Babel: Adventures in Translation is a new collection of essays co-written by Committee member Matthew Reynolds together with Dennis Duncan, Stephen Harrison, and Katrin Kohl. Published by Bodleian Publishing, the book shows how linguistic diversity has inspired people across time and cultures to embark on adventurous journeys through the translation of texts. Sixty-five color illustrations accompany examples ranging from Greek papyri through illuminated manuscripts and fine early books to fantasy languages, the search for a universal language, and the challenges of translation in multicultural Britain.

Divya Dwivedi, member of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, has written, with Shaj Mohan, Gandhi and Philosophy: On Theological Anti-Politics. Published by Bloomsbury with a foreword by Jean-Luc Nancy, this book shows the points of intersection and infiltration between Gandhian concepts and such issues as will, truth, violence, law, anarchy, value, politics, and metaphysics, compelling the reader to imagine Gandhi’s thought anew.

Here is a selection of studies published by current and former members of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory in 2018:

Raphaël Baroni (co-ed. w. Anaïs Goudmand), Les avatars du chapitre en bande dessinée (= Cahiers de narratologie 34);

Vladimir Biti, Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in Post-imperial Europe (Leiden: Brill);

Ersu Ding, “Poetic Logic and sensus communis,” Semiotica 225: 447–55;

Anne Duprat (co-ed. w. Marc Hersant and Luc Ruiz), Romanesques noirs (1750–1850) (= Romanesques 10);

Divya Dwivedi (co-ed. w. Henrik Skov Nielsen and Richard Walsh), Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives (Columbus: The Ohio State UP);

Angela Esterhammer, “The 1820s and Beyond,” inThe Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism, ed. David Duff (Oxford: Oxford UP), 74–88;

Jernej Habjan, “Rancière’s Lesson: October ’17, May ’68, October ’17,” CR: The New Centennial Review 18.3: 53–72;

Péter Hajdu, “The Collective in the Hungarian Narrative Tradition and Narrative Studies,” Neohelicon 45.2: 431–43;

Hermann Herlinghaus (ed.), The Pharmakon: Concept Figure, Image of Transgression, Poetic Practice (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter);

Eva Horn, The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age, trans. Valentine Pakis (New York: Columbia UP);

Marko Juvan, “The Poetic Sacrifice: Cultural Saints and Literary Nation Building,” Frontiers of Narrative Studies 4.1: 158–65;

György C. Kálmán (w. András Kappanyos), “Avant-Garde Studies in the Institute for Literary Studies of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,” in Local Contexts / International Networks: Avant-Garde Journals in East-Central Europe, ed. Gábor Dobó and Merse Pál Szeredi (Budapest: Petőfi Literary Museum; Kassák Museum; Kassák Foundation), 183–87;

Svend Erik Larsen, “Interdisciplinarity, History and Cultural Encounters,” European Review 26.2: 354–68;

Joep Leerssen (ed.), Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe (Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP);

Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu and Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, Policing Literary Theory (Leiden: Brill);

Kyohei Norimatsu, “‘Explosion’ as National Identity: The Influence of Yuri Lotman on Russian Postmodernist Theory,” in World Literature and Japanese Literature in the Era of Globalization, ed. Mitsuyoshi Numano (Tokyo: The University of Tokyo), 131–48;

Sowon S. Park, “Scriptworlds,” in The Cambridge Companion to World Literature, ed. Ben Etherington and Jarad Zimbler (Cambridge: Cambridge UP), 100–15;

Ruth Ronen, Lacan with the Philosophers, trans. Michal Sapir (Toronto: U of Toronto P);

Monika Schmitz-Emans, Wendebücher—Spiegelbücher: über Kodexarchitekturen in der Buchliteratur (Berlin: Christian A. Bachmann Verlag);

Robert Stockhammer,  “Welt, je schon übersetzt,” in Wörter aus der Fremde: Begriffsgeschichte als Übersetzungsgeschichte, ed. Falko Schmieder and Georg Töpfer (Berlin: Kadmos), 272–76;

Galin Tihanov, “Ferrying a Thinker Across Time and Language: Bakhtin, Translation, World Literature,” Modern Languages Open 1;

Dominique Vaugeois (co-ed. w. Sylvain Dreyer), La critique d’art à l’écran : les arts plastiques (Villeneuve-d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion);

Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, Mother-Tongue in Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism: Toward a New Polylingual Poetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan);

Stefan Willer, “Die Welt als Erbe. Zur Problematik von ‘World Heritage’,” in Erbe_n, ed. Burkhard Pöttler and Lisa Erlenbusch (Weitra: Bibliothek der Provinz), 281–92;

Robert J. C. Young (co-ed. w. Jean Khalfa), Alienation and Freedom (London: Bloomsbury);

John Zilcosky, “‘The Times in Which We Live’: Freud’s The Uncanny, World War I, and the Trauma of Contagion,” Psychoanalysis and History 20.2: 165–90.

This year’s workshop of the AILC/ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory will be held as part of the twenty-second triennial congress of the AILC/ICLA, which will take place on 29 July–2 August in Macau. Titled “Decolonizing the Theory Canon 2019: Literary Theory Outside the Norton Anthology,” the workshop will be hosted by the University of Macau. The program is forthcoming on this site.

Dominique Vaugeois, former member of the ICLA theory committee, has edited, with Sylvain Dreyer, La critique d’art à l’écran : les arts plastiques (Art Critique on Screen: Visual Arts). This collection of essays published by Presses Universitaires du Septentrion addresses the capacity of cinema to construct a critical view on artistic production; to capture the gesture of painting and penetrate the secret of a certain style; to represent museums and its visitors; and to question the distribution of hierarchies and genres.

Eva Horn, former member of the ICLA theory committee, published The Future as Catastrophe: Imagining Disaster in the Modern Age. Published by Columbia UP, this is the translation, by Valentine Pakis, of Horn’s German-language book on the modern fascination with disaster, which she treats as a symptom of our relationship to the future. Analysing the catastrophic imaginary from its roots in Romanticism and the figure of the Last Man, through the narratives of climatic cataclysm and the Cold War’s apocalyptic sublime, to the contemporary popularity of disaster fiction and end-of-the-world blockbusters, Horn argues that apocalypse always haunts the modern idea of a future that can be anticipated and planned.

Takayuki Yokota-Murakami, former member of the ICLA theory committee, published Mother-Tongue in Modern Japanese Literature and Criticism: Toward a New Polylingual Poetics. Published by Palgrave Macmillan, the book examines how early research on literary activities outside national literatures such as émigré literature or diasporic literature conceived of the loss of ‘mother-tongue’ as a tragedy, and how it perpetuated the ideology of national language by relying on the dichotomy of native language/foreign language. Yokota-Murakami transcends these limitations by examining modern Japanese literature and literary criticism through modern philology, the vernacularisation movement, and Korean-Japanese literature.

Joep Leerssen, former member of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory, has edited the Encyclopedia of Romantic Nationalism in Europe. Written in cooperation with almost 350 authors from dozens of countries and published by Amsterdam UP, this two-volume encyclopedia gives a clear idea of the intricate transnational and intermedial networks and entanglements in which all aspects of Romantic nationalism are connected.

The AILC/ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory has elected Woosung Kang as a new member as of 2018. Woosung is Associate Professor at the Department of English Language and Literature, Seoul National University, and works primarily on critical theory and American literature.

Divya Dwivedi, member of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, has co-edited, with Henrik Skov Nielsen and Richard Walsh, Narratology and Ideology: Negotiating Context, Form, and Theory in Postcolonial Narratives. Published by The Ohio State UP, the volume brings together many of the most prominent figures in the interface between narratology and postcolonial criticism. It stages a meeting between these two fields as it negotiates both narratological and postcolonialist concerns by addressing specific features of narrative form and technique in the ideological analysis of key postcolonial texts.