This lecture explores the complex and often contentious dynamics of Ukrainian-Russian coexistence within the so-called “shared cultural space” from the early 1920s to the early 1950s, focusing specifically on the field of literary translation. It examines how Russian literature was translated into Ukrainian, considering both reprints and first-time translations.
Lada Kolomiyets is a DSc (Philology) in Translation Studies, Professor at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. An interdisciplinary researcher in literature, folklore, and translation studies.
The recording of the lecture in English is available HERE.
At the beginning of this year, a unique publication was released in the prestigious Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series, edited by our colleague Dobrota Pucherová and Erika Brtáňová from the Institute of Slovak Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. The publication, Jozef Ignác Bajza, René, or: A Young Man’s Adventures and Experiences. An edition with commentary of the first Slovak novel, is the very first English translation of the first Slovak novel. Bajza’s novel was translated by David Short, an acclaimed British translator of Czech and Slovak. In addition to the translation, the book includes an introduction, extensive annotations, an illustrated appendix, and two studies that place the work René mláďenca príhodi a skúsenosťi (1783–1785) in the context of the European Enlightenment.
For more detailed information about the book, please click HERE.
In his latest monograph, Dreams in Chinese Fiction: Spiritism, Aestheticism, and Nationalism (Routledge, 2025), Johannes Kaminski examines the modern political concept of the “Chinese Dream” through the lens of dream representations in Chinese literary tradition—from ancient times to the present day. What range of meanings and forms do dreams take in Chinese literary and philosophical texts? And how does the traditional understanding of dreams evolve at the turn of the 20th century?
The studies on the topic of this issue give rise to a discussion of the extent to which the often postulated dominance of the life sciences affects the position of literary studies (and thus literature) in the current system of disciplines and their discourses and whether literary studies themselves can be understood as a type of life knowledge. From an interdiscursive perspective, the articles point to parallels between the discursive status of literature and that of the life sciences, since both combine specific discourses into new entities. The process of reflection brings up questions: what legitimizes the supposedly dominant position of the life sciences in the 21st century, and what are the prerequisites and forms of a fully-fledged communication between literature, literary studies, and life sciences?
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: OTTMAR ETTE
Warum die Literaturwissenschaft eine Lebenswissenschaft ist
AMELIE BENDHEIM – DIETER HEIMBÖCKEL
Auf Herz und Nerven. Zur Literaturgeschichte der Ohnmacht
MONIKA SCHMITZ-EMANS
Aussterben. Über Literarisierungen eines liminalen Lebenswissens
ESTERA GŁUSZKO-BOZCOŃ
Zwischen Gesundheitsdiktatur, Ökoterrorismus und individueller Freiheit: Lebenswissenschaften in Juli Zehs Corpus Delicti und Dirk C. Flecks GO! – Die Ökodiktatur
MILUŠE JUŘÍČKOVÁ
Klimatický diskurs v zrcadle současných norských textů
FANG WAN
Towards a Global South posthumanism: The more-than-human world in Han Song’s Red Ocean and Véronique Tadjo’s In the Company of Men
ROMAN MIKULÁŠ
Vergessen als Gegenstand der Lebenswissenschaften und der Literaturwissenschaft: Dargestellt am Roman Noras Gedächtnis von Dorothea Zeppezauer
JOSEF FULKA
Láska, afekt, text: nad několika textovými motivy v Rousseauově Julii
ALENA KYSELICOVÁ
Teória krátkej prózy v medzinárodnom kontexte
The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be foundHERE.
In this journal issue, edited by Oksana Blashkiv, an international group of scholars searches for answers regarding the contemporary condition of the university and its representations in Anglophone and non-Anglophone campus fiction in its plurality and diversity. By bringing attention to campus fiction in Ukrainian, Swedish, Spanish, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, Czech, German, Bulgarian, and American literature, the issue sheds light on the global campus providing comparative global/transatlantic and national/local perspectives on the university and the ways it is perceived in different cultural contexts. Simultaneously, the authors delineate a series of idiosyncratic characteristics of the campus/academic novel within a specific national literary tradition, while drawing parallels with the best-known case, the Anglo-American genre. Their articles highlight the diversity of campus fiction, thus widening the discussion about the global campus and enriching it with the topics of national/local history and cultural memory, distinctive perspectives on multilingualism and hybrid identities, and above all, the past and present of the university that defines its future.
The event will be moderated by the issue’s editor Oksana Blashkiv.
The full content of the issue with links to the individual texts can be foundHERE.
Bratislava, Slovakia May 14, 2025 – Doctoral seminar Institute of World Literature SAS (address: Dúbravská cesta 9, 841 04 Bratislava, Slovakia) GPS: 48°10’12.8″N 17°04’14.4″E
May 15-16, 2025 – international translation history colloquium in English and French Room G 239, Faculty of Arts, Comenius University in Bratislava, 2nd floor of the Gondova 2 building (address: Gondova 2, 814 99 Bratislava, Slovakia) GPS: 48.1405, 17.1164
Interpreting into Slovak will be provided. Visitors are welcome to attend the colloquium free of charge and without registration. To attend the colloquium online, please use the link.
The colloquium is co-organized by the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava, and CEFRES – French Research Center in Humanities and Social Sciences – Prague. This event is supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency under the Contract no. APVV-21-0198.
The colloquium brings together translation and humanities scholars from all around the world, experts starting out in the field as well as established prominent figures to explore the circumstances of non-literary transfers and translations (philosophy, sociology, arts, history, linguistics, etc.) and to study the commonalities and differences between Western and Central-Eastern Europe in this respect. The contributions will focus on the following areas of expertise:
histories of humanities translations
translation and transfer of scholarly knowledge and their institutional contexts
concepts, terminology, types of scholarly texts and their argumentation, stylistic conventions
translators and key figures of humanities (case studies)
Apart from a standard conference module with a round table, keynote lecture and sessions, it will also host a doctoral seminar on May 14. Here a specially called up panel of experts consisting of prominent translation and humanities scholars will offer PhD. students greater feedback and an opportunity to discuss their work in detail.
Interpreting into Slovak will be provided. Visitors are welcome to attend the colloquium free of charge and without registration.
The programs and the original Call for Paper in English and French can be found here:
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→
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 foundHERE.
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 foundHERE.
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.
This lecture explores the complex and often contentious dynamics of Ukrainian-Russian coexistence within the so-called “shared cultural space” from the early 1920s to the early 1950s, focusing specifically on the field of literary translation. It examines how Russian literature was translated into Ukrainian, considering both reprints and first-time translations.
