All posts by usvlwpadmin

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.

World Literature Studies 2/2024: The Interdiscursive Communication between Literature and Bioethics

News

eds. Bogumiła Suwara ‒ Jana Tomašovičová

The interdiscursive communication between literature and bioethics has gone through significant changes under the influence of dynamic bio-scientific advancements. The articles in this issue document the shift from the traditional portrayal of the doctor-patient relationship to new themes inspired by contemporary bioethical challenges, including regenerative medicine, gene editing, cloning, human enhancement, and euthanasia, thus demonstrating the reciprocal transfer of literary and bioethical discourses. Through the emergence of this new interdiscursive space, literary and artistic representations are enriching the rationalist ethical rhetoric and normative argumentation with many humanistic aspects, including a narrative approach to ethics, specifically bioethics.

Articles:

BOGUMIŁA SUWARA ‒ JANA TOMAŠOVIČOVÁ
The interdiscursive communication between literature and bioethics
SAJJAD GHEYTASI
Unveiling the subversive potential: Challenging dominant ideological discourses
in selected literary texts
IVAN LACKO
Dignity, healing, and virtue: Bioethical concerns in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never let me go
TOMÁŠ KÁROLY
The bioethics of coexistence with robots today and in the sci-fi future
ADAM ŠKROVAN
Bioethics and genetic engineering in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
MARIUSZ PISARSKI
Ripperdocs and game makers: Bioethics in the dystopian future of (post)cyberpunk
fiction
PETER SÝKORA
Bioethics of the human body in Michael Crichton’s Next and Rebecca Skloot’s
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
JANA TOMAŠOVIČOVÁ
Význam naratívneho prístupu v bioetike
BOGUMIŁA SUWARA
Rozmanitosť života, a najmä jeho konečnosti, na príklade vybraných diel
CLAUS-MICHAEL ORT
Text – poznanie – prax: Za možnosť literárnej vedy vychádzať z vedomostnej sociológie

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

Lecture: Marianna Deganutti: Border Writing as a Language Contact Literary Case

Uncategorized

Marianna Deganutti

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

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/81202958446?pwd=YLvL2bPN54jk6IBHgkdBJt3XkQ1qci.1
Meeting ID: 812 0295 8446
Passcode: 364610

 

In this lecture I will present my 2023 book “Literary Multilingualism in the Borderlands.The Challenge of Trieste” (Routledge). The book focuses on literary multilingualism and specifically on the challenging condition of writing in Trieste, a key European borderland located at the intersection between the Latin, Germanic and Slav civilizations.

This is part of the IMPULZ project “Translation and Cross-Lingual Stylistic Transfer: Towards a Theory of Language Contact in Literature (E. Kelbert Rudan).

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 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

World Literature Studies 1/2024: Derrida and Literature

News

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.

Guest lecture: Utopia in Central Europe

Invitations

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 →

Guest lecture: The Bright and Dark Sides of Translating Russian Literature in Soviet Ukraine

Miscellaneous

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 →

Guest lecture: Changing a Translation Method and Erasing Translation Theory in Ukraine in the 1930s

Miscellaneous

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 →

Guest lecture: Language Contact, Translation and Translingual Reading

Invitations

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.