Committee member Ivana Perica is the author of Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Socialist Central Europe, 1928–1968 (Bloomsbury). In this alternate framing of Eastern and Western European literary and political afterlives of revolution between 1928 and 1968, Perica combines the transfer of ideas between historical turning points with a comparative reading of political literatures in the European East and West to address the disparity between the abundance of scholarly accounts of 1968 and the simultaneous forgetting of developments in the interwar period that peaked around 1928. Offering new readings of Bertolt Brecht, Ivan Olbracht, and August Cesarec among others, her book excavates a series of problems, optics, and styles characteristic of the forgotten episodes in the literary history of the twentieth century.

 

28th July – 1st August, 2025, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Committee will convene for a workshop during the 2025 ICLA Congress at Goyang City / Dongguk University (Seoul). The workshop topic is “Literary Theory and Technology” and it is open for audience participation.

Literary theory has always maintained a complex relationship with the technological aspects of the composition and reception of literary texts. In Poetics, Aristotle dismissed the whole technical side of staging a text, from scenography to actor direction, committing it to the inferior skills of “show organizers”. Of course, this neglect of technique was largely compensated for, from the Renaissance onwards, by the inclusion of various discourses of expertise (in architecture, painting, dance, music, as well as politics, morality, science and economics), which de facto intervened in the abstract theorization of literary forms. In Europe, the Romantic period was the one that saw, with the reproducibility of the work of art, the massive entry of technology into the production and circulation of the literary text. But it was in the 20th century that technology itself became a central object of thought for literary theory, as a main factor in power relations between individuals, communities and states, and therefore as a structuring element of their representation in modern cultural imaginaries – particularly in the colonial and then post-colonial contexts.

How does this theorization of the technological in literature play out, before as well as in the age of digital production of texts, before as well as during the emerging presence of artificial intelligence in their composition and processing? How did the technological change our understanding of literature? And does the meaning of the term itself change, now that the material, concrete dimension of the technical gesture in the making of the work is once again being erased, to make way for a new kind of abstraction, characteristic of the “liquid” environment in which stories, images, words, fictions and memes are circulated and exchanged?

The Research Committee’s three sessions at the Seoul ICLA/AILC Congress 2025 workshop will focus on all the issues raised for a comparative literary theory by the fundamental shifts in thinking about technology. We will be enquiring in particular at the way in which literary theory accounts for the technologies and affordances of literary forms (Karin Kukkonen, Marco Caracciolo, Anne Duprat, Mara Santi), at the poetics of data processing (Sieghild Bogumil-Notz, Rok Bençin) and at the complex relationship between literary techniques and technologies and their theoretization (Stefan Willer, Zaal Andronikashvili, Susanne Strätling).

Full workshop programme is available HERE and abstracts HERE.

The proceedings of the 2019 workshop of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory, “Decolonizing the Theory Canon” are out! Guest edited by Divya Dwivedi and Robert J. C. Young, they have been published as a special issue on “Decolonising the Theory Canon: Literary Theory Outside the Norton Anthology” with Parallax 30, Issue 3 (2024).

Current committee member Natalya Bekhta is looking for candidates to fill a funded three-year doctoral position in her research project on “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989” (Tampere University, Finland). The project, funded by the Research Council of Finland, studies utopian imagination of the 20th and 21st centuries in Eastern Europe with a larger aim to deprovincialise literatures of this region by (a) mapping anew the existing geographies of comparison, (b) developing a comparative theory of literary semi-peripheries, and (c) revising the current understanding of the novel as a globally-dominant genre. Thematic focus on utopia serves as a strategic frame and a socio-cultural interest, through which this set of research problems is approached.

Deadline for applications: 7 July 2025. For further details click HERE.

2 June, John W. Boyer Center, Paris

Current Committee President, Anne Duprat (Université de Picardie Jules Verne/IUF), together with former Committee members, Alexandre Gefen (THALIM) and Françoise Lavocat (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle/IUF), will participate in a roundtable, marking the publication of the book Le Hasard. Littérature, arts, sciences, philosophie (eds. Anne Duprat, Alison James, Fiona McIntosh-Varjabédian, and Anne-Gaëlle Weber; CNRS 2025). See also the book’s English edition: Figures of Chance I & Figures of Chance II (Routledge 2024).

Rountable discussion will include contributions from Ariane Bayle (Lyon 3/IUF), Emmanuel Bouju (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle/IUF), Dominique Brancher (Yale University), Anaïs Goudmand (Sorbonne Université), and William Marx (Collège de France). The roundtable will take place on 2 June 2025, at 6 pm at the John W. Boyer Center, Paris. Free entrance but registration is required.

Vladimir Biti, Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, is the author of Perpetrators’ Legacies: Post-imperial Condition in Sebald and McEwan (Routledge). The book presents Winfried Georg Sebald and Ian McEwan as paradigmatic post-imperial writers who strive to disentangle themselves from the hierarchies of power inherited from the age of imperialism. To this end, Biti argues, both writers undertake a subtle detachment from the analogously implicated subject positions of their protagonists. Such a detachment from familiar protagonists, however, requires the consent of unknown readers with whom the writers forge a long-distance solidarity, connective association or complicitous alliance. Thus, in order to exempt themselves from one complicity, Sebald and McEwan in effect enter another one.

28th July – 1st August, 2025, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Committee will convene for a workshop during the 2025 ICLA Congress at Goyang City / Dongguk University (Seoul). The workshop topic is “Literary Theory and Technology” and it is open for audience participation.

Abstract TBA

11-13 March 2025, Berlin

Stefan Willer, Former Committee member and Secretary, has oranised in collaboration with Caroline Sauter an international, multilingual and comparative conference on “Translation and Flight”. The conference will take place on March 11-13, 2025 at Humboldt University in Berlin and will feature presentations by Committee member Tiphaine Samoyault and Honorary Committee President Robert Stockhammer.

Full programme available HERE.

Former Committee member Jernej Habjan is the guest-editor of a forthcoming issue of CLCWeb titled “World Literature as World Crisis: Discussing World Literature to Change the World.” Aiming to unearth a discourse of crisis in what has been canonized as the debate on world literature, this special issue welcomes contributions that relate the world literature debate to larger issues of world literature as, among other things, a late capitalist commodity, a site of postmodern culture wars, a stand-in for a concept of world history, a bastion of Eurocentrism, a source of anti-Eurocentrism, a project born of internationalist utopianism, and an invitation to a monolingual dystopia. Abstracts of 250 words, including a 100-word bio and 5 keywords, should be sent to jernej.habjan@zrc-sazu.si by March 31, 2025, with full articles of 5,000–8,000 words, or critical reviews of 3,000 words, due by September 30, 2025.

Here is a selection of studies published by current and former members of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory in 2024:

Zaal Andronikashvili (ed.), Vom Krieg zerrissene Kulturlandschaften: Nachdenken über die Ukraine​. ​​Göttingen: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen;

Natalya Bekhta, “A Re-Invention of Language: War, National Community and a Poetics of the First-Person Plural,” in The Aesthetics of Collective Agency, ed. Simone Knewitz & Stefanie Mueller (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag), 193–212;

Natalya Bekhta, “Beyond the Novel: Satire in Eastern Europe and Volodymyr Rafeyenko’s Mondegreen,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 66.1: 12–22;

Rok Benčin, Rethinking the Concept of World: Towards Transcendental Multiplicity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP);

Vladimir Biti, “Past Empire(s), Post-Empire(s), and Narratives of Disaster: Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March and Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge over the Drina,” in The Languages of World Literature, ed. Achim Hölter (Berlin: De Gruyter), 65–84;

Marco Caracciolo, “Metaphorical Figures for Moral Complexity,” New Literary History 55.1: 125–43;

Michel Chaouli, Something Speaks to Me: Where Criticism Begins (Chicago: The U of Chicago P);

Anne Duprat (co-edited w. Alison James), Figures of Chance II: Chance in Theory and Practice, trans. Martyn Beck (London: Routledge);

Divya Dwivedi, “The Psychomachia of Caste and Psychoanalysis in India,” CASTE 5.2: 97–120;

Angela Esterhammer, “The March of Mind: Knowledge Mobilization in the 1820s,” European Romantic Review 35.2: 399–416;

Alexandre Gefen, Repair the World: French Literature in the Twenty-First Century (Berlin: De Gruyter);

Davide Giuriato, “Die Armut (er-)zählen: Bettine von Arnim und die Poetik der Armenliste,” in Armut und Menge, ed. Jobst Welge & Cornelia Wild (Leiden: Brill), 93–109;

Djelal Kadir, “Telemachos Kanthos, the Optometrist of History,”
in Exhibition Catalogue, Kanthos: The Sharp Edges of History. A. G.
Leventis Foundation Gallery, Nicosia, Cyprus (23/11/2024—09/03/2025);

Woosung Kang (co-ed. w. Yu-lin Lee), Current Comparative Literary Studies in East Asia (= Concentric 50.2);

Maya Kesrouany, “Between Writer and Militant: Arab Realism and the Accidental,” Neohelicon 51.1: 85–103;

Ulrike Kistner, “Traumatic Neuroses and Psychoneuroses in (and) Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in Towards the Limits of Freudian Thinking: Critical Edition and Readings of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. Herman Westerink, Jenny Willner & Philippe Van Haute (Leuven: Leuven UP), 197–223;

Karin Kukkonen, “Designing an Expert-Setting for Interdisciplinary Dialogue: Literary Texts as Boundary Objects,” Social Epistemology 38.1: 38–48;

Svend Erik Larsen, Between Truth and Trust: Forgiveness as a Literary and Cultural Challenge (Cambridge: Ethics P);

Xiaofan Amy Li, “Translation as Queer Practice: (De)gendering Feminist Language in the Poetry of Xi Xi and Zhai Yongming,” in Inclusion, Diversity and Innovation in Translation Education, ed. Alejandro Bolaños García-Escribano & Mazal Oaknín (London: UCL P), 157–76;

Ivana Perica (co-ed. w. Benjamin Kohlmann), The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920–2020 (London: Bloomsbury);

Tiphaine Samoyault, “La traduction durable,” Littérature 216: 41–54;

Robert Stockhammer (co-ed. w. Bernd Stiegler & Johannes Ullmaier), Brian Eno (= AugenBlick 90–91);

Susanne Strätling, “Literary Theory between Contingency and Contiguity: Yakov Druskin’s ʽLaw of Heterogeneity’,” Neohelicon 51.1: 19–31;

Ábel Tamás, “Maius opus moveo: Vergil’s Hidden Signature in Aeneid 7.45?”, Classical Philology 119.3: 429–34;

Galin Tihanov, “Desynonymizing (World) Theory and Poetics,” Philosophy and Literature 48.1: 31–47;

Elisabeth Weber, “ʽWhat We Are to Remember in the Future’: Thoughts on Elliot Wolfson’s Book on Dreams,” in New Paths in Jewish and Religious Studies: Essays in Honor of Professor Elliot R. Wolfson, ed. Glenn Dynner, Susannah Heschel & Shaul Magid (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue UP), 31–40;

Stefan Willer, “Contingencies of Localization in Literary Theory,” Neohelicon 51.1: 78–84;

Robert J. C. Young, “Winging It with Wittgenstein and Benjamin,” Neohelicon 51.1: 33–56;

John Zilcosky, “The End of Drawing: Kafka, Jugendstil, and Losing Weight in All Directions,” The Germanic Review 99.2: 144–71.