Anne Duprat, member of the ICLA theory committee, has co-edited, with Fiona McIntosh Varjabédian and Anne-Gaëlle Weber, the edited volume Figures of Chance I: Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th–21st Centuries) (Routledge). Offering a transhistorical approach, the book will serve as a reference work on the evolution of literary and artistic representations of chance and contingency. Alongside its multidisciplinary companion volume (Figures of Chance II), it considers how the projective and predictive capacity of societies is shaped by representations and cultural models of a reality that is understood, to varying degrees, to be contingent, unpredictable, or chaotic. Giving special emphasis to the French context while also developing broad cross-cultural comparisons, this volume examines the dialogue between evolving conceptions and changing representations of chance, from Renaissance figures of Fortune to the data-driven world of the present. Written by recognized specialists of each of the periods studied, it identifies and historicizes the main fictional and factual modes of portraying, narrating, and comprehending chance in the West.

Ivana Perica, current Committee member, has co-edited with Benjamin Kohlmann a volume on The Political Uses of Literature: Global Perspectives and Theoretical Approaches, 1920-2020 (Bloomsbury 2024). Drawing on a global history of politicized writing, the book explores literature’s utility as a mode of activism and aesthetic engagement with the political challenges of the current moment.

Here is a selection of studies published by current and former members of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory in 2023:

Zaal Andronikashvili, “Constitutional Origins of Ethnic Nationalism: Cultural Aporia of a Nation-State,” Telos 202: 123–44;

Natalya Bekhta, “Narrating the Future: A World-Literary Take on the Crisis of Imagination and the Novel,” Poetics Today 44.3: 463–86;

Rok Benčin, “Art between Fetishism and Melancholy in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory,” Estudios de Filosofía 68: 31–43;

Rok Benčin, “Adornos Monadologie,” in Unversöhnlichkeiten: Einübungen in Adornos Minima Moralia, eds. Pierre Buhlmann, Tobias Nikolaus Klass, and Philipp Nolz (Wien: Verlag Turia + Kant), 168–87.

Vladimir Biti, “(Anti)Barbarous Empires: J. M. Coetzee’s Iconoclasm in Waiting for the Barbarians,” European Review 31.1: 9–16;

Marco Caracciolo, “Remediating Video Games in Contemporary Fiction: Literary Form and Intermedial Transfer,” Games and Culture 18.5: 664–83;

Marco Caracciolo, Contemporary Narrative and the Spectrum of Materiality, Berlin: De Gruyter;

Anne Duprat, “Sequence in French, Italian, and Spanish Literature (1500–1800),” in Handbook of Diachronic Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn, John Pier, and Wolf Schmid (Berlin: De Gruyter), 420–42;

Divya Dwivedi (ed.), “Caste and Racism in India” (= Critical Philosophy of Race 11.1);

Alexandre Gefen (ed.), Créativités artificielles – La littérature et l’art à l’heure de l’intelligence artificielle (Dijon: Les Presses du Réel);

Davide Giuriato (co-ed. w. Claas Morgenroth and Sandro Zanetti), Noten zum “Schreiben”: Für Martin Stingelin zum 60. Geburtstag (Leiden: Brill);

Jernej Habjan, “Free Indirect Jane Eyre: Brontë’s Peculiar Use of Free Indirect Speech, and German and Slovenian Attempts to Resolve It,” in Matthew Reynolds et al., Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers), 703–20;

Péter Hajdu, “Hungarian Writers in the Interwar USA: The Fiction of József Reményi and Áron Tamási,” Neohelicon 50.1: 207–24;

Djelal Kadir, “Plague, Pestilence, Pandemic: Keywords for a Cultural Epidemiology of the Present,” Review of International American Studies 16.2: 67-88;

Maya Issam Kesrouany, “Critical Hope: Critique in the Works of Husayn Muruwwa and His Grandson Rabih Mroué,” Critical Times 6.1: 85–113;

Karin Kukkonen, “Literature as Uncertainty Practice: An Anomaly at the End of Literature,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 97.4: 1143–52;

Françoise Lavocat (co-ed. w. Alison James & Akihiro Kubo), The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief (New York: Routledge);

Xiaofan Amy Li, “Risky Masquerades: The Play of Masks in Yukio Mishima’s Confessions and Qiu Miaojin’s Crocodile,” Comparative Literature Studies 60.4: 719–45;

Ivana Perica, “The Male Capital and Its Female Provinces: Ivan Olbracht’s O Anně, rusé proletářce (On Anna, the Red Proletarian, 1925),” Brücken 30.1: 41–61;

Ivana Perica and Benjamin Kohlmann, eds.: “Peripheral Europes.” Special issue of Critical Quarterly 65.4;

Matthew Reynolds et al., Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers);

Tiphaine Samoyault, “Communes créatrices,” Critique 911: 302–11;

Robert Stockhammer, Welt – Erde – Globus: Zur Philologie der Erdliteratur (Konstanz: Konstanz UP);

Galin Tihanov, “Alexandre Kojève: Adventures between Philosophy and Wisdom,” Thesis Eleven 178.1: 66–71;

Elisabeth Weber, “ʽEverything is Breath’: Critical Plant Studies’ Metaphysics of Mixture,” SubStance 52.1: 117–24;

Stefan Willer, “ʽWir treten vor Euch auf’. Präsenz und Referenz in Goethes Theaterreden,” in Gegenwartskonzepte 1750–1800, ed. Julia Mierbach and Eva Stubenrauch (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag), 163–79;

Robert J. C. Young, “The Soviet Invention of Postcolonial Studies,” boundary 2 50.2: 133–56.

Françoise Lavocat, former member of the ICLA theory committee, has co-edited, with Alison James and Akihiro Kubo, The Routledge Handbook of Fiction and Belief. The book offers a reevaluation of the relationship between fiction and belief, surveying key debates in narratology, cultural studies, religious studies, and political science. The handbook draws on global research to investigate the historically variable understandings of fictionality, and allows readers to grasp the role of fictions in our understanding of the world.

Former Committee member and current ICLA Research Development Committee chair Matthew Reynolds and his team of co-authors have published the book Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages. Freely available on the website of Open Book Publishers, the volume and its accompanying visual resources approach Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre through the prism of its numerous translations. At almost 900 pages, the book masterfully showcases prismatic translation as a novel approach in literary and translation studies that Reynolds and his colleagues, including Former and Honorary Committee President Sowon Park, have introduced at the 2016 Committee workshop on “Prismatic Translation.”

Ivana Perica, current Committee member, is co-organising a workshop on “European Centers and Peripheries in the Political Novel”, to take place on April 25-26, 2024 in Berlin (Germany). This workshop is part of the European Union-sponsored Horizon Europe-project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe”. It will focus on the question of how center-periphery-dynamics are articulated in explicitly political terms by the political novel. The workshop aims to put special emphasis on examining Europe as a combined and uneven formation characterized by economic, social, cultural, and literary asymmetries. It invites investigations of the question of what formal and textual features are common, if not typical, of literary capitals (centers) on the one hand and margins and peripheries on the other, as well as the question of how literary centers and peripheries respond to political novels – and how these literary texts, their authors, publishers, and reading publics anticipate, react to, and interact with these responses.

Deadline for abstracts: 10 December 2023. Further details HERE.

Current Committee member, Divya Dwivedi and Shaj Mohan have published an urgent piece on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war and the resulting catastrophe unfolding in Gaza. The piece is published with the journal “Philosophy World Democracy” and can be read HERE.

Susanne Strätling, current member of the ICLA literary theory committee, has co-edited, with I. Kalinina and Yu. Murasheva, the collection Энергия: трансформации силы, метаморфозы понятия [Energy: Transformations of Power, Metamorphoses of a Concept]. The collection features contributions by British, Israeli, German, Russian and Swiss scholars and traces migrations of the concept “energy” across disciplines, its semantic shifts and symbolism in the areas as diverse as political, ecological and cultural concerns of today.

The time of the annual workshop of the Research Committee on Literary Theory of the International Comparative Literature Association is fast approaching. This year’s workshop, “Tropes of Theory”, is taking place in Berlin during 20-21 October 2023 and it is hosted by Zaal Andronikashvili (ZfL) and Susanne Strätling (FU Berlin) in cooperation with EXC 2020 “Temporal Communities. Doing Literature in a Global Perspective.”

Venue: Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL), Pariser Str. 1, 10719 Berlin.

Programme

October 20
10:00 Welcome
10:15-12:15 Panel I: Figuring Theory
Chair: Susanne Strätling
Robert Young (New York University): Theory as Trope
Divya Dwivedi (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi): Theory and the Trope of Reading
Rok Benčin (ZRC SAZU Ljubljana): The Miracle of Analogy and the Displacement of Concepts
Robert Stockhammer (LMU Munich): Synecdoche and Representative Anecdote (Kenneth Burke) in Theory
12:15 Lunch

13:30-15:30 Panel II: Mining the History of Tropology
Chair: Natalya Bekhta (Tampere University)
Amy Li Xiaofan (University College London): Illumination: The Solar Trope in Literary Theory from a Comparative Perspective
Susanne Strätling (FU Berlin): Poetics as Energetics? Trajectories of Modern Literary Theory
Anne Duprat (Université de Picardie-Jules Verne): Elegance, or: How Stylish Can Literary Theory Be?
Maya Kesrouany (NYU Abu Dhabi): Figural Hauntings in Contemporary Arabic Literary Theory
15:30 Coffee break

16:00-17:30 Panel III: Reading Tropes
Chair: Maya Kesrouany
Stefan Willer (HU Berlin): Ties: Metaphors of Postcritique
Woosung Kang (Seoul National University): Reading Freud Reading: How Blindness Drives Theories
Marco Caracciolo (Ghent University): Tropes for Complexity in Literary Theory

October 21
10:00-11:30: Panel IV: Politics of Tropes
Chair: Anne Duprat
Ivana Perica (ZfL): Polysemy of ‘the Political’
Davide Giuriato (Universität Zürich): Drastic: Breakdown of Tropes? (Jankelevitch, Abbate, Dath)
Zaal Andronikashvili (ZfL): Small and Minor: Figures of Minority in the System of World Literature
11:30 Closing remarks
12:30-13:30 Business meeting

Proceedings of the 22nd Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association (2019) are now out! Edited by the former comittee member Péter Hajdu and Xiaohong Zhang, the volume contains a selection of papers to discuss the four hottest fields of the discipline: the future of comparison, the position of national and diaspora literature in the context of globalization, the importance of translation, and the concepts of world literature. The contributions cover huge geographical and cultural areas, but pay special attention to the connections between Western (both American and European) and Asian (especially Indian and East-Asian) literatures. More details here.