International Conference Small Literatures as World Literature

Events
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28 – 30 May (Wednesday – Friday) 2025
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in Slovak and English

Zoom Meeting
International Conference Small Literatures as World Literature (May 28)
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89541726597?pwd=VO7XOwHg8JZiO24JOwaC7prnobduxH.1
Meeting ID: 895 4172 6597
Passcode: 040644

 

 

 

International Conference Small Literatures as World Literature (May 29)
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/83177360485?pwd=HuWanlIYTiVA0V62v2aODDb36jzuJ3.1
Meeting ID: 831 7736 0485
Passcode: 774980

International Conference Small Literatures as World Literature (May 30)
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84535880133?pwd=TorC31AaIg0XiOaXne4DP05h9sO6WH.1
Meeting ID: 845 3588 0133
Passcode: 261202

The conference is organized by the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences as part of the grant project VEGA 2/0127/23 Slovak literature in inter-literary and transcultural contexts.

How can we think about small literatures in the context of world literature? Both terms – “small literature” and “world literature” – are neither self-evident nor agreed upon and already open up a myriad of questions. The conference intends to create space for a productive discussion and polemics about these questions that could open up new ways of thinking about literatures from Central Europe. We are interested in how these literatures communicate with other literatures and create interliterary communities, how they circulate in translation or adapt to the world literary system, how they see their own identity, which literary centres they look to for inspiration or consecration, or whether the term “national literature” is still a useful category. By asking these questions, we want to open up the larger discussion about the relationship between “small literature” and “world literature”, the local and the global, centre and periphery and the national and the postnational. Continue reading International Conference Small Literatures as World Literature →

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

Events, Invitations

30 April (Wednesday) 2025 at 14:00 CET
Institute of World Literature SAS + online, in English

Join Zoom Meeting:
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/84450486196?pwd=AfmjSqmWOz9NjQhhi2hNbd28HWcbX3.1
Meeting ID: 844 5048 6196
Passcode: 061687

In this journal 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 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. The issue will be presented by three authors of the studies: Kilian Jörg (Independent Artist and Scholar), Anton Matejička (Faculty of Philological and Cultural Studies, University of Vienna) and Michael Ka-chi Cheuk (School of Arts and Social Sciences, Hong Kong Metropolitan University).

The event will be moderated by the issue’s editor Johannes D. Kaminski.

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

World Literature Studies 1/2025: The Global Campus: Academic Fiction in World Literature

News

ed. Oksana Blashkiv

What is the global campus today? What are its representations in fiction? What do they say about the university’s role in contemporary society? This issue devoted to the campus novel searches for answers in contemporary Anglophone and particularly non-Anglophone campus fiction in its plurality and diversity. The relevance of the topic is explained by the significant changes that the world of academia and its literary narratives undergo in the present. By bringing attention to campus fiction in Ukrainian, Swedish, Spanish, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, German, Czech, Bulgarian, and American literature, the authors shed light on the global campus and national peculiarities of its portrayal.

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: 40 €

Articles:
MERRITT MOSELEY
Globalism, then and now: The rise of international neoliberalism and the academic novel
OKSANA BLASHKIV
Central European perspectives of the global campus: Slavic academic fiction after 1989
ANNA GAIDASH
Aging professors: Reading transatlantic academic plays of the 1990s
ELŻBIETA PERKOWSKA-GAWLIK
The academic murder mystery as a popular subgenre from the Polish perspective
PETR HRTÁNEK
The campus novel and university satire in recent Czech literature
CORINA SELEJAN
Magical realism and the othering of the academic in three Romanian postcommunist novels
MARTA KOVAL
The American university in the aftermath of 9/11 in Susan Choi’s novel A Person of Interest
PETR ANTÉNE
“The inhospitable city”: A Spanish view of Oxford in Javier Marías’s All Souls
PAULÍNA ŠEDÍKOVÁ ČUHOVÁ – MARTINA KUBEALAKOVÁ
The Perlmann crisis of the academic world
EWALD MENGEL
The university as heterotopia in Tabea Mußgnug’s Nächstes Semester wird alles anders…
JULIE HANSEN
A tale of two professions in the Swedish campus novel Vård, skola och omsorg
MILENA KIROVA
The phenomenon of the “Professorenroman” in Bulgarian literature

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

 

 

Translation and Literary Multilingualism: A Language Contact Perspective

Invitations

We invite you to an online-lecture by our colleagues Eugenia Kelbert and Marianna Deganutti entitled “Translation and Literary Multilingualism: A Language Contact Perspective”.
WHEN: on Thursday 3 April 2025 from 4.30 to 6.00 pm CET
WHERE: online (on the internet platform of the project Multilingualism in Translation) if you would like to join the meeting, please send a request to julie [dot] charles [at] univ-lille.fr

This lecture posits that translation and original writing in different languages are fundamentally distinct. Original writing is closely tied to language choice, influencing register, tone, and narrative. Therefore, a work conceived in one language would differ
if written in another. This premise puts into question the aims and tatus of literary translation and ultimately reframes translation as a unique source of literariness, separate from original writing, with its own distinct characteristics that stem from the infusion of other languages. However, rather than considering literary multilingualism in an original writing context and translation as mutually exclusive, we suggest that both are encompassed within the broader field of language contact. By delving into this framework, we will try to demonstrate how both practices derive from language contact situations. At the same time, we aspire to understand how different settings of language contact relate to one

Dr. E. Kelbert and Dr. M. Deganutti are implementing the international project  IMPULZ Translation and Transfer of Style Across Languages: Towards the Theory of Language Contact in Literature at the Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences.

About the MIT project

“Script-switching in Literary Text” online conference

Miscellaneous

12 March 2025: 8:55 AM – 2:00 PM
13 March 2025: 2:55 PM – 8:00 PM
14 March 2025: 9:55 AM – 5:00 PM

Sign up for Zoom link before 10 March 2025: zerocodeswitching@pm.me
For more information contact Marianna Deganutti (marianna.deganutti@savba.sk)

 

The conference is co-organized by Langueflow, an international research group supported by the University of Bielefeld that focuses on literary multilingualism and the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The event is being held as part of the IMPULZ project Translation and Transfer of Style Across Languages: Towards the Theory of Language Contact in Literature.

This conference brings together scholars from around the world to explore the phenomenon of script-switching in literary texts. The conference’s scope encompasses a range of topics, including the stylistic functions of script-switching in Japanese literature and its connection to multilingualism and translation. Presentations will also examine multi-script usage in various regions, such as Asia, North Africa, and Europe, as well as the significance of script choice in historical documents. The narratological potential of heterography will be explored through the works of authors like Ezra Pound and Anne Carson. Furthermore, the conference will address the role of script in contemporary contexts, including avant-garde drama, K-pop lyrics, art and occult science texts. Four keynotes will be delivered, including one by Haun Saussy and Monika Schmitz-Emans. A book presentation featuring “Writing Beyond Writing” by Tim Brookes is also included in the program. This conference provides a forum for scholarly exchange and discussion on this multifaceted topic.

The full programme and book of abstracts can be found here: https://langueflow.eu/cfp-script-switching-in-literary-texts/

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.