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16802 - (POST)IMPERIALE NARRATIVE IN DEN (ZENTRAL)EUROPÄISCHEN LITERATUREN DER MODERNE

 

Organizer(s): Müller-Funk, Wolfgang (Universität Wien, Drosendorf, Austria); Chovanec, Johanna (Universität Wien, Brunn am Gebirge, Austria)

Leitung: Marijan Bobinac (Zagreb), Wolfgang Müller-Funk (Wien) und Clemens Ruthner (Trinitiy College Dublin)

The claim of our proposal represents an international research project on post-imperial narratives based at the University of Zagreb. It includes an analysis of what constitutes different cultures and power relations in the multi-ethnic late Habsburg Empire but also to the Ottoman and the Russian Empire. We therefore define our principal objective to highlight the production of knowledge regarding the complex cultural connections between the central and peripheral regions in Central, East and Southeast Europe in last two centuries.

Our proposal starts from the observation that the dominant scholarly discourses have not sufficiently acknowledged the impact and the cultural complexity of the Habsburg Monarchy and other European Empires, especially the significance of power relations within this state structure. Our methodological point of departure is therefore the assertion that cultural and especially literary production cannot be properly understood in isolation, but only in reference to the entirety of culture. We intend to examine and explore the complexity of this totality as refracted through cultural histories of the Danube Monarchy but also compare it to other empires like the Ottoman Empire. Therefore proposals dealing with (post-) imperial narratives and power structures in the mentioned empires would enrich our panel and are welcome.

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17218 - (Queer) Relationality: Gender and Queer Comparatists at Work

 

Organizer(s): Spurlin, William (Brunel University London, Uxbridge/London, Great Britain)

Sponsored by the Comparative Gender Studies Committee.

Because the comparative examines literary and cultural texts relationally rather than what is assumed to be given ontologically, how might we theorise the ways in which genders, sexualities, languages, temporalities, identities, and cultural spaces touch? How might we examine spatial and cultural notions of physical proximity in comparative gender and queer studies frameworks? Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick observes in Touching Feeling that the term ‘beside’ is generative because ‘it comprises a wide range of desiring, identifying, representing, repelling, paralleling, differentiating, rivalling, leaning, twisting, mimicking, withdrawing, attracting, aggressing, warping, and other relations’ (8). What is crucial to queer relationality is not only the act of comparison, but a critical examination of the space ‘in between,’ which is not a space separating discrete categories, bodies, or languages, but binds, transforms, and translates them quite queerly. How might an emphasis on relationality demonstrate, in new ways, the multiplicity of inflections and intersections between gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, national and religious affiliation, and disability? Finally, what are some of the political stakes of a relational analysis, when we consider, for example, relations of language and violence and other power relations? To what extent can the relational, the trans, the liminal, the mediating space ‘in between’ operate as a potential site of rupture, of epistemological or social transformation?

Paper topics might include feminist/queer relations; transgender; gender and violence; queering translation; bodily proximities/distances; global/local relations; transnational relations and/as queer spaces; queering public/private relations and relations between the academy and the everyday world; rethinking kinship, family, and community relations; relations between gendered/sexual subjects and nation-states, etc.

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17319 - (Wissenschafts-)Sprachen an der Grenze: Phänomene der Überforderung im Wissen vom Menschen um 1800

 

Organizer(s): Hamel, Hanna (Institut für Germanistik, Wien, Austria); Langer, Stephanie; Assinger, Thomas (Institut für Germanistik, Wien, Austria)

Die Ausdifferenzierung moderner Wissenskulturen tritt um 1800 in aller Deutlichkeit hervor. Die damit verbundenen Herausforderungen sind nicht nur theologischer oder epistemologischer Natur; mit der disziplinären Ausdifferenzierung wird vielmehr auch ein kommunikatives Problem virulent. Durch die zunehmende Präzision der Beschreibungen wissenschaftlicher Gegenstände entstehen Spezialistenkulturen mit je eigenem schwer übersetzbarem Vokabular, wucherndem Material und idiosynkratischen Anordnungsweisen. Diesen babylonischen Zuständen des Wissens und des Sprechens vom Wissen wollen Großprojekte wie Johann Gottfried Herders Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit oder Alexander von Humboldts Kosmos begegnen. Sie bleiben aber unvollendete Bemühungen, in der unüberschaubaren Datenlage präzise Ordnungsstrukturen anzulegen.

Dies sind die Pole, zwischen denen sich die epistemologische Überforderung um 1800 aufspannt: Die Vielfalt wissenschaftlicher Perspektiven versucht mit sprachlicher Präzision und verstärkter Ausdifferenzierung Gegenständen zu begegnen, die sich ihrerseits klaren Distinktionen entziehen - damit wird eine universale Betrachtungsweise unmöglich, die Gegenstände des Wissens werden als Objekte unterschiedlicher Wissenskulturen vieldeutig.

Der Workshop widmet sich daher exemplarischen Schwellen- und Grenzphänomenen, die das Ringen um sprachliche Präzision bei gleichzeitigem Fehlen distinkter wissenschaftlicher Objekte veranschaulichen. Darunter fallen die Bemühungen, anhand ethnologischer Beschreibungen klar markiert "Kulturen" oder "Rassen" zu definieren. Dazu gehören die medizinische Überprüfung der Grenzen des menschlichen Lebens und die Neubeschreibung des Sterbens als dreiphasigem Prozess, die in das trügerische Grenzphänomen des Scheintods führt. Der Workshop fragt somit nach literarischen und wissenschaftlichen Verhandlungen von Grenzphänomenen oder Schwellenkategorien, in denen die Übersetzungsschwierigkeiten moderner, wissenschaftlicher Polyperspektivität in ihren frühen Ausprägungen anschaulich werden.

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17292 - A challenge for Comparative Literature: The dynamics of Romani literatures and their many languages

 

Organizer(s): Eder-Jordan, Beate (Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen, Universität Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria); Blandfort, Julia (Jade Hochschule Wilhelmshaven, Wilhelmshaven, Germany); Kovacshazy, Cécile (Université de Limoges, Espaces Humains et Interactions Culturelles, Limoges, France)

The last twenty years have seen a distinct increase in the scientific engagement with the arts of Roma. In the field of literary works we can therefore speak of the establishment of a small field of Studies of Romani Literature. However, as the dispersal of Roma across Europe and the whole world has led to a wide range of different literary forms in different languages, most of the approaches – for the lack of translation and the language barrier – focus on one single national context or take into consideration one language. The aim of the encounter lies therefore in discussing different theoretical approaches as much as in comparing findings at national level in order to develop the comparative perspective on a broad level. The aim is to meet the challenge of developing a multi-perspective view on the variety of Romani Literatures and their many (poetical) languages. Two different axes may inspire the discussions: the Cultural Studies perspective and the literary aesthetical perspective. Points of discussion from the Cultural studies perspective Language(s) and identity/alterity: - Representation of language(s): multilingualism vs. monolingualism - Political language(s) and language(s) as a political means - Tension of individual and collective voice(s) - Recognition as an autonomous literary current (may Romani Literatures become “host nation” of book fairs such as Leipziger or Frankfurter Buchmesse?) Language and medium: - Persistence/transfer of oral structures in the written form or vice versa? - References to other artistic “languages” like visual arts, dance and music? Points of discussion from the Literary Studies perspective Narratology: - Is there a narrative language of the Roma in form of independent shapes of narratives that can be traced in all Romani literatures? Poetics: - Can we trace specific metaphoras? - Which range of genres can we find? - Are there intertextual references to other poetic languages?

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17477 - A VIEW FROM THE SOUTH

 

Organizer(s): Buescu, Helena (Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal)

Ever since the eighteenth century and the onset of full modernity, but even more so since the start of the European unification project after WWII, European identity or “Europeanness,” along with the concentration of economic and political power, has overwhelmingly been located in the Northern and Western parts of Europe, with the Eastern and Southern parts of the continent being perceived as “borderline” to such identity. When it emerged this view in fact constituted a reversal of the until then customary view of a Europe primarily defined by a Southern, that is to say Mediterranean, outlook, rooted in the classical tradition. It is our contention that in a globalizing world characterized by mass migration, changing economic patterns, and shifting political and military power relations, especially Southern Europe, precisely because of its “border” situation, which directly exposes it to the forces of globalization, can serve as an alternative laboratory for a future European identity to more Northern realms. Concretely we want to investigate how such future European identity or identities are (fore)cast in literary works emanating from the Southern tier of Europe, especially: Portugal, Spain, Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, and Romania. Issues such as world literature, migration, different kinds of cosmopolitanism, or the fecundity of the borders, among others, will be especially welcome.

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17338 - Affective language between action and passion

 

Organizer(s): Jirsa, Tomas (Institute of Czech and Comparative Literature, Prague, Czech Republic)

  The proposed workshop will deal with the relation betweeen affectivity and language, especially the languages of modern literature, philosophy, and aesthetics. During the last two decades, the so-called “affective turn” has largely influenced and interconnected different humanities such as sociology, film studies and cultural anthropology. The affects have been meticulously explored within fine arts, visual studies, and cognitive sciences, yet a consistent analysis of the affective operations in literary language has been undertaken only rarely. The reason might be that affects are often overlooked as unanalysable experiences, mere affections of the reader.  However, one might object that the very sharing and/or transmitting of an affective effect is often the primary aim that the literary text strives to attain. To put it in even more radical way, the effect of literature displays affectivity as something primarily shared, exteriorized, ontologically dynamical, as – to use Eugenie Brinkema’s words – “a self-folding exteriority” which is based on its textual or visual form. Thus, various questions concerning the relation between affects and language can be raised, such as: Whence the capacity of the literary language to grasp and mediate affects? Or is it rather that affect could be perceived as a linguistic medium? What does the affective force of literary language consist in, and how does it shape its formal structure, its narrativity and/or performativity? In what ways does subjectivity interfere with affects? Besides our attempt to answer these questions, and along with a few case studies upon which the aesthetic as well as the figural and epistemological force of affects will be demonstrated, the workshop will ask questions about the potential use of other concepts which shed light on the link between language and affects, such as Roland Barthes’ notion of “punctum” and George Didi-Huberman’s analysis of the visual symptoms.

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17370 - Afriphone literature: the contribution of African language literature to a comparative literature agenda in the 21st Century

 

Organizer(s): Bodomo, Adams (Institut für Afrikawissenschaften, Wien, Austria)

Papers are invited for a panel discussion on the contribution of African language literature to a comparative literature agenda in the 21st first century. Afriphone literature or African language literature, conceptualized as literature produced in the medium of indigenous African languages, has increasingly gained importance in the field of African literature, especially in school and university curricula. It is gradually interacting with and even confronting colonial paradigms of African literature like “Anglophone African literature, “Francophone African literature”, and “Lusophone African literature” whose languages of expression are those of the former colonial powers of Africa. The main goal of this panel is to explore how and to what extent African literature as a whole has contributed and can contribute more effectively to the field of comparative literature, whose raison d’etre is based on the “comparison of literary texts from different cultural spheres and in different languages”. The emphasis on African language literature is particularly poignant here since the main theme of this conference is “the many languages of comparative literature”, meaning that this conference has decided to chart a multilingual agenda for comparative literature.

Some of the issues the papers should address are: how and to what extend has African literature contributed to comparative literature in the medium of English, French, Portuguese, and other non-indigenous African languages? How and to what extent can African language literature contribute to this multilingual theme of comparative literature at the Vienna conference? What methodological and theoretical challenges do we face in charting such an agenda?

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16082 - Assia Djebar et la transgression des limites linguistiques, littéraires et culturelles

 

Organizer(s): Asholt, Wolfgang (HU Berlin Institut für Romanistik, Berlin, Germany); Gauvin, Lise (Université de Montréal Dpt Littér. francaise, Montréal, Canada)

Assia Djebar (1936 – 2015), tout en écrivant en français, aborde dans son œuvre toujours plusieurs cultures et plusieurs idiomes. A côté des ses langues maternelles ou natales (l’arabe, le berbère le français), elle invente à partir de sa langue d’écriture d’autres langues, celle de son dialogue avec les morts dans Le Blanc de l’Algérie (1993) ou celle de La Disparition de la langue française (2003) ou d’Oran langue morte (1997). Ces langues (littéraires) veulent toujours dépasser le monolinguisme de l’autre en devenant les langues des autres, que ce soient les femmes dans leurs combats historiques pour l’indépendance nationale ou dans leur émancipation personnelle/sociale. À partir de cette multiplicité de langues se développe aussi une identité autobiographique et sociale qui dépasse les frontières linguistiques, littéraires et culturelles. L’oeuvre d’Assia Djebar est une grand expérience sur le savoir vivre ensemble, sur les femmes-récits et sur les espaces d’identités féminines et masculines qui participe et dépasse le post-colonialisme et les question de genre/gender. Gayatri Spivak a comparé le « Ghostwriting » de Loin de Médine (1991) avec les Spectres de Marx de Derrida, parus deux ans plus tard : son œuvre est donc à la fois une mémoire (collective et culturelle) et une promesse. Il représente une transmission entre les littératures et les cultures et ce panel veut se consacrer à étudier la multiplicité des limites que cet œuvre évoque, questionne et transgresse.

Nous invitons donc à aborder cet œuvre dans le contexte de la section « cultures multiples, idiomes multiples » que ce soient les aspects de « langage et culture », « langage et identité », « multilinguisme – problème ou opportunité » ou « transgression de limites culturelles ».

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16791 - 'Autor', 'Text' und ŽLeser' im Kontext (Komparatistik und Sozialwissenschaften)

 

Organizer(s): Batorova, Maria (Dionýz-Durisin-Kabinett, Forschungsstätte des Instituts für philologische Studien an der Pädagogischen Fakultät der Comenius-Universität, Bratislava, Bratislava, Slovakia); Pospisil, Ivo (FF MU Brno, Brno, Czech Republic)

Kategorie: C Wer spricht? Komparatistik und Sozialwissenschaften 'Autor', 'Text' und 'Leser' sind drei bestimmte Teile des Paradigmas, das von dem schoepferischen und kuenstlerischen Verfahren geprägt ist. Seit einem Extrem der zwei Jahrhunderte, des 18. und 19. Jhds., in dem der Autor als Genie verstanden wurde und sein Werk ausschliesslich unter Zugrundelegung von seiner Biographie interpretiert wurde, ist im 20. Jhd. das andere Extrem zu bemerken, und zwar die ausschliessliche Hervorhebung des Textes im Interpretationsprozess.

Die postmodernen Theorien, die die These hervorheben, dass der Text nach der Veroeffentlichung nicht mehr dem Autor gehoere, weil der Text "sein eigenes Leben hat", gingen soweit, dass es deklariert wurde, der Autor sei uninteressant, sogar ungeeignet im Sinne der Erwähnung seiner Existenz bei der literaturwissenschaftlichen Untersuchung bzw. Interpretation des Textes. Die Ansätze der Soziologen gleichzeitig Philosophen M. Foucault und R. Barthes u. a. befassten sich sogar mit dem "Tod des Autors".

In vorgelegtem Fall geht es nicht um die stereotypischen Rueckwege zu den alten Konzepten des Autors. Es geht um den Aufbau der neuen Methodologie und personalistischen Konzeption als einem Bestandteil des komplexen Zuganges zu dem literarischen Kunstwerk, in dem jeder Aspekt eine bestimmte unvertretbare Aufgabe aufweist.

Besonders die Genres an der Grenze der traditionellen Genre-Entitäten, oft auch an der Grenze von Fiction und Non-Fiction koennen als ausschlaggebend bei der Forschung der Integration der personalistischen Konzeption neuer Zeiten im Rahmen der holistischen Perspektive der Forschung des literarischen Artefakts gelten. Der komparatistische Gesichtspunkt, der durch den personalistischen Zugriff als den Bestandteil des komplexen Anblicks kennzeichnend ist, kann neue Impulse sowie Wendungen innerhalb der vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft und ihrer neuen Entwicklungsphase darstellen.

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17301 - Bilingualism in world poetry: languages and cultural transfer

 

Organizer(s): Azarova, Natalia (Institute of Linguistics of Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia)

 The panel session invites papers dealing with bilingualism in poetry, with a view to reconsider it in terms of linguistics, poetics, and semiotics. From a historical perspective, there have been ‘golden ages’ of poetic bilingualism, such as, for example, Medieval Muslim Spain or Russia in Soviet times. Bilingualism in literature has enjoyed considerable scholarly attention over the last decades, whereas poetic bilingualism has only been the subject of selective critisism being, as a rule, a part of studies of particular authors’ poetics. There are very few theoretically grounded studies of poetic bilingualism so far. This session is aimed at the discussion of bilingual poetry within the larger scale of cultural transfers, with various national cultures and languages involved. The scope of problematics encompasses two major issues raised. The first is the poet’s bilinguality, implying that the poet can speak two languages, but actually writes in one of them only. The second is poetic bilingualism, that is, the production of poetic texts by an author in two languages. Both issues are of scholarly interest, but the methodology of research should vary in these two cases. Besides, this issue borders with the topic of translingual interactions in monolingual poetry. Currently, we can observe a rise in translingual interactions in poetry of various countries and, although these interactions require particular definitions and do not constitute poetic bilingualism strictu sensu, this issue is of high relevance to comparative literature and linguistic studies.

Particular topics to be discussed within this session are:

- The bilingual poet’s identity and subjectivity in bilingual poetic writings

- The poets’ metalinguistic reflections on bilingualism

- The bilingual poets’ choice of language

- The bilingual poet’s languages: a unified ‘stock’ or two individual systems?

- Intermediary languages in bilingual and multilingual interactions

- The bilingual poet’s translations and self-translations

 

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17311 - Brazil-language: toward a multipolar globalization in the field of culture

 

Organizer(s): Lima, Rachel (Universidade Federal da Bahia, Salvador (BA), Brazil); Martins, Anderson (Universidade Federal de São João del Rei, São João del Rei (MG), Brazil)

The history of Brazilian literature, which includes the history of Comparative Literature in Brazil, is deeply embedded in the process of formation of the country as a modern nation along with the intellectual and aesthetic project of Brazilian nationhood, even “nationness” in Homi Bhabha’s now famous phraseology. This is naturally not surprising, especially in view of Latin America’s, and Brazil’s, specific presence in the geopolitics of the so-called modern world-system. Nevertheless, the economic, cultural and technological conditions that have been shaping the wide-ranging state of globality within international, transnational and postnational relations demand compelling responses and positions from individual national cultures represented by their intellectual and artistic classes. In such a scenario, Brazilian culture and Brazilian literature must be approached as a language in itself, or even a multiplicity of languages and language systems, that must work its way into today’s increasingly globalizing/globalized societies, communities, commonalities, groupings and regroupings. The proposition of a “Brazil-language”, as recently put forward by the Brazilian author Silviano Santiago, is a potent sign and metaphor through which the insertion of this country into the ever shifting settings of the contemporary world can be debated critically in its cultural, literary, artistic and semiotic specificities. It must be highlighted that the term “specificity” here marks an unequivocal alignment with the notion that globalization and global relations does not bring about a new undifferentiated hegemony of the same, but a pervasive circuit for the production of open commonalities of negotiated difference. And since the concept of “specificity” must not be equated with any notion of insularity, the debate of a “Brazil-language” will also benefit significantly from the inclusion of contributions by researchers whose work go beyond the aspects of a nation-in-globalization to incorporate the wider spectrum of globalization-across-nations.

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17324 - Cartographie européenne de l'écocritique

 

Organizer(s): Hermetet, Anne-Rachel (Université d'Angers / EcoLitt, Malakoff, France); Thiltges, Sébastian (Université du Maine (EcoLitt) / Universität des Saarlandes, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxemburg); Guest, Bertrand (Université d'Angers (EcoLitt), Villers-Cotterêts, France)

L’émergence d’une écologie sociale, politique et culturelle modifie profondément l’écriture de l’environnement et encourage la création de méthodes permettant l’étude des rapports entre littérature et écologie. Tandis que les écrivains se démarquent des formes traditionnelles de représentation de la nature, les sciences humaines et littéraires expérimentent l’essor de l’ecocriticism, puis des humanités environnementales. Ces approches hétérogènes s’implantent dans des terreaux culturels, où des philosophes, des écrivains et des scientifiques ont pensé l’environnement et imaginé l’articulation entre nature et culture de manières différentes. Confrontées à de nouveaux thèmes, genres, contextes et concepts scientifiques (Descola, Latour), tels que l’anthropologie culturelle (Iser), la théorie des systèmes sociaux (Luhmann), la géocritique (Westphal) ou l’écopoétique (White, Schoentjes), elles se développent ainsi en se diversifiant.

En invitant des chercheurs à travailler sur des corpus inédits, à comparer leurs résultats, mais aussi à situer leurs travaux dans ce champ innovant, l’objectif escompté de la présente section est d’établir une cartographie (Moretti) conceptuelle, multilingue et comparatiste de l’étude environnementale des textes. Si elle entre plus particulièrement dans la section « langages de la thématique », elle touche aussi profondément aux problèmes de l’échelle qui sont au cœur du comparatisme et de sa dimension multilingue, articulant en effet la question des régionalismes — ou de ce que l’écologie appelle « local » - à ce qu’elle nomme « global », « planétaire » voire « cosmique », autrement dit à celle d’un universalisme à questionner. Afin de garantir un échange international, alors même que l’absence de traductions des textes demeure un frein à la circulation des idées, une écocritique comparée (Suberchicot) constitue, de nos jours, l’opportunité de dépasser la seule influence anglophone en vue d’un renouveau des recherches écocritiques.

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CANCELLED - Chung-shu Chien's Sublimation Theory From the Perspective of Bakhtin’s Dialogism - 17245

 

Organizer(s): CHEN, TAO (CHINA WOMEN'S UNIVERSITY, BEIJING, China)

Translation is de facto a process of using one language to express another one. It is a linguistic transfer, a cognitive process of trans-context, trans-cultural exchange expressing different cultural implications and an interactive process of different translation subjects which coincides with intersubjectivity of Bakhtin’s dialogism. Sublimation theory reflects the dialogue between subjects which hints that single subjectivity (i.e. translator-centre, original-writer-centre and reader-centre) should be avoided in the literary translation. Literary translator undertakes multiple tasks and needs to coordinate them harmoniously in the interactive process of self and other, of which Bakhtin’s dialogism could better our understanding.

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17318 - Comparative Literary Histories of Slavery:

 

Organizer(s): Simonsen, Karen-Margrethe (Aarhus University, Denmark, Rønde, Denmark)

The origins and causes of slavery often seem to be found within national or regional political contexts but slavery is also intimately connected with international circulation and its forms and effects are transnational. In this section we will focus both on comparison between different national histories of slavery and on the transnational or global aspects of slavery. The intention is to raise a number of questions regarding the problem of comparison and historicization: what do we actually compare and how do we place the comparison within different histories of political, economic or cultural development of modernity? In the section we have a special focus on literary histories of slavery. The word ‘literary’ should be understood in a broad sense (anything from literary genres like the novel, poetry, drama to the movie, travel narrative, diary, account book, cartography etc). The underlying assumption is that comparisons may look differently depending on the materials compared and their contextualization. Also, the history of slavery raises a fundamental problem of literary genre, since much literature about slavery is written in new, experimental or alternative genres. The literary history of slavery thus has to be written in a different way than classical literary histories.

We invite papers that address both the problems of texts, methods of comparison and historicization and that may address some of the following or similar questions: Do we compare micronarratives of different forms of slavery or larger developmental histories? Is slavery best understood through the perspective of microhistories or longue durée? What understanding of comparison is at stake and what kind of literature? If slavery is transnational and based on circulation rather than national contexts, how do we frame the comparison geographically and methodologically?

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16497 - Comparative Literature: Global Practice

 

Organizer(s): Eoyang, Eugene (Indiana University, Bloomington, Bloomington, USA); Zhou, Gang (Louisiana State Univrsity, Pineville, USA)

British comparatist Susan Bassnett starts her Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction with a question often asked by comparatists: "Sooner or later, anyone who claims to be working in comparative literature has to try and answer the inevitable question: what is it?" In fact, the identity crisis experienced by American comparatists is very much about the same question. Instead of vainly searching for an abstract definition of what comparative literature is, This panel starts with a more empirical question: what do comparatists around the world do? The panel welcomes reports and presentations on comparative literature in various countries, with the aim of providing a forum for comparatists around the world to acquire some global perspective on the field. Despite the crises, declines, and demises of comparative literature reported in articles and books in the US, it may be salutary to know that, in other countries, comparative literature maybe struggling to establish itself, is burgeoning, or is flourishing.

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16658 - Comparative Literature as a Transcultural Discipline

 

Organizer(s): Coutinho, Eduardo (AC Studies Center, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

Comparative Literature has always held a special position in the cadre of Human Sciences for having been created in opposition to the study of national literatures and for having been always characterized by its trans-disciplinary perspective. Unlike the study of national literatures which were confined to the sphere of single nations or to literary productions in a single language, Comparative Literature crossed the barriers of several national literatures, approaching them in their mutual relations. Besides, from its very beginning, the discipline also included comparative studies between literature and other forms of artistic expression as well as literature and other forms of knowledge. The discipline’s object of study has often been distinct literary, or rather cultural, texts, be them oral or written, and as such it can be redefined as the study of the dialogue among cultures. This section welcomes papers which deal with this dialogue in any of its forms, ranging from the mere influence or interference of one of the elements upon the other to a real conflict that may result in new forms of expression.

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17346 - Comparative Literature in India and the Many Languages of Indian Literature

 

Organizer(s): Sarkar, Judhajit (Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India)

Semantic interaction between languages spoken across the Indian subcontinent is a historically verifiable linguistic fact. While the literatures composed in these languages bear considerable traces of this linguistic interaction, literary studies in India in the last century has remained largely oblivious to this plural reality, conceptualising “Indian Literature” as a constellation of various individual language literatures. The disciplinary and hermeneutic practice of Comparative Literature in India, however, is predicated upon the continuing existence of this plurilingualism as it exhibits itself in the very ‘texture’ of Indian literatures.

As a result of a shared pattern of linguistic development, verbal art in each of the Indian languages has always had at its disposal a shared vocabulary of cultural expressions. One of the aims of this panel is to show how the presence of this vocabulary has been useful for, rather than obstructive of, creative de-familiarizations in Indian literary art across time and space. Mainly historiographic in nature, the panel will examine the bi- and multilingualism of Indian writers, the use of multiple registers in individual literary texts drawn from multiple language sources and most importantly, the heterogeneous and plural nature of each of the individual language systems as evident from their respective literatures.

The panel will try to buttress this understanding of literary multilingualism with an analysis of the logic and politics of linguistic standardization, an ongoing process that began with the intervention of British colonial policies in the nineteenth century, leading to the linguistic division of Indian states after independence. The five papers included in this panel will try to show how this tension affects the practice of Comparative Literature in India and how it responds to the various institutional manifestations of this tension.

 

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17320 - Comparative Studies in Central European Context

 

Organizer(s): Kálmán, György C. (Institute for Literary Studies, Humanities Center, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary)

The group of papers will focus on the local (East and Central European) contribution of comparative studies to the global scholarship, in many ways: first, the history of the literary studies wittness that in East and Central Europe comparative studies had a strong emphasis, sometimes even political background, and counted as a way out from the narrow constraints of the totalitarian control of cultural orientation. Some areas (e.g., tranlation theory) were even globally acknowledged as pioneered by Central European scholars. Second, comparative studies in the region have always had a special scope of interest, partly in the literatures and arts of East and Central Europe itself, and partly in East/West interface (influences, similarities, homologies, etc.). Third, emigration has played a crucial political and cultural role in the region. In the literary and scholarly works of East-Central European émigrés peculiar transnational perspectives of comparison have opened up with regard to linguistic and cultural exchanges, memory and identity formation, assimilation and dissimilation.

Papers concerning the special East and Central European history of comparative studies are welcome as well as those dealing with the regional comparisons and the questions of emigration/immigration, language changes, language isolation etc.

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17255 - Comparing the arts: art as a universal language

 

Organizer(s): Oliveira, Solange (Federal University of Minas Gerais Brazil, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)

The group session starts out as a discussion of the concept of the universal as related to art. It will move on to the question of how far art can indded be taken as a universal language: it is debatable whether works of art in different media can be proven vehicles of universal communication. Suffice it to say that members of so called primitive peoples do not necessarily recognize even their own faces in photos of themselves. Needless to add, numberless cualtural products celebrated in the West as instances of universal art can in fact prove culture-bound.

On the other end of the argument, it may be contended that certain literary creations may be claimed to be carriers of universal meaning, as exemplarily illustrated by re-readings of Shakespeare´s plays in so many different languages and cultures. Taking this line of the argument, the discussion will move on to the analysis of representations of archetypes from the perspective of Comparative Literature in relation to Jungian psychology. A number of such representations in different cultures will be analysed as endowed with worldwide intelligibility. Here belong, for instance, artistic creations related to archetypes such as the mother, the father, the warrior, the ruler,, the lover, the child as well as universal themes such as love, birth and death, grief and joy.

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17280 - Comparison and Intermediality: The Gesamtkunstwerk

 

Organizer(s): Fusillo, MASSIMO (University of L'Aquila, ROMA, Italy); Grishakova, Marina (University of Tartu, Department of Comparative Literature, TARTU, Estonia); Fischer, Caroline (Universitè de Pau, PAU, France)

Studies on intermediality are facing the continuous hybridization and the multisensory milieu in which we constantly live: the «culture of convergence», as was defined by Henry Jenkins. It is a perspective that must certainly involve comparative literature, since literary text is becoming a part of a complex galaxy of media, languages, cultures.

First conceived by Wagner as a way to recover the synthesis of arts at the core of Greek tragedy, the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) played a significant role first in Symbolism and Aestheticism (the poetics of synesthesia), and then in the various avant-gardes and in their utopian subversions. The main goal is a regeneration of the public function of artistic creation, which is strongly opposed to mass culture and technology, but at the same time depends on them, in an ambivalent relationship, clear in the various realizations of the total work of art in 20th century (Ejsenstejn, Brecht, Riefensthal, Stravinskij, Artaud, Disney’s, Warhol, but even the delirious aestheticization of Nazism as well as Stalin’s propaganda).

What is left of this category in our age, characterized by the end of utopias and avant-gardes, and by fragmentations and disseminations? Nowadays the total work of art can be read as a specific variation of intermediality, a practice that subverts any essentialist vision of artistic languages, aiming at a complex blending of perceptions, amplified by new media and by the syncretic nature of the cyberspace. The workshop aims at discussing those categories, and at analysing how storytelling and other literary techniques can be realized in a variety of media. Intermediality can thus regain the comparative tradition of inter-art studies, and propose a medium-aware analysis of various hybrid genres, from the most studied to the new media: musical theatre, theatrical performance, filmic adaptation, TV series, graphic novels, iconotexts, computer games, video-art, video-clips, advertising.

19416 - Computing Literature. Corpus-based Methodologies in Digital Literary Studies

 

Organizer(s): Ivanovic, Christine (University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria)

This session will focus on corpus-based literary studies and examine these new modes and methodological approaches of reading, analyzing, interpreting, translating and editing literary texts in the context of large text corpora. The examples will demonstrate latest research efforts and research results of corpus-based studies of literature, computational philology, digital editions, analytical text encoding practices, and electronic text analysis applications.

17328 - Cultural Anxiety as Creative Potency of Cosmopolitan Perspective in Comparative Literature

 

Organizer(s): Kim, Choon-Hee (Institute of Humanities, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea)

In his essay entitled “Occasional Paris”, Henry James begins by stating that “It is hard to say exactly what is the profit of comparing one race with another, and weighing in opposed groups the manners and customs of neighbouring countries; but it is certain that as we move about the world we constantly indulge in this exercise. This is especially the case if we happen to be infected with the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite—that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none.” The “habit of comparing” as cosmopolite exercise generates anxiety, a kind of cultural condition, due to the “uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none.”

The purpose of this seminar is twofold: 1) to examine different aspects and levels of cultural anxiety created in the process of forming “the habit of comparing”; 2) to define the ways of how cosmopolitan sensibilities take shape in terms of cultural dichotomy between the native and the foreign, by consequence pursue inner unity of the two.

By opening up the discussion of cultural anxiety, we seek to re-configurate a new cosmopolitan perspective in comparative literature. This will be done by analyzing specifically cosmopolitan literary issues and concerns raised continuously or rarely in comparative literary studies.

* The languages of the seminar are English and French.

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17691 - Cultural Memory: Humanistic and Neuroscientific Perspectives

 

Organizer(s): Nalbantian, Suzanne

From the 1990s onward, the field of neuroscience has advanced in research on individual, episodic memory, giving us insights into the consolidation and retention of memory which is a key factor in the making of personal identity. Moving forward, the link from individual to collective memory is an interesting one to probe, particularly with respect to the lability or stability of memory. Neuroscientifically, collective, shared memory, has been studied less than individual memory, and this domain requires more contribution from the fields of literature, sociology, history and evolutionary psychology. Cultural studies involving treatments of the genocides of the 20th century shed some preliminary light on this topic. But a sound foundation for this approach could involve current responses to 20th-century sociologists like Maurice Halbwachs, Pierre Bourdieu and others, along with updated recourse to neuroscientific, socio-epigenetic studies in the budding field of cultural neuroscience. Hypotheses regarding culture-gene coevolution can be explored-- how cultural and social environment can shape gene expression in the neuronal recycling of brain circuitry. Literary critics can examine the emotional dimensions of collective memory, as treated by creative writers. Historical critics can contemplate how certain social groups form their own collective memory and how historians of specific nations or groups are influenced by their social frameworks, raising the issue of objectivity. Cultural studies in academe have not sufficiently subjected their own methodologies to rigorous scrutiny. The current sessions provide another forum to bring comparatists and neuroscientists together in meaningful and solid interdisciplinary exchange. Proposals for papers on such aspects of cultural memory are welcome and should be submitted via the following ICLA link: icla2016.univie.ac.at/abstract-submission/

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17126 - Dans quelle mesure l'effet de vie est-il la condition du langage de l'art ?

 

Organizer(s): Münch, Marc-Mathieu, France; Couto Pereira, Helena Bonito; Guiyoba, François (France)

L’intuition que l’art est un code universel propre à Homo sapiens se trouve partout sous la plume des grands écrivains et des artistes.

Mais elle entre en contradiction avec la dispersion des méthodes critiques littéraires et artistiques qui abordent les œuvres à partir du riche clavier des différentes sciences humaines actuellement existantes.

La jeune école de l’effet de vie juge possible de surmonter la contradiction grâce à la découverte d’un invariant, l’invariant de l’effet de vie qui montre en dernier ressort comment l’œuvre d’art fonctionne certes avec, mais surtout au-delà des sciences humaines qu’on lui applique, car elle possède une spécificité forte.

Aussi proposons-nous au XXIe Congrès AILC une table ronde (group section) réunissant des chercheurs de presque tous les continents pour communiquer autour du sujet suivant :

« Dans quelle mesure l’effet de vie est-il la condition du langage de l’art ? »

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17334 - Das Werk Heimito von Doderers in Übersetzung - Probleme und Chancen

 

Organizer(s): Sommer, Gerald (Heimito von Doderer-Gesellschaft, Berlin, Germany)

Erzählende, essayistische und lyrische, aber stets in besonderer Weise das österreichische Deutsch mit außerordentlicher Originalität verbindende Werke des österreichischen Autors Heimito von Doderer (* 5. September 1896 in Weidlingau, NÖ, † 23. Dezember 1966 in Wien), dessen 50. Todesjahr 2016 begangen wird, wurden bisher – soweit bekannt – in 30 Sprachen übersetzt. Wie kaum anders zu erwarten, wurden sie insbesondere in die Weltsprachen Englisch, Französisch und Spanisch, aber auch in die großen europäischen Nationalsprachen Italienisch, Polnisch und Russisch sowie in eine Fülle weniger verbreiteter Sprachen übertragen. Mit 13 Fremdsprachen überschritt Doderers literarischer Kriminalroman „Ein Mord den jeder begeht“ (1938) am häufigsten die Sprachgrenze, gefolgt von Doderers bekanntestem Werk, dem Roman „Die Strudlhofstiege oder Melzer und die Tiefe der Jahre“ (1951), der in zehn Fremdsprachen vorliegt. Wiederholt übersetzt wurden auch Erzählungen und Kurzgeschichten des Autors. Gelegentlich wurden Texte auch mehrmals in eine Zielsprache übertragen, insbesondere Erzählungen und Kurzprosa sowie einmal auch der schon genannte „Mord“-Roman (spanisch 1966 und 1985).

Ziel des Panels ist es, in exemplarischer Weise vorliegende, aber – sofern möglich – auch entstehende Übersetzungen von Werken Doderers vorzustellen und sich in kritischer Weise mit ihnen auseinanderzusetzen. Angestrebt wird weiterhin, Doderer-Übersetzer und Doderer-Philologen in einer Runde zusammenzubringen und möglichst Übersetzungen in mindestens zwei, idealerweise aber vier Zielsprachen im Rahmen des Panels zu berücksichtigen.

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17354 - Der Süden als Metapher. Komparatistische Annäherungen an eine transkulturelle Literaturwissenschaft

 

Organizer(s): Reichardt, Dagmar (Dept. of European Languages and Cultures ETC Faculty of Arts, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands); Maeder, Costantino C. M. (Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve , Belgium)

Seit Leonardo Sciascia das Paradigma eines “Siziliens als Metapher” 1979 prägte und damit Goethes Sizilien-Diktum eines “Schlüssel zu allem“ von 1787 fortschrieb, ist der europäische Süden imagologisch zu einem Sinnbild der Wahrheit und Universalität avanciert.

Diese Gruppenveranstaltung diskutiert Beiträge, die auf einen Stereotypen hinterfragenden, dekonstruktivistischen, postkolonialen und transkulturellen Theorieansatz rekurrieren und diesen auf literarische Fallbeispiele anwenden, die mit der südlichen Hemisphäre verbunden sind. Dabei wird methodologisch das Ziel verfolgt, ein komplementäres Gegenstück zu Edward Saids Orienttheorie zu formulieren, die zeitgleich zu Sciascias gesellschaftskritischem Engagement entstand, und den kulturwissenschaftliche Diskurs über den Süden seit Gramsci im Zeitalter der Globalisierung voranzutreiben, indem komparatistische Lektüren des Südens mit dem transkulturellen Paradigma programmatisch verknüpft und genreübergreifend erweitert werden.

Durch die Einbeziehung der digitalen Medien und intermedialer Bezüge soll nach alternativen Referenzparametern geforscht bzw. der klassische Süden transkulturell reinterpretiert werden. Als möglicher Ausgangspunkt bieten sich thematisch u.a. folgende metaphorische Aspekte an: der Süden als Sehnsuchtsort; als archaischer Ort der Armut und Unterentwicklung; als Wiege der Kultur; als Ort der Gewalt; Symbol der Sonne; oder in Hinblick auf die Spannungsfelder Männlichkeit vs. Weiblichkeit, Heimat vs. Fremde, Zuhause vs. Exotik.

Der Versuch, eine vom Äquator und der Geographie unabhängige transkulturelle Verortung des Südens grenz- und nationenübergreifend zu illustrieren, wirft die Frage auf, wo unsere fiktionale, imaginäre „Süd“-Grenze verläuft, und mündet in der These, dass der literaturwissenschaftliche Süden sinnbildlich für einen Ort der Ambivalenz, der Hybridität, des Übergangs und des Synkretismus im Zeichen einer völkerverbindenden Transkulturalität steht.

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17310 - Die Arena der Stimmen: Intermedialität, Intertextualität und Sprachenvielfalt in Literatur und Film Lateinamerikas

 

Organizer(s): Sartingen, Kathrin (Universität Wien, Institut für Romanistik, Wien, Austria); Bauer, Verena-Cathrin; Reitböck, Petra (Universität Wien, Institut für Romanistik, Wien, Austria)

„Deixa disso camarada/Me dá um cigarro” endet das bekannte Gedicht Pronominais von Oswald de Andrade. Die minimale Veränderung im Satzbau – das Umstellen eines Pronomens – hat hier maximale Auswirkungen: In dem Sprachwechsel vom Portugiesischen zum Brasilianischen steckt eine tektonische Verschiebung im brasilianischen Selbstbild, die gleichzeitig Widerstand gegen das (sprachliche) koloniale Erbe und erstarkendes politisches und künstlerisches Selbstbewusstsein einer jungen Nation programmatisch ausdrückt.

Die Sprache wird zur Arena, in der Identität, Differenz und Alterität verhandelt werden – ein Raum, der Transgression ebenso ermöglicht wie neue Kombinationen und hybride Kultur- und Diskursstrategien. Dieser Zusammenprall der Sprache der Kolonialisierten und der Kolonisatoren findet in Brasilien seinen Ausdruck in der Antropofagia : Sprache wird zum Katalysator einer kulturellen Bewegung, die das Westliche, Europäische frisst, um Brasilianisches zu kreieren und so einen konstanten Prozess von Appropriation und Re-Appropriation in Gang zu setzen, der sich auch auf die Ebene der Intertextualität und Poiesis – etwa in neuen Interpretationen westlicher und eigener Mythen – erstreckt.

Die Sprache ist in Lateinamerika auch Ausdruck postkolonialer Machtverhältnisse und globaler Migration (u.a. aus Japan wie bei B. Carvalho und J. P. Cuenca oder Arbeitsmigration der indigenen Bevölkerung) sowie Tor in die Vergangenheit des Kontinents: Spuren indigener Kulturen finden sich nicht nur auf der Ebene der Sprache, sondern auch in Intertexten (z.B. autochthonen Mythen). Sprachwechsel und Code-Switching sind als Folge der Unzulänglichkeit zu sehen, die sich - angesichts des „Unsagbaren“(z.B. Kriegstraumata) - bis zur Sprachlosigkeit steigern kann: Zahlreiche Texte zeigen Situationen auf, wo die Sprache der Eroberer als Ausdrucksform versagt und auf die indigene Muttersprache, Gesänge oder mythische Narrative zurückgegriffen wird (etwa bei L. Puenzo, C. Llosa oder im Film Hamaca Paraguaya ).

Es bietet sich eine Diskussion der Sprache(n) in Verbindung mit postkolonialen Theorieentwürfen zum Third Space und zum Mimikry von Homi Bhabha und zur (Un-)Möglichkeit von Sprache und Sprechen subalterner Subjekte im Sinne G. C. Spivaks an. Intermedialität, Intertextualität und Polyphonie-Konzepte erweitern das Analysespektrum, das sich in dieser Sektion vor allem auf die vielsprachige und vielstimmige Literatur- und Filmproduktion Lateinamerikas beziehen soll.

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17329 - Die vielen Stimmen des Georg Lukács:

 

Organizer(s): Seidler, Andrea (Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Wien, Austria)

Georg Lukács (1885-1971, geb. Georg Löwinger) war ein ung. Philosoph und Politiker, dessen öffentliche Karriere mit literaturkritischen Arbeiten einsetzte. Er war ein von jungen Jahren an weit vernetzter Intellektueller, dessen Lebensmittelpunkt (Budapest, Heidelberg, Wien, Berlin und Moskau) sowie seine wichtigsten Bezugspersonen besonders in seinen früheren Jahren mehrfach wechselten. Sowohl in seinem Werk, dessen bisherige Rezeptions- und Wirkungsgeschichte wechselvoll war, als auch in seinem bislang größtenteils unbearbeiteten Briefnachlass schlägt sich dies auf mehreren Ebenen nieder. Eine Neuverortung basierend auf der Aufarbeitung des Nachlassmaterials eröffnet eine Reihe neuer Forschungsmöglichkeiten rund um die historische FigurGeorg Lukács. (Forschungen des Wr. Forums georg-lukacs.univie.ac.at/ueber-flk/ )

Eine Auswahl dieser Ansätze, die alle um die Themen Sprache und Identität, Mehrsprachigkeit sowie das Überschreiten kultureller Grenzen kreisen, sollen hier vorgestellt und diskutiert werden. Die vorgeschlagenen group sections umfassen sechs Vorträge von:

1. ao.Univ.Prof. Dr. Andrea Seidler (Wien) untersucht die Sprache des Tagebuchs von Georg Lukács (1910-11). 2. MMag. Erika Erlinghagen (Wien) untersucht, wie sich eine spezifische kommunistische Identität in den Briefwechseln von Lukács mit europäischen Gleichgesinnten seiner Zeit auf sprachlicher Ebene festmachen lässt. 3. Mag. Kerstin Putz (Wien) untersucht Lukács‘ intellektuelle Begriffsarbeit und wie sie sich in Korrespondenzen mit den österreichischen Intellektuellen Günther Anders und Ernst Fischer darstellt. 4. MMag. Matthias Schmidt (Wien) thematisiert das problematische Verhältnis zwischen Lukács und dem Filmästhetiker Béla Balázs. 5. PD Dr. Károly Kókai (Wien) analysiert „Die vielen Stimmen der Kommunistischen Internationale und Lukács' Beitrag in den 1920er Jahren“ über die vieldiskutierte, jedoch wenig erforschte Wiener Emigrationszeit von Lukács. 6. Univ.Prof. Dr. Mauro Ponzi (Rom) möchte sich der Frage von Identität und Alterität im Werk von Georg Lukács widmen.

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17408 - Die Sprachen der Biographie

 

Organizer(s): Österle, David (Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie, Vienna, Austria); Mitterer, Cornelius (Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Geschichte und Theorie der Biographie, Vienna, Austria)

Die Session wird die sprachlichen Formen, Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Biographie in den Blick nehmen. Die sprachspezifischen Pattern, Narrative und „Biographeme“ (Roland Barthes) sind dabei von besonderer Bedeutung. In Beispielen aus Theorie und Praxis biographischen Schreibens können dabei folgende Fragestellungen diskutiert werden:

Wie generiert die Biographie eine eigene Sprache hinsichtlich der Dialektik

• zwischen dem „infamen“ (Foucault) und dem „großen“ Menschen (Thomas Carlyle)
• zwischen Dichtung und Wahrheit? (Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, Stefan Zweig, Carlo Ginzburg, Wolfgang Hildesheimer)
• zwischen Literatur, Historiographie und Soziologie, sowie dem Verhältnis von Individuum und Gesellschaft in Form von Individual- und Strukturbiographie
• zwischen biographischem Fragment und Totalität (Roland Barthes)
• zwischen „praktischer Identität“ (Bourdieu) und Identitätskonstruktion (Sigfried Kracauer, David Nyes Antibiographie)

…

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CANCELLED - Digital Fluency, Research, and Pedagogy - 17342

 

Organizer(s): Marchant, Anne (Shenandoah University, Winchester, USA)

Just as Akkadian, Aramaic, Latin, Arabic, Swahili, and other languages have served as lingua francas in the past, today the digital language of the internet has become the common parlance. Further, technology now allows us to study the humanities in ways not previously possible. Research into language and literature can be enhanced and amplified with such tools as mapping, visualization, quantitative analysis, and by relating other cultural artifacts.

We propose a group presentation in which panelists will work collaboratively to describe a framework in which students will research, document, curate, and publish their ideas. Coursework will be constructed around original interdisciplinary research projects that will be supported by technology. Projects will study artistic expression in the context of society from multiple perspectives. Students will publish their work electronically as electronic books, blogs, sites, or “apps” as appropriate to the class. The goal is to promote the development of the skills necessary for discovery, analysis, and synthesis so that students are able to present their ideas in a world that demands proficiency in digital research and communication for a global audience. It is our hope that the roles between researcher and student will blur as they work together to study literature and other aspects of culture. Indeed, technology creates possibilities for inter-institutional and interdisciplinary study in ways not before imaginable.

Outcomes will include plans for modes of teaching, ideas for projects, and the identification of supporting technologies. Further, this group will reflect on the place of technology in the evolution of human expression as well as for its study.

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CANCELLED - Digital Humanities and Academic Publishing

 

Organizer(s): Menon, Nirmala (Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Indore, India)

€That there is a crisis in multilingual academic publishing in the Humanities and Social Sciences has been well acknowledged and we are now seeing various models of OA publishing in journals and more recently, monographs. The Open Library for Humanities (OLH), Open Access India and others are doing notable and ground breaking work in the area. As a postcolonial scholar, I see one major gap in this conversation and it is the limited number of languages in the conversation. Is it not time to move towards a more expansive and inclusive open access publishing? Traditional scholarship in postcolonial studies have tended to be disppropotionately monolingual in that most of the analyses are centered on works written in English (some of that is changing but very slowly). Postcolonial DH should consciously facilitate projects in multiple postcolonial languages so as to preempt any canonical/linguistic hierarchy of languages. DH has the potential to be able to do just that with the aid of technology that facilitates publishing and translating ventures. The technology is still nascent and often unsophisticated but that is precisely the role of Humanities in Digital Humanities. In other words, it is not about simply re-engineering computing excellence but a conscious attempt at re-imagining postcolonial publishing paradigms. We invite papers/questions that looks at problems/questions/solutions that consider some of the possible directions of academic publishing in the humanities:

1) critically looks at and evaluates the publishing industry with respect to open access publishing in the Humanities,

2) specifically considers multilingual scholarly publishing and its use for postcolonial scholarship,

3) examines marginalized discourses in Digital Humanities so there is a conscious attempt to not reproduce the center/peripheral webs of traditional humanities,

4) DH projects and proposals that address any of the above issues.

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17340 - Disturbing Crossings: Untranslatability and the Languages of Crossing Borders

 

Organizer(s): Chatta, Rasha (SOAS, University of London, London, Great Britain); El-Desouky, Ayman; Harrison, Rachel (SOAS, University of London, London, Great Britain)

Building on recent debates on the possibilities of comparative critical thought that is able to effect linguistic and cultural crossings, the question to be posed is not only how to work across linguistic and cultural provenances that resist translation, but also in what language is such a negotiation articulated and circulated. Beyond linguistic diversity as a growing reality, that which withdraws or resists ready transference, how is it perceived or translated as different? And that which crosses borders, intercommunal and intercultural (and indeed interdisciplinary), how is it samed or appropriated?

This panel will address the ready assumptions of global translatability, ultimately arguing for an ethical imperative in the act of crossing. We locate this ethical dimension in the very assumption of translatability across languages and cultures in unquestioned (or linguistically and culturally samed) concepts and terms of theoretical and cultural knowledge production. The ultimate aim will be to rework the questions of untranslatability in light of translational and hermeneutical negotiations of non-European cultures. We offer the suggestions of a methodology for translating cultures that is based on hermeneutical negotiations of hegemonic languages of theory and localised languages of theory. The panellists will offer the cases of negotiating such borders within the same national space, in the case of French Global and Quebecois literature, Thai literary spheres and Egyptian literary and cultural production.

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17339 - Do you speak digital? The Past, Present, and Future of Electronic Literatures

 

Organizer(s): Backe, Hans-Joachim (IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark)

Digital culture is ubiquitous and, prominent counter-examples notwithstanding, mostly invisible or transparent. Our 21st century media ecology is so thoroughly permeated by digital technology that we are almost symbiotically linked to digital hardware – computers, tablets, and smart-phones – and the content and communication opportunities they provide. Digital production and distribution of books of all genres has had an enormous impact on the publishing business and changed reading as well as archival strategies of individuals. At the same time, boundaries between traditionally distinct media have been blurred by digital technologies’ capability for emulation and incorporation of older forms of communication, as have the differences between authors and recipients.

From 2007 to 2015, the ICLA Research Committee for Literature in the Digital Age has pursued questions of digital reading and writing strategies, the poetics of digital poetry, narratological challenges inherent in digital fiction, generic and aesthetic traditions continued in digital literature, and many other connected issues.

As the mandate of the Research Committee for Literature in the Digital Age comes to an end, its members feel the need for an open discussion of the past, present, and future of digital literatures, both as a phenomenon in itself and as a research subject within ICLA. Therefore, a round-table discussion shall be convened at the Vienna World Congress to facilitate both a stock-taking of the work done in the past and an engaged (and hopefully somewhat controversial) discussion about the future. The RC will provide spokespeople for different aspects of digital literature and organize the participation of (still to be determined) more conservative voices. Ideally, this round-table discussion could take place in two consecutive time-slots, one of which would be focused on a discussion among the invited disputants, while the second would open the discussion to include the whole audience.

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17314 - Eastern European writers into "major" cultures between 1945 and 1989: "translational" literature and transnational audience

 

Organizer(s): Vranceanu, Alexandra (University of Bucharest, Bressanone, Italy)

The choice to abandon their home and their language was taken with difficulty by most authors coming from Eastern Europe between 1945 and 1989. They chose to leave their countries in order to be able to publish their work even if it meant to do it only in translation or if they had to become "French", "Francophone" or "English" writers. They often discussed languages as a literary topic, by presenting themselves as "exiled writers" coming from communist countries. How did they transform their Eastern European identity in the context of "major" culture ? Is there any common pattern at the level of themes, myths and literary genres to be found in the works of authors such as Milan Kundera, Norman Manea, Herta Müller, Paul Goma, Dumitru Tsepeneag, Cioran, Petru Dumitriu, Imre Kertesz, Katalin Molnar etc.? How did they transpose their cultural identity in a "major" culture/language? Is the representation of communism essential for their work? How did the fact that they had to adapt to a transnational audience affect their work from the point of view of themes, myths or genres? How did they adapt their "minor" culture and language to the dominant literary tendencies in Occidental culture: Nouveau Roman, Postmodernism, autofiction, docufiction etc.? Frequently the novels published by Eastern European writers were read as "real stories", inspired by particular historical conditions and read for its "true" aspects: how did this fact influence the choice of literary themes, myths and genres adopted by these authors? After 1989, when writers exiled from Eastern countries were finally published in their home-cultures they did not always find a place in the national literary canon. How did their choice to write in a transnational context influence their presence in the national literary canon?

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17248 - Embracing the Other

 

Organizer(s): Kostova, Raina (Jacksonville State University, Powder Springs, Georgia, USA); Schweitzer, Petra (Shenandoah University, Winchester, Virginia, USA)

In the past two decades, universities, organizations, and businesses around the western world have placed a great emphasis on celebrating diversity, welcoming members, students, faculty, and employees from different ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, or national identities. Based on such developments, the "other"—as the person belonging to some minority group who had been ostracized in the greater part of the 20th century—has been welcomed from the margins of society to its very center.

At the same time, since most western countries have implemented increasingly tightened laws to prevent workplace harassment and offensive speech, discussions about one’s racial, socio-economic, religious, gender, and sexual differences have become increasingly censored, or at best have become a very sensitive topic in our societies at large. The paradoxical effect of such policies is that while they have resulted in a greater diversity, they have also perhaps enhanced individuals’ functional roles in our societies (such as co-workers, co-citizens, suppliers, customers, etc.) at the expense of individuals’ openness to private or personal interactions. Thus, ironically, such laws may have led to molding uniformity and reducing the differences between individuals by taking away the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, unspeakable element of otherness, therefore, shaping otherness into an institutional norm to the effect of controlling or minimizing it.

In literary, philosophical, and political theories, the concept of the ‘other’ has long been a site of contention. Fundamental questions such as “What is otherness?” continue to evoke passionate scholarly debates. However, in the changing environment of the 21st century, we suggest to revisit the notion of the other by asking the following questions: What are the effects of globalization and immigration on our understanding of otherness? How is otherness manifested in workplaces, schools, public events, or recreational activities in a global world? On what condition is the other welcomed to the center of industrially developed societies? What are the dangers of embracing the other?

We invite abstracts that address these questions as they occur in 20th and 21st-century literature, philosophy, politics, art, film, electronic media, and performance.

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17337 - Emotion Metaphors and Literary Texts

 

Organizer(s): Bethke, Kathrin (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany)

We know through Hans Blumenberg and the various branches of cognitive linguistics that metaphors have the epistemological as well as cognitive function of making abstract phenomena intelligible. That includes, of course, emotions and other affective phenomena. However, the corpus linguistic studies of scholars such as Mark Johnson, Raymond Gibbs, and Zoltán Kövecses are usually based on every day language and thus suggest that basic emotion metaphors are timeless and universal. Literary texts, on the other hand, often encode a historically specific intelligence about emotions by means of their figurative language. This session invites case studies that investigate the various metaphorical source domains and conceptual blends used to represent particular emotions in particular literary texts. The contributions might address the following theoretical issues:

What distinguishes literary emotion metaphors from the basic metaphors we use in our every day language?

How do literary emotion metaphors interact with other poetic as well as rhetorical features of the text (syntax, prosody, etc.) in order to represent emotions, moods, or atmospheres?

What do literary emotion metaphors 'know' and imply about the the nature and function of emotions? Do they confirm or contradict theoretical assumptions prevalent in their period?

What is the affective impact of literary emotion metaphors and how, if at all, can it be described?

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17336 - Engaging Publics In and Through Translation

 

Organizer(s): Bermann, Sandra (Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA)

Engaging publics in and through translation We invite twenty minute presentations about the ways that translation engages with the public sphere. We begin with the premise that translators communicate differently depending not only on the audience that they seek to engage, but also on the exposure that they could (purposefully or accidentally) receive depending on the larger public sphere in which they operate. These spheres may be bounded by citizenship, by language fluencies, and by geographic region, but also by access to web and print media, by status and identity markers, and by cultural, ethnic, political, religious, and institutional affiliations. We hope that this broad topic gives scholars working on a range of topics in translation studies a chance to reflect on the various positions and potential effects of translators within the globalized world. A conversation on translation’s place in the public sphere might include, for example, perspectives on new media, pedagogy, literary translation, and international law. Translation practices and products expose themselves to the following publics, among others:

online publics—through translated web media and uses of translation services such as Google translate

academic publics—through teaching and learning translation theory and practice in different parts of the world

reading publics—international differences in the audience for published literary and non-fiction translations, and the cultural and market forces behind these differences

vulnerable publics—legal decisions curtailing and enabling translation services for refugees and other vulnerable groups

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17495 - English language for "Universal Brotherhood"? Trans-national Networks, Appropriations and Conflicts in Modern Asia

 

Organizer(s): Hashimoto, Yorimitsu, Japan

In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore received the nobel prize for literature, as the first non-European writer. It is epoch-making not only as the beginning of the world luterature(s) beyond the geographical boundary, but the formation of peripheral connections and networks between Ireland and India because the English translations of Tagore's Gitanjali (1912) had been effectively revised by Irish well-known poet W. B. Yeats. Yeats, not surprisingly, seemed to feel the rivalry against the former and the first Nobel prize awarded writer (1907) of the English speaking world and widely considered as the agent of British imperialism, Rudyard Kipling. As this emulation suggests, English became a vehicle not only to "curse" or write back the British nationalism or literature but also to interconnect local literatures, even to conceive and re-invent "Asia" including Celticness as an umbrella word meaning anything non-Western. Tagore-craze across Asia, therefore, might be one of the initial examples which Asian male-dominated intellectuals realised the beginning of the world literature in the "universal brotherhood", not the previous metaphor of marriage between East and West.In the broader contexts,Tagore was merely a piece of other complex networks in the beginning of the 20th century. Some of them appropriated the ideas into local language and literature, others used skillfully two languages, in both of which several misunderstanging or conflicts are not unusual. In this workshop, we would like to indicate how English was used as working language in modern Asia to strengthen, consolidate and dissolve the world literatures.

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17256 - France - Russie: Littératures croisées. Présences et représentations de la langue de l'autre (XXe-XXIe siècles)

 

Organizer(s): Stemberger, Martina (Universität Wien, Wien, Austria); Chvedova, Lioudmila

Les rapports culturels et littéraires entre la Russie et la France, aussi intenses que complexes, constituent un objet de choix pour une étude des « multiples langues » de la littérature comparée. D’un point de vue français, la Russie a traditionnellement fait fonction d’un de ces « fundamental others » (E. Adamovsky) co-constitutifs de la propre identité : des discours sur la Russie (tsariste, soviétique, contemporaine), se dégage une image à l’envers de la France, « toute une anti-France » (S. Cœuré). Du côté russe, la France apparaît de même comme un « autre » privilégié : cas paradigmatique donc d’auto-/hétéro-images – et de littératures – croisées.

Dans cette section, organisée en collaboration entre l’Université de Lorraine et l’Université de Vienne, il s’agira d’étudier, sur un vaste corpus franco-russe du XXe et du XXIe siècles, présences et représentations des respectives langues autres, avant tout dans la fiction littéraire, mais aussi dans le genre « frictionnel » de la littérature de voyage. Nous envisageons d’explorer surtout les pistes de réflexion suivantes : langue et identité ; langue et (dé-)construction d’une image de la culture/de la société autres ; fonctions du texte littéraire comme « interdiscours » (J. Link) dans une perspective de médiation interculturelle ; métadiscours sur la question de la langue dans les textes d’auteurs russes en France (et vice versa), émigrés et voyageurs ; parcours d’écrivains entre les langues, entre les cultures ; échanges linguistiques, phénomènes d’hybridisation ; stratégies rhétoriques/narratives et prises de position idéologiques face à la langue de l’autre, entre exotisation/folklorisation et familiarisation, « othering » et appropriation, essentialisation et contextualisation interculturelle. Enfin, le discours (littéraire et critique) sur la traduction et le (prétendument ?) « intraduisible » se révèle fort éclairant quant à la mise en scène – et en question – d’un imaginaire plus ou moins stéréotypé de l’autre.

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17316 - Fremde Literaturen im Web 3.0 / Foreign Literatures in Web 3.0?

 

Organizer(s): Ulrich, Silvia (Università degli Studi di Torino, Torino, Italy)

 

Internet has changed both the production and the diffusion of knowledge. A paradox has arisen though: the massive sharing of digital knowledge rarely coincides with a conscious mastery of adequate tools to help interpretation and critical evaluation of digital culture. The traditional opposition of book to web and of humanities to digital technology is often rooted in the idea that the two fields are well-distinguished and alien to each other.

The panel workshop aims at starting a discussion on literature and on applied digital science (computational linguistics) in order to promote interaction between the two fields. It seems to us that literature has a twofold role in this context. First, it triggers the reception of digital and/or interactive texts. Second, it also triggers the production of contents with high semantic value in the digital world. The panel discussion will also consider the educational implications of research methodology according to the following guidelines:

• The role of digital technology in the creation/fruition of digital literature, in relation to its specific themes and the typology of recipients
• Hybridity between literary and non-literary contents; in particular, are these hybrids innovative examples in literary research?
• Language learning and culture acquisition through and thanks to digital technology
• Limitations and potentialities of a digital approach to literature
• Use of social networks in research projects and/or education
• Dissemination vs communication of academic research
• New frontiers for literature from 2.0 web to 3.0 web
• Impact of the digital world on literature: themes and types of audience
• Qualitative analysis (literary works) vs quantitative analysis (digital archives)

We encourage proposals tackling these and more questions related to Digital Humanities and their impact on literature worldwide.

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16609 - FROM EUROPE TO BRAZIL: THE CIRCULATION OF LANGUAGE AND CULTURE IN THE PORTUGUESE-SPEAKING WORLD

 

Organizer(s): Jobim, José Luís (Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

This seminar intends to discuss how the distinct linguistic/cultural ideas from abroad in the fields of Literature, Visual Arts, Linguistics and Music circulate in Brazil from 1822 to the present. Topics for this group will include: Comparative Literature and the politics of languages in the Portuguese-speaking world; Portuguese as a "national" idiom, the basis of Brazilian literature; Portuguese as source-language and target-language in literary translation; the situation of Portuguese-speaking countries in a global context where texts in Portuguese have to be translated to be part of "World Literature"; the meta-language of scientific discourse and literary terminology; the Portuguese-speaking world as a multicultural environment; Portuguese-speaking authors in a scholarly culture increasingly influenced by the English language.

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17462 - Global Modernisms and Transvisual Studies

 

Organizer(s): Capeloa Gil, Isabel (Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisboa, Portugal); de Medeiros, Paulo (U.Warwic, United Kingdom)

The field of Modernism Studies has been revitalised several times and the recent discussions on peripheral and global modernisms have served to greatly expand the field beyond traditional notions of a European centred avant-garde. One facet that, although not completely ignored, deserves further scrutiny concerns the intersections between visual studies and modernism studies. Whereas disciplines such as art history and film studies all have engaged with questions relating to Modernism and modernity, there is still a perceived need for a closer interaction between the different approaches so as to consider how visual studies and literary studies can address new questions pertaining to our conceptualisation of Modernism as both a historical movement and as a global tendency that is far from exhausted. Attention to the visual in literature and to the “reading” of visual representations and their multiple intersections is the aim of this panel that seeks to establish a definite contribution to current debates on modernism, modernity, and a world system marked by combined and uneven development.

 

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17358 - HISTOIRE LITTERAIRE ET CULTURELLE DES AVANT-GARDES. LES CIRCULATIONS TRANSATLANTIQUES DANS LA PREMIERE MOITIE DU XXe SIECLE

 

Organizer(s): Moura, Jean-Marc (SFLGC, Nanterre, France); Tomiche, Anne (SFLGC, Paris, France)

L’histoire littéraire transatlantique se propose comme un cadre théorique nouveau ouvrant sur l’analyse des circulations, échanges et migrations littéraires entre Europe, Amérique et Afrique, non plus donc en termes régionaux ou linguistiques, mais dans les relations complexes traversant cultures, régions et langues, établies à travers l’Atlantique.

Dans la première moitié du XXe siècle, les avant-gardes constituent une dynamique qui traverse l’Atlantique de l’Europe vers les Amériques, les Caraïbes voire l’Afrique et réciproquement. Cet atelier s’intéressera à l’histoire des circulations des mouvements d’avant-gardes à travers l’Atlantique, à leurs appropriations par diverses cultures et littératures ainsi qu’aux novations littéraires et culturelles qui s’ensuivent.

Les contributions porteront :

1) sur une réflexion théorique concernant l’élaboration d’une histoire littéraire et culturelle des avant-gardes traversant l’Atlantique dans la première moitié du XXe siècle ;

2) sur une étude de cas mettant en évidence un mouvement littéraire ou une œuvre de l’avant-garde particulièrement important dans l’espace atlantique.

Un titre et un résumé d’environ 200 mots (10 à 15 lignes) devront être envoyés aux organisateurs avant le 15 août 2015 . Les propositions pourront être rédigées en allemand, anglais ou français.

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19438 - Historizing the Dream / Le rêve du point de vue historique

Organizer(s): Dieterle, Bernard (Université de Haute-Alsace);Engel, Manfred (Universitaet des Saarlandes)

 

In this workshop we will try to analyze historical differences in the poetics of literary dreams. Our focus will lie on the time between 1500 and the present, but papers on Antiquity or the Middle Ages will also be very welcome. Presentations (20 minutes) should focus on no more than three literary (or non-fictional) dream texts and should compare either (a) dreams from different periods or (b) from the same period (with an attempt to identify general characteristics). Papers can but need not be comparative in themselves. We are hoping for a broad survey of as many periods of literary history and as many different cultures as possible. As always, our approach towards dreams will not be a psychoanalytical one; we are reading dreams within their historical context, i.e. the dream-theories of the author and his age. Congress languages will, as always, be English and French.

Cet atelier sera consacré à l’examen des différences historiques entre différentes poétiques du rêve littéraire. Nous nous intéressons principalement à la période allant de 1500 à nos jours, mais des contributions portant sur l’Antiquité ou le Moyen-Âge sont les bienvenues. Les communications (d’une durée de vingt minutes) doivent se limiter à deux ou trois rêves littéraires et mettre en regard soit des textes de différentes époques, soit d’une seule époque permettant de bien mettre en évidence sa singularité. Les communications ne doivent donc pas obligatoirement être comparatistes en elles-mêmes; nous comptons sur un survol historique et culturel aussi large que possible tout en restant fidèle à notre ligne générale qui consiste à mettre de côté l’approche psychanalytique au profit d’une mise en perspective historique (contextes théoriques, conceptions personnelles). Les communications doivent être présentées en anglais ou en français.

17305 - How can Comparative Literature and the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme cooperate?

 

Organizer(s): Jordan, Lothar (UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, Rietz-Neuendorf, Germany)

[For:] Digital Humanities

The UNESCO Memory of the World Programme aims at the improvement of safeguarding and at assisting universal access to documents, among them literary documents, with a special eye on digitization. This may be most interesting especially for those who see the importance of and the chances for interdisciplinarity and international orientation in working for and with documents and the relevance of the Internet and other ICTs as major future tools for education and research. The growing number of digitization projects gives clear evidence of their importance. They open local and national sources and knowledge to the world. Comparative Literature shares a lot of interests with this programme, like cultural and linguistic diversity, the crucial role of translations and transfer from one cultural context to another - or to a worldwide audience. The use of the internet will change not only the form, but the contents of scholarly commentaries in online publications of literary documents and texts as well. They have the potential to address users worldwide, to create international networks of cooperation. Another question Comparative Literature and Memory of the World share is the possible tension between global and local value and significance.

A workshop wants to explore the possibilities of cooperation between comparative literature and the Memory of the World programme, concerning the aforementioned keywords and other ones. If the nation or country (f.e. in national histories of literature) is still a frame for the different philologies, could UNESCO be a frame for Comparative Literature analogously?

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17252 - Hybridisierung literarischer Sprachen und Ausdrucksformen als Innovationsmodus

 

Organizer(s): Hintereder-Emde, Franz (Universität Yamaguchi, Yamaguchi, Japan)

Literatur entwickelt sich heute in einem globalen Umfeld und zeigt eine Dynamik narrativer Innovation im Uebergang von Medien, z.B. Verfilmung, Sprachen und Kulturen, etwa Übersetzung und Literaturmarkt. Damit einhergehend sehen sich auch literarische Normen einem permanenten Prozess der Umwertung ausgesetzt.

Basierend auf einem durch die Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, JSPS, geförderten Projekt zu Robert Walser und Friedrich Glauser, sowie in Kooperation mit Forschern die bereits auf zwei internationalen Tagungen, im November 2013 an der Universite de Lorraine in Nancy, Frankreich und im Maerz 2015 an der Universität Yamaguchi, Japan, angrenzende Fragen erörtert haben, soll der Workshop dazu beitragen, ein interdisziplinäres und internationales Netzwerk zu bilden.

Gerade das Schreiben Walsers und Glausers führt bei allen Unterschieden auf repräsentative Weise vor, wie Autoren sich ueber literarische Wertungen hinwegsetzen, indem sie Stil und Strategien etwa aus der Unterhaltungsliteratur aufgreifen und sie fuer ihre eigenen narrativen Experimente fruchtbar machen. Diese kreativen Formen der Grenzüberschreitung sollen auf verschiedene Epochen, Literaturen und Autoren ausgeweitet diskutiert werden. Wir wollen damit die Bezuege zwischen traditionellen Wertungen, pluralen Rezeptionsmoeglichkeiten und intertextuellen sowie intermedialen Umarbeitungen und Adaptionen in den Blick nehmen. Dabei sollen oft getrennt untersuchte literaturwissenschaftliche Teilbereiche sowohl in diachroner wie in synchroner Perspektive unter Aspekten der medialen und kulturellen Vielfalt neu gebündelt werden. Erwartet werden komparatistische Beiträge zu den Wechselbeziehungen von hoher und niederer Literatur in einem transkulturellen Umfeld, die Impulse fuer eine Aktualisierung des literaturwissenschaftlichen Austausches geben. Es sind etwa drei Sitzungen mit insgesamt bis zu zwoelf Referaten geplant.

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17228 - Indian Theatre, Ritual and Drama: Towards an Intercultural Understanding of the Dramatic Mode.

 

Organizer(s): MAUFORT, MARC (UNIVERSITE LIBRE DE BRUXELLES, BRUSSELS, Belgium)

Different cultures- literary or otherwise- have their own ways of defining drama. In Sanskrit poetics, dramatic poetry seeks to elicit an affective and emotional response from the discerning and sensitive audience. The transition from emotion of poetic composition (bhava) to the aesthetic experience of an emotion for the audience (rasa) is achieved by a combination of factors such as language-use and performative codes. Sanskrit drama differs substantially from its Greek counterpart, as articulated by Aristotle and criticism that ensued in response to Aristotle’s formulations. When we think of drama and tragedy in the West, we think in terms of ‘mimesis’, ‘anagnorisis’, ‘katharsis’. In India, the audience experienced a panoply of moods that reaffirm the order of the universe. In both Sanskrit and Greek drama, however, there is a notion of the affective associated with the dramatic more so than any other literary mode of enunciation. Theatricality also appears as a stylistic device in various genres of literary writing such as the novel or epic as well as in ritualized performance. The difference between ritual and the performance of the written or spoken word resides in their respective illocutionary power or force. As a mode of enunciation, drama is categorized by its performative immediacy as well as its literary context.

This proposed panel solicits submissions on the dramatic mode in all its complexity within diverse literary, cultural, social, religious, political contexts with the hopes of moving towards an intra- and intercultural understanding of dramatic phenomena. In particular, we seek papers that deal primarily with Indian drama – ‘Classical’, ‘Folk’ and ‘Modern’ – in a comparative context, either a comparison of the various Indian dramatic forms such as Yaksagama, Kootiyatthan, Kathakali, Ram Lila, etc., modern art theater, group theatre and political theatre or in comparison with other world dramatic systems (ancient Greek, Western and non-Western, medieval and modern).

The workshop will convene three times during the congress, with a maximum of 12 participants. The presentations, once revised, will be published in a volume to be co-edited by Dorothy Figueira and Marc Maufort (“Dramaturgies” series, P.I.E Peter Lang, Brussels) in the course of 2017.

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17284 - INTERFERENZEN: Dimensionen und Phänomene der Überlagerung in Literatur und Theorie

 

Organizer(s): Donat, Sebastian (Universität Innsbruck, Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Innsbruck, Austria); Sexl, Martin; Raic, Monika; Fritz, Martin (Universität Innsbruck, Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Innsbruck, Austria)

In der Physik versteht man unter Interferenz Phänomene, die bei Überlagerung zweier Wellenzügen entstehen. Abhängig von Faktoren wie Stärke und Position der Impulsgeber entwickeln sich im betrachteten Feld Verstärkungen (konstruktiv) oder Auslöschungen (destruktiv). Das Ergebnis sind Musterbildungen, die von Symmetrie bis zum (scheinbar) chaotischen Rauschen reichen. Der Begriff der Interferenz soll literaturwissenschaftlich fruchtbar gemacht werden. Phänomene im Umfeld von Vermischung, Kreuzung und Hybridität werden damit neu perspektiviert. Dabei richtet sich der Blick auf I. Werke, Gattungen, Kulturen und Sprachen sowie auf II. ‚die vielen Theorien der Literatur‘. I Interferenzen in/zwischen Werken, Gattungen, Sprachen, Kulturen Der Themenbereich I beleuchtet intra- und intertextuelle Wechselwirkungen. Dabei soll Interferenz historisch und systematisch produktiv gemacht werden für die Beschreibung von Prozessen sowie von literarischen und kulturellen Konstellationen. Mögliche Untersuchungsaspekte - Beschaffenheit der ‚Impulsquellen‘ u. des Mediums (z.B. optisch/akustisch) - Verstärkung u. Auslöschung - Statik u. Dynamik (z.B. ‚stehende Wellen‘) - Oberfläche u. Tiefenstruktur der Wechselwirkungen (phänotypisch/genotypisch) Gegenstandsbereiche von Interferenzphänomenen - Mehrsprachigkeit - Multiperspektivik u. Vielstimmigkeit - Gattungsmischung (z.B. graphic novel, polymetrische Dichtung) - Literarische Übersetzung - Intertextualität u. Intermedialität - Komik als Interferenz von Serien (Bergson) II Interferenzen in und zwischen Theorien Die Verortung von Literatur- und Kulturtheorien in einem Spannungsfeld von nationalen, kulturellen, sprachlichen, politischen, sozioökonomischen, historischen und biographischen Kontexten, von Phänomenen und Praktiken sowie von anderen (konkurrierenden, flankierenden) Theorien lässt Interferenzen zwischen Theorie und Kontext, zwischen Theorie und Phänomen, zwischen Theorie und Praxis bzw. zwischen Theorie und Theorie entstehen. Mögliche Gegenstandsbereiche und leitende Begriffe - Interferenzen von Theorien u. ihrem (institutionellen) Umfeld - Interferenzen von Theorien, ihren Kategorien (class, race, gender, culture etc.), ihren Metaphern u. ihrem Stil (Wissenschafts-/Alltagssprache) - Interferenzen von Theorien u. ihrer Rezeption - Interferenzen von Theorien u. ihrer (literarischen, literaturwissenschaftlichen) Praxis - Interferenzen von Theorien u. Theorien - Interferenzen von Theorien u. ihrer Übersetzung

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17278 - Intermedialität: Konzeptionalisierungen und Methoden. Für eine trianguläre Kommunikation zwischen deutsch-, englisch- und französischsprachiger Literaturwissenschaft

 

Organizer(s): Bosse, Anke (Musil-Institut für Literaturforschung, Klagenfurt, Austria); Paul, Claude (Universität Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany)

Seit den 1990er Jahren hält die Attraktivität des Begriffs ‚Intermedialität‘ an. Beim Blick auf seine Karriere in den Literaturwissenschaften fällt auf, dass ‚Intermedialität‘ ein genuin komparatistischer Ansatz ist (‚interart‘ und ‚comparative art studies‘); die ‚mixed art‘ und ‚interart studies‘ absorbiert hat; im Anschluss an H. Marshall McLuhan dazu geführt hat, den Begriff des Mediums (kultur-)anthropologisch zu erweitern zu einem Träger von Information, Kommunikation und Wahrnehmung, die er grundsätzlich prägt, so dass Literatur-, Medien- und Kulturwissenschaften sich einander interdisziplinär annäherten. Nimmt man jedoch eine interkulturelle Perspektive ein, so lässt sich feststellen:

Der erweiterte Medienbegriff und der Begriff ‚Intermedialität‘ haben sich im deutsch- und englischsprachigen Raum produktiv entfaltet, kaum im französischsprachigen (Ausnahme: das kanadische CRI). Im deutsch- und englischsprachigen Raum haben sich Konzeptionalisierungen von ‚Intermedialität‘, methodische und terminologische Ansätze herausgebildet.

Der französischsprachige Raum konzentriert sich auf Fallstudien, die abseits der Intermedialitätsdiskussion operieren.

Wir stehen vor einem grundsätzlichen Problem, das das Zentralthema des Wiener Kongresses berührt: Sprache. Hier: Sprachbarriere als Wissenstransferbarriere. Die jeweiligen Sprach-Communities bleiben in sich geschlossen, und aus gegenseitiger ‚sprachlicher‘ Ignoranz hat sich ein fundamentales Kommunikations- und Interessedefizit entwickelt. Wissenschaft aber lebt von Wissenszirkulation. Unser Ziel ist es, diese zu beleben und die bisher vertanen Chancen auf Synergien zu nutzen. Eine deutsch-, englisch- und französischsprachige Gruppenveranstaltung wäre der ideale Rahmen. Die Sprachen des Wiener Kongresses („Die vielen Sprachen der Literaturwissenschaft“) würden autoreflexiv thematisiert sowie die Terminologiediskussion internationalisiert. Themen für Impulsreferate:

Sprache als audiovisuelles Archi-Medium
Materialität, Medialität, Modalität
Semiotische Systeme Text-Bild-Ton und ihre medialen Erscheinungsformen
Medienwechsel – intermediale Transposition Intra- und intermedialer Transfer

Unser Vorschlag stellt eine Kommunikationskontinuität zur Gruppenveranstaltung „Comparatisme et intermédialité“ (Paris 2013) her. Sektionen: „Verschiedene Medien, verschiedenen Ausdrucksformen“ (A) und „Codes der Literaturwissenschaft“ – „Internationale Terminologie“ (E).

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17331 - IRANIAN COMPARATISM: Recent Challenges and Future Opportunities

 

Organizer(s): Bahrevar, Majid (Visiting Professor of Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, Prague, Czech Republic)

The newly Iranian comparatits are trying to improve their inquiries both at theory and work. Some of Iranian institutions and universities study and research on promotion of comparative literature inside and some other attempts provide outside. But as a whole the Iranian comparative literature is forced to loan its basics from the western approaches, moreover the comparatits oftentimes uses the old-fashioned non-disciplinary approaches besides simple comparing, especially the cultural and translation studies are not well applied.

 

By organizing this section, we'll provide a debate on new inquiries of Iranian comparatits in order to consider the Iranian national discourses and international interactions in the field of comparative literature. Also we have more to do in future. But first of all, we should introduce new theories and approaches in comparative literature to academicians and the literary community of Iran. Following are some aims and objectives of "Comparative Literature Society" in Iranian Academy of Persian language and Literature:

Survey of relations of Persian literature with the eastern and western literature and their impact on each other;
Interaction of eastern and western literature through the last two centuries and evaluate their role in the emergence of new literary forms such as novels, short stories, plays, modern poetry;
Publishing special issue of Comparative Literature;
Developing curriculum of Comparative Literature;
Translating books and articles in the field of comparative literature;
Inviting national and international experts in Comparative Literature to have lecture;
Achievement of research projects in the field of comparative literature;
Organizing conferences, forums, workshops, and researches;
Collecting bibliography of comparative literature in Iran and in the world;
Development of interdisciplinary studies in Iranian comparative literature;
Providing scientific consult for the centers and institutions in the field of comparative literature.

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17222 - Island Fictions and Metaphors in Contemporary Literature

 

Organizer(s):Schödel, Kathrin (University of Malta, Msida, Malta); Dautel, Katrin (University of Malta, Msida, Malta)

With their apparent self-enclosure, seemingly easy to survey and conquer, as well as a prevalent notion of distance to the ‘known world’, islands have inspired a diverse mythology and have an enduring presence as a distinctive space in the cultural imaginary, with notable differences between a ‘Western’ island discourse and other approaches (Christian Moser). The perceived closure of island spaces – and the closure of their various meanings and interpretations – is counteracted by the spatial qualities of islands: their shores opening up to the horizon and the sea as the ‘other’ of inhabited land (Gilles Deleuze). Reflecting on the linguistic construction of islands thus also leads to reflections on discursive and aesthetic projections and codifications in their fragility and ambiguity, their intrinsic openness towards the ‘other’ and their inherent deconstructive moments. Island fictions and metaphors are exemplary constructions of ambivalent spaces between closure and openness, seclusion and interconnection, centre and periphery, significance and ‘insignificant’ smallness, sameness and otherness. Hence, they provide an important setting in contemporary literature as (fictional) spaces and offer a rich metaphorical potential. The literary construction of islands is often connected to larger topical issues, such as the engagement with postcolonial situations and other structures of socio- or geo-political inequality and exclusion; and, for instance, issues of ecology, the question of limited (economic) growth; themes of travel, migration and intercultural encounters; localisations of utopian concepts. T he ‘small world’ of the island opens up broad intertextual and intercultural webs of reference.

The proposed section within topic 'C. Many cultures, many idioms' invites contributions dealing with island fictions and metaphors in contemporary literature of any language, engaging with the issues outlined here as well as further approaches.

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16460 - Kolonialismus, Globalisierung(en) und (Neue) Weltliteratur

 

Organizer(s): Sturm-Trigonakis, Elke (Aristoteles-Universität Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece)

Dem Motto der ICLA der „vielen Sprachen der Komparatistik“ soll in dieser Gruppensektion zum Themenkomplex Kolonialismus, Globalisierung und (Neue) Weltliteratur einerseits auf der Ebene literarischer Texte, andererseits auf der theoretischen Ebene literatur- und kulturwissenschaftlicher Annäherungen an diese Texte Rechnung getragen werden, wobei die Zusammenschau dreier Diskurse, nämlich des Kolonialismus, der Globalisierungen sowie der (Neuen) Weltliteratur geleistet werden soll, um in diesen drei Diskussionsfeldern similare Phänomene sowohl literarischer als auch theoretischer Art zunächst sichtbar zu machen und dann kulturwissenschaftlich-komparatistisch zu systematisieren. Ausgangspunkt bildet die Erkenntnis, dass sich etwa seit den neunziger Jahren des 20. Jahrhunderts das Definitionsspektrum aller drei Termini stark erweitert hat; Resultat der Sektion könnte die Erstellung einer vielsprachigen Kategorie von Texten sein, in der sich koloniale Strukturen vom antiken Griechenland als erster „Kolonialmacht“ Über die ükonomische Kolonialisierung der Länder der Süd-EU durch jene des Nordens bis hin zur jüngsten russischen Rekolonalisierung der Krim abbilden, wobei die Übertragung und Übersetzbarkeit theoretischer Ansätze aus benachbarten Forschungsrichtungen wie dem ecocriticism oder der Linguistik besonders relevant ist. Zu diesem Zweck wendet sich diese Sektion nicht nur an KomparatistInnen und KulturwissenschaftlerInnen, sondern auch und gerade an SpezialistInnen aus Gebieten wie z. B. der Afrikanistik, der Romanistik oder der Slavistik, die mit ihrer Expertise Bausteine für die Errichtung eines grüßeren Gebäudes „Weltliteratur des Kolonialen“ liefern können. Vorschläge in Deutsch und Englisch sind willkommen.

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17347 - Kulturtransfer in fiktionalen Fernsehserien

 

Organizer(s): Ackermann-Pojtinger, Kathrin (Universität Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria); Laferl, Christopher F. (Austria); Poole, Ralph (Universität Salzburg, Salzburg, Austria)

Fernsehserien werden nicht nur in den Ländern ihres Ursprungs gezeigt, sondern finden auch au§erhalb ihres Produktionsraumes ein Publikum. Dabei hatten die US-amerikanischen Produktionen immer schon eine Sonderstellung, da sie weltweit exportiert und dadurch modellbildend wurden, gleichzeitig aber auch bei der literarischen Intelligenz einen besonders schlechten Ruf genossen und paradigmatisch zum Inbegriff der Ästhetisch-ideologiekritischen Verurteilung des Mediums Fernsehens erklŠrt wurden. Hinzu kam, dass in den USA eine Rezeption europäischer Serien kaum stattfand, es sei denn durch Neuverfilmungen. Dabei gab und gibt es wie beim Film eine breite Skala von Strategien der †bernahme: Die Remakes können sich sehr eng an die Vorlage anlehnen oder auch betrüchtlich, bis zur Unkenntlichkeit, von ihr abweichen. Die Bewertung dieser Praktik schloss sich in der Regel der Bewertung von filmischen Remakes an, bei denen dem europŠischen Film der mit Hšherwertigkeit verbundene Begriff des Originals zugeschrieben wurde, während dem Remake ein eigener Ästhetischer Wert abgesprochen wurde.

Dies beginnt sich zu ändern, seit sich die neuen amerikanischen Quality TV-Serien (wie z.B The Wire, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under) als avancierteste und innovativste Form audiovisuellen Erzählens etabliert haben, was sich u.a. an ihrer Adelung zu Autorenserien (in Analogie zum Autorenfilm) ablesen lässt.

Auch wenn amerikanische Serien weiterhin auf europäische zurückgreifen, um sie für den eigenen Markt anzupassen, ist durch den neuen Qualitätsstandard die reflexhafte, stereotype Dichotomisierung Original vs. Kopie, Authentizität vs. Plagiat, Produktion vs. Reproduktion, Kunst vs. Kommerz fragwürdig geworden. Verstanden als eine Form der kulturellen ,übersetzung können Neuverfilmungen oder Format übernahmen nicht mehr nur als kommerzielle Produkte verstanden werden, sondern als audiovisuelle Erzählungen, die ähnlich gelesen werden können wie literarische Texte.

Die Sektion zielt auf Beitrage ab, die methodisch in der vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft und den Cultural Studies verankert sind. Ausgehend von genauen Analysen von Verfahren der Um-Schreibung in fiktionalen Fernsehserien soll die Frage diskutiert werden, ob es eine spezifisch europäische Serienkultur gibt.

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17503 - La « forme pure », l’« art absolu », la « littérarité » : utopie artistique ou impulsion à la création ?

 

Organizer(s): Werth, Eva (Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée, Marne-la-Vallée, France); Tchougounnikov, Serge (Université de Bourgogne, Dijon, France)

Deux idées ont puissamment marqué l’évolution du champ littéraire : celle d’une spécificité irréductible de la « langue littéraire », et celle d’une « forme pure », conçue comme l’idéal de toute création. Si l’idée de la « forme pure » est surtout caractéristique de la démarche des auteurs ou des artistes eux-mêmes, en revanche, l’idée de la spécificité de la « langue littéraire » semble s’élaborer plutôt au sein du discours critique ou théorique sur la littérature, voire sur l’art en général (le « roman absolu » de F. Schlegel, la « poésie pure » de H. Bremond, la « poéticité » ou « littérarité » de R. Jakobson…). Ces deux notions – celle de « forme pure » et celle de « littérarité » comportent néanmoins une forte dimension métalinguistique : dans les deux cas il s’agit du discours sur la littérature, parfois même de la littérature sur la littérature. Ces termes cherchent à saisir le processus d’autonomisation du « langage littéraire », sa tendance à se libérer de tout référent et à mettre en valeur cette dimension « autotélique » qui lui est constitutive. De nombreuses questions se posent: Existe-t-il un lien entre d'une part la "forme pure", notion des artistes et, d'autre part, la "poéticité" ou "littérarité", concept des théoriciens ? Quels sont les divers procédés de « purification » de l’objet esthétique? Quel est le destin de ces notions dans les pratiques récentes de la littérature et dans la théorie littéraire ? Ces notions restent-elle en priorité confinées au domaine littéraire ou concernent-elles l’ensemble des arts (peinture, musique, danse, cinéma…)? Ces notions restent-elles tributaires de la tradition culturelle occidentale ? ou bien peut-on constater leur émergence dans des traditions culturelles autres ? enfin, quelle serait l’influence mutuelle des arts dans le champ délimité par ces notions ?

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16445 - Langage scientifique, langage littéraire : quelles médiations ?

 

Organizer(s): Dahan-Gaida, Laurence (Université de Franche-Comté, Besançon, France)

Cet atelier a pour ambition d’explorer les médiations linguistiques qui permettent de donner une inscription littéraire à la science. On s’interrogera sur le processus de traduction - au sens d’une opération de transposition vouée à produire une «équivalence sans identité» - qui permet de passer d’un langage à l’autre : figuration épistémique, métaphores, allégories, modélisation, dramatisation, diégétisation, utilisation d’un lexique spécialisé ou de forgeries néologiques, définitions, intertextualité, échantillons de discours, montage de citations, jeux d’érudition, etc. Parmi ces techniques de traduction, la métaphore joue un rôle prééminent : loin d’être un simple reliquat figural, elle est en effet une procédure cognitive qui peut contribuer à élargir le discours, répondre à une carence de dénomination ou préparer le travail du concept en donnant une représentabilité aux intuitions. On s’efforcera également de repérer, sous la plume des savants et des écrivains, l’opposition d’un « style savant » et d’un « style littéraire » en se demandant si cette opposition reflète exactement la distinction entre sphère savante et sphère littéraire. On pourra enfin s’intéresser aux opérations de « filtrage » qui accompagnent la circulation du discours scientifique dans le discours social: vulgarisation, popularisation, manipulations idéologiques, etc. A partir d’exemples précis, tirés de la littérature mondiale, les interventions pourront proposer une réflexion sur l'usage des métaphores scientifiques dans le discours littéraire, incluant éventuellement une dimension critique et métaréflexive : que faisons-nous, en tant que critiques littéraires, lorsque nous utilisons des métaphores savantes ? Construisons-nous un « langage » critique et scientifique ? On pourra également interroger l'usage des métaphores en science ou les technologies littéraires mobilisées par les écrivains pour assurer l’intégration du discours scientifique. A quel travail de réagencement discursif et de textualisation ce dernier est-il soumis ? Quelle rhétorique ou quelle poétique implicite les écrivains mettent-ils en œuvre lorsqu’ils réécrivent la science?

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17303 - Langages, voyages et migrances au féminin

 

Organizer(s): ALFARO, MARGARITA (UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE MADRID, MADRID, Spain); Moura, Jean-Marc (PARIS-OUEST, Nanterre, France)

Des voyages au féminin dans l'Atlantique au XXe siècle Jean-Marc Moura Paris-Ouest L’histoire littéraire transatlantique se présente comme un cadre théorique nouveau ouvrant sur l’analyse des circulations, échanges et migrations littéraires entre Europe, Amérique et Afrique, non plus en termes régionaux ou linguistiques, mais dans les relations complexes traversant cultures, régions et langues à travers l’Atlantique.

Nous présenterons quelques trajectoires féminines contemporaines qui se sont accomplies entre les continents bordant cet océan, en vue de poser quelques jalons d’une approche systématique des espaces littéraires océaniques et des migrances féminines qui ont pu les traverser.

Le voyage de la Révolution en Amérique latine: du rêve à la réalité.
Margarita Alfaro
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Laura Alcoba (La Plata, 1968), d’origine argentine, publié des romans en rapport avec ses souvenirs d’enfance en Argentine et en France lors de son exil en 1978. Les passagers de l’Anna C. (2011) illustre une manifestation singulière du voyage politique d’initiation en rapport avec le contexte de la révolution cubaine en Amérique latine tout au long des années 60 et 70. Les voyageurs de l’Anna C. découvrent les conséquences du rêve d’un discours révolutionnaire enflammé qui se termine par la déception. Alcoba met en valeur une nouvelle esthétique éloignée de la mission politique des jeunes militants qui voulaient changer le monde.

Migation et cosmopolitisme en Méditerrané: les écrivaines de la Diaspora libanaise
Vassiliki Lalagianni
Université du Péloponnese

Fortement ancrée dans une relecture du passé, en particulier celui lié aux guerres du Liban et du Moyen Orient, l’œuvre des écrivaines de la Diaspora libanaise (Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Evelyne Accad, Abla Farhoud, Nadine Ltaif, Etel Adnan et bien d’autres) fait partie de cette littérature mémorielle qui communique une connaissance de son auteur et de son parcours. Leur œuvre porte en elle le poids de l’histoire collective, mise en relation avec un désir de sortir de la surdétermination du passé et de ses représentations. Avoir passé les frontières d’autres cultures, être rentré dans la toile d’une autre langue, transforme la vision que l’on garde du passé et aboutit à un cosmopolitisme heureux qui traverse leurs écrits.

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17234 - Language Policy and Literary Evolution

 

Organizer(s): Wang, Hongzhang (College of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Fudan University, Shanghai, China); Dang, Shengyuan (Foreign Literature Research Institue, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China); Zhou, Qichao (Foreign Literature Research Institue, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, Austria); Chu, Xiaoquan; Wei, Yuqing; Li, Zheng (College of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Fudan University, Shanghai, China); Wang, Jiaxing (College of Foreign Languages, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China); Xia, Zhongxian (College of Foreign Languages, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China); Chen, Tao (Foreign Literature Research Institue, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, China)

We are a group of Chinese academics whose working languages include Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese and Russian, and who are doing research work in various fields of language and literature studies. In our combined efforts, we propose to present a group event intended to discuss, on a comparative basis, the impact of language policies implemented by national governments and non-government literary schools in various historical periods on the development of national literatures and criticisms. Our attempt is, on the one hand, to derive and formulate some governing principles from this impact found to be underlying the linguistic and stylistic formation of constantly evolving literary genres such as poetry, drama and prose, with particular emphasis on its shaping force on poetic meter and rhythmic aspects of prose, and, on the other, to explain the rationale behind the changing discourse of literary criticism, including the invention of new critical vocabulary and the creation of new theoretical and critical systems, both of which we find to be significantly affected at least partly by the implementation of related language policies. We will try to identify for specific comparative studies some important historical moments when language policy appears to have brought about radical changes in the history of traditional Eastern and Western literature and criticism. We will bring our professionally academic expertise to bear on this topic, broad and spacious as it may seem. Individual proposals dealing with specific sub-topics for this group event will be submitted separately before the due date.

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17261 - Languages of Climate - Comparative Approaches to the Environment

 

Organizer(s): Nitzke, Solvejg Elisabeth (Institut für Germanistik, Austria); Horn, Eva (Institut für Germanistik, Wien, Austria)

Currently, climate is something that is talked about in abundance – but does it have its own language or even languages? If, to borrow Timothy Morton’s phrase, ‘weather weathers about climate’, what does climate do or have to say and how is it being talked, if not ‘weathered’ about?

However, while ‘climate change’ is in the center of attention in recent discussions, the changes in the way climate is framed and understood to express itself, has yet rarely been examined. Taking into account that climate cannot be observed directly but only through its expressions, the central question when looking at languages of climate is what specific knowledge of climate and one’s ability to depict it and to read its expressions is formed and presupposed by any discourse about climate. This task is only seemingly an exclusively scientific one or in dire need of ‘scientific literacy’ – the practices of reading, depicting, and communicating climate rely heavily on cultural narratives and traditions which are equally important to investigate. Moreover, they are to be found in texts which by far precede disciplinary scientific communication within the realm of climatology, meteorology and ecology. In this workshop we propose to investigate comparative approaches to climate in order to offer a view that is able to take into account the change of ideas of what climate is – from local to global climate, from a determining factor in the conditio humana to a life-threatening force on a human scale – as well as what languages it produces. Entering the discussion by means of comparative literature, we will attempt to recognize climate not as a single (changing) object, but as an environment of life forms as well as texts in its own right.

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17312 - Languages of Dwelling, Solidarity and Community: A Comparative Semiotics of Urban and Architectural Formations

 

Organizer(s): Reisenleitner, Markus (Canadian Comparative Literature Association, Toronto, Canada)

Geocriticism has established a coherent methodological framework for addressing the engagement of literary texts and related modes of representation and imagining with space and the environment. This session is interested in papers informed by geocriticism that explore representations and imaginings of solidarity and community (or the impossibility thereof) in urban living. Comparative engagements with topics such as social housing, the banlieu, smart cities, theme parks, neo-traditional and new urbanist town planning and their impact on negotiating spatial segregation and integration in terms of class, gender and ethnicity, in literature, film, and related cultural practices are welcome.

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16929 - Languages of the Imaginary: interdisciplinary reflections

 

Organizer(s): Valenzuela, Sandra Trabucco (Universidade Anhembi Morumbi, São Paulo, Brazil); Cunha, Maria Zilda (Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil); Baseio, Maria Auxiliadora (Universidade Santo Amaro, São Paulo, Brazil)

It is fact, that we are inserted in a reality semiotically woven by complex threads, and we need to find new ways to understand it. One of the possible paths to take is through the Imaginary. As the collective archive of images and speeches of an specific culture, the imaginary establishes a dialogic relation with arts, once it projects itself and is projected by arts. Being the world's organizing element, able to reveal relevant cultural issues and inspire action, the comprehension of mankind and of it's history, through the path of the imaginary, is an important articulator project to bring back ways to express the reality, as well as project ways to transform this same reality. The speeches of the imaginary are diverse, present in literature, painting, photography, cinema and other arts. Our goal is to propose inter-textual, inter-artistic and intercultural dialogues, in perspective of comparative literature, in order to establish intra and extra-literary relations as a way of understanding the complexity that underlies the interaction of speeches to connect different systems and cultures. In short, this symposium aims to discuss in a comparative perspective, the opportunities of dialogue between word and image in works of different artistic expressions, providing interdisciplinary reflections that cover relations between creative processes, aesthetic and ideological projects, and construction of the imaginary.

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16679 - Langues et littératures de jeunesse

 

Organizer(s): Benert, Britta (Université de Strasbourg, STRASBOURG, France); CLERMONT, Philippe (Université de Strasbourg, STRASBOURG, France)

 

Premiers conférenciers envisageant de contribuer : Hans-Heino Ewers; Isabelle Guillaume; Rainier Grutman; Alfons Knauth; Mathilde Lévêque; O'Sullivan, Emer; Schmitz-Emans, Monika.

Argument

L'atelier vise des études de corpus de littératures de jeunesse dans lesquels une/des langues se trouvent mises en jeu en tant que sujet de littérature. On s’interrogera sur le rôle que joue la langue comme topique littéraire dans l’esthétique des fictions considérées. Il s’agira aussi de montrer que la littérature de jeunesse fonctionne exactement comme la littérature « pour les grands » et qu’il est légitime de voir que les langues y trouvent une place en tant qu’objet de fiction et d’analyser celle-ci.

1) Langues et identité(s) : Seraient intéressants les corpus mettant en scène des personnages pour lesquels les langues/une langue présentent des enjeux d’identité : identité sociale (p. ex. les genres), politique ou psychologique. Dans le cadre fictionnel la langue peut être outil de résistance ou de combats, d’affirmation ou d’aliénation, d’expérimentation ou de négociation.

2) Représentations de l’apprentissage des langues/d’une langue comme apprentissage du monde : La mise en fiction de l’apprentissage d’une langue peut être un fil narratif fécond pour les auteurs et offrir une expérience d’altérité. L’analyse des représentations fictionnelles est une approche prometteuse pour dire le monde à travers une langue, d’une aire culturelle à l’autre. La scène d’apprentissage d’une langue, comme topos littéraire, est révélatrice d’une conception de l’apprentissage, d’une conception des relations à l’autre.

3) Langues et fiction : Cet axe pourrait porter sur les langues inventées au sein de la fiction, sur les jeux de langage comme moteur de la fiction littéraire, sur les personnages possédant leur langage propre qui n’est pas la langue commune et permettrait de montrer comment la créativité des auteurs se fonde sur un jeu avec la langue/les langues pour faire œuvre de fiction.

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17313 - Leftism and Love: The Languages of Anna Lacis's Latvian Legacy

 

Organizer(s): Ingram, Susan (York University, Toronto, Canada)

This proposal is for a group session on Anna Lacis and the impact of her work in Latvia. Lacis is primarily known in the rest of the world as Asja, Walter Benjamin’s Latvian Bolshevik girlfriend, and the existing scholarship on her primarily addresses her relationship to Benjamin and her role as a conduit between proletarian theatrical circles in Weimar Germany and Soviet Russia. Given the fact that a not unsubstantial part of Lacis’s life was spent, and much of her theatrical work done, in Latvia, the purpose of this group session is to explore the Latvian aspect of Lacis’s legacy and to ascertain in how far it compares with the themes that have dominated her global reception: namely, leftism and love. The session is interested in both Lacis’s own work in Latvia as well as Latvian work that she inspired or motivated. Topics could include:

Lacis’s participation in the workers’ theaters in Riga after WWI
her relationships with noted Latvian authors and intellectuals
her theatrical career in post-WWII Valmiera and her writings on Latvian theatre
her influence on Latvian leftist culture and the development of feminism in Latvia the afterlife of her multilingual autobiographical oeuvre
traces of Lacis in Latvian land- and cityscapes.

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17294 - Lektüre und/als Theorie. Zwischen Metasprache und Artefakt

 

Organizer(s): Bohn, Carolin (Universität Innsbruck / Institut für Sprachen und Literaturen, Innsbruck, Austria)

Der Workshop zielt darauf, das Verhältnis von Theorie und Artefakt (wieder) produktiv zu machen. Bei aller Verschiedenheit der literaturwissenschaftlichen und kritischen Positionen und Sprachen haben sie eine Gemeinsamkeit: Sie entzünden sich in der Auseinandersetzung mit einem Artefakt. Kritik, Kommentar, Theorie bekommen einen gleichsam sekundären Rang, den Rang einer Metasprache, in welcher sich ihre Divergenzen zeitigen. Wie aber stehen Metasprache und Theorie konkret zu ihrem primären Gegenstand? Und wie verhält sich das Artefakt zur Theorie? Mit seinem Augenmerk auf dem spezifischen Verhältnis zwischen primärem Artefakt und sekundärem Kommentar richtet der Workshop zugleich seine Aufmerksamkeit auf Formen der Lektüre, insofern der Leseprozess als zwischengeschalteter Moment jenes Verhältnis bestimmt. Der Workshop ist offen für folgende mögliche Bereiche und Fragestellungen:

(1) (Re)Lektüren eines (kanonischen) Primärtextes sind willkommen, die Potentiale und Grenzen etablierter Literaturtheorien, konventioneller Lesarten, literaturwissenschaftlicher Gemeinplätze oder diskursbestimmter Begriffe aufdecken (indem in etwa beispielsweise mit Sophokles gegen Freud argumentiert wird; oder mit Sophokles gegen Freud für psychoanalytische Theoriebildung).

(2) Der Workshop lädt insbesondere dazu sein, das oppositionelle, zumindest duale Verhältnis von Theorie und Literatur als ein implizites zu denken. Inwiefern entwickelt Literatur implizit Theorie? Inwiefern ist Theorie literarisch? Wie sind implizite Reflexionen evident zu machen und auf welche Weisen wurden sie von Theoretikern exemplarisch herausgekehrt?

(3) Der Workshop fragt nach Theorien der Lektüre. Insbesondere sind konkrete Beispiele, die Lektüre als Theoriebildung anschaulich machen sowie Analysen, die Dichtung, Malerei oder Film als Theorie zeigen, willkommen.

(4) Das Konzept von der Theorie, die konkret aus der Lektürepraxis erwächst und sich im Leseprozess bildet, steht in der Tradition des griechischen Verständnisses der theōria, ein Anschaulich-Werden, ein sprachlich produziertes Vor-Augen-Treten. Vor diesem Hintergrund interessieren im Workshop auch rhetorische Bildgebungsverfahren sowie das Verhältnis von Bild und Sprache, insofern es die Beziehung von Theorie und Artefakt spiegelt.

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17341 - Literature and the Language

 

Organizer(s): Rao, Mythili (Jain University, Bangalore, India)

 

The Proposal takes its cue from the contemporary scenario where we find the status of minority discourses, tribal, aboriginal and Dalit literatures in the context of mainstream writings in multilingual and multicultural societies in India and elsewhere in the world. The plea in favor of retaining the pluralist heritage consists of diverse ethnic and tribal communities, visualizing that every flower has the right to grow and spread its own fragrance to make up the cumulative beauty of the garden called multicultural society of a nation.

One of the most important boons of the post-colonial and post modern discourse is giving voice to the marginalized. Here we would like to look at the term ‘marginalized’ in two ways or contexts. During colonization and in the post –colonial era, on the one hand you have the literature created by the country in response to the colonization and on the other we have the response of one section of society from within the country which has been relegated to the margins due to the very structure of the society. In both these situations we have one group exercising power over the other and another which is suppressed and overpowered / vanquished. In this entire process language plays a key role. Even in this unequal relationship language plays a role in establishing a contact between the two sections. Power structures get created on the basis of the hegemony of the language of the powerful. The one in power absorbs everything that it can take from the other group and gets enriched at the same time not allowing the other to flourish or grow. If language is the vehicle for expression of culture then those cultural expressions also get affected in these circumstances. The combined appropriation of language and culture leads to a sense of loss of identity for the subjugated.

Many multicultural countries which are being studied under this rubric are: India, Canada, Australia or any other country, which was colonized. An ideal situation would be where this mutual exchange does not become a matter for exhibition but contributes to the growth of knowledge and wisdom and leads the society to ‘mutual illumination’ (bhaktin).

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CANCLEED - Literature in Japanese Before and After the March 1st Movement - 17345

 

Organizer(s): Kim, Hyosun (Korea University, Seoul, South Korea)

In 1910, the Japanese Empire took control over Korea, establishing the Japanese Government General of Korea. The repressive rule of the empire resulted in public hostility towards Japan and collective yearning for national liberty. Inspired by the idea of national self-determination proclaimed by President Wilson, one of the earliest public movements calling for Korean independence occurred on March 1st, 1919. The March 1st Movement had a significant effect on colonial rule of Japan and became the catalyst for the replacement of the military police with a civilian force. As part of such shift, the Japanese Government General of Korea initiated an effort to collect, compile and translate traditional Korean arts and literature. Since Japan’s colonization policy became stabilized around this time, Korean intellectuals began to create works in Japanese or translated works from Korean to Japanese, which triggered a boom in the translation of Korean literature, especially its modern works. Through cross-cultural research on literary works written in Japanese in changing Korea, the panel will examine diverse aspects of colonial literature in terms of hybridity and comparatism.

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17307 - Literature, Philosophy and Intellecutal History: The Language of Intersicipalinary Research

 

Organizer(s): ZHANG, HUI (Institute of Comparative Literature and Comparative Culture, Peking University, Beijing, China); Zhang, Chunjie (University of California, Davis, Davis, USA)

Plato had written in the dialogical form of drama, not in the form of an academic essay. The famous German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing used various forms of writing. Rousseau gained his fame not only with his novels but also with his political and philosophical treatises. Robert Musil is a novelist but asserts the privilege of “essayism.” Friedrich Nietzsche is a philosopher but also pays great attention to different genres.

All these prominent writers transcend the boundaries and limitations of disciplines and genres. They use the language of poetry to narrate philosophy and metaphysics.. Their poetry is philosophical; their philosophy is poetic.

In the same vein, in the Chinese language, Confucius’s notion of the “learning of benevolence” (ren xue仁学) must be understood and interpreted in the context of his dialogues with his disciples. The classical texts of Chinese intellectual history such as Meng Zi (孟子) and Zhuang Zi (庄子) consist of a series of stories. Han Yu (韩愈) is a poet, essayist, and an adamant protector of Confucianism. Lu Xun (鲁迅) is China’s greatest modernist novelist and, at the same time, the sharpest and the most profound thinker.

Hence, from the perspective of inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue and integration, we propose to further explore the relationships and dynamics between literature, philosophy, and history across global history and geography in order to help create new dimensions of research and teaching. The round table we are proposing has three major topics.

I.The conflict and dialogue between literature and philosophy.
II.The relationship between form and meaning.
III.Literature, narration, and the moral order.

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CANCELLED - L'original et les langues - 17361

 

Organizer(s): Marty, Philippe (Université Montpellier III, Montpellier cedex 5, France)

Le nom propre « Babel » se comprend communément comme désignant la multiplicité des langues : par exemple, un site d’apprentissage des langues en ligne a été baptisé « Babbel ». Pourtant, au chapitre XI de la Genèse, « Babel » est l’histoire de la langue unique qui se confond, c’est-à-dire devient inopérante, de sorte que les hommes, qui s’étaient agrégés comme un seul homme à Babel, se délient de la tâche commune et se dispersent en tous lieux ; et le récit complémentaire dans les Actes des apôtres (le miracle de la Pentecôte) parle aussi du rassemblement de toutes les langues en une seule, et même sur la pointe d’un seul mot, un adjectif, « christos », qui désigne l’original ou paradigme au nom duquel se rejoignent, comme un seul homme à nouveau, les fidèles de la foi nouvelle. C’est donc, si l’on compare les deux récits, un double mouvement qui est chaque fois représenté, de concentration extrême et d’expansion universelle, systole et diastole. Le multiple et le divers y sont chaque fois un effet ou un avatar de l’un, ou « original ».

C’est ce concept d’original que nous voudrions exposer, dans cet atelier. Il est, nous semble-t-il, un des concepts essentiels que la recherche comparatiste peut offrir aux sciences humaines, et il intéresse le thème du Congrès parce qu’il implique, d’emblée, le pluriel : les langues. L’original, en effet, c’est ce dont on ne parle qu’à partir du moment où l’opération de traduction s’est enclenchée. Par exemple, le premier vers du premier des Sonnets de Shakespeare n’est appelé « original » que s’il est considéré à partir d’au moins une de ses traductions. L’original est engendré, donc, par le « deux », par le couple qu’il forme avec sa première traduction une fois apparue. Mais d’autre part, l’original, c’est ce auprès de quoi commence un mouvement qui, en puissance, est sans limite et met en jeu autant de langues et de versions nouvelles qu’on veut : l’original, à son tour, engendre le pluriel.

Sont attendues, donc, pour cet atelier, des propositions qui réfléchissent à cette dialectique de la langue unique (mythique, à venir, ou en train de se constituer, par exemple sous la forme d’un « globish ») et des langues multiples, cette réflexion incluant une dimension pédagogique, car beaucoup de comparatistes utilisent, dans leur enseignement, ces sortes de textes uns-multiples : un original (par exemple le premier vers du premier des Sonnets de Shakespeare) et ses dizaines de versions en plusieurs langues.

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16680 - Mapping Multilingualism in 19th-Century European Literature: Closing the Gap between Past and Present

 

Organizer(s): Weissmann, Dirk (Université Paris-Est Créteil, Créteil, France)

Workshop co-organized with Olga Anokhina (CNRS, Paris) and Till Dembeck (University of Luxemburg)

Scholarship on multilingual literature from Europe has up to now mostly focused either on pre-modern periods, or on avant-garde modernism, and on the present. At first sight, the 19th century does not seem to matter for the history of European literary multilingualism. This might seem logical since the 19th century is rightfully considered the epoch that most effectively promoted nationalist monolingualism, in the wake of the European reception of the Herderian theory of culture. Still, it is worth considering forms of multilingualism also in this period. Firstly, not all European countries have undergone a process of nationalization and monolingualization to the same extent. And secondly, recent studies, namely in sociolinguistics, have shown that monolingual norms can be implemented only by massive language-political intervention. Therefore, it is plausible to assume that some forms of multilingualism play a role even in the apparently most monolingual constellations of European literary history. A mapping of literary multilingualism in 19th-century European literature seems thus necessary.

This section proposes an investigation into 19th-century European literary multilingualism, particularly into the period from 1800 to 1880. All areas of European literature will be considered. The term ‘multilingualism’ as used in this section includes all kinds of code-mixing, either in single literary texts or in multiple texts produced by the same author.

Topics to be explored might be the following, amongst others:

* multilingual authors in struggle with monolingual or national frameworks, multilingualism as a (hidden) background for national writers

* literary subversions of monolingual norms, language normalization processes and literature

* translation, heterolingualism and language hybridity

* travel, exile, extraterritoriality and literary multilingualism

Proposals from all disciplines devoted to European (Romance, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, Finnougric ...) literature are welcome. Papers can be presented either in English, German or French.

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17333 - Media, mediation, fiction. Medium as a language?

 

Organizer(s): TANE, Benoît (LLA CREATIS, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Toulouse, France); Krzywkowski, Isabelle (Université Grenoble 3-Stendhal, Saint-Martin-d'Hères, France)

Fiction is mediated by different media that comparative literature may study. But the comparison has namely to explore the problematic relationship between fiction and its media ; this relationship appears to be involved by its own creation’s and reception’s processes.

Above all, the crucial point is that fiction try not only to make believe but to make forget its media.

Such a apparent disappearence of media is perhaps even the sine qua non condition for the esthetic effect of the fictionnal Illusion. It follows, therefore, that the concept of Immersion analysed by theoricians of fiction could be related with the immediacy explored by the Media Studies, from Digital Studies to Medienwissenschaften.

But this illusion itself has to be studied , such a study is an emergency when at the same time « dematerialisation » is the doxa : the digital production is a material one, although in a different way than the printed one for example.

Furthermore, fiction highlights many media in its own subjects. What is the reason of such a display ? Is it a sort of « mise en abyme » ? Could it makes forget the medium used by the fiction itself, whatever it is, writing, speak, painting or film ? What are the fictions of the medium, for instance, at first, the immediacy ? How does fiction work when art, for example the Avant-garde, put the emphasis on the medium ? Is it an ethical question ?

This workshop finally intends to highlight the mediation, or the mediality, implied by fiction. There is not only a sort of indifference for the medium, but a « différance », in the sens of Derrida, of the medium itself : the medium is an intermediary but it defers the contact ; it homogenizes but it makes different too. Do traditional comparisons (literary gender, text/image, arts/mainstream production...) transform themselves due to such an issue ? Do the relationship with media vary in the different linguistic and cultural area ?

Isabelle Krzywkowski (Professeur de Littérature comparée, Université Stendhal Grenoble 3) Benoît Tane (Maître de conférences en Littérature comparée, Université de Toulouse Jean-Jaurès, Equipe LLA-CREATIS)

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17343 - Metaphor and the Conceptualization of Fictionality

 

Organizer(s): Trauvitch, Rhona (Florida International University, Miami, USA)

Hofstadter and Sander argue that categorization is indispensable to communication, and that analogy is the root of all thought and conceptualization: “…without concepts there can be no thought, and without analogies there can be no concepts.” If our conceptualization is based on analogies and metaphors, how might we imagine beings whose language bears a markedly different relationship to metaphor?

In this group, presenters will explore literary texts that foreground language – specifically, language that either precludes or depends on metaphor. Examples of the former are the Ariekei in Miéville’s Embassytown, who are incapable of speculation and cannot conceive of metaphors, and the Thermians in Galaxy Quest who have no sense of fiction or lies and take television shows to be historical documentaries. An example of the latter are Star Trek’s Tamarians, who can only communicate in metaphor, and cannot express a concept if not via analogy. Instances of literary texts with similar focuses include works by Delany, Borges, and Orwell, among many others.

The connections among language, metaphor, and thought lead us to a study of the sense of fiction: a being who cannot recognize the concept of make-believe would be impervious to fictionality. Since a conception of fiction is related to theory of mind – one’s ability to recognize the existence of other minds – this line of inquiry would be enriched by a discussion of cognitive approaches to literature. There may also be implications in language philosophy in terms of modality – especially linguistic capacities to express irrealis moods, subjunctive moods, and counterfactuals.

What is the relationship between the presupposition of a mind and the presupposition of an ability to conceive of fictionality? What are the reverberations of the inability to conceive of fiction? We will seek to answer these questions by navigating the fascinating interstices of language, metaphor, and thought in literary texts.

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19351 - Migrations/Notions/Translations: Concepts of Literature in European Context

 

Organizer(s): Vlasta, Sandra (Universität Mainz, Mainz, Germany)

Literature in the context of migration has been a major topic in literary research across Europe during the past fifteen years. However, comparative research on the topic is still only in its early stages. This might be due to the huge variety of concepts that are used in different academic spheres, depending on their cultural, linguistic, and historical background. A transcultural reflection of the phenomenon thus proves to be a challenge, requiring careful consideration of the terminology used and the concepts applied, as well as an awareness of the origins and motivations for particular approaches.
The participants of the proposed round table will discuss the question of the transferability of theoretical concepts in the realm of literature and migration, and address difficulties that may arise. How can theoretical concepts be translated into different languages and different contexts? To what extent are we as scholars manipulated by our own academic background when we deal with (theoretical) concepts and how can we handle this? How has the study of migration and literature been influenced by the use of differing terminology?
Each panellist will give a brief statement on her approach, which will then be discussed by the panel. The discussion will also open up to questions and contributions from the audience.
The participants will refer to their experience gained in the research and publication project Trans-Cultures: Migration and Literature in Contemporary Europe (to be published in the CHLEL-series with Benjamins, Amsterdam). The project reflects on migration and literature in Europe from the 1950s onwards based on a transnational approach. It also focuses on the reception of the phenomenon by European scholars and critics, and on its aesthetic and poetic imperatives (state of the art).

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17299 - Modernism and Translation

 

Organizer(s): Taylor-Batty, Juliette (Leeds Trinity University, Leeds, Great Britain); Meylaerts, Reine; Roig Sanz, Diana (KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium)

Translation is central to modernism. A large number of modernist writers were also translators, and the mutual impact of translation and creative practice was significant in the period: literary experimentation led to new translation strategies (Venuti 1995), while translation itself became an expressly generative practice (Yao 2002).

The recent ‘transnational turn’ in modernist studies has led to a significant increase in critical interest in the role of translation, but the enormous scope and scale of the topic, combined with the very focused linguistic and literary expertise required for the study of translation, has resulted in very few comparative studies. Indeed, particular emphasis on the role of translators is still needed (Bassnett 2012).

We propose therefore that modernism and translation need to be brought into broader comparative and global focus. This is the aim of this international group section of 3 collaborative panels:

Modernist translators: What translation strategies are employed by modernist writers who work as translators? What impact does translation have on their original work? Self-translation: What new sets of transfer practices established modernist writers within multilingual and multicultural contexts? Did modernist writers use different languages for different purposes? Translation as composition: In what ways is translation used by writers as a creative practice, and/or compositional mode? How have modernist writers appropriated texts, via translation, into original works?

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MUTENESS - 17429

 

Organizer(s): Segal, Naomi (Dept of Cultures & Languages, School of Arts Birkbeck, University of London, London WC1H 0PD, United Kingdom)

This group session turns the topic of Section B against itself, questioning what happens when literature comes up against a failure or absence of language – the muteness of things, creatures or readers. The three papers take a variety of angles on the question, bringing texts into encounters with fine art, animal studies and translation/reception studies. Like any liminal point, this relation between speaking/hearing/reading and its obverse is ambiguous: is the point where language fails a loss or a challenge? What is produced in language when it tries to understand the animate or inanimate other – and how does this wish to understand partake of fear, aggression, desire or rivalry? How does the body intervene, and whose body is it? In ‘Words, bodies & stone’, Naomi Segal compares texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century French and German poets about the fantasy of touching sculpture: how are the ideas of space and desire reconfigured by an idea of the impenetrability of material art-objects? In ‘Silent Encounters: Animal Studies and Comparative Literature’, Florian Mussgnug examines the fundamental fluidity in definitions of human/animal, paying particular attention to silence as a contested marker of dehumanization: language, insofar as it refers to both speech and silence, may be best understood as a liminal zone of encounter between species. In 'Mutes, Muting, and Mutations: the Reception of English, Irish and Scottish Writers in Europe', Elinor Shaffer begins to assess, after a ten-year programme of studying the European reception of a range of English-language authors in a variety of fields (poets, novelists, dramatists, scientists, philosophers, and politicians), whose voice is heard, in what language and in what measure , and how time, place and tone alter the very substance of the word. These papers will be followed by discussion of texts and images.

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17353 - New Man, New Languages

 

Organizer(s): Budrewicz, Aleksandra (The Pedagogical University of Krakow, Krakow, Poland)

The papers on our panel will set out to demonstrate that the idea of “New Man” has a recurrent presence in the history of literature, art and philosophy. The notion usually triggers associations with both the question of political reform and various avant-garde movements in the arts, but it is also deeply rooted in the traditions of Western thought and culture.

Prof. Stanislaw Jasionowicz will examine Gilbert Durand's vision of a future Science of Man, presented in "Science de l'homme et tradition. Pour un Nouvel Esprit Anthropologique", which could become a lingua franca for the humanities and consequently also for comparative studies.

Prof. Nina Pluta will focus on diverse images of the inhabitants of Latin America and South America which emerge from the texts of Hispano-American culture (essays, prose, as well as painting) inspired by the three decades of reformist zeal from 1920s through 1940s of the last century.

On the basis of life and work of the Welsh poet Ronald Stuart Thomas (1913-2000) Dr Przemysław Michalski will engage with the question of how one’s identity is informed by the language one speaks as vernacular and the interpretative structuring of reality it inevitably carries.

The main issue for dr Aleksandra Budrewicz will be a range of visions and projections of the ‘New Man’ whom William Morris hoped to create in his literary and artistic works.

Dr Tomasz Szybisty will address the problem of changes, shifts and transitions which may occur in the speaker’s emotional attitude and perception of reality on mastering a new language.

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16881 - New Perspectives on the Paragone

 

Organizer(s): Thoss, Jeff (Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany); Mathieson, Jolene (Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany)

“Beethoven, Raphael, cannot reach / The charm which Homer, Shakespeare, teach,” concludes Matthew Arnold in his “Epilogue to Lessing’s Laocoön” (1867), yet the rivalry between the arts, the paragone, has never been settled as neatly as Arnold’s couplet suggests. Broadly speaking, the paragone has been broached by at least three distinct yet related critical traditions. To art historians, it primarily refers to a debate in the Italian Renaissance that, in a first step, sought to put the visual arts on equal footing with poetry and music and, in a second step, determine the respective merits of painting and sculpture. To scholars of ekphrasis, emblems and similar phenomena, the paragone denotes a perennial struggle between words and images that permeates Western cultural history. Finally, media theorists frequently resort to notions of competition in order to describe our shifting contemporary media landscape – whether they label this as a paragone or not. Literary critics have, to a greater or lesser extent, taken part in all three discussions, yet the paragone is hardly in common parlance in our discipline and its specific manifestations in literary texts and literary history remain to be closely studied in many cases. Our group section proposes to (re-)examine the role and place of literature in the three interconnected fields mentioned, focusing in particular upon question such as: At which points in literary history is the paragone especially conspicuous? Which arts does literature engage in a rivalry with at which times? Which devices and strategies do texts employ to display their superiority? What influence have the various paragone theorists (from Alberti and da Vinci to Bolter and Grusin) had upon writers? Is the paragone a basic condition of the arts or a temporally limited phenomenon? What function(s) does the rivalry between the arts serve?

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17304 - Old and New Concepts of Comparative Literature in the Globalized World

 

Organizer(s): Gafrik, Robert; Maria Batorova; Milos Zelenka (Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences)

Comparative literary studies are a discipline which has been connected with globalization processes since the creation of the idea of world literature. However, it does not only explore various literatures of the world but has been practiced differently in different countries. Therefore comparative literary studies do not have either a single object of study or a single or unified method. Theory and methodology is discussed in various languages and power relations. New terms enter the discourse of comparative literature or old terms return, often in new meanings as for example recently did the term "world Literature" in American comparative literary studies. The group section seeks to explore the pluralistic world of theory and methodology of contemporary comparative literary studies as well as the migration of concepts in time and space, while showing the specificity of local and regional traditions of comparative literary research. For example, in the 20th century the heterogeneous region of Central Europe produced several concepts of comparative literature (Dionyz Durisin in Slovakia, Anton Ocvirk in Slovenia, Frank Wollman in Czechoslovakia or Alexander Flaker in Croatia) which have been developing parallel to the so-called American and French school of comparative literary studies. How do the various schools and traditions communicate with each other? Where do they converge and diverge? Do they have the potential to enrich each other? What is the role of the hegemonic anglophone discourse on non-anglophone comparative literary studies? Which terms and concepts of non-anglophone comparative literature seem viable in the present globalized comparative literary discourse? The contributions in the group section should not only focus on theoretical studies but also on the exploration of terms and concepts on the basis of concrete literary material.

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17121 - One theme: different media

 

Organizer(s): DINIZ, THAIS (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil)

A. Section: The art as universal code

One Theme: Different Media

The group section intendes to discuss the variety of treatments possible for the development of identical themes in different media. This will naturally lead to the airing of related topics. Here belongs, for instance, revisiting various theories of adaptation as well as the concept of remediation developed by Lars Ellestrom. Another relevant topic is the central role played in Western critical discourse by the ancient rivalry between the art of the word and the art of the image, the paragone sometimes dressed in friendly terms like "the sister arts". The discussion will of course also involve the relations between other media, including kinetic forms like film or television. Also involved is the question of the alleged superiority of one art over the others in their capacity to represent material reality. More specifically, the group will focus on the changes emerging from the specificities of each medium, with special emphasis on the matter of how far these specificities may contribute to a variety of justifiable readings of the source text.

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17295 - Original / Translation. The implied languages of imagined translations

 

Organizer(s): Rath, Brigitte (FU Berlin, Berlin, Germany); Vanacker, Beatrijs (KU Leuven / FWO, Leuven, Belgium)

This ICLA seminar focusses on a specific form of multilingualism -- on mostly monolingual texts that do not present but rather evoke another language. There are many instances in which a text we read implies that it was "originally" in a different language: We read Usbek's and Rica's letters from Paris in Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721) in French, but we understand that they "originally" wrote to their Persian correspondents in Persian; Macpherson's English Fragments of ancient poetry (1760) never let us forget that they are "translated from the Gaelic or Erse language"; Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (1832) chronicles a torturous attempt to acquaint the British public with a German philosopher's work, citing long passages from the "originally" German text in English "translation"; and when in Ted Chiang's story "The truth of fact, the truth of feeling" (2013) a missonary in West Africa talks with his student, they speak in Tiv, but we read their conversations in English.

In all these cases, the present language brings an absent language into play. These texts evoke and involve another language by inviting us to imagine the original text we read as a translation of a preceding original.

This wide-spread phenomenon has only recently become a focus of scholarly attention. The terms used proliferate with the increasing number of contributions: pseudotranslation (Toury, Rambelli, Gürçaðlar), pseudo-traduction (Collombat, Jenn, Martens/Vanacker), seudotraduccion (Santoyo), fictitious translation (Bassnett), translations without an original (Apter), assumed translation (Komissarov, Halverson), traduction supposée (Lombez), transmesis (Beebee), and original translation (Rath). This seminar aims at bringing the many languages of different research traditions together to discuss the implications of the multilingualism of imagined translation for Comparative Literature. These include questions on the concepts of original and translation, on the process of translation and translatability, on transnational reception, authorship and audience, and on the multilingual potential of any language.

We invite papers that present individual case studies -- from all periods and literatures -- and/or discuss the concept and its many names. These individual contributions to the seminar will allow us to explore and map this productive phenomenon for comparative literature.

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17619 - Panel der Kommission der OEAW The North Atlantic Triangle

 

Organizer(s): Zacharasiewicz, Waldemar (Universität Wien, Wien, Austria)

 

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16447 - PANEL Digital Humanities in Comparative Literature, World Literature(s), and Comparative Cultural Studies

 

Organizer(s): Totosy de Zepetnek, Steven (Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA)

Call for Papers ICLA Panel "Digital Humanities in Comparative Literature, World Literature(s), and Comparative Cultural Studies" (org. Steven Totosy de Zepetnek, Purdue University & Graciela Boruszko, Pepperdine University), triannual Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association / Association Internationale de Litterature Comparee www.ailc-icla.org , University of Vienna 21-27 July 2016. Participants in the panel(s) discuss aspects of digital humanities from various perspectives within the discipline of comparative literature and the fields of world literature(s) and comparative cultural studies. Owing to the current situation worldwide when fewer students are interested in the study of literature, digital humanities has promise for the social relevance of the humanities in research (e.g., data science, libraries), practice (e.g., digital publishing of journals and books), pedagogy (e.g., online and blended teaching), and matters technical.

CANCELLED - Performativities of Many Languages

 

Organizer(s): Innami, Fusako (University of East Anglia, Norwich, Great Britain)

It has been half a century since J. L. Austin gave a series of lectures regarding ‘performatives’, subsequently published in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words. Through his distinction between performative and constative, Austin discusses how performative language does rather than states. This work has played a particularly influential role in such areas as rhetoric, comparative literature, and performance studies. Yet Austin occasionally signals that the difference between performative and constative is marked in English but is not necessarily the same in all languages, as the performative has various manners of ‘performing’ in multiple languages. To name only a few, Korean and Japanese generally have a ‘subject-object-verb’ sentence structure. In Japanese, where the verb is modified by tense and negative at the very end of the sentence, one experiences the performativity of delay—one has to wait for the performative moment until the very end of the utterance. The particular natures of specific languages make us rethink the extent to which the construction of concepts, ideas, and theories depend on which language one employs.

Considering the multiple manners of performatives derived from various languages, this panel reconsiders polyphonic (temporally, spatially, and sensually) manners of performatives through many languages.

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16582 - Performing Provincialism in a Cosmopolitan World - CANCELLED

 

Organizer(s): Landry, Travis (Kenyon College, Gambier, USA)

This roundtable proposal aims to explore how world literature is perceived and taught at small liberal arts colleges of the United States. For the past year, six faculty members from Kenyon and Oberlin Colleges in Ohio have collaborated with the support of the Great Lakes Colleges Association (GLCA) to enhance our research, respectively, on world, postcolonial, global, transnational, and diasporic literatures and to develop intellectually robust parameters for framing our courses on world literatures and cultures that are not simply those of Europe and the United States. We believe that the small college model is ideally suited to generate an exchange of ideas between colleges in such a way that innovative thinking about the global can move outward from our localized communities. For the AILC/ICLA 2016, we would like to invite participation from other faculty engaged with world literature within the GLCA, which is a consortium of thirteen small colleges in the Midwest of the United States. Indeed, an eye toward new networks of meaning within the field of world literature has opened the possibilities for novel ways of bringing "the world" into the curriculum through faculty hiring initiatives, broader course offerings, and interdisciplinary projects. Typically, however, any one department at small liberal arts colleges will not have more than one or two faculty members engaging questions of world literature. But in the aggregate, these faculty members among the GLCA institutions and affiliates represent a significant resource. Therefore, we aim to identify work that is already ongoing in small liberal arts colleges and that fits conceptually within our identity as scholars and teachers. Our proposed collaborative group will serve as a microcosm for larger discussions framed by the AILC/ICLA 2016 more broadly and will thus foster a re-imagining of the scope of world literatures when folded within liberal arts institutions.

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16284 - Pictures for Everybody! Postcards and Literature/ Bilder für alle! Postkarten und Literatur

 

Organizer(s): Sauer-Kretschmer, Simone (Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft, Bochum, Germany)

Postcards are travel souvenirs and messages to those who have remained at home. Moreover postcards have been collected and arranged in special albums ever since their emersion, and have quickly formed different categories and genres. Photographic picture postcards not only keep record of the sender and the recipient of their short messages, but – notably around 1900 – they also play a major role in creating and reproducing new world-views and in imagining ‚foreign‘ parts of the world. But what happens to postcards when they show up as parts of fictional texts? And how can the specific relationships between texts and pictures be described when postcards are ‚translated‘ into literature? This workshop focuses on the various connections between postcards and literature. Topics might include, but are by no means limited to: the integration of postcards into literary texts, literary narrations about postcards, and narratives in postcard-style.

Postkarten sind Souvenirs von Reisen, Botschaften an die Daheimgebliebenen und seit jeher auch Sammelobjekte, die in Alben organisiert und arrangiert werden. Von Beginn an differenziert sich daher die Postkarte in verschiedene Genres aus. Doch fotografische Bildpostkarten dokumentieren als zirkulierende Objekte nicht nur Sender und Empfänger ihrer kurzen schriftlichen Botschaften, sondern sind insbesondere um 1900 an der Reproduktion und Erzeugung von Weltbildern und den mit ihnen verbundenen Imaginationen beteiligt. Was aber geschieht mit dem Medium Postkarte, wenn es uns als Bestandteil fiktionaler Texte wiederbegegnet, und wie lassen sich die spezifischen Text-Bild-Beziehungen analysieren, die entstehen, wenn Postkartenbilder und -texte in literarische Formate ,übersetzt‘ werden? Die vielfältigen Beziehungen von Postkarten und literarischen Texten stehen im Zentrum des Workshops, dem es sowohl um die Integration von Postkarten in literarische Texte, das literarische Erzählen über Postkarten als auch um Geschichten und Schreiben im Postkarten-Stil gehen soll.

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CANCELLED - Pluriculturalism and Plurilingualism as Paradigm of Cultural Encounter - 17298

 

Organizer(s): Tafazoli, Hamid (University of Bielefeld, Germanistik, Bielefeld, Germany)

Description: Recent researches about language and culture turn the view to the relative importance of language in defining culture and identity especially in a global culture that is mostly affected by migration and cross border motions. Regarding the newest theories of cultural studies that shift the view to plurality of identity and language, the contemporary German culture demonstrates that topics such identity and language are not issues limited to the Otherness and Foreignness as categories, but specific topics that confront every society in today’s era of globalization and mobilization. Literature represents social challenges and issues of self-discovery in an intercultural context. In light of this observation, the panel should examine the relationship between language, identity and culture on the one hand, and the literary reflection on those topics on the other.

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17326 - Poetics of Code

 

Organizer(s): Niebisch, Arndt (Institut für Germanistik, Wien, Austria)

This panel aims at exploring the aesthetics of code in a historical perspective. Code, cryptographic technologies and literature constituted ( from magical spells to contem porary code poetry ) a complex fi e l d of interaction that constantly challenged and transformed modes of reading. The contributions to this panel will display the particular practices that conflate the production of code and literature. Historically, we will reflect on the creation of symbolic entropy through the ars combinatoria in the baroqu e, the use of cryptography by authors such as Heinrich von Kleist and E.A. Poe, the integration of formulaic writing in the avant-gar d e and neo avant-garde, and the adaption of computer code in the 20 th  century and 21th century in poetic language.

A major question of o ur investigation will focus on the fact that cod e has a unique performative func tion , which becomes esp e cially apparent in computer programs that are not made to be read bu t t o be executed. We will ask if the use of code in poetry implements a quality that transforms the reading process into something that could be described as a compilation or execution of code -- a transformation of the reading process into a complex form of data processing.

In addition , the panel will also ask if there is a certain specific style of code , which also can be connected to contemporary discussion s about writing “good” code. This discussion will open up the question of the philological implications that go along with the integration of code. Especially in present discourses about computer code , the necessity of commenting computer programs transforms the use of code into a philology of code itself.

The dominance of information technology, the rich history of blending literary text s and cryptograph ic techniques, and the self-reflexive forms of commenting in computer programm ing allude to philological practices that make it apparent that code should be included among the languages of comparative literature. Code is thereby not only an additional idiom, but a practice of writing that by its ver y nature demands interpretation , i.e. a practice that constitutes at its core a philological and not only technological mode of intervention .

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17283 - Poetics through time : the comparatist perspective

 

Organizer(s): HAQUETTE, Jean-Louis (Société française de littérature générale et comparée, REIMS, France)

Workshop organized by the French society of general and comparative literature.

In the last decades, the topical opposition between literary theory and literary history has been reworked by many critics in less conflicting terms than in the late seventies. Universalist literary poetics used to consider that historical variations were minor aspects and to look for timeless literary forms. This exclusion of historical development has been challenged in many ways, that have emphasized the temporality of literary norms and forms.

Researchers in comparative literature, dealing with at least two literary systems, languages or artistic media, are more particularly confronted to differentiated rhythms of development and therefore sensitive to the evolutionary nature of literary language and norms.

The aim of this workshop is to reassess, in an international perspective, the ways in which formalist critical tools belonging to poetics can deal which the questions of successivity, time and history, in the study of literary and artistic productions. It will seek to take into account the complex interplay between literary language and dynamics of change and to promote renewed conceptions of the “history of forms”. We will try and investigate the ways in which a historical and comparative perspective can challenge or improve general theoretical views, but also, conversely, how historical approaches do benefit from theoretical considerations. The decisive question of the extent (in space and time) of literary corpuses that give ground for literary theory is also meant be taken into account.

The languages of the workshop will be French, English and German. The call for papers will accordingly be proposed in these three languages.

For the SFLGC : Françoise Lavocat (president) Jean-Louis Haquette and Guy Ducrey (vice-presidents).

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17282 - Pratiques littéraires du plurilinguisme - mondes arabes

 

Organizer(s): Picherot, Emilie (Université Lille 3, Paris, France); Boidin, Carole (Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense, Ivry sur Seine, France)

Cette proposition émane d’un réseau d’enseignants-chercheurs en voie de constitution, nommé LGC-MA (Littérature Générale et Comparée – Mondes arabes, voir URL : lgcma.hypotheses.org). Ce réseau, initié en France, entend multiplier des partenariats internationaux, déjà initiés.

Ce réseau a pour objectif de rassembler des enseignants-chercheurs en littérature comparée intégrant dans leur enseignement et leur recherche des documents arabes.

Une telle intégration pose en effet des problèmes méthodologiques multiples. Les conceptions et pratiques littéraires dans le « monde arabe » ne sont pas uniformes et varient en fonction de l’époque, du lieu, du milieu socio-culturel, voire de la langue pratiquée. Comment, dès lors, comparer ces littératures aux littératures influencées plus directement par le modèle européen moderne, aussi bien au niveau de l’enseignement que de la recherche ?

L’un de nos chantiers de réflexion concerne la diversité linguistique des pratiques littéraires rattachées au domaine arabe. Les linguistes ont montré la richesse des situations vécues et imaginées par les locuteurs de cette zone géographique. Ils ont décrit le « continuum » qui mène des dialectes régionaux et sociaux à l’arabe dit littéral, ou les situations de diglossie entre arabe, langues périphériques (kurde, berbère, araméen, etc.) et langues centrales (anglais, français notamment). En adoptant un point de vue diachronique, la multiplicité des situations n’est que plus frappante.

Quelles en sont les conséquences pour les pratiques littéraires, et à quelles conditions la discipline comparatiste peut-elle les prendre pour objet ?

Il s’agira d’observer ensemble des expériences de recherche et d’enseignement, de les prolonger par des réflexions théoriques et méthodologiques, pouvant évidemment passer par la comparaison avec d’autres domaines linguistiques de la discipline comparatiste. Nous présenterons donc une série de communications, dont certaines à plusieurs voix, portant sur un éventail large d’objets et de méthodes.

L’un des objectifs sera aussi de tirer les conclusions de ces expériences pour la définition de la discipline comparatiste, en France et dans le monde. Nous souhaiterions donc saisir l’occasion de ce Congrès pour solliciter des collègues étrangers et prendre de nouveaux contacts.

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16829 - Prismatic Translation

 

Organizer(s): Park, Sowon (Oxford University, Oxford, Great Britain)

Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political and legal contexts. The second view attaches to contexts where several spoken languages share the same written characters (as in the Chinese scriptworld), to circumstances where language is not standardised (eg minority & dialectal communities & oral cultures), to the fluidity of electronic text, and to literature, especially poetry and theatrical performance. The first view sees translation as a channel; the second as a prism.

The prismatic view of translation has yet to be fully theorised. For instance, a historical and intercultural glimpse at translation practices reveals a highly varied relationship between 'original' and 'copy' that demands further examination. Papers of the 2016 committee meeting could study the pragmatic requirements of translations (e.g., the function of dominant languages, the precarious prestige of specialized vernaculars, shifts in audiences, the situated behavior of authors), their concrete realization in the individual transformation of documents (i.e., in multilingual groups of texts consisting of originals and translations), and their impact on the history of language and literature.

This approach would develop the line taken in the key recent intervention in the study of translations, the Cassin et el Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, itself translated as Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Despite its catchy subtitle or title, the volume in fact tends to deconstruct the binary translatable / untranslatable, revealing instead what Benjamin called "Ubersetzung bis zu einem gewissen Grade" ('the translatable to some degree'). Such degrees of translation require standard ideas such as 'equivalence', 'fidelity', and the binary of 'foreignizing' and 'domesticating' to be rethought. Attention to non-European languages and translation traditions is likely to be crucial to this endeavour.

Hamarneh, Park, Reynolds, Willer.

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17290 - Quand le recours aux langues d'origine fait la différence

 

Organizer(s): Heidmann, Ute (Centre de recherche en Langues et littératures européennes comparées (CLE), Université de Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland)

Cet appel à contribution sollicite des présentations de recherches permettant de découvrir des dimensions qui seraient restées inaperçues sans le recours aux langues d’origine des corpus et des phénomènes analysés et comparés. De quel type et de quelle ampleur sont ces découvertes ? Restent-elles confinées aux détails philologiques et linguistiques ou vont-elles jusqu’à renverser des dogmes convenus et des préjugés institutionnalisés ? Sur quels plans se situent ces découvertes, quelles pratiques langagières et culturelles concernent-elles ? Quelles sont les langues, anciennes et modernes, majeures ou mineures, qui sont en jeu ? Quels sont les genres et pratiques littéraires et culturelles interrogés ? Quels sont les méthodes et outils d’analyse mis en œuvre dans ces études, quels sont leurs présupposés et concepts préconisés ?

On s’interrogera sur les conclusions à tirer des découvertes rendues possibles par la prise en compte des langues et aussi des contextes d’origine. Offrent-elles des arguments suffisamment puissants pour défendre la nécessité de maintenir le multilinguisme de notre discipline contre l’emprise d’un idiome unique imprégné d’intérêts commerciaux ? Le recours aux langues d’origine permet-il de défendre la « diversalité » (terme proposé par Glissant, Chamoiseau et Bernabé) des langues, littératures et cultures du monde contre les stéréotypes produits dans l’enseignement de « la littérature mondiale » dont le canevas et le corpus sont préfabriqués et prédéterminés par quelques READERS composés d’extraits et diffusés à large échelle par deux ou trois maisons d’édition influentes ?

(Proposition visant à organiser un groupe de travail, faite par le Centre de recherche en Langues et littératures européennes comparées (CLE) de l’Université de Lausanne)

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16603 - Rhizomorphe Identität? Motivgeschichte und kulturelles Gedächtnis im europäischen Kulturraum

 

Organizer(s): Piszczatowski, Pawel (Universität Warschau, Warszawa, Poland); Godlewicz-Adamiec, Joanna (Uniwersytet Warszawski Instytut Germanistyki, Warszawa, Poland)

Die Motivgeschichte gehört zu den traditionellen Grundgebieten der interkulturellen Forschung und Komparatistik. Dass die geplante Gruppenveranstaltung an dieses Paradigma anknüpft, soll aber nicht bedeuten, dass in deren Rahmen eine Rekonstruktion der Entstehungs- und Wandlungsprozesse von literarischen und künstlerischen Motiven in verschiedenen Nationalkuturen Europas angestrebt wird. Viel mehr sollen die traditionellen Forschungsmodelle in ihrer linearen und hierarchischen Struktur kritisch hinterfragt werden. Viele Ansätze in der neueren Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft bieten Anlass zu einer solchen Auseinandersetzung mit den herkömmlichen Modellen der Komparatistik. Berücksichtigt werden dabei vor allem die Auffassung der Kulturorganisation als Rhizom (Deleuze/Guattari) und die Konzeption des kulturellen Gedächnisses (Assmann/Assmann). Beide ermöglichen eine Dezentralisierung der komparatistischen Herangehensweise an die Motivgeschichte der europäischen Kultur. Vor diesem Hintergrund soll die Frage nach der Möglichkeit einer methodologischen und inhaltlichen Aufhebung der bipolaren und hierarchischen Denkstrukturen von Zentrum und Peripherie, Diachronie und Synchronie, Eigenheit und Fremdheit, sowie Einfluss und Rezeption erörtert werden.

Diese Herangehensweise scheint auf vielen Gebieten der komparatistischen Reflexion fruchtbar. Sie kann sowohl eine Neuorientirung in der Aufarbeitung der vornationalen europäischen Kultur des Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit ermöglichen, als auch zur kritischen Erfassung des nachaufklärerischen Einheitsdenkens bis hin zur Auseinandersetzung mit dem postkolonialen Erbe der abendländischen Großmächte führen. Darüber hinaus können Fragen nach der Sprache (den Sprachen) als Indentifikationsinstanz neu gestellt werden und mit den Modellen des Kulturtransfers konfroniert werden. Es soll zu einer nicht europozentrischen Analyse der Korrelationen mit den „fremden“, bzw. „peripheren“ Kulturen und zur Erfassung der Hybridität als eines Grundmusters des interkulturellen Geflächts beitragen.

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CANCELLED - ROMAN ESTHETIQUE ROMAN INITIATIQUE - 17233

 

Organizer(s): Brion, Charles (Université de La Rochelle, la rochelle, France)

Intitulé "Roman esthétique roman initiatique", cet atelier voudrait examiner, a priori dans les aires européennes anglaise (Grande-Bretagne et Irlande), allemande (Allemagne et ex-Autriche-Hongrie) et française (France et Belgique), la façon dont les romanciers, se cantonnant volontiers dans des positions esthétisantes au tournant du siècle, ont forcément été incités dans les années 1910-1920 à quitter cette position de repli sous l'influence des événements internationaux cristallisés dans la guerre 1914-1918. L'on devrait pouvoir constater que certains auteurs (par exemple E. M. Forster, Thomas Mann, André Gide?), s'intéressant davantage à la communauté, ont en effet évolué vers des positions plus éthiques, ce qui prendrait souvent dans leur oeuvre la forme d'un récit initiatique. D'autres auteurs, au contraire, restant focalisés quasi exclusivement sur des questions d'innovation formelle, seraient demeurés enfermés dans des questions purement esthétiques (par exemple Joyce, Kafka, stigmatisés à ce titre par Lukacs dans La Signification présente du réalisme critique , Giraudoux?, Proust?).

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16499 - Science et littérature : une question de langage?

 

Organizer(s): Weber, Anne-Gaëlle (Université d'Artois, Arras, France)

La linguistique organiciste s’inspira dès les années 1860 des théories des zoologistes et s’empara rapidement du lexique darwinien. Certains dénoncèrent alors l’assimilation entre le langage et les phénomènes vitaux et la confusion possible entre les « métaphores » et les faits. Mais Darwin, lui-même justifiait son usage savant des métaphores dès la première édition de On the Origin of Species. La constitution d’une « science » du langage peut passer par l’emprunt à des mots et des logiques savants. Inversement, l ’invention de langages propres ou l’usage d’un langage modélisé va de pair avec une réflexion des savants sur l’usage du vocabulaire commun et du style. Cet atelier a pour ambition d’explorer, sous la plume des savants et des écrivains, la définition de styles « littéraires » ou « savants » ainsi que les emprunts, par les uns et les autres, de langages relevant de la sphère opposée.

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16692 - Secular Literary Texts and Sacred Exegesis

 

Organizer(s): Steven, Shankman (University of Oregon, Eugene, USA)

We invite papers that ponder the relationship -- from a broadly comparative perspective, in a variety of traditions -- between the interpretation of (secular) literary texts and the exegesis of sacred texts. What is the relation between the two, and where does ethics fit in? We are not speaking here about the question of "belief," but rather of ways of reading. We are interested in how the interpretation of works from within a particular literary and cultural tradition is influenced by the exegesis of sacred texts within that tradition (a Buddhist reading of the great eighteenth-century Chinese novel The Dream of the Red Chamber, for example); in how works from particular literary and cultural traditions have been influenced by sacred texts from very different traditions; and also in how literary texts can be opened up when viewed through the lens of religious or spiritual traditions of which its author was unaware -- a Buddhist reading of emptiness or nothingness in Shakespeare's King Lear, for example, or a Talmudic/ethical approach to the Mahabharata or to Tolstoy's War and Peace.

This panel is proposed by the Research Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature of the ICLA.

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17288 - SOUTH ASIAN PATHWAYS : LANGUAGES, GENDER AND POLITICS

 

Organizer(s): MOHAN, CHANDRA (COMPARATIVE LITERATURE ASSOCIATION OF INDIA, NEW DELHI, India)

This proposal draws its connectivity from the ICLA Congress sub-theme titled: "Many Cultures: Many Idioms". Primarily, it is related to the ICLA Research Committee project: "Literary and Cultural Interrelationships between India, Its Neighboring Countries and the World”.

The Proposal is directed at exploring various cultural similarities, differences and developments in the South Asian region as ideas and cultures have travelled and intermingled and also as there is a shared past between India and Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka and other SAARC countries.

The panel, likely to spread over all the 5 days of the conference aims at working through the politics, gender relations and languages (as they have evolved on different soils) and tracing patterns of similarities and differences, with the aim of working out areas of peace, of the possibilities of negotiations, the role of religion in defining a society, as well as gender positions, the diversity in objectives, the rights of the state versus the rights of the individual, the right to relate to others outside the boundaries of one's nation, the similarity or difference in political struggles.

It would also be interesting to move through the shared history and influence of colonization and its totalizing aura, yet look for interstitial space for resistance, protest, non conformity. We could see what has happened to accepted notions of language and its meanings, both at the level of semantics and syntax. Although we are looking at translations, this area could also be explored, because this is very importantly tied up with sexuality/gender. Further, it is important to look at all aspects of orality in our region. While discussing the oral traditions we also need to look into the surviving elements of the oral and aural in contemporary culture. It may further be explored how pluralism and multiculturalism are reflected in the poetics of South Asian Region.

The research committee coordinator will submit the selected abstracts from the eminent scholars and researchers to the ICLA Congress Academic Committee at Vienna for inclusion in the program well on time.

Prof. Chandra Mohan, Coordinator, Group Section, ICLA Congress, Vienna; Chair, ICLA Research Committee, India; General Secretary, Comp. Lit. Assn. of India

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16832 - Speaking About Small Literatures in Their Own Language

 

Organizer(s): Talviste, Katre (University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia); Lukas, Liina (University of Tartu, Tartu, Estonia); Glesener, Jeanne E. (University of Luxembourg, Walferdange, Luxemburg); Matajc, Vanesa (University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia)

The past decades have brought to comparative literary studies an increased interest in describing the position of small literatures (literary cultures characterized by small number of authors and readers, limited international accessibility and dissemination) in the global literary space. The emphasis has mostly been on how small literatures in the periphery of western literary space relate to its centres – to literatures of high visibility, diffusion and influence. One reason for this perspective is that the most influential descriptions (Deleuze & Guattari 1975, Casanova 1999, Moretti 2000) emerge from the centres and are constructed accordingly. Their perceptions often exhibit a pronounced unawareness of processes not directly related to the centre, and depend largely on the availability of texts in a few central languages.

Our goal is to discuss the limits of these perceptions and the alternative foci and descriptive categories small literatures can contribute to the study of trans- and international literary relations and practices. Their own sensitivity to central literary processes has considerably influenced their self-description, but has also led to the realization that constructing objects of study on the example of differently structured and positioned literary cultures is often inadequate to account for key aspects of the local traditions. We seek to launch a discussion of possible new descriptive models that emerge when concentrating on comparing and modelling the empirical cultural experience of small literatures. Participants are invited to identify incompatibilities that have resulted from applying central descriptive models to empirical material related to small literatures, describe their means of overcoming these difficulties, and discuss alternative models that allow for a more diverse and comprehensive description of literature as an essentially multicultural and multilingual phenomenon.

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CANCELLED - Sprache - Terminologie - Theorieimplikate: Spezifika der russischen und osteuropäischen Komparatistik - 17360

 

Organizer(s): Kemper, Prof. Dr. Dr. Dirk (RGGU Moskau, Moskau, Russia)

Auch die Komparatistik bildet kulturdifferente Wissenschaftsvarianten aus, die sich auch und gerade hinsichtlich ihrer wissenschaftlichen Beschreibungssprache und Terminologie unterscheiden. Solche Differenzen dürfen nicht durch Internationalismen verdeckt, sie müssen vielmehr diskurs- und wissenschaftsgeschichtlich aufgeklärt werden. Darin liegt das Ziel der Sektion

Terminologische Differenzen können vielfältig bedingt sein: Sie entspringen

- kulturspezifischen Theoriediskursen (russische Schule der historischen Poetik; russ. Formalismus etc.);

- anderen Traditionen der Terminologiebildung (in Russland z.B. weitere Lizenzen der Metaphorik)

- oder werden durch Differenzen im Wissenschaftssystem bedingt (das Nebeneinander von Germanistik, Austriazistik und Helvetistik macht in Russland den Begriff einer "Komparatistik des deutschsprachigen Raums" möglich).

Ähnliche Phänomene stehen in Polen, Tschechien, der Slowakei und anderen Ländern an.

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17400 - Sprache der Migration. Migration der Sprache. Transkulturelle Literatur im Zeitalter der Globalisierungsprozesse

 

Organizer(s): Moraldo, Sandro M. (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna, Bologna, Italy); Franke, William (Vanderbilt University, Department of French and Italian, Vanderbilt, USA); Rösch, Gertrud Maria (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprachenphilologie, Heidelberg, Germany); Kniesche, Thomas (Brown University, Department of German Studies, USA); Haase, Michael (Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprachenphilologie, Heidelberg, Germany)

 

Der Umgang mit migrationsbedingter Heterogenität ist längst zu einem relevanten Diskurs der Weltliteratur avanciert. AutorInnen, die ihre literarische und sprachliche Heimat verlassen haben und migrieren mussten, sind für die vergleichende Literatur- wie kontrastive Sprachwissenschaft relevant geworden. Statt „einer strengen linearen Biographie“ ist ihre Lebensgeschichte ein „irregulärer Lebenslauf“ (F. Zaimoglu). Sie verstehen sich als Vertreter einer hybriden Mischkultur, als Figuren des Dritten, die in ihren Texten die Grenzen und Widersprüche binärer, essentialistischer Strukturen offenlegen. Aufgrund ihrer Mehrsprachigkeit schwanken sie in ihrem Schreiben zwischen ihrer Herkunfts- und einer Dienstsprache (so der aus Polen stammende Artur Becker). Für die einen hat letztere etwas herausfordernd Faszinierendes (Marica Bodrožić: sie hält „eine ganz neue und andere Welt in sich bereit, wie jede Sprache es tut, da sie mit Erfahrungsräumen, Traditionen, Denkweisen verbunden ist und jeder, der in sie stößt, muss sie erobern, muss sie spüren, fühlen, berühren - anders wird man nicht Teil davon“), für die anderen etabliert sie Machtverhältnisse (cfr. Olga Grjasnowa: „Sprachen bedeuteten Macht. Wer kein Deutsch sprach, hatte keine Stimme, und wer bruchstückhaft sprach, wurde überhört.“). Im Spannungsfeld zwischen den Literatur-Sprachen entsteht ein sprachästhetischer, -politischer und -theoretischer Raum, der unterschiedlich besetzt, ausgelotet und neu verortet wird. Viele schreiben abwechselnd in ihrer Herkunfts- oder Dienstsprache, andere wiederum interessiert der kreative und höchst systematische Umgang mit Mischäußerungen. Biographische Zerrissenheit heimatlos sich fühlender AutorInnen, experimentelle Wortkunst, poetische Widerständigkeit, die Auflösung homogener Sprachordnungen und tradierter Erzählformen sind weitere Themen. Erwünscht sind in der GV Beiträge zur Begrifflichkeit (Migrations-, Migranten-, transkulturelle, Literatur der Fremde etc.?) sowie zum Phänomen des Sprachwechsels, dessen Bedeutung für das poetologische Selbstverständnis der AutorInnen, zur sprachlichen Kommunikation handelnder Figuren (Codeswitching, Mischsprache etc.) bei der Aushandlung von Identitätskonstruktionen, zur sprachlichen Codierung von Migration, zur Funktion neuer, hybrider Erzählstrukturen etc… Die Beiträge können in deutscher, englischer, französischer oder italienischer Sprache verfasst sein.

 

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17289 - Sprache und Liebe

 

Organizer(s): Just, Rainer (Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Austria)

Die Liebe, heißt es in Becketts „Namenlosen“, sei eine Karotte, die immer zieht: L’amour, voilà une carotte qui n’a jamais raté… Die Liebe, das ist das, was einem Lust macht, seine Zunge zu benutzen. Die Liebe treibt einen an, zu sprechen; die Liebe beginnt dort, wo man anfängt, sich eine Geschichte zu erzählen, über sich und den anderen, von dem man sich mehr verspricht als Worte. Mehr als Worte? Die Liebe – denn auch das steckt in Becketts „carotte“ – wird immer schon der Schwindel gewesen sein, ein leeres, betrügerisches Versprechen, das gerade, weil es Fülle verspricht, nicht aufhört, einen an der Zunge zu ziehen. Erklär mir: Liebe! Der Diskurs der Liebe, der am liebsten als Literatur zur Sprache kommt, ist der Diskurs schlechthin, wenn Dis-cursus ursprünglich den Begriff des Hin-und-Her-Laufenden meint, die rastlose Bewegung einer Sprache, die ein Unerfassbares zu begreifen sucht: „Der Liebende hört in der Tat nicht auf, in seinem Kopf hin und her zu laufen, neue Schritte zu unternehmen und gegen sich selbst zu intrigieren. Sein Diskurs existiert immer nur in Gestalt von Sprach-‚Anwandlungen‘“, schreibt Roland Barthes in „Fragmente einer Sprache der Liebe“. Die Literatur: eine Liebeserklärung. Die Sprache: mit Begehren gesättigt. Man kann nicht nicht über die Liebe sprechen… Das Symposion will den Spuren, die die Liebe in der Sprache hinterlässt, nachgehen, um sie in ihren vielfältigen Weisen und Funktionen zu analysieren. Da wäre zunächst die zeichentheoretisch orientierte Frage, wie das Semiologische mit dem Erotologischen zusammenhängt. Ein zweites Betrachtungsfeld befasst sich mit der Literaturgeschichte als Liebesgeschichte, d. h. der performativen Kraft des Narrativen, Liebe als Phantasma zu stiften. Und drittens soll auch nach den kultur- und geschlechtsspezifischen Ausdifferenzierungen von Literatur und Liebe gefragt werden, etwa in welcher Form die Artikulation des Begehrens und das Begehren der Artikulation „kolonisiert“ wurden.

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17268 - Stylistic Phenomena in Multilingual Literature since 1900 (Finno-Ugrian Studies/ Scandinavian Studies)

 

Organizer(s): Wischmann, Antje (Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Wien, Austria); Laakso, Johanna (Universität Wien, Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Vienna, Austria); Tischmann, Hannah (Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Wien, Austria); Wagner, Philipp (University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria)

Most of the wide-ranging scholarly analyses of language policies, minority languages, multi-ethnic codes or bilingual writers have failed to combine literary and linguistic analyses.

The horizon of research has been broadened through critical examination of imagined language communities as well as the emerging power relations between institutions and actors, as shown by recent publications about migration literature, diglossia and super-diversity show. A meta-perspective has allowed scholars to attend more closely to the presuppositions of recipients/producers: both the drawing of boundaries and the notion of language as a system, a construct, or repertoire of practices affect the applied methodology and the epistemological possibilities.

Neither the hegemonies of national languages nor verbally expressed social distinctions can be understood as a mirror of sociolinguistic circumstances. The style and form of multilingual texts are the focus of controversial debate in this group. While they are often seen to epitomise subjective speech and assurance of authenticity in literary studies, the model of a writer-specific 'way of speech' remains highly questionable from a linguistic point of view.

Interdisciplinary cooperation is a major goal in research: “Understanding the relationship between linguistic reality and its literary representations is crucial for the understanding of literary multilingualism. For this, in turn, the tools of both literature research (multilingual mimesis) and linguistics (the actual forms and uses of the ‘other’ languages) are needed” (J. Laakso, 4/2015). Therefore, our group will analyse concrete stylistic phenomena in all layers of multilingual texts: What expectations are matched by their respective styles? What presuppositions manifest themselves through the way in which styles are used?

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16309 - Talking About Literature, Scientifically

 

Organizer(s): Sarkhosh, Keyvan (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt a.M., Germany); Knoop, Christine A. (Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, Frankfurt a.M., Germany)

Claims that literary studies and the sciences are incompatible have long been recognized as obsolete. Numerous scholarly endeavours bring together researchers, theories, and methods from literary studies and the sciences, e.g., cognitive poetics, empirical aesthetics, computational literary analysis, evolutionary approaches, and meta-analyses of historical scientific discourses in literature. Yet attempts at an integration of the two fields have not only been contested, but also the issue of mutual incomprehension remains unsettled. This is largely due to both sides having different notions of what constitutes scholarly language. The group section will debate the extent to which scientific methods and tools can contribute to literary studies, and particularly at the role of scientific terminology as a new dictionary with the potential to transgress the boundaries of academic disciplines and individual languages. Topics for our session of brief talks plus in-depth discussions may include:

The language of science: What constitutes “the sound of science”? It is necessary to evaluate critically the particularities of scientific language and its ability to achieve terminological precision and clarity.

Identifying the scope: Under which circumstances is it justifiable to extend scientific terminology to the study of literature? The scientific vocabulary is tied to specific methods/ theories; its application to literary studies raises issues of complexity and integration.

Creating added value: Does scientific language as a meta-dictionary in the field of literary studies add to terminological clarity? If so, it might prove useful for Comparative Literature to converge seemingly irreconcilable phenomena.

The struggle for authority: Taking recourse to scientific terminology further strengthens the role of English. What are the implications for Comparative Literature?

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17257 - Texts with No Words: Communication of Speechlessness

 

Organizer(s): Knaller, Susanne (Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Graz, Austria); Pichler, Doris; Rieger, Rita (Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz, Graz, Austria)

The aim of the panel is to discuss and focus on an unavoidable and at the same time poetically most productive phenomenon in the context of language: that of speechlessness in the broadest sense. Speechlessness has to be considered as a paradigmatic topic of modern literature which serves to discuss radical changes in media, society, and art. Rhetoricians and authors explicitly rely on a lack of words as a medium of expression for aesthetic ideas (linguistic innovation, intermedial relations of literature with music, painting, film, dance, etc.), for certain social conditions (economic marginalization, deprivation of legal, human or individual rights, loss of individual or cultural identity) and for psychological and physical reasons, etc. The panel aims to consider the intertwining of speechlessness as a phenomenon of texts and its meaning in the creative and/or reading process. We are therefore interested in the question of how speechlessness appears and is used in both literary genres (fiction/prose, poetry, drama) and theoretical texts from 1900 to the present. This period is particularly interesting for a number of reasons: Firstly, the turn of the century brings with it a number of technical and scientific inventions. Secondly, social, media, and aesthetic innovation change the literary system and perception of art. Thirdly, the 20th century is historically marked by its many wars and genocides (WW 1+2, the Holocaust, the Spanish Civil War, Balkan Wars, etc.). All these occurrences have a deep impact on artistic creation and are reflected still today. Speechlessness can refigure on a number of levels. Topics of particular interest are therefore: ‒ Explicit expressions on the level of story and discourse as well as on the level of medium/medial materiality ‒ Implicit representation on a phonetic, graphic, and semantic level (metaphors, symbols, blank spaces/Leerstellen, silence etc.) ‒ Speechlessness in a creative, textual, and receptive perspective (as preverbal phase preceding and accompanying the process of writing and imagination; as triggering contents; as causing certain emotions such as fear, astonishment, shock, empathy, etc. in the reading process). Once admitted, the call for papers for the section will be published in different platforms to reach both specialists and young professionals.

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17286 - The Atlas Project

 

Organizer(s): Han, Jihee (Gyeongsang National University, Jinjushi, South Korea); Jain, Jasbir (The Institute for Research in Interdisciplinary Studies, Jaipur, India); Hambuch, Doris (United Arab Emirates University, Al Amin, United Arab.); Bellarsi, Franca (Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Bruxelles, Belgium); Hao, Liu (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China); Huh, Sukyung (Independent Scholar and Poet, Altenberge, Germany)

Witnessing how capitalism vulgarized and reduced complex relations to a banal iconography, a poet once expressed a sense of disappointment at the massive inarticulation among the educated, including writers and teachers who have the relative freedom to describe what they witness without sacrificing rational nuance. Her concerned remark stings me because it mirrors the image of me, a silent intellectual who would click the mouse to read the current worldwide news of terrorism, regional wars, religious strife, genocides, and so on and then move on to my daily scholarly life in dead silence, feeling caged in the narrowing corridor of a national university. However, witnessing the Sewolho-Ferry (世越號) Disaster which took away the innocent lives of 250 South Korean high school students on April 16th 2014 and reading the world news of the death of hundreds of refugees from the war zones in the Mediterranean Sea, I decided to invite scholars of poetry to probe what poetry can do to recover ‘the human’ in the age of IOT(Internet of Things). Although we are marked as digital avatars and although the very zones of our feelings and relationships are invaded by a flood of virtual information, I think we still have the hunger for the actual emotional connection with other human beings and the desire for exploring the humanly possible that no consumption of virtual commodities can satisfy. Then, what we scholars can do is to dive into the wrecked humanity and look for the evidences of the humanly possible by asking the human questions again in a new way. Certainly, poets in any history and place have explored the human questions, interrogated the power of language, and chosen to break the silence. Like them, we can choose to speak up from the perspective of writers and teachers. We can choose to write how poetry has not only satisfied our emotional needs but also helped us keep alive in the time of danger, disaster, and tragedy. This project is not trying to iconize anything but to encourage us to become one small persistent dot, wishing to make an atlas of the difficult world and to take up a difficult task of forming IOH(Internet of Humans)despite the differences in races, histories, and cultures. This may be one of the humanly possible we can do at least, here and now.

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16711 - The Chinese Scriptworld and World Literature

 

Organizer(s): Park, Sowon (Oxford University, Oxford, Great Britain)

The issue of how language relates to thought has dominated twentieth century literary criticism. But there has been relatively little consideration of the relations between script systems, language and thought. Do scripts contribute to shaping thought? If so, how, and to what degree? And what are the implications of scripts for literature and for culture? While it would seem that English, along with its phonetic system, is doing away with whatever differences historically discrete script communities may have had, the borders of the Chinese scriptworld (China, Korean, Japan and, to an extent, Vietnam) have been particularly impenetrable to those using a phonetic script system. And thinkers as diverse as Ernest Fenollosa, Ezra Pound, A C Graham, Chad Hansen, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida have asserted, in different contexts, the distinctness of the Chinese script and its effects on thought, literature and culture. For example, it has been proposed that the Chinese script produces ‘nominalist’ thought on account of its ‘graphic wealth’ and ‘phonetic poverty’, while the phonetic Roman/Latin alphabet lends itself to the kind of abstract thinking that produced western ‘realist’ philosophy.

This stream proposes to explore the validity of such propositions by bringing theories of ‘scriptworlds’ to bear on the ‘new’ literatures of East Asia (China, Korea, Japan and Vietnam). Topics may included but are not limited to: how the Chinese script provided a common structure upon which various cultural identities were negotiated; how the Chinese literary system compares with other script systems; the transfers and exchanges between scriptworlds, in particular those that emerged out of specific negotiations with the Roman/Latin literary system with the advent of modernity; the relevance of script to ideas such as ‘translation zones’, ‘world literary systems’ and the ‘world republic of letters’; the validity of scriptworlds as analytical units for world literature; the relevance of script for translation.

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CANCELLED - The Conquista of Writing - 17321

Submitted abstracts have been moved to the general pool!

Organizer(s): Gölz, Sabine (University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA)

The invention of writing profoundly transformed human civilizations. It released enormous potential to generate and manage complexity and has fueled the growth of cities, economies, literatures, symphonies, math, sciences, and technologies. The obverse is an equally deep link to mechanisms of social control. From its inception, writing is hieratic and hierarchic – associated with social prestige and power. This tendency culminates in the most recent chapter, where writing – as computer programming – is creating the most perfect surveillance apparatus the world has ever seen.

Any text depends on being read. As a self-organizing system, writing surrounds itself with embodied practices that reproduce it and maintain its readability. The carriers of writing – scribes, priests, authors, and rulers of sundry kinds – are motivated to use the apparatuses they control to bolster their privileges and subjugate populations of readers.

This group section initiates a broad-based interdisciplinary dialogue on the history of writing, focusing on the practices that surround scripts, on the disciplining mechanisms generated by textual economies, and on re-conceptualizing reading as the self-consciously elusive ‘ground’ of any writing system.

SESSION I: BEGINNINGS The invention of ancient writing systems, their social, cultural, and theoretical contexts, modes of reading associated with them. (E.g.: the debate about cuneiform’s origins in the needs of accounting and empire, or in the interpretive science/ religion of divination. Are Mayan glyphs ‘writing’ in the Western sense, or do they imply a different mode of seeing?)

SESSION II: PRACTICES Any system of notation engenders certain practices. E.g.: comparison between mathematics as a semiotic system without indexicals, and ‘natural’ languages that interpellate and ‘naturalize’ us at every turn. What is the relation of music notation to performance, of law to what it legislates, of computer models to what they model, of visual apparatuses to the techniques of their observers?

SESSION III: POETICS Rethinking how literary and poetic texts aim to prefigure and control reading, but also the strategies and tactics with which readers have responded. The disciplinary dimensions of ‘aesthetics’.

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16661 - The Ineffability of Language and Mystic Utterances

 

Organizer(s): Figueira, Dorothy (University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA)

Regarding the status given to mystical literary works, the problem has always been how to speak about the so-called ineffable experience which cannot be spoken about. Michel de Certeau theorized that such an experience of possession (divine possession as in the case of mysticism) has no language of its own, but is marked in theological discourse and inscribes itself in the effects it has on the discourse it borrows from its given religious tradition. Mystical speech is thus written into religious language as a discourse of transgression.

This problem of ineffability informs the theorizing of mysticism in all religious systems.. Significantly, it also contributes to the manner in which literature is inscribed in the ineffable. Gershom Scholem claimed that modernity could not have produced Kafka had it not been for the kaballah. He supported this claim by demonstrating that Kafta's aesthetic project, in which language no longer anchors itself in semantics, drew on a long Jewish mystical tradition with ties to Gnosticism, medieval Zoharic schemes and a belief in a hidden God. Once one can imagine language outside of description. Scholem's theorizing is but one example of the modern phenomenon in which scholars see texts working mystically to shift a reader's attention away from the communicable toward the ineffable, away from the epistemological and toward a representational "beyond." This shift appears to coincide with the convergence of religion, ethics, and literature as axes around which contemporary problems are reframed so that these three disciplines taken together stage new contexts for resolving social crises.

This panel, proposed by the Research Committee on religion, Ethics, and Literature of the ICLA, invites scholars to submit paper proposals on how the ineffability of language, the mystic's utterance in literature, might express new modes of thinking about the social, the aesthetic, and the ethical. 

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CANCELLED - The Language of Nature - 17223

 

Organizer(s): Wagner, Walter, Austria

This panel proposes to explore the heterogenic field of Ecocriticism from the perspective of language. Welcome are papers which deal with one of the following aspects:

If one of the aims of environmental texts is to capture and render the natural world, we must ask ourselves if this intention necessarily leads to what Lawrence Buell calls “disciplined extrospection” or simply the rehabilitation of mimesis. Would this ‘commitment’ to a realist poetics mean that even in fiction environmental representation is based on a high degree of referentiality? Or should we deal with environmental representation by taking into account postmodern doubts about the reliability of language to give a faithful image of the material world?

If we agree with Robert Kern that “literature can reflect the reality of such a world [= the natural environment] with reasonable success” without denying that our perception of reality is language based, we can take a closer look at the various modes of representing the natural environment. We may ask ourselves how an environmental text can give language to nature which has no ‘voice’. What rhetorical devices are necessary to make animals, plants, and minerals ‘speak’? How can the communication between human beings and the natural world be represented in literature? How can we render animal ‘thought’ beyond anthropomorphism? What is the heritage of Romantic animism and mythology when it comes to language-based representations of the natural environment?

However, if “myth is a parole”, to speak with Barthes, we can explore myths of nature as narratives containing certain signifiers. How can we decode then myths such as wilderness, the garden, Arcadia or Eden, Mother Nature, Gaia, the organic and the mechanistic myth, etc.?

Another possible approach would be to analyse in how far the global ecological crisis determines the language of environmental texts. In other words, how do literary texts reflect pollution, loss of biodiversity, resource depletion, various risk scenarios, but also questions of sustainability, ecological lifestyles, etc.? What is the impact of the discourses of environmental ethics, ecological justice, and environmental aesthetics on the language of literature? Is there a special ecolanguage that refers to the interconnectedness of the global ecosystem? In other words, how does our experience of the natural world influence language?

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17322 - The Languages of Immersion

 

Organizer(s): Kukkonen, Karin (University of Turku, Turku, Finland); Hautcoeur, Guiomar (Paris VII Diderot, Paris, France)

Jean-Marie Schaeffer (1999) remarks that the goggles, headgear and gloves of virtual realities are by no means the first kind of technology which facilitates immersion in fictional environments. For centuries have epics, drama and the novel served their readers and spectators to a similar purpose, with language as a major conduit toward immersion.

What is the role of language in creating immersion? A range of answers have been proposed recently: language indexes the existants of fictional worlds (such as characters, objects etc.) and makes them “present” for readers (Ryan 1991; 2001). Language can create bodily resonances of the movements we read about and hence give readers a sense of “being there” in the fictional world (Bolens 2012; Caracciolo and Kukkonen, eds. 2014). At the same time, linguistic style can evoke a sense of “enchantment” that goes beyond the mimesis of fictional worlds and still create immersive effects (Felski 2008). Indeed, literary language might lead to the “production of presence” that seems to leave the linguistic dimension of meaning-making behind entirely (Gumbrecht 2004).

Are different languages equivalent with respect to the creation of immersion? Or do translations between different languages (from French to English, e.g.) indicate significant differences? What shared features of immersiveness are there between written language and the visual languages of painting, film and TV?

Finally, what kind of language do we use to speak about immersion? Is it a language of metaphor (“transportation” and “absorption”, e.g.)? Is it a language of the ineffable (“enchantment” or “fascination”, e.g.)? Is it a language of critical distance (“escapism” e.g.)?

This group proposal invites literary scholars to a joint investigation of the languages of immersion - one of the most persistent and yet most elusive phenomena in literature and aesthetics.

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17416 - The language of satire

 

Organizer(s): Nabugodi, Mathelinda (University College London, London, United Kingdom)

The satirist is the figure in whom the cannibal was received into civilization.’ Walter Benjamin on Karl Kraus The aim of this panel is to situate satire within the context of contemporary literary theory by examining its relation to other literary modes, its presence in different languages, and at different times. Satirical expression resembles irony and allegory in being a use of language that does not mean what it says, but while irony and allegory have received ample critical attention, there has been relatively little theoretical investigation into satire. Its tongue-in-cheek nature makes it difficult to treat satire ‘seriously’ and with ‘critical rigour’ and yet satire is an important component of Western literary history. Satire has offered a medium for stinging political critique, while protecting the satirist against judicial prosecution. Much written satire responds to visual satire (prints, journals etc.), forming an early example of an intermedial genre. The visual language of satire also includes a repertoire of satirical heroes, e.g. Don Juan, Satan, the misanthrope etc. Furthermore, the contextual richness of satire poses a specific problem in translation – translation between languages as well as translation between historical time periods. We invite papers that offer a theoretical discussion of themes such as:

• Comparative perspectives on satire, irony, allegory, and other rhetorical modes
• Satire and seriousness
• Satire and humourSatire as political intervention
• Translating satire between languages, cultures, and time periods
• Satire and visual media: satirical prints, newspapers, journals and webpages

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17281 - The Languages of Theory (Group Section organized and hosted by the German Comparative Literature Association, in collaboration with the Swiss Comp. Lit. Association)

 

Organizer(s): Moser, Christian (Universität Bonn, Institut für Germanistik, Vergleichende Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft, Bonn, Germany)

In the past, the philological study of texts and their linguistic properties on the one hand and the issues of theory on the other hand have often been regarded as distinct concerns, sometimes even opposed to each other. At a closer look, however, it is clear that this simple opposition does not hold. In recent times numerous literary studies have successfully combined philological and theoretical approaches and thereby given proof of their compatibility. But the interrelation between philology’s concern with the manifold languages of literary texts and the engagements of theory reaches further. Philological matters are not just a supplement to theory. Far from being external to theoretical reflection, philological analysis is a core element of the making of theory. Thus, philological and linguistic inquiries are often at the heart of theoretical investigations. Michel Foucault, for example, in his lectures held at the Collège de France, takes a great interest in the origins of certain ancient Greek terms such as aletheia and parrhesia which are developed as key notions of a new way of accounting for the subject’s engagement with truth and its relation to power. Similarly Giorgio Agamben, drawing on the seminal works of Émile Benveniste and Georges Dumézil, systematically resorts to etymological reflections of the history of words in the Indo-european language family in order to deploy the meanings of certain core concepts, as for example the term sacer . As a further example we could point out Bruno Latour’s recurrent preoccupations with rhetoric, e.g. when he problematizes the old distinction between truth as a conviction created by language and truth as evidence established by demonstration. Rhetoric, Latour argues, is not only a fundamental device of the arts and humanities, it is also secretly at work in the scientific pursuit of emprirical knowledge.

Our panel welcomes papers focusing on the linguistic implications of current literary and philosophical theory. We would like to encourage studies examining cases of convergence between literary theory and philology or philological investigation. Where does the philological problem of the many languages enter into theoretical reflection? And in how far does it turn out to be an integral part of the theoretical enterprise? By exploring the “languages of theory” our panel attempts to draw out the implications of this linguistic impulse and to gain a fuller understanding of the intricate relation between theory and philology.

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17306 - The Many Languages of Communist Cultural Resistance in India

 

Organizer(s): Chattopadhyay, Kunal (Comparative Literature Association of India, Kolkata, India)

Section: Language – The essence of world literature

Theme: The language of power – the language of resistance

Abstract: Systematic socialist/communist propaganda began in India after the Russian Revolution of 1917. By the 1930s, a serious attempt had begun to build a Marxist cultural movement. This panel will focus on the plurality of reception of Marxist/ socialist-realist cultural politics in the different Indian languages, in the way class struggle, anti-colonialism, caste exploitation and gender oppression were woven together, in novels, stories, drama, poetry and critical theory. Looking at Urdu-Hindi, Bangla, Malayalam, and Tamil literature (and if possible others) in both synchronic and diachronic frames from the 1930s Progressive Movement to the era of mass communist oppositions in independent India, the group will seek to examine the ways in which the language of communism, charged with being alien, was able to respond to Indian realities. Attempts will be made to look at the concept of Socialist Realism developed by the Soviet Writers Congress and its application under quite distinct Indian conditions.

Papers will seek to address the reasons for the lasting communist cultural impact in some languages and its relatively greater decline in others, along with tracing diverse strands of interaction between political lines and cultural production. A preliminary working hypothesis is that where caste, class and gender intermeshing were properly articulated in literature, there was a lasting relevance. By contrast, when an English educated middle class interpreted party line and imposed its hegemony, reception was superficial and often weakly related to Indian social and cultural realities.

 

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17277 - The Many Languages of Medieval Literature

 

Organizer(s): Meyer, Matthias (University of Vienna, Wien, Austria); Peggy McCracken, University of Michigan

 

We propose a series of four panels on the multilinguistic Middle Ages. Papers will explore formal languages (Latin and vernacular), as well as the languages of political, religious, and literary culture. A primary goal of our sessions is to feature scholarship that demonstrates the vitality and breadth of medieval comparative literary studies.

The evolution of the language(s) of European vernacular literature is intrinsically comparative: the rise of vernacular culture happens over a period of centuries and easily crosses linguistic borders, resulting in imitation, repetition, modification, and experimentation with literary forms. As a system of meaning, language is invented, contested, and subverted in medieval literature; as a literary tool, it is deployed sometimes with humor, sometimes with great seriousness, and sometimes with imperial ambition. And of course several genres of medieval literature contest the identification of language as a human ability in their representations of talking animals.

Topics to be addressed in our sessions include:
* Medieval multilingualisms
* Translations of religion and culture
* Languages of courtly culture
* The Language of Allegory
* Language and Human Identity
* Language and gender/Gendered language

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17332 - The Metaphor and languages of the diseases, the healing and the medicine since 20th century.

 

Organizer(s): Choi-Hantke, Aryong (Institute of Body and Mind, Seoul, South Korea)

The literature, films, TV series and visual contents depict characters and societies with the diseases, the healing, and the medicine: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest(Kesey), A Personal Matter(Oe), The Bear Came Over the Mountain (Munro), A Gesture Life(Lee), My Sister’s Keeper(Picoult), The Knick(Soderbergh) and Jewel in the Palace(Dae Jang Geum. Lee). Topics of the diseases, the healing and the medicine have involved witch-hunting against the midwife or healer, mystification, evacuation, isolation, otherization or romanticization from bible, fairy tales to contemporary texts. . The diseases as metaphor represent the phases of their times and epistemology: their appearance, the perspective toward them, the way to treat them and the relationship between patients and healers or the society like leprosy, disorder, madness, AIDS, SARS, Ebola, radioactive contamination, aging, and so on. They lead to the discourse between the curable and the incurable, the scientific and the non-scientific, the reason and the superstitious, the alien and the resident, the primitive and the developed, heroism and anti-heriosm in the map of the politics and the society.

We invite presenters from the interdisciplinary perspectives of any discipline: literature, films studies, cultural studies, communications, psychology, psychosomatic studies, architecture, urban design and so on to deal with the topics below:

The metaphor and the languages of the diseases,
the healing and the medicine,
The space of the hospital,
the health center,
the rehab center and so on
The metaphor and languages of patients, the medicine and the healer
The medicine, alternative medicine,
the psychosomatic medicine Romanticizing or otherizing or alienating the diseases or being terrified at them

Papers are by no means limited to the above.

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CANCELLED - The Poetry and Aesthetics of Walt Whitman and Sri Aurobindo: An Integral Approach - 17362

 

Organizer(s): Ghosal, Sarani (National Institute of Technology, Goa, India); Ghosal, Goutam (Visva-Bharati Central University, Santiniketan, India)

The link between Walt Whitman and Sri Aurobindo has been too insufficiently explored, and there is an urgent need to speak about this relation between the American poet and the Indian seer-poet to a wider audience. The poetry and the aesthetics of Whitman mark the climax of Transcendentalism in America. While Sri Aurobindo’s spiritual poetry is a new history in the field of Indian English poetry.

Sri Aurobindo returns from England to India in 1893, a year after Whitman’s death. He concentrates on Whitman’s Indian sources (the Veda, the Upanishads and the Gita), which Whitman had gathered through Roy literature, then famous among the American Transcendentalists (the translations of the Indian Scriptures by Rammohun Roy). Sri Aurobindo’s later poetry has the unmistakable influence of Whitman, though he advances the tradition by his new experiences. But, even his early poetry shows the stamp of Whitman’s aesthetics and style.

Between 1917 and 1920, Sri Aurobindo serialized his poetic manifesto, The FuturePoetry ( an echo of Whitman’s “Poetry of the Future”), where he refers to Whitman more than twenty times as a pioneer of the poetry of incantation or poetry as Mantra, as an inward and upward looking poet, who speaks of poetry as an impassioned utterance of the soul, which relies at its best moments on vision, revelation, prayer and what Sri Aurobindo calls “ a rhythmic voyage of self-discovery”. Apart from the aesthetics of Truth, Beauty, Delight, Life and the Spirit( the five suns of poetry, found both in Whitman and Sri Aurobindo), there is a stylistic resemblance in their poetry.

The purpose of this paper is to find the link between Whitman and Sri Aurobindo with reference to their poetry and aesthetics and to indicate the birth of a new seer-poet in the Whitmanesque tradition. The theoretical framework of our paper is Sri Aurobindo’s theory of integral approach, which takes all life as the province of poetry and aesthetics. Both the poets take life as a whole, as the fusion of Matter and Spirit, and even the lowest impulses have been felt in their pilgrim path to a Supreme Light.

Key Words: integral, mantra or incantation, vision, revelation, seer-poet

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17229 - The Rhetorics of the Anthropocene

 

Organizer(s): Dürbeck, Gabriele (Universität Vechta, Institut für Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften, Vechta, Germany)

Der Begriff des ‚Anthropozäns‘ (Crutzen/Stoermer 2000) bezeichnet den tiefgreifenden menschlichen Einfluss auf biologische und geologische Prozesse der Erde und Erdatmosphäre und hat sich zu einem interdisziplinären Diskurs bis hinein in die Kultur-, Literatur- und Kunstwissenschaften ausgeweitet.

Der komparatistische, intermedial und international ausgerichtete Workshop soll die rhetorischen und narrativen Strategien einer ‚Poetik‘ des Anthropozän in literarischen Texten erkunden. Im Zentrum stehen drei Schwerpunkte:

eine Neulektüre und damit eine Neubewertung von Texten, die vor der Einführung des Begriffs ‚Anthropozän‘ entstanden sind – etwa im Bereich der Science Fiction (z.B. am Topos der Postapokalypse) oder im Zuge der Umweltschutzbewegung (z.B. in der Natur- und Ökolyrik von Gary Snyder oder Erich Fried).

das Anthropozän als Thema seit Etablierung des Begriffs in literarischen Texten (inkl. Film, TV-Serie und Graphic Novel) entweder in Verbindung mit ökologischem Bewusstsein und Ethik (z.B. in der zweiten Staffel der TV-Serie Damages, in der Kinder- und Jugendbuchliteratur oder didaktischen Comics) oder mit der Repräsentation von Natur- und Klimakatastrophen (z.B. in der ‚Post-Katrina Literatur‘).

die Perspektive des ‚Posthumanen‘ und die Abkehr vom Anthropozentrismus in literarischen Texten, in denen etwa Wasser, Lebewesen und selbst unbelebte Agenzien zur narrativen oder handlungsbestimmenden Instanz werden (wie z.B. in Virginia Woolfs The Waves, Frank Schätzings Der Schwarm).

Vorgesehene Sprachen: Deutsch und Englisch. Max. 12 Vorträge, die vorher kursieren. Eine zeitnahe Publikation der Ergebnisse ist geplant.

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CANCELLED - The roman noir in minority literatures - 17219

 

Organizer(s): Nanquette, Laetitia (University of New South Wakes, Sydney, Australia)

B. Language – The essence of world literature

The roman noir started in America in the 1930s and in France in the 1940s as a version of the crime novel with a twist, as the protagonist is not a detective or a police officer but a victim or a perpetrator of the crime. In addition the ending more often than not does not re-establish social order. As it developed as a genre, the roman noir came to be characterized by a pessimistic view of the world and an emphasis on politics. The roman noir is indeed interested in the reasons for crime and in questioning society about its responsibility in their production.

The genre is predominantly a Western one, with well-known writers and numerous audiences in North America and Europe. However minority literatures also have romans noirs, which are essential to understand the genre in a world literature context. Sometimes written by migrant writers from peripheral countries in their adopted major languages, sometimes written in minor languages, these romans noirs redefine the genre and its politics. As they circulate in a globalized world, they come to not only question their country’s society but the world order in the making of crimes, for example when narrating the international selling of organs or the trafficking of humans.

This panel will consider the roman noir from three peripheral literatures. It will use examples of novels written in English and French but also in Chinese and Persian. Grounded in a historical understanding of the genre in the context of these minor literatures, it will focus on the politics of the roman noir from peripheral literatures in the redefinition of the genre.

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17297 - The Serialization of Literature and the Arts: Comparative Approaches.

 

Organizer(s): Schleich, Markus (Universität des Saarlandes, Saarbrücken, Germany); Nesselhauf, Jonas (Universität Vechta, Vechta, Austria)

As a phenomena of popular fiction, serialization – in the form of television series such as the Sorpanos , The Wire , Mad Men or Breaking Bad – has gained a lot of momentum within literary and media studies. And even though other art forms – Victorian serials such as the Penny Dreadfuls , French feuilleton novels, or graphic novels/comics – are being reevaluated accordingly, we find that the impact of serialization on narratives and what makes them so appealing has not been fully scrutinized. Thus far, serialization has been mainly examined in the context of modern culture: from popular fiction and mass publications to new print techniques, literacy and eventually digitalization.

This sits odd with the idea that human beings are ‚story telling animals‘, indicating an anthropological constant which has little to do with certain art forms or periods.

If human beings universally crave for narratives – and serially structured narratives are apparently a very successful way of organizing and telling such stories – we would like to expand the focus toward art forms not usually associated with serialization and periods prior to mass culture.

How can photography, classical music, popular music, visual arts, poetry, or even architecture be serial? Is there something as transmedial serialization? Is seriality or serialization a universal code in all media or do medial means differ in achieving it? And more importantly: How do different arts influence each other? Is there a development or chronology of serial story-telling? It might thus be interesting to explore seriality beyond the the 19th century. Newer theories of oral-formulaic composition imply that epic poetry was often presented in a somewhat serial form which covers the time from antiquity to the middle ages. How does this seriality differ from newer approaches? And is there a traceable lineage of seriality through the ages?

We invite papers to answer the questions mentioned above and others.

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19249 - The State of Adaptation Studies Today

 

Organizer(s): Brigitte Le Juez (Dublin City University, brigitte.lejuez@dcu.ie) and César Domínguez (University of Santiago de Compostela, Spain, cesar.dominguez@usc.es).

 

After all, the work of other writers is one of a writer’s main
sources of input, so don’t hesitate to use it; just because somebody else
has an idea doesn’t mean you can’t take that idea and develop a new
twist for it. Adaptations may become quite legitimate adoptions.
—William S. Burroughs

As cited at the beginning of Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006), Burroughs’ play on words between adaptation and adoption is particularly apt for scholars who are more interested in the concept of creativity than in the concept of fidelity.

The concept of creativity itself is pertinent to a wider context of comparative literary studies if one considers, like Eugene Eoyang in his 2012 The Promise and Premise of Creativity: Why Comparative Literature Matters, that "where other disciplines aspire to order and orthodoxy, comparative literature encompasses chaos and heterodoxy" (208), which are in the case of adaptation, necessary ingredients to successfully outcomes, i.e. new works demonstrating the vitality and never-ending transformation of artistic endeavours. Adaptations are ways of engaging with original texts that make us see those texts in different lights.

As early as 1948, André Bazin argued against faithfulness to form and sought equivalences in meaning, rather than exact transpositions (if such replica were even possible). For him stories exist beyond the limitations of their original characteristics and can be innovatively represented through different media.

The following are the various lines of investigations we would like to consider (more may be accepted if deemed suitable):

• The Ethics of Adaptation,
• The Processes of Adaptation,
• Cinema adaptations of literary works (any genre),
• Theatre adaptations of literary and cinematic works,
• Operatic adaptations of plays, short stories or myths,
• Retelling of ancient plays, tales, myths, and of more recent literary works (including e-texts and graphic novels),
• Expansion of well-known literary texts (whether it be through verbal, visual or digital new texts),
• Adaptation as Creative Reception,
• Adaptation and Audience Reception,
• Adaptation as Intertextual, Intercultural, Transcultural and Intertemporal communication,
• Adaptation as Palimpsest,
• Adaptation and Ideology,
• Adaptation and Ethics, rewriting and re-righting,
• Adaptation as Translation
• Adaptation and Intermediality
• Ekphrasis and Adaptation,
• Specific Analyses of Adaptations.

 

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17403 - The Teaching Function of Literature and its Aesthetic: ethical literary criticism

 

Organizer(s): Songlin, Wang (William) (Faculty of Foreign Languages, Ningbo University, Ningbo, China)

This Panel deals with relationship between the teaching function of literature and its aesthetic and encourages ethical literary criticism as a methodology applied to literary studies, particularly comparative studies of the ethical values and their presentation in different cultural and historical contexts. For several decades, the ethical values of literature have been ignored or overlooked by some critics as well as writers, who overemphasize the formalistic structure of literary writing and tend to show a literary world with metaphysical and self-contained critical terms. Some postmodernist writings and critics have almost reduced the metaphorical values of literature to meaningless linguistic signs. Never before has literary criticism been so immediately faced with the dispute over issues concerning the teaching (ethical) function of literature and its aesthetic. As such, papers presented in this Panel will concentrate on studying literatures from ethical literary criticism and explore, through comparative and multi-cultural perspectives, the teaching function of literatures achieved by the way of aesthetic reading. Such key terms of ethical literary criticism as ethical choice, ethical identity, ethical chaos, natural will, free will and rational will are to be discussed and applied to decoding literary texts.

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17052 - The Text as Being: Ontologies of Redemption, Repair, and Regret

 

Organizer(s): Millet, Kitty (SF State University, SF, USA)

 

In H.G. Adler’s The Journey (2009), Paul, a Jewish survivor of a death camp, swept up in a group of wandering refugees, finds his way to an abandoned barracks where he studies his reflection in a mirror. He realizes that he “needs no witness to confirm that he has become a person again. . . . . He lives by his own laws now; it’s the only way possible if what he wants is more than to be called by just any name like all the others.” In this moment, Adler pegs Paul’s new existence to an imagined identity. He writes into Being a subject position for the one who “has become a person again.” In Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979), Dana imagines literature as a prosthetic because she has been injured by the legacy of slavery. The text must represent the regret of loss. In Francisco Rodriguez’s testimonio, Vida para los que vienen despues en el Salvador (1993), Rodriguez invents Abelino, a figure who narrates Rodriguez’ childhood during El Salvador’s civil war because it is “too difficult to write in the first person about all he saw, lived, felt.” The text becomes a voice for the muted and the silent.

These examples suggest literary ontologies as a means of redemption, repair, and regret. Conceptually, they rethink arguments proposed by Immanuel Kant, Etienne Gilson, Emil Fackenheim to show that the work of art calls into being new subject positions: there must be an aesthetic stage on which to reposition the subject around the recognition of loss, its regret, and the subjunctive hope for what could be or could have been. Literature provides a space to reclaim the ethical, to mark and address the subject in repair. This panel, proposed by the Research Committee on Religion, Ethics, and Literature of the ICLA, invites scholars to consider literary ontologies as new modes of thinking about the religious, the aesthetic, and the ethical.

 

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17327 - Theory in Love

 

Organizer(s): Wocke, Brendon (University of Perpignan, Perpignan, France); Manzari, Francesca (Université de Aix-Marseille, Aix-En-Provence, France); Lampropoulos, Apostolos (University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France)

This panel concerns theory speaking in terms of love, seeking to establish the relationship between “ l’àmour ” and theory.

In The Politics of Friendship Derrida reflects on the question of the indecidable possibility, the “peut-être,” of love, of friendship, and of desire: “‘Je t'aime entends- tu?’; cette déclaration d'aimance hyperbolique ne pourrait donner sa chance à une politique de l'amitié que soumise à l'épreuve du peut-être, de l'indécidable” How then can we express a refusal, a no, without listening, without hearing? How can one express the divergent and differential possibilities opened by this phrase? And yet Derrida already has, in Envois , where he explores, theorizes and dramatizes a love affair, tracing the course of its refusal in the various postcards and letters which remain unsent, forever awaiting their destination.

What Derrida performs in Envois is effectively echoes by Lacan, who in Seminar XX says: “ people have done nothing but speak of love in analytic discourse. [...] What analytic discourse contributes - and perhaps that is, after all, the reason for its emergence at a certain point in scientific discourse - is that to speak of love is in itself a jouissance.”

If, as Lacan says, the troubadours understood that love is nothing other than form, we could perhaps establish a relationship between love’s discourse and theoretical discourse as bridging the gap between philosophy and literature.

Does love function as a theoretical paradigm? Or should we think of theory as an act of love? Or even as born out of love? Can one think of a polyamorous theory? And what would such a theory consist of, in the writhing phrases which intertwine like the honeysuckle of Tristan and Iseult.

We welcome contributions on the subject of love and its relation to theoretical writing.

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17285 - Towards a New World Literature

 

Organizer(s): Brinker-Gabler, Gisela (State University of New York, Vestal, USA)

Since the second half of the 20th century, the concept of World Literature has been rejuvenated and re-oriented from Goethe’s original notion of Weltliteratur, understood as a canon of texts that are read globally beyond national boundaries, to an international field were literatures and peoples meet. Processes of decolonization and of globalization, of migration, and exile have produced a rich body of literature of mobility that explores and reflects on postcolonial and migrant experiences, diasporic, exile, and refugee conditions. Literatures of mobility and textual exchange lend themselves to the analysis of the complex processes of interactive and dialogic dynamics between and across cultures and their creative expressions. These three sessions will focus on significant literary and theoretical works about cultural encounters occurring in various parts of the world in order to study key elements, thematic and aesthetic aspects of this emerging New World Literature. The papers examine major critical approaches to this literature and discuss theoretical foundations of key concepts. Also, they rethink the phenomenon of World Literature and existing and possible new theories of cultural negotiation and translation.

Session I: Rethinking Exile. Papers focus on new perspective on exile as New World Literature. If an early exile literature research of the 1970s and 1980s years did its best still to describe exile literature as literature of resistance or dominated by nostalgia, current discussions broaden this perspective and turn the attention towards the transcultural and transnational dimensions of exile.

Session II: Between and Across Borders. Papers focus on transcultural literary works interested in the interactive and dialogic dynamics between and across borders following mainly two perspectives: the self-distancing, self-estrangement and self-criticism of one’s own cultural identities, and/or acknowledging the transitory, confluential, and mutually transforming nature of cultures.

Session III: Encountering the Other(s). Papers focus on texts that demonstrate a search for “encountering the other(s)” as a direct expression of their creators transcultural realities or sensibilities, presenting a kind of writing that is different in its resistance to being appropriated by one single national canon, one monolingual tradition or one single cultural/ethnic expression.

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17300 - Translation as a common language / La traduction comme langue commune

 

Organizer(s): Reynolds, Matthew (OCCT - Oxford University, Oxford, Great Britain)

The role of translation in comparative literature has been transformed in recent years. Once neglected by a discipline focused on the study of texts in their original, national languages, translation today is the object of a myriad critical studies, and is changing corpuses, methods, and readings. Is translation the necessary basis for a truly multilingual comparatism? Given the rise of world literature on the one hand, and the globalisation of the academy on the other, has translation become the common language of comparative literary work? If this transformation is renewing the theory and practice of both comparison and translation, does it also entail loss and deracination? We plan to explore the polysemy of the word ‘common’ and use it to energise our investigation: many angles of analysis will be opened in this workshop held in common by OCCT (Oxford) and CERC (Paris 3).

- Translation and close reading: new methods for reading with and through translation, and for the analysis of translated texts.
- Comparison of the role of translation in different critical cultures.
- How is it possible to conceptualise the common in a world of translation?
- Translation as a language, and the languages of translation.

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16740 - Translation Within a Single Language

 

Organizer(s): Hayot, Eric (Penn State University, State College, PA, USA); Saussy, Haun (University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA)

The usual idea of translation presupposes linguistic difference— two languages, posited as mutually incomprehensible, and a translator to overcome the gap between them. By choosing to consider translation as an operation within a single language (as it happens, the “target” language), the polysystems school of translation theory renewed the topic, with powerful implications for comparative literature. But many consequences of translation do not apply straightforwardly to differences within a single language: “translations” between different registers, periods, or referential fields, for example. The papers in this session should examine the role of translation in intellectual life, but in a way that is not dominated by the question of fidelity to the source.

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16416 - Translational Literature - Theory, History, Perspectives

 

Organizer(s): Ivanovic, Christine (Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, Austria); Hassan, Wail (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL, USA)

The dualism of original and translation is rarely questioned in literary theory and literary history, and the operations that take place within that dualism are hardly ever recognized as genuine basic cultural actions. Translational literature radically questions this dualism. The section intends to explore how certain kinds of original texts depend on translation processes, make such processes explicit, reveal the possibilities and limits of translations, and/or use translation as a theme or as a trope. Translational literature includes recent texts that are increasingly exophonic and multilingual , but it also encompasses older texts of world literature that thematize translation or use it as a narrative device or organizing trope (e.g., Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, Cervantes’s Don Quixote ). In many such cases, translation as a genuine cultural act is not simply carried out tacitly, but marked explicitly: in making translation a topic within the texts themselves, in staging translation aesthetically, or in literally performing translation, such texts generate textual processes, layers, and discourses that have not yet been systematically recorded or properly described. The section aims at a broad historical and geographic review of translational literature. It also aims to develop categories to further identify and classify the various forms and functions of translational literature. We welcome papers that attempt such surveys or propose categories of translational literature, as well as case studies and exemplary analyses from various languages and epochs. Possible topics include: 1) History of translational literature 2) Topology of translational literature (tropes of translation in literary texts; original and translation as figures in literary texts, etc.) 3) Typology of translational literature (forms and functions of translational literature; originals written to be translated or to defy translation, etc.) 4) Non-classical forms of translation and other forms of transformation (migration, religious conversion, sex change, phonetic translation, pictorial translation, translation from natural languages into computational languages, etc.)

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17267 - Translingual entanglements - African francophonie and its "others"

 

Organizer(s): Moji, Polo (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa); Horne, Fiona; Vassilatos, Alexia (University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa)

Based on the conception of francophonie as a “multiplicity of linguistic life-forms” (Emily Apter) that lends itself to comparative criticism, this round table explores the translingual entanglements that create the “multiplicity” of African francophonie(s). Entanglement reframes African subjectivity through imbricated historical, cultural and ideological constructions that render French a porous lingua-franca. Each of the of constituent presentations examines the translinguistic entanglements inside and / or outside of the French language, connected to broader questions of hybridity, multiculturalism, multilingualism, transnational subjectification and the circulation of literary texts. Alexia Vassilatos discusses the interpenetration of the (pan) African literary cannon, translation and modes textual circulation through the transculturation of Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka (1925). The complex intellectual relationship between Southern Africa and Francophone Africa is illustrated by a close reading of Léopold Senghor’s poetic interpretation of this Sotho novel based on the life of the Zulu king, Shaka (1956). Fiona Horne maps the evolution and the emergence of Francophone identities in post-apartheid South Africa and considers the disjuncture of meanings attributed to this term. Francophonie is an ideology promoting diversity and tolerance and validating the democratic project in South Africa; it is also lived experience of African migrants, which is complex and fluid and often characterized by marginalization and hostility. Turning to Afro-diasporic subjectivity and the literary representation of cosmopolitanism as a hybrid space of subjectification, Polo Moji analyses the languages of food and music as mediators of multiple cultural affiliations in Leonora Miano’s Soulfood équatoriale (France - Cameroon, 2009). Through these interventions, multiple languages, selves and literary worlds are shown to reconfigure African francophonie as a comparatist space.

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17417 - Transnational dynamics of global/local literature. A new idea of world literature?

 

Organizer(s): De Michele, Fausto (Universität Graz, Graz, Austria / Österreich); Sorrentino, Alessandra (Universität München, München, Germany); Van Den Bossche, Bart (Universität Leuven, Leuven, Netherlands ); Rössner, Michael (Universität München, Institut für Kulturwissenschaften und Theatergeschichte, Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, München, Germany)

The panel proposes various questions about so-called world literature that suggests a different perspective of the relationship betweencenters and peripheries, global and local literature, dominant anddominated cultures.
You are invited to think about a work of literature from all over theworld that is enhanced through translation; may inspire a new vocabulary fused with local concepts and may acquire meanings indifferent times, places and cultures. The following questions should contribute in the discussion of and tracing the current guidelines of this wide field of study.
What are the new channels and dynamics of world literature?
Does speaking of world literature mean a return to hermeneutics?
Should "babelization” be seen as an opportunity or a threat?
Is the intertextual and intermedial comparison a possible key for interpreting global literature?
How movie adaptations can be a tool for the reception of literature?

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17335 - Unsettled Narratives: Graphic Novel and Comics Studies in the 21st Century

 

Organizer(s): Pao, Lea (Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA); Buchenberger, Stefan (Kanagawa University, Yohohama, Japan); Mikkonen, Kai (University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland); Coughlan, David (University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland)

Group Session, Research Committee “Comic Studies and Graphic Narrative”

Comics and graphic narratives engage in a wide array of artistic practices. They have emerged as genres from the long-debated relationship between the verbal and the visual, and have since then continuously challenged understandings of graphic storytelling. Today, scholars widely agree that comics and graphic narratives are more than a mere combination of textual and graphic media, art forms, and means of representation, but it remains an open question as to how they have critically shaped our contemporary categories of media, literature, aesthetics, and culture at large. The proposed group session aims to advance these ongoing questions about the history of the genre, and the cultural and social developments of comics and graphic narratives as significant expressions of historical and cultural realities. With the focus on “unsettled narratives,” the sessions brings together recent topics and approaches such as, but not exclusively, the theme and representation of war and conflict, the role of gender in superhero comics, and the history of satire and journalistic publications; topics that continue to invite us to ask what it means to read, interpret, and analyze graphic novels and comics not only as a part of today’s literary scene but a fundamental question of literary criticism and comparative literature. The session is a continuation of the symposia held at the previous ICLA congresses in Hong Kong, Rio, Seoul, and Paris, and invites papers that contribute to these developments, including historical and comparative approaches (questions about genre, medium, production, and reception), narrative studies (forms of storytelling, sequence, temporality, spatiality, voice), culture, social, and media studies (globalization, comics and other media, gender, ethnicity, politics, pedagogy), as well as analytical and theoretical approaches in linguistics, literature, philosophy, and arts.

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17325 - Variety of texts and languages in Baltic region of early modernity

 

Organizer(s): Lams, Ojars (University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia); Grudule, Mara; Laizans, Martins (University of Latvia, Riga, Latvia)

The Baltic region has been a pendular border between Eastern and Western cultures for more than 800 years. 17th century was a turning point for textual expression creating an environment that incorporated both the paneuropean values of neolatinity, and Baltic German literary movements and the local vernacular languages as well. As a result a corpus of Latin, German and Latvian texts emerged that provides examples of poetic and aesthetic interaction between the cultures on the one hand, and the search for their unique peculiarities on the other hand. The ideas of antiquity, reformation and counter-reformation are important driving forces for all three languages, but each of them manifests these ideas in different genres starting from epic poems in Latin at the turn of the 17th century, church hymns in Latvian and German and even in theoretical treatises of poetics on Latvian poetry that has not yet come into being. This multilingual textual environment is a foundation for the development of modern European identity of the region at the time.

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17254 - Wer spricht im Gedicht?

 

Organizer(s): Klimek, Sonja (Universität Freiburg/CH, Freiburg, Switzerland)

Im Gegensatz zu den anderen Großgattungen Epik und Dramatik hat sich für die Erforschung der Lyrik bisher keine eigenständige Teildisziplin innerhalb der Allgemeinen Literaturwissenschaft herausgebildet, die auf die dem Ausschreibungstext folgende, metaphorisch zu verstehende Frage antworten könnte: Gibt es eine eigene Sprache der Lyrik? Bisher liegen lediglich einige – allerdings gewichtige – Einzelpublikationen zur allgemeinen Lyriktheorie vor (u.a. Hempfer: Lyrik. Skizze einer systematischen Theorie, Ders. (Hrsg.): Sprachen der Lyrik, Lamping: Das lyrische Gedicht, Zymner: Lyrik. Umriss und Begriff).

Die Hauptfrage unserer Sitzung „Wer spricht im Gedicht?“ rekurriert auf ein zentrales Desiderat der allgemeinen Lyrikforschung: Trotz einer lebhaft geführten Diskussion zu Sprecherrollen in lyrischen Texten und der zu deren Bezeichnung geeigneten Begrifflichkeit („lyrisches Ich“, „Textsubjekt“, „artikuliertes Ich“ etc.) sind zentrale Fragen der Sprecher-, Figuren- und Perspektivgestaltung in Gedichten – ganz im Gegensatz zur sehr differenzierten Diskussion zu Erzählinstanzen, Figurenkonstitution und Perspektivierungsformen in Erzähltexten – bisher noch unbeantwortet: Wie konstituieren sich Sprechinstanzen und Figuren in Gedichten? Wie werden diese wahrgenommen und wie wird ihre Wahrnehmung durch die paratextuelle Rahmung beeinflusst? Welches Verhältnis zwischen personalen und figuralen Instanzen und Autoren und Lesern von Gedichten präsupponieren diese Darstellungsverfahren?

Ziel unseres Panels ist es, Anstöße für eine Erweiterung und Differenzierung der lyrikologischen Forschung zu personalen bzw. figuralen Instanzen in Gedichten anzuregen.

 

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17317 - When narratology does not travel well

 

Organizer(s): Hajdu, Peter (Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Research Centre for Humanities, Budapest, Hungary); Qiao, Guo-Qiang (Qufu Normal University / Shandong University / University of Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom)

Narratology is supposed to be a universal approach. However, the application of some general theoretical notions or concepts in some particular national literary contexts seems difficult, irrelevant or even impossible. In other cases it is difficult to find general narratological concepts to describe local phenomena. The aim of this group is to analyse cases in which narratology does not travel well.

Of course, narratology is not a monolithic, unified, coherent discourse; it has its own history and versions. These versions, however, have been widely adapted, and it is a question, how much they had to change to be adaptable, and if they remain really useful in their new contexts. E.g. Gérard Genette's sophisticated analyses of tenses can be applied to literary traditions of languages that do not have tenses only with great difficulties. The differences between direct, indirect, and free indirect discourse may be problematic in languages that express the indirectness with special sign systems, as e.g. classical Latin did.

Language, however, is only one aspect of difficult applicability. Another may be the differences between local or regional literary traditions. Many branches of narratology do not focus on literary material, or rather we can say that when they do, they already apply narratology to literature. These application also travel: is it easy to do similar applicative moves in a different literary context where the readers' expectations, where the generic system, the rules of elliptic utterances, and many other things are different?

It is a widely discussed topic in literary criticism that traveling theory may be problematic both epistemologically and politically. Participants are encouraged to scrutinise the problems of traveling in the most universal branch of literary theory, namely narratology. What are interesting here are concrete examples of problematic transfer, which does not exclude cases of fertile misinterpretation or very creative adaptation.

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17430 - Workshop "Denkbilder der Übersetzung" - ICLA 2016

 

Organizer(s): Oikonomou, Maria (University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria)

Die Formierung von Konzepten und die Verhandlung von Wissen sind unweigerlich auf Inzenierungsformen angewiesen. Ohne diese Inszenierungen - etwa in Narrativen, Fachsprachen, Symbolkomplexen - bleiben sie "undenkbar". Deshalb erweist sich solche Verbildlichung nicht nur als Repräsentation, sondern zu einem gut Teil gar als Poïesis und Kreation (Joseph Vogl spricht von den Poetologien des Wissens), die unser Verständnis des jeweiligen Wissensgegenstands programmiert. Der Workshop beschäftigt sich mit den Verfahren dieser Sicht- und Sagbarmachung im Hinblick auf die (sprachliche bzw. literarische) Übersetzung. Denn während die Arbeit des Übersetzens schlicht als interlingualer Ersetzungsprozess erscheint, bleibt das "Wesen" der Translation ein Abstraktum, das eine Vielzahl unterschiedlichster Denkbilder hervorgebracht hat und durch sie immer neu hervorgebracht wird. So sind unter vielem anderem der Turm (Steiner) und die Brücke (Derrida), das Verhältnis von Kern und Frucht (Benjamin), die Drittheit (Colapietro), die Perlenwägerin (Serres) oder auch der Zwilling und Hermaphrodit (Cicellis) Figurationen, die Übersetzung erst in die Anschauung heben. Das Doppelpanel stellt dabei die Frage nach ihren historischen Dominanten und Verschiebungen, nach ihrem Verhältnis zu Metapher, Symbol, Allegorie oder Hypotypose, nach ihrer Gültigkeit auch für nichtsprachliche und außerliterarische Bedeutungstransfers, nach ihrer Integration und Anwendung anderer, etwa mechanistischer, wissenschaftlicher, philosophischer, ästhetischer, medialer Diskurse. Auf diese Weise soll nicht zuletzt darüber nachgedacht werden, ob es sich bei den Bildern, Sprachen und Sprachbildern vom Übersetzen selbst um Übersetzungen handelt und inwiefern sie Einblick geben in die ganz eigene „Ästhetik und Affektökonomie“ von Theorien. Der für alle Interessenten offene Workshop umfasst zwei Konferenzpanels à 90 Minuten, in denen die Teilnehmer_innen zuvor gelesene knappe Textebeispiele diskutieren. Vorgesehen sind außerdem drei bis vier Impulsreferate von max. 15 Min. (u.a. von Reinhard Babel, DAAD Bogota, Autor von Translationsfiktionen / Andreas Keller, ZfL Berlin, Co-Leiter des Forschungsprojekts "Übersetzungen im Wissenstransfer" / Ulrich Meurer, tfm Wien, Herausgeber von Übersetzung und Film), die die Texte perspektivieren und erste Thesen vorstellen.

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17093 - WORKSHOP: Places and Media of Encounters. Transfer, Mediality and Situativity of Jewish Literatures.

 

Organizer(s): Terpitz, Olaf (Universität Wien, Wien, Austria); Windsperger, Marianne (Institut für Germanistik, Wien, Austria)

 

In current models and reflections on “new world literatures” – conceptualized in connection with migration, diaspora and exile – we encounter concepts of transfer, exchange and transmission (cf. „Travelling Concepts“ by Mieke Bal, „Literatures on the Move“ by Ottmar Ette, serial figures by Ruth Mayer). The proposed workshop aims at confronting and expanding these common models by concrete studies of Jewish literatures in diverse linguistic, cultural as well as historical contexts.

Our thematic and theoretical approach draws attention to three interlocked moments: phenomena of transmission between local and global as well as imperial and particular interests, between Jewish and non-Jewish literatures, between genre and knowledge. These phenomena can be understood and analyzed on three levels:

• Languages: their semanticization and perception (for example “American English as Yiddish”; casteidish) in literary texts as well as on a metatextual level (labeling, systematization, visualization and metaphorization of Jewish literatures)
• Texts and book forms: literary and pragmatic texts (feuilletons, literary ego-documents, collection books and anthologies etc.) as relay stations of time, knowledge and discourse
• Literary figures as moments of transfer and encounter: processes of literary reception and translation through and in figures, forms of appropriation, adoption and transformation of literary figures as well as their change of genre and artistic medium.

We are interested in contributions discussing the topics outlined above in diverse historical, linguistic and cultural settings.

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17308 - Workshop: Die vielen ¿Sprachen¿ der Klassiker. Eine medienorientierte Perspektive

 

Organizer(s): Wojcik, Paula (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany); Picard, Sophie (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Jena, Germany)

Literarische Klassiker sind Bestandteil des kulturellen Gedächtnisses und zugleich Wissensspeicher, die die Vorstellung vergangener Epochen und fremder Kulturen prägen. Sie wirken sowohl in späteren Generationen als auch in anderen Kulturräumen und sind so Gegenstand eines Transferprozesses, in dem sie beständig in neue Kontexte ‚über-setzt‘ werden. Medien spielen bei dieser Vermittlung eine wichtige Rolle. Die internationale Rezeption von Klassikern verläuft anhand von Übersetzungen, Theateraufführungen, Parodien, Verfilmungen, Comics, Vertonungen, um nur einige der medialen Ausdrucksformen von Klassikern zu nennen. Jede der „Sprachen“ eröffnet neue Interpretationsräume und den Zugang zu neuen Zielgruppen. Im Rahmen des Workshops sollen die unterschiedlichen Ausdrucksformen der Klassiker auf ihre jeweiligen Funktionen im Prozess des kulturellen Transfers untersucht werden, wobei insbesondere Rezeptionsformen in populärkulturellen Medien von Interesse sind. Medialisierungen von Klassikern können als subversive Gesten gegen die Institution des Kanons verstanden werden, die den Anspruch der Deutungshoheit eines bürgerlichen Milieus oder einer von „männlichen Weißen“ dominierten Literaturgeschichtsschreibung unterlaufen. Sie können zugleich von der anhaltenden Aktualität von Klassikern zeugen und so die Institution des Kanons implizit bestätigen.

Als historische Marke, von der aus wir eine Perspektive bis in die Gegenwart eröffnen möchten, dient das späte 18. Jahrhundert: Hier lässt sich parallel die Entstehung neuer medialer Adaptions- und Verbreitungsmöglichkeiten sowie eines Klassikerdiskurses beobachten.

Im Format eines Workshops soll eine größere Zahl von Fallanalysen versammelt werden, um auf ihrer Basis zu systematischen Einsichten über Funktionen unterschiedlicher Medien bei der Klassikervermittlung und -verbreitung zu gelangen.

Gruppengestaltung: Gezielte Einladung und CfP.

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16657 - Workshop: Productivity of plagiarism

 

Organizer(s): Polubojarinova, Larissa (Staatliche Universität Sankt Petersburg, Sankt Petersburg, Russia); Krauss, Charlotte (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany); Baron, Christine (Université de Poitiers, Poitiers, France)

In our epoch of globalization and capitalization of many aspects in our lives, the protection of intellectual property has gained great importance – and the question of plagiarism has become a significant issue. The mass media frequently reports cases of individuals incriminated for having stolen texts from known or unknown authors, details taken from the private lives of people pretending to find themselves in the text, the story, thoughts, style or even emotional states of individuals or groups. If one can make capital out of pretty much anything, such real or imagined thefts signify a monetary loss for the complainer. However, literature is rooted in adaptations. Following W. Benjamin's notion of 'mimetisches Vermögen', every culture is grounded in the imitation of preceding actions. Intertextuality, rewriting, transformation etc. might well be at the origin of every artistic creation.

But is it possible to draw a line between an adaptation (positively regarded) and a case of plagiarism (seen as something negative)? Or is plagiarism basically nothing more than a juridically contested adaptation? And in consequence, can plagiarism be considered other than as an illicit loan?

This workshop would like to analyse literary plagiarism as a productive and eminently comparative phenomenon, for example:

- cases of intercultural plagiarism, i.e. the “theft” of a topic, a style or literary form transgressing a linguistic and/or cultural frontier – and the positive or negative aspects of this phenomenon as well as their possible repercussions on the original culture,

- cases of translations leading to an appropriation of the original text, published under the name of the translator for a new public – for example in poetry,

- the discussion of intellectual theft in literary texts, either explicit or implicit, such as an enigma or a roman à clef,

- economic and juridical aspects of plagiarism in the editing world, the role of publishers and lawyers in the production process of books.

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17259 - World fantastic literature: multiple languages, multiple perspectives

 

Organizer(s): Philippov, Renata (Universidade Federal de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil); Amaral, Gloria (Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, Sao Paulo, Brazil)

Fantastic literature has long been subjected to several discussions with the constant aim of defining it as a genre or mode. Such discussions have also been marked by several common places and theoretical approaches, such as the works of Caillois (1965), Bellemin-Noël (1971), Bessière (1973), Vax (1974), Todorov (1975), Furtado (1980), Malrieu (1992), Ceserani (2006), Roas (2014), among others. With this regard, some questions arise: in the 21st-century global-village scenario, is there still place for the Fantastic as a genre or mode to be studied? Is there a unique world fantastic or rather local fantastic literatures spurring multiple languages and perspectives? Up to what extent in the 21st century is the fantastic other or does it still follow the 19th century matrix? Is there a translational Fantastic? As it opens itself to other arts, such as cinema, does that bring about changes to the genre? If so, what are some possible causes for such changes? Bearing those issues in mind, in this seminar, a sequel to the Fantastic Across Borders panel held during the 2013 ICLA congress, we would like to resume the conversations stemming from that event, as well as questions and common places pertaining to the genre or mode, so as to pursue new and broad perspectives, limits and borders, under the language, literary discourse or multiple art points of view. Papers in English or French are welcome.

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CANCELLED - WORKSHOP: WORLD WARS IN WORLD LITERATURES: COMMEMORATION IN MANY LANGUAGES - 17352

 

Organizer(s): Bahrevar, Majid (Institute of Near Eastern and African Studies (ÚBVA), Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic)

Following the centenary of First World War and the septuagenarian of Second World War, we have plenty time to reinvestigate such legacies by comparing those representations in many languages, literatures and cultures. We, here simultaneously as comparatists and corporatists of world literature, can also connect together western/eastern, Allied/Central, conflicting-neutral, or propagandist/peaceful accounts of all around the world.

Only passing through the multilingual hybridity and multicultural plurality there will be a way to collect and achieve shared goals in comparative literature. In this regard "world languages" practically the same as "language of world" will go beyond any centre-peripheral bias or self-other imaging of human warfare.

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