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.

Divya Dwivedi, member of the ICLA theory committee, is the editor of the special issue on “Caste and Racism in India” for Critical Philosophy of Race (11:1, 2023). The special issue draws attention to the absence of the caste system from the “broad multidisciplinary project of critical philosophy of race” and paves way for a focused engagement with what has so far remained an “isolated object of ‘South Asia studies'”.

Committee member Alexandre Gefen has edited a volume on the topic of renewed and widespread interest: Créativités artificielles – La littérature et l’art à l’heure de l’intelligence artificielle (2023) tackles questions of the role of artificial intelligence in literature and art and the place of works, created by AI, in how we understand creativity and aesthetic value today.

In his latest book, committee member Marco Caracciolo investigates how the experience of slowness in contemporary narrative practices can create a vision of interconnectedness between human communities and the nonhuman world. Caracciolo argues that we need patience and an eye for complex patterns in order to recognize the multiple threads that link human communities and the slow-moving processes of climate and geological history. Decelerating attention offers important insight into human societies’ relations with the nonhuman materialities of Earth’s physical landscapes, ecosystems, and atmosphere. More information about Slow Narrative and Nonhuman Materialities here.

Françoise Lavocat, former member of the ICLA theory committee, has co-edited, with Alison James and Akihiro Kubo, the collection Can Fiction Change the World? Published by Legenda, the book studies the effects of fiction at different scales, from the paradoxes of individual emotional response to large-scale collective action. From Don Quixote’s delusions to Emma Bovary’s romantic daydreams, fiction has often portrayed its own effects in negative terms, while contemporary anxieties about video games and virtual worlds revive ancient fears of the confusion between fiction and reality. Beyond these representations and denunciations, this edited collection of essays demonstrates that there is ample evidence of the influence of fictional universes on real lives, identities and social practices.

The annual workshop of the AILC/ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory will take place in October 20-21, 2023 in Berlin at the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL). The workshop’s topic is “The Tropes of Theory.“

Committee member Alexandre Gefen is co-organising the international colloquium dedicated to the 25-year anniversary of the “Fabula.org” site, an important platform in Francophone literary theory.

The colloquium will take place in Paris on 2-3 June 2023. Further details can be found here.