This article is a report on the XXIII International Congress of the AILC-ICLA, a hybrid eventdedicated to researching various aspects of world literature that was held in Tbilisi in July 2022.It ...evaluates the keynote papers presented by Irma Ratiani (Georgia), Marko Juvan (Slovenia),Toshiko Ellis (Japan) and Jennifer Wallace (UK). The main lecture on Central and East Europeanliteratures, Juvan’s keynote “How to Think World Literature from its Edge?” examinedworldliness as both a global system based on international authorities and prestigious publishinghouses and as a capillary worlding that, due to its minority character, popularizes the activitiesof lesser-known writers. The Congress’s viewpoint not from the perspective of the Anglophone“centers”, but from its margins, enabled the reflection of a number of other subtopics suchas the issue of so-called minor literature, gender, postcolonialism, digital culture, intermediality,interculturality, etc. The general conclusions reached at the Congress can be formulatedas follows: 1. the reinterpretation of comparative literature from institutional and thematic perspectives,2. the point of view of so-called small literatures, and 3. the revitalization of the term “national literature”.
This article aims to systemize the trends in world literature research, highlighting the differences between the concepts of this phenomenon as embraced by “small” and “large” literatures. It also ...takes account of the Czech and Slovak line of thinking which questions the concept of world literature as normative poetics or the standardized canon of masterpieces and their various discourses. The historical experience of Czech and Slovak comparative literary studies defending the independent values of Slavic literatures suggests that there cannot be any arbitrary research on world literature. With some exceptions and regardless of their terminologically and semantically different interpretations of this specialism, contemporary theoretical concepts (as embraced by Emily Apter, Pascale Casanova, David Damrosch, Marko Juvan, Franco Moretti, etc.) re-establish recognizing world literature as an international research issue or a subject employing English as a universal means of communication. Imposing such a notion would allegedly condone inequality as a kind of epistemological framework to codify the binary opposition of “developed” and “underdeveloped” or “the center” and “periphery”. It was mainly the Czecho-Slovak structuralist tradition (represented by Frank Wollman, René Wellek, Dionýz Ďurišin, etc.) that rejected national literature as a natural starting point of world literature. Anchored in the Central European intellectual milieu at the crossing of various aesthetic movements, these “defensive” theories were linked with the structural concept of the Prague Linguistic Circle, letting alone the multilingual tradition of the former Habsburg Empire and the phenomenon of migration which implied the aspect of polyglossia and heterotopia as a breeding ground for comparative scholars.
Drawing upon research on literary culture and
memory, this article explores the transformational mechanisms of the canonization and worship of authors in the process of social mobility from 1840 to ...1940. As a result of the joint endeavor of the comparatists Marijan Dović and Joep Leerssen, the analytical concept of “cultural saints” conceives of canonization as a movable network of textual and extra-textual discursive practices. The importance of the concept lies in its more precise differentiation between objective and subjective factors, which are instrumental in the preservation and reconstruction of the practice of artistic creations. Implementing an ethno-semantic analysis, Dović and Leerssen’s model supports the abstraction that the constitution of national identity through collective rituals and the formation of new ideas establishes a canonized set of rules, the “cultural grammar” of any society.
The study is concerned with contemporary theoretical concepts of world literature (“literature of the world”, “worldliness of literature”, “world literary system”, “world literary republic”). ...Considering the results of the XXII International Congress ICLA/AICL in Macau 2019, it discusses how the concepts are reflected in the Slovenian scholar Marko Juvan´s monograph
Worlding a Peripheral Literature
(2019). The book analyses conditions under which small national texts (for example, Slavic) become world texts. According to Juvan, the space of world literature was historically originating in the mid-nineteenth century, in parallel with the genesis of national literatures. The decisive factors of this process included the importance of language and the significance of the country. On the one hand, Juvan’s idea of world literature admits that an acceptable consensus can be reached in the form of an epistemological and terminological basis defined by a set of concrete concepts and principles, on the other hand, the acceptance of inequality between the so-called big and small literatures as a way of thinking is a consequence of economic and mass media globalization. Overall, however, Juvan’s concept, inspired by Moretti’s theory of evolution and economic models, brings a fundamental theoretical contribution to current discussions on the forms, essence, and functions of world literature as a universal phenomenon.
The study is an analysis of the XXII Congress of the AILC/ICLA Literature of the World and the Future of Comparative Literature which took place between July 29 and August 2, 2019 in Macau. As its ...name indicates, the lectures and workshops emphasised the concept of “literature of the world”, which is considered less elitist than the traditional, and more homogenous, concept of “world literature”. The idea that the (world) literature cannot be approached only from one cultural or theoretical point of view also permeated the joint Czecho-Slovak issue of the journal World Literature Studies entitled “The Image of Remote Countries in the Literatures of Central and Eastern Europe” published on the occasion of the Congress. Using various literary materials, the issue attempted to discuss modern methodological approaches to intercultural problems from the imagological intercontinental perspective.
L’étude met en relief l’importance historique de la littérature comparée française et de ses fondateurs, tels que Fernand Baldensperger, Paul Van Tieghem etc., qui influencèrent positivement la ...pensée comparative de la littérature dans le contexte slave, et principalement tchèque. À travers la correspondance jusqu’ici inédite de l’historien littéraire tchèque V. Tille (1867-1937) avec F. Baldensperger, premier rédacteur en chef de la Revue de littérature comparée , et P. Van Tieghem, elle signale leur collaboration qui n’était pas connue, l’intérêt français pour la participation des comparatistes tchèques aux activités de la Commission internationale d’Histoire littéraire moderne fondée au congrès de Budapest en 1931. Sur un plan méthodologique, les thèses de Van Tieghem, principalement la distinction entre « littérature générale » et « littérature comparée », ne trouvèrent une résonance que dans les années 1930 parmi la génération plus jeune de la littérature comparée tchèque, chez V. Černý, R. Wellek et F. Wollman.
In Central and Eastern Europe, the research into interliterary relations traditionally drew on national concerns emerging naturally from the proximity of a great number of neighbouring nation states ...with their distinct cultures, or national minorities living within a majority culture. Yet the contacts or relationships with structurally and typologically different cultures have remained outside of critical attention. Studying them requires not only some knowledge of the extraliterary context in which those cultures are situated, but a methodologically different approach as well, such as is used in postcolonial or decolonial theory, Orientalism, imagology, etc. The paper draws attention to the problems connected with comparisons using these approaches, especially imagology, as their main methodological tool. At the same time, it aims at finding out how such approaches contribute to the understanding of cultural, ethnic, biological or material “otherness” (especially through stereotyped imagotypical structures), and whether it is possible to transfer, for example, the imagological concepts historically created in a certain context to a cultural area of a different civilization, and use them to analyze the nature of the literary.
Studie vyzdvihuje historický význam francouzské komparatistiky a jejich zakladatelů jako byli Fernand Baldensperger, Paul van Tieghem ad., kteří pozitivně ovlivnili srovnávací myšlení o literatuře v ...slovanském a především českém kontextu. Prostřednictvím dosud nepublikované korespondence českého literárního historika V. Tilleho (1867–1937) s prvním šéfredaktorem Revue de Littérature Comparée F. Baldenspergerem a P. van Tieghemem upozorňuje na jejich neznámou spolupráci, na zájem francouzské strany, aby čeští komparatisté participovali na aktivitách Komise pro mezinárodní literárněhistorické dějiny založené na kongresu v Budapešti 1931. Metodologicky Tieghemovy teze se odrazily až v třicátých letech 20. století u mladší generace české literární komparatistiky, u V. Černého, R. Wellka a F. Wollmana.
