Peina Zhuang
(Sichuan University, China)

11 September 2024 (Wednesday) at 11:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS

As two of the most romantic figures in the history of Eastern and Western philosophy, the philosophical ideals of Zhuangzi and Plato exhibit remarkable similarities. They coexisted during pivotal eras, enduring turmoil and transformation and witnessing the prosperity and collisions of civilizations. Both staunch idealists, they established romantic sanctuaries of the spirit for posterity, crafting poetic philosophical concepts. In their views on the body, they similarly regard it as a synthesis of physiology and spirit. Furthermore, they both express a profound affinity for the spirituality of the body, even dedicating their lives to the pursuit of spiritual freedom and beauty. However, upon closer examination, it becomes evident that Zhuangzi and Plato hold fundamentally different perspectives on the body. While both emphasize the composite nature of the body and pursue an aesthetic of spiritual transcendence beyond physiology, their concepts diverge significantly in their definitions of spirit (soul) and form (body), as well as in their understanding of the destination of spirit (soul) and form (body). This lecture will conduct a meticulous analysis of primary classical texts, combined with relevant literature from both Eastern and Western sources, to compare and contrast Zhuangzi and Platoʼs perspectives on body culture and the practical implications arising thereof.

Peina Zhuang is associate professor and Ph.D supervisor of comparative literature at Sichuan University. Her research interests include comparative literature, intercultural studies, and translation studies.

Lada Kolomiyets
(Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine; Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College, USA)

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 899 5934 9119
Passcode: 549052

This lecture will depict the dramatic conflicts of Ukrainian-Russian coexistence in the so-called “common cultural space” from the early 1920s to the early 1950s, which unfolded in the field of translation. Translating from and through Russian, as a mediating language, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s, reminded the slow but increasingly deadly compression of a rabbit by a boa constrictor. When in the post-Stalin era, this suffocating grasp partly relaxed, an entire school of translation emerged inflected against Russification. Its chief theorists included well-known translators of Russian Continue reading Guest lecture: The Bright and Dark Sides of Translating Russian Literature in Soviet Ukraine →

Oleksandr Kalnychenko
(Translation Studies of Mykola Lukash Translation Studies Department at V. N. Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine)

17 April 2024 (Wednesday) at 15:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online

Join Zoom Meeting:
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Meeting ID: 899 5934 9119
Passcode: 549052

The lecture will reveal the mechanism of state interference in translation matters during the Stalinism period. In the late 1920s – early 1930s, a significant number of Ukrainian scholars and literati shifted their professional interests to the field of translation. Collectively, they elaborated philologically accurate translation method (oriented towards the text to be translated). This approach (homologous translation) was theorized by Continue reading Guest lecture: Changing a Translation Method and Erasing Translation Theory in Ukraine in the 1930s →

ed. Péter Hajdu, Shenzhen University, China

From the perspectives of circulation or canonization, world literature does not exist in a single universal form, but in local, regional, areal, national, and sociocultural variations. National literature emerged as a meaningful term in the 19th century. Its relationship to world literature has been a topic of discussion for 200 years. The articles in this issue scrutinize the concepts of world and national literature from various theoretical approaches, such as investigating their interactions from viewpoints of power and gender. It also includes case studies from the Lusophone and Chinese contexts, showing how writers from the Renaissance to the Internet era have transcended national readerships and reached global ones. #openaccess #worldliteraturestudies 

Articles – Topic

PÉTER HAJDU
National peculiarities in approaching the Classics: The case of Catullus with Hungarian modernism
MICHAEL STEPPAT
Nation vs. world? Global imprints on Shakespeare and the orientation of world literature
SIMÃO VALENTE
World literature and national literatures in Portuguese
FATIMA FESTIĆ
Gender as a mediation between world literature and national literature
ZHENLING LI
Cross-culture, translation and post-aesthetics: Chinese online literature in/as world literature in the Internet era
TAO HUANG
The state’s role in “worlding” a popular national genre: The case of China and Liu Cixin
DAVID PAN
The end of world literature?

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

Editor: Johannes D. Kaminski (The Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy
of Sciences in Bratislava)

In the wake of Russia’s prolonged attack on Ukraine, this special issue of World Literature Studies reconsiders theoretical and literary ideas of how peace can be established in the long term. Provocatively, this also includes the question why a perennial state of peacefulness might not even be desirable.

While Eternal Peace represents an elusive but necessary goal in philosophy, speculative fiction evinces a striking ambivalence about its desirability. One the one hand, the climaxes of science-fiction narratives frequently coincide with a utopian promise. On the last page of Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1992–1996), for example, Ann describes her new habitat in glowing terms: “Nowhere on this world were people killing each other, nowhere were they desperate for shelter or food, nowhere were they scared for their kids.” Peace has come, finally. On the other hand, the joyful prospect of Eternal Peace stands at odds with the experiences of those unlucky protagonists who indeed inhabit a society that has already been harmonized. Especially in dystopian writing, the beneficiaries of Eternal Peace are bound to suffer from oppressive laws and homogenized lifestyles. Others simply feel bored beyond belief. The Controller in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) already knows: “Actual happiness always looks pretty squalid in comparison with the over-compensations for misery. And being contented has none of the glamour of a good fight against misfortune.”

 Languages of contribution: English, German

Please send your abstracts and short bio to j.kaminski@savba.sk and a copy to usvlwlit@savba.sk by 31 October 2023. (The submission of the full articles will be February – March 2024.)

Read more HERE.

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:

World Literature Studies 1/2022 

World Literature Studies 1/2020 

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.