The Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences is organizing the International Colloquium Humanities in Translations – Translation in Humanities. Exploring transfer and reception on 15 and 16 May 2025. The colloquium is part of the APVV research project Translation and aspects of reception of social science and humanities texts as cultural and literary transfer in the 20th century. Colloquium languages: French, English.
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.
Zsolt Cziganyik
(English Department at ELTE, Budapest)
24 April 2024 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online
Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/86128836042?pwd=VIV0kHA5jyrW9I9BMSD6IU35nS40w9.1
Meeting ID: 861 2883 6042
Passcode: 305063
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
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:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89959349119?pwd=9JyzV0UjA4wUVQ4YuSznTwuNZxaL7C.1
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:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89959349119?pwd=9JyzV0UjA4wUVQ4YuSznTwuNZxaL7C.1
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
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
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/88160376952?pwd=bfArZjYZyLNaoQB5fDEaeeIEzRLRUf.1
Meeting ID: 881 6037 6952
Passcode: 360609
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.
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.
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
BCLT Book Launch
Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages
Monday 11 December 2023
4 – 6pm (GMT)
Online (Hybrid) and UEA Campus: JSC 1.03
Register to watch the event ONLINE
In this hybrid (in-person / online) book launch seminar, co-authors Matthew Reynolds (St Anne’s, Oxford), Eugenia Kelbert (UEA), Jernej Habjan (Ljubljana) and Kayvan Tahmasebian (SOAS, London) will be discussing Prismatic Jane Eyre, which is available as an open access download from Open Book Publishers.
Hear about the interesting book and meet one of its co-authors, our new colleague Eugenia Kelbert Rudan. She joined our institute on November 1, 2023, to work on the project TRANSLATION AND CROSS-LINGUAL STYLISTIC TRANSFER: TOWARDS A THEORY OF LANGUAGE CONTACT IN LITERATURE (funded by the grant scheme IMPULZ of SAS).
The event is co-hosted by BCLT, UEA East Centre, Institute of World Literature (Slovak Academy of Sciences) and Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation.
Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and first published in 1847, has been translated more than six hundred times into over sixty languages. Prismatic Jane Eyre argues that we should see these many re-writings, not as simple replications of the novel, but as a release of its multiple interpretative possibilities: in other words, as a prism.
Prismatic Jane Eyre develops the theoretical ramifications of this idea, and reads Brontë’s novel in the light of them: together, the English text and the many translations form one vast entity, a multilingual world-work, spanning many times and places, from Cuba in 1850 to 21st-century China; from Calcutta to Bologna, Argentina to Iran. Co-written by many scholars, Prismatic Jane Eyre traces the receptions of the novel across cultures Continue reading
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:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82090121934?pwd=GBIG7nyn6x1N0pCMmIZiNxSoGJJsDx.1
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