Anne Duprat, member of the ICLA theory committee, and Alison James have co-edited the collective volume Figures of Chance II: Chance in Theory and Practice (Routledge). The companion volume to Figures of Chance I: Chance in Literature and the Arts (16th–21st Centuries), the book proposes a multidisciplinary analysis of cultural phenomena related to notions of chance and contingency. Partly building on the Committee’s 2021 annual workshop “Théories littéraires du hasard et de la contingence / Theorizing Chance: How Does Literary Theory Deal with Contingency?”, it reevaluates the role played by figurative representations of chance in contemporary discourses about chance and contingency.

Divya Dwivedi, current Committee member, and Shaj Mohan have co-authored a collection of essays titled Indian Philosophy, Indian Revolution: On Caste and Politics (Hurst Publishers 2024). The essays were written from 2016 to 2023, when India’s democratic institutions were subverted and caste-based oppression overflowed into public space—killing and menacing the lower castes of all religions, minorities, women, students and the media.

This book chronicles the ascending oppression of democracy in India, a veritable biography of authoritarianism. Dwivedi and Mohan reject simplistic accounts of India’s politics as the opposition between ‘Hindu majoritarian nationalism’ and ‘the religious minorities’, or between ‘Hindu fundamentalism’ and ‘religious pluralism’. They propose instead a genuinely transformative account of Indian politics, grounded in political philosophy and in the lower- caste majority position.

What does revolution mean where the constitutional promise of equality is betrayed daily by the millennia- old inequality of caste? What does politics mean where religion serves as the justification for descent- based enslavement and indignity? Revolution has only one sense in India, the annihilation of caste; and ‘citizen’ has only one sense, the people of the state shedding caste and racism.

The proceedings of the 2021 workshop of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory, “Theorizing Chance: How Does Literary Theory Deal with Contingency?” (chaired by Anne Duprat and Alexandre Gefen at the University of Paris 3), have been published as Theoria Accidentiae, in Neohelicon 51, Issue 1.

Marco Caracciolo’s book, Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities, published by Nebraska University Press in 2022, won the 2024 Barbara Perkins and George Perkins Prize. Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities provides a significant exploration of contemporary narratives of the ecological crisis by focusing on slowness as a distinctive quality of narrative and its embodied reception to envision the interconnectedness of human communities and the nonhuman world. With this book, Caracciolo, who is the current Committee member, makes an outstanding contribution to the study of narrative through an innovative and sophisticated investigation of the challenge that climate as a complex nonlinear system poses to the human apprehension of environmental emergency.

More details about the prize can be found HERE.

Rok Benčin, current Committee member, has published the book Rethinking the Concept of World: Towards Transcendental Multiplicity (Edinburgh UP 2024). By engaging with the work of modern and contemporary philosophers and writers, in particular G. W. Leibniz, Alain Badiou, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Rancière, and Marcel Proust, the book proposes a new understanding of these worlds as overlapping transcendental frameworks consisting of fictional structures that frame ontological multiplicity. Examining political conflicts and aesthetic interferences that exist between divergent worlds today, he reconsiders the way political and artistic practices reconfigure contemporary experiences of worldliness.

Rethinking the Concept of World is available in open access here.

An updated programme of the workshop “European Centers and Peripheries in the Political Novel”, co-organised by the current Committee member Ivana Perica, is now ONLINE. The workshop, which is part of the Horizon Europe-project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe” (CAPONEU), will include a presentation by another Committee member, Natalya Bekhta, and will take place in at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (Berlin), 6-7 June 2024.

Programme:

Thursday, 6 Jun 2024

13.00

• Welcome & Introduction
• Alina Bako (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu/Romania): Spatial representations and circulation of political ideas. The case of the Romanian novel
  Respondent: Paul Stewart (University of Nicosia/Cyprus)
• Charles Sabatos (Yeditepe University/Turkey): Reimagining Political Peripheries in Pišťanek’s and Boldizar’s Siberian Slovakia
  Respondent: Nina Weller (ZfL)

15.15

• Mónika Dánél (Eötvös Loránd University Budapest/Hungary): Multilingual Minority: Poetical Decomposition of the Embodied Dictatorial Legacy (Andrea Tompa’s The Hangman’s House, 2010)
  Respondent: Philipp Wegmann (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/Germany)
• Alexandra Irimia (University of Bonn/Germany): Bureaucracies of Memory. Institutionalized History in Four Contemporary European Novels
  Respondent: Stephen Shapiro (University of Warwick/United Kingdom)

17.15

• Discussion of text excerpts
  (Closed session for workshop participants only)

Friday, 7 Jun 2024

9.00

• Brînduşa Nicolaescu (Bucharest University/Romania): A Political Novel between the Periphery and the Center: The Black Envelope by Norman Manea (1986/1995)
  Respondent: Natalya Bekhta (Tampere Institute for Advanced Study/Finland) [Online]
• Stefan Segi (Czech Academy of Sciences Prague/Czech Republic): A Kidnapped East. The Tragedy of Western Europe from the perspective of a Czech populist novelist
  Respondent: Błażej Warkocki (Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań/Poland)

11.00

• Discussion of text excerpts
  (Closed session for workshop participants only)

12.30

• Final discussion

Michel Chaouli, former committee member, has published a new book on “poetic criticism”. Written in the mode of a philosophical essay, Chaouli’s Something Speaks to Me (2024, University of Chicago Press) draws on a wide range of writers, artists, and thinkers to describe a mode of criticism based on three moments: Something speaks to me. I must tell you about it. But I don’t know how. The heart of criticism, no matter its form, lies in these surges of thoughts and feelings. Criticism arises from the fundamental need to share what overwhelms us.

Reflecting on these dimensions of poetic experience, Something Speaks to Me is less concerned with joining academic debates than communicating the urgency of criticism.

Zaal Andronikashvili, current committee member, is co-hosting an international conference on Evald Ilyenkov’s (1924–1979) intellectual legacy. The conference focuses on a central concern of Ilyenkov’s work: the concept of the ideal. What are ideals? What is the relation of the ideal to images and imagination? What are the radical and utopian potentialities of the ideal today? And what place does the ideal hold in materialist dialectics? The conference, co-organised with Matthias Schwartz, Isabel Jacobs and Martin Küpper, will take place on 15-17 May 2024 at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung in Berlin.

More information about the conference and the full programme can be found HERE.

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.