 1934
Passcode: 055833

The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine in 2014 has changed the direction of contemporary Ukrainian literature and culture. Modern Ukrainian literature has registered recent historical events in numerous works, which have changed the way of development of Ukrainian culture and Ukrainian identity as well. Some oeuvres of Ukrainian writers seek to recover Ukrainian historical narratives “lost” during the Soviet era and which in turn have influenced the Ukrainian film industry.
Continue reading Guest Lecture: Ukrainian Culture after the Revolution of Dignity: Changes and Challenges →

Professor Alexis Shotwell
(Carleton University, Canada)

11 October 2023 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

It is a standard existentialist trope that humans come into the world without a pre-given purpose for existence. On this view, there is nothing in particular that we are made for, and we must make for ourselves any meaning or direction. Often this sense of being condemned to our freedom is experienced and discussed at the individual scale. This is odd, since from the beginning of the tradition philosophers have theorized the relationship between individual freedom and the collective context in which we exercise it.
The urgency of thinking beyond the individual becomes clearer when we confront existentially demanding problems such as climate change, migrant crises, global pandemics, wars, or famines. Professor Shotwell will argue that anarchism helps us in thinking about the necessarily collective aspect of addressing wicked problems like these. She will take Ursula Le Guin’s science fiction as a key theoretical resource for an existentialist anarchism and reflect on the following questions: What are the implications of reading fiction as philosophy? How is Le Guin’s conception of shared social responsibility helpful for projects of ongoing life on earth?

Link:
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Meeting ID: 829 3617 4665
Passcode: 272992

Alexis Shotwell’s work focuses on complexity, complicity, and collective transformation. She is a professor at Carleton University, the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times.