New poetics and Russian prose of the early 21st century

April 26, 2023Newsusvlwpadmin

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.

Guest Lecture: Peripherocentrism – Geopolitics of Comparative Literatures between Ethnocentrism and Cosmopolitanism

April 17, 2023Events, Invitationsusvlwpadmin

Prof. Dr. Marko Juvan
(Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)

26 April 2023 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS (conference room + online)

Organisers:
Institute of World Literature SAS in cooperation with Czech and Slovak Association of Comparative Literature

Regardless of its actual position in the world-system, each national literary ecology typically perceives its position as the cognitive center. In this respect, peripheral literatures fall into what might be called “peripherocentrism.” As a narrative discourse that shapes collective memory, national literary history is essentially ethnocentric, but it is, especially in so-called small literatures, a gesture of worlding, that is, of imagined self-location in the literary world-system. Comparative literature emerged at a time when ethnocentric literary histories dominated both global centers and peripheries. In its early and classical phase, comparative literature aimed to overcome national parochialism. Nevertheless, recent research has exposed the Eurocentric and ethnocentric orientation of cosmopolitan concepts, including Goethe’s idea of world literature. The literary world-system channels interliterary exchange in ways that correspond to the economic inequality between centers and perihepries. In addition to writers, literary historians themselves depend on the global status of their language and literature. Consequently, comparatists tend to incorporate their cosmopolitan perspectives and methods into ethnocentric, even nationalist agendas: they world their home literature through cross-national comparisons and argue for their geopolitical prestige. The comparatists of the core countries consolidate the world-systemic dominance of their literatures, while the comparatists of the periphery attempt to place the internationally lesser-known literary production of their homelands – which they nonetheless consider central in their peripherocentrism – in the virtuality of world literature.

Marko Juvan is a member of Academia Europaea, a senior researcher at the ZRC SAZU Institute of Slovenian Literature and Literary Studies, a professor of literary theory and Slovenian literature at the University of Ljubljana, and a member of the ICLA Executive Committee. His recent publications on genre theory, intertextuality, literary geography, Slovenian Romanticism, and world literature include History and Poetics of Intertextuality (Purdue University Press, 2008), Literary Studies in Reconstruction (Peter Lang, 2011), Prostori slovenske književnosti (ed., Založba ZRC, 2016), Hibridni žanri (LUD Literatura, 2017; Serbian translation 2019), Worlding a Peripheral Literature (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Med majem ’68 in novembrom ’89: Transformacije sveta, literature in teorije (ed., Založba ZRC, 2021).

Link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/82801435424?pwd=MThxbkRDc1pWUFM3ZHB3YzJHR294dz09
Meeting ID: 828 0143 5424
Passcode: 483164

“Literature and Knowledge” in the Context of Literary Interdiscourse Analysis

December 21, 2022Newsusvlwpadmin

Roman Mikuláš
Ján Jambor
(eds.)

This issue responds to current key research questions on the literature-science nexus, opening up two basic lines of thinking: how literature transforms the complex contents of scientific knowledge and how distinctively literary modes shape scientific discourse. Conceptually the articles focus on this research through the literary theory of interdiscursivity, that is, the analysis of interdiscourses. One block of articles is devoted to the theoretical, methodological and literary-didactic aspects of interdiscursivity, while the other presents case studies on the work of authors whose poetics are characterized by elements of special scientific discourses.

Articles

ROMAN MIKULÁŠ
Od topológií k typológiám a späť: K problematike štruktúrovania korelácií literatúry,
vedy a poznania
MONIKA SCHMITZ-EMANS
Apotheke, Baukasten, Randgang, Exkursion ins Imaginäre: Lexikographien wissenschaftlicher. Begriffe und Theorien als Beiträge zum literarisch-wissenschaftlichen Interdiskurs
MARKO JUVAN
The essay and interdiscursivity: Knowledge between singularity and sensus communis
NATHALIE KÓNYA-JOBS
Literarhistorisches Verstehen auf Grundlage der Interdiskursanalyse fördern? Didaktische
Überlegungen zum Text-Kontext-Problem
ALINA BAKO
Cognitive cartographies in Liviu Rebreanu’s “Forest of the Hanged”
MARTA SOUČKOVÁ
Medzi literatúrou a vedou – na materiáli textov Stanislava Rakúsa
CAROLA HEINRICH
Theater und Wissen. Pflanzenphilosophie auf der Bühne
SANTIAGO SEVILLA-VALLEJO
Science fiction, ecology of mind and the uncanny in “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” by Philip K. Dick

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

Transculturalism and narratives of literary history in East-Central Europe

October 25, 2022Newsusvlwpadmin

Judit Görözdi
Zoltán Németh
Magdalena Roguska-Németh
(eds.)

This issue explores East-Central European literary and literary historical narratives from the perspective of the phenomena and networks of transculturalism, following the concepts of globalism, heterotopia, extraterritoriality, translocality, deterritorialization and border crossing. By examining the role of transculturalism in the specific literary formations of the region, the articles show the effect of multi- and translingualism as well as cultural hybridity in texts, microliteratures and minority literatures. The aim is to contribute to the development of more diversified approaches in the writing of national literary history in East-Central Europe.

You can read the editorial HERE.

Articles

WOLFGANG WELSCH
Transculturality in literature: A phenomenon as old as it is current
ANDERS PETTERSSON
On the concept of world literature
KATARZYNA DEJA
The problems with delimiting the notion of transculturality in literary studies
MAGDALENA ROGUSKA-NÉMETH
Transculturalism in literature as reflected in the works of translingual writers from the Hungarian cultural context
BEÁTA THOMKA
Fiction: heritage, choice, creation
KAROLINA POSPISZIL-HOFMAŃSKA
Confluences: On the possibility of describing a transcultural history of (micro)literature – the Upper Silesian perspective
EVA KENDERESSY
Transculturality in Romanian literary histories: The case of literature from Moldova
ZOLTÁN NÉMETH
The transcultural levels of minority literary history writing: Hungarian literature in Slovakia
ANIKÓ DUŠÍKOVÁ
The possibilities of a transcultural narrative in 19th-century Central Europe: Ján Chalupka and Gusztáv Szontagh

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

CfP World Literature Studies 4/2023: Autobiographical writing and autofiction: contemporary approaches

September 20, 2022Miscellaneoususvlwpadmin

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

Guest Lecture: Born to Write Another Language. Between Cognitive Constraint and Translingual Aesthetics

September 16, 2022Eventsusvlwpadmin

Eugenia Kelbert Rudan. FOTO - ARCHÍV — Eugenia Kelbert Rudan. FOTO – ARCHÍV

Dr. Eugenia Kelbert
(University of East Anglia)

21 September 2022 (Wednesday) at 14:00
Institut of World Literature SAS + online

Link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84450735380?pwd=Nk1RaW5iTjQ3cjNjblEzSUpQYmRQUT09
Meeting ID: 844 5073 5380
Passcode: 321895

Literature written on the margins of linguistic proficiency has, paradoxically, served as a catalyst for debates on issues of minor literature, postmonolingualism, untranslatability, and world literature for some decades. Translingualism, or literature written in a non-native language, is an extreme embodiment of this trend that has already provoked several prize committees into awarding highest institutional honours to authors writing in a language not their own.

Yet what is the secret to the work of Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, Romain Gary, Joseph Brodsky, Vladimir Nabokov, Milan Kundera and, more recently, Andreï Makine, Eva Hoffman and numerous others? If mastery of a second language is achieved through imitation of native speakers, how can the pinnacle of such a process possibly amount to an original style?

This talk considers this question in conjunction with a related one – why now? Translingual literature has a very long history, but it is only starting with the twentieth century that it has become a literary phenomenon, allegedly marginal yet, increasingly, both recognised and emulated. With the advent of modernism, a changed attitude to language has made translingualism, it argues, into one of the more prominent strands within a new aesthetic, which has continued to develop steadily to this day.

Dobrota Pucherová: Feminism and Modernity in Anglophone African Women’s Writing. A 21st-Century Global Context

August 17, 2022New Booksusvlwpadmin

This book of Dobrota Pucherová re-reads the last 60 years of Anglophone African women’s writing from a transnational and trans-historical feminist perspective, rather than postcolonial, from which these texts have been traditionally interpreted. Such a comparative frame throws into relief patterns across time and space that make it possible to situate this writing as an integral part of women’s literary history.
Revisiting this literature in a comparative context with Western women writers since the 18th century, the author highlights how invocations of “tradition” have been used by patriarchy everywhere to subjugate women, the similarities between women’s struggles worldwide, and the feminist imagination it produced. The author argues that in the 21^st century, African feminism has undergone a major epistemic shift: from a culturally exclusive to a relational feminism that conceptualizes African femininity through the risky opening of oneself to otherness, transculturation, and translation. Like Western feminists in the 1960s, contemporary African women writers are turning their attention to the female body as the prime site of women’s oppression and freedom, reframing feminism as a demand for universal human rights and actively shaping global discourses on gender, modernity, and democracy.
The book will be of interest to students and researchers of African literature, but also feminist literary scholars and comparatists more generally.

World Literature Studies 2/2022: World Literature from the Perspective of “Small” Literatures

July 14, 2022Newsusvlwpadmin

Róbert Gáfrik
Miloš Zelenka
(eds.)

Over the past few decades, world literature has been conceived of as a canon or a system which texts enter through the “large” literatures written in hegemonic languages such as English. Texts from smaller literatures have to fulfill something extra in order to achieve the status of world literature. This concept presents world literature as a correlate of political and economic power. The current issue presents studies reflecting on the relation of ”small” literatures to world literature, while also raising epistemological and ethical questions.

CFP World Literature Studies 2/2023

June 23, 2022Miscellaneoususvlwpadmin

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.

Guest lecture: This Is Not An Original. Linguistic Relativity and the Translated Text

June 20, 2022Invitationsusvlwpadmin

Guest lecture
Dr. Eugenia Kelbert Rudan
(University of East Anglia)

29 June 2022 (Wednesday) at 10:00
Institut of World Literature SAS + online

The implications of the recent “bilingual turn” in psycholinguistics have not yet been fully explored in translation studies, even though this field has bilingualism at its very center. This includes, notably, recent advances in the understanding of linguistic relativity. An up-to-date non-deterministic interpretation of linguistic relativity provides, as I will argue in this talk, a novel perspective on several key areas in translation studies. This concerns especially the study of the so-called translation universals, i.e. textual characteristics that are particular to translations. The proposed approach to translation from the perspective of linguistic relativity thus calls for a more concerted study of the translated text as a kind of literature that is inherently different from original writing. Far from approximating what the author may have written in the target language, a translated text carries a particular kind of literary value that could not have arisen from an original writing process.

Link:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/85196234711?pwd=TDNEbHlYOTJBcGlQQXhUOU9nOFRuUT09
Meeting ID: 851 9623 4711
Passcode: 059274

Eugenia Kelbert Rudan is currently a scholarship holder at the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences within the National Scholarship Programme of the Slovak Republic. She is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of East Anglia, where she also serves as Co-Director of the East Centre for the study of East-Central Europe and the former Soviet space (https://www.eastcentre-uea.org/) and Assistant Professor of Philology at HSE University, Moscow (currently on leave). Continue reading Guest lecture: This Is Not An Original. Linguistic Relativity and the Translated Text →