Jernej Habjan
(The Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana)
4 November 2026 (Wednesday) at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online
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The lecture is organized as part of the VEGA Slovak literature in inter-literary and transcultural contexts.
Ever since its first mentions, world literature has been theorised by some of the same figures that are supposed to be theorised as key representatives of world literature, including such obvious candidates as Goethe, Tagore, Gorky, Hesse, Kundera, and Pamuk. Moreover, theorists of world literature have never ceased to draw on the theoretical meditations offered by these writers, thus confirming the impossibility of metalanguage rather than the conceptual availability of world literature. It is hence apt to read theoretical pronouncements on world literature as potential examples of world literature. In this lecture, we will consider not only what theorists of world literature say, but also where and when they say it; not only the truth value of their statements, but also the genre of their utterances. Whether these come from writers or scholars, we will observe the object of their studies while being attentive to their studies as an object. Thus, the history of their mappings of the world will bleed into the history of the world itself. In turn, world literature will appear as that which literary scholars and writers debate when they wish to debate world history. World literature will appear as world-historical literature.
Jernej Habjan is a fellow at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, where he is the PI of the project ‘World War Literature: Historicizing the Debate on World Literature as a Debate on World War’. This project is a continuation of the work he undertook in 2020–21 as a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University, as well as of his earlier postdoctoral research at the University of Munich. His past essays on world literature theory have appeared in the Journal of Global History, the Journal of World Literature, Neohelicon, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Habjan’s book on Ordinary Literature Philosophy appeared in 2020 with Bloomsbury.