Guest lecture – Multilingual Originals in Translations: The Acoustic Poetics of Invented Names

Invitations

Mónika Dánél
(Univerzita Eötvösa Loránda, Budapešť)

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82905745792?pwd=agmZq64nniVksvBj0Gzy1upI3fWiq9.1
Meeting ID: 829 0574 5792
Passcode: 422096

 

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 →

World Literature Studies 4/2024: Fictional Realities of Eternal Peace

News

ed. Johannes D. Kaminski

The utopian appeal of peace, both in a political and spiritual sense, belongs to the powerful drivers of the human imagination. Yet the rhetorics of peace are difficult to untangle from the realities of war; after all, efforts that supposedly serve a higher purpose frequently result in injustice and violence. In the present issue, an international group of scholars discusses European, American, and Chinese texts that cover a wide spectrum of imagined peace, ranging from naïve enthusiasm for top-down solutions to dejected elegies for the demise of civil liberties.

The journal was published within the project SASPRO World Government: Grand Narratives in Contemporary Science-Fiction.

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:
ALEXIS SHOTWELL
“All we have is means”: Ursula K. Le Guin’s utopianism as ongoingness
KILIAN JÖRG
Messy utopianism and the question of war: What does “staying with the trouble” mean in relation to war?
JOHANNES D. KAMINSKI
World-wide conflicts, insular solutions: Universalizing government, language and race in
H. G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia and Kang Youwei’s The Great Unity
GABRIEL F. Y. TSANG
Mind and peace: The “democratic” info-technological determinism of Gu Junzheng’s “The Dream of Peace”
MICHAEL KA-CHI CHEUK
The Chinese Nobel complex and peacebuilding: Gao Xingjian and Mo Yan as case studies
CATHERINE MACMILLAN
Everyone’s watching you: The future of society in Dave Eggers’s The Every
ANTON MATEJICKA
Totalitarian systems and their peaceful alternatives in Karin Boye’s Kallocain and Olga Ravn’s The Employees
MAGDALENA MÜHLBÖCK
The terrible within the peaceful: Christoph Ransmayr’s Morbus Kitahara
ADAM ŠKROVAN
The pursuit of harmony: Groups and communities in post-apocalyptic narratives
ELAHEH KARIMI RIABI
The image of Persian women in Lomnitsky’s travelogue Persia and Persians

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

PF 2025

PF 2025 – not only with literature…

Warfare runs against the values promoted by liberal democracies. There are situations when peace falls into the same category, such as when authorities impose the
“peace of Ulysses’s comrades”, who languished in the cave of the Cyclops, waiting
their turn to be devoured. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Du contrat social (1762), this Homeric reference emblemizes the undignified peace that results from submission to power. This is why literary authors, despite their often pacifist convictions, have also provided the most drastic accounts of power constellations when “peace” reveals itself as “pacification”.
World Literature Studies 4/2024 Fictional realities of eternal peace (Johannes D. Kaminski, ed.)

Broadening of Poetics 4: Signs of Culture/Signs of Nature. Semiotics and Poetics in Relation to Sustainable Development

Events, Invitations

28 and 29 October 2024

The Institute of Polish Literature of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences invite you to the International Online Conference Broadening of Poetics 4: Signs of Culture/Signs of Nature Semiotics and Poetics in Relation to Sustainable Development.

Conference organizers:
dr Weronika Lipszyc, dr Anna Tenczyńska, prof. Ewa Szczęsna – The Section of Comparative Studies and the Laboratory of Intersemiotic and Intermedia Research of the Institute of Polish Literature, Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw;
prof. Bogumiła Suwara – The Institute of World Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

The project is carried out as part of cooperation between the Institute of Polish Literature of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the University of Warsaw and the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Conference programme HERE.

 

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

News

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

Miscellaneous, News


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. 

Humanities in Translations – Translation in Humanities. Exploring transfer and reception / Sciences humaines en traduction – traduction des sciences humaines. Questions de transfert et de réception

Events, Invitations

The Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences is organizing in
cooperation with the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University Bratislava and CEFRES 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.

Call for Papers / Appel à communication

Application Form / Formulaire d’inscription

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.

Guest lecture: The Body Aesthetics in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons: From the Unity of Form and Spirit to the Humanization of Literary Theory

Events, Invitations

Shunqing Cao & Liu Shishi
(Sichuan University, China)

11 September 2024 (Wednesday) at 10:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS

This talk aims to explore how the body concept in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons (hereafter Wen Xin Diao Long) represents a unique perspective in Chinese literary theory, linking literary works with human physiological structures such as form, spirit, blood, qi, and organs, forming a “heterogeneous isomorphism” in poetics. According to Liu Xie, literary works possess a unique “form” and “spirit”, akin to the human body. This viewpoint is deeply influenced by traditional Chinese “philosophy of experience”, where the style and substance of poetry correspond to the physical features of the human body. Through this analogy, literary creation is not only a mental activity but also an extension of bodily behavior, achieving a fusion of emotion and style, which resonates with the idea that the body is a unity of flesh and spirit. This lecture points out that the body concept plays a central role in ancient Chinese literary criticism, Continue reading Guest lecture: The Body Aesthetics in The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons: From the Unity of Form and Spirit to the Humanization of Literary Theory →

Guest lecture: On the Comparison of Zhuangzi and Platoʼs Views on the Body

Miscellaneous

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.