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.

Péter Hajdu, former Committee member and one of the editors-in-chief of Neohelicon, is inviting contributions to the international conference dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the journal.

In the conference, research papers should be presented that are connected to Neohelicon’s half-century history and should revisit or further elaborate a topic among the numerous thematic issues, clusters or mini-clusters, or even a single but especially important paper from the journal. Any topic ever discussed in Neohelicon can be revisited, but the specific stress of the conference will be on the following topics:

> Youth in literature (1985/2)
> Literatures of regions or areas (among others both issues of 1996)
> Ecocritical approaches to literature (2009/2, 2017/2)
> Concepts of world literature (2011/2)

Deadline for submissions: March 31, 2023. The conference will take place during 28-30 August 2023 in Szeged, Hungary. Further details can be found here.

Committee member Karin Kukkonen has launched a new research project on «Jeu du roman» at the University of Oslo. The project seeks to shed light on how literary games in the French 17th-century salons contributed to establishing the novel as a genre. The project combines literary studies, anthropology and creative writing and, by re-enacting some of these 400 years-old games, it aims to reconstruct part of the context for the rise of the novel. Further information can be found here.

Committee member Alexandre Gefen is co-organising (with Caroline D. Laurent, Denis Peschanski and Anne-Marie Picard) the colloquium on fictions of terrorism. The even will consider the way in which French society has been able to recapture, through narratives (testimonies or works of fiction), the terrorist attacks of 2015 and how this narrative engagement with the attacks compare to the post-9/11 United States.

The colloquium will take place on November 15-17, 2023 at the American University of Paris and Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. Deadline for proposing papers: 1 March 2023. Further details can be found here.

Committee member Ivana Perica has assumed a new post as associate researcher in the HORIZON 2022 project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe” (2023-2027). Launched on 1 February 2023, this consortium project examines how a specific literary genre (political novel) in various national and cultural contexts deals with political issues and thereby shapes the perception of local and global politics. In particular, the project aims to understand how perceptions formed by different beliefs, values, traditions, economy, history, culture, age and gender are reflected in the political novel, and how and why this literary genre re-emerges as a social factor today.

Join the project’s kick-off event on February 17, 2023, at 10 a.m. CET at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb (conference hall) and online.