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.

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.

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.

Editors: Zuzana Malinovská (Comenius University, Bratislava), Ján Jambor (Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences)

This issue of World Literature Studies follows upon the thematic issue Autobiography– autofiction – fiction and contemporary (novelistic) discourse (2/2011) edited by Katarína Bednárová. Our aim is to offer a representative variety of the above-mentioned literary phenomenon with an emphasis on a diversity of expressions, strategies and techniques of autobiographical writing and autofiction published after 2000. We propose that in the new millennium there has been an increase in the significance of individual (literary) self-expression as a result of various political, social, economic, environmental, cultural and media developments. In addition to case studies and comparative analyses of relevant texts (of various linguistic and cultural provenance) we are particularly interested in new tendencies in autobiographical writing and autofiction, such as meta-autobiograhy or interdiscursivity. We also welcome contributions reviewing the productivity of various typologies (e.g., Colonna’s four types of autofiction) and new theoretical approaches to contemporary autobiographical writing and autofiction, as well as studies on the paradoxes of the writing subject in the process of self-representation and on the issues of style and modes of expression, i.e., autobiographical writing and autofiction as a “linguistic adventure” (Philippe Gasparini: Autofiction : une aventure du langage, 2008).

Please send abstracts (max. 1800 characters with spaces) by 31. 1. 2023 to usvlwlit@savba.sk, jan.jambor@savba.sk, zuzana.malinovska@fedu.uniba.sk

Read more HERE

The Many Faces of Resilience and Healing in Contemporary Narratives

Editor: Prof. Ana MŞ Fraile Marcos, Universidad de Salamanca

Keywords: resilience, healing, vulnerability, ethics of care, narrative therapy.

Resilience has become a ubiquitous and contested concept. As a “pervasive idiom of global governance” (Walker and Cooper 144), it has become part of political speechesand everyday conversations, especially as in the midst of the pandemic citizens all around the world were asked to build resilience. This overuse calls for a reassessment of its validity and accuracy as a working concept, as well as a deeper study on the nuanced implications it holds, especially in regard to related notions such as vulnerability, precarity or the ethics of care. Moreover, as Fraile-Marcos has evinced, “the alignment of the discourse of resilience and neoliberal ideology” demands a critical approach (4-6).

More information HERE.