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.

Here is a selection of studies published by current and former members of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory in 2022:

Zaal Andronikashvili, “A Tale of Two Europes,” in Realities, Challenges, Visions? Towards a New Foreign Cultural and Educational Policy, ed. Caroline Y. Robertson-von Trotha (Karlsruhe: KIT Scientific Publishing), 43–54;

Rok Benčin, “Verso un materialismo stilistico,” in Sulla soglia delle forme: genealogia, estetica, politica della materia, ed. Anna Montebugnoli (Milan: Meltemi), 91–106;

Marco Caracciolo (co-ed. w. Marlene Karlsson Marcussen & David Rodriguez), Narrating Nonhuman Spaces: Form, Story, and Experience beyond Anthropocentrism (New York: Routledge);

Divya Dwivedi (ed.), Virality of Evil: Philosophy in the Time of a Pandemic (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield);

Alexandre Gefen ( co-ed. w. Loïc Bourdeau), “Sous contrôle” : fictions et contre-fictions du contrôle social (= Nouvelles Études Francophones 37.1);

Davide Giuriato, “Kind/Kindheit,” in Handbuch Idylle, ed. Jan Gerstner, Jakob C. Heller, & Christian Schmitt (Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler), 465–67;

Jernej Habjan (ed.), Writing the Himalaya in Polish and Slovenian (= Slavica TerGestina 28);

Hermann Herlinghaus, “Affectivity beyond ‘Bare Life’: On the Non-Tragic Return of Violence in Latin American Film,” in A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture: Second Edition, ed. Sara Castro-Klaren (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons), 537–54;

Djelal Kadir (co-ed. w. Theo D’haen & David Damrosch), The Routledge Companion to World Literature: Second Edition (London: Routledge);

Woosung Kang, “A Fantasy of Survival and Class Stink in Parasite,” Unitas 95.2: 189–212;

Maya Kesrouany, “Theatre of the Probable: Saʿdallah Wannous, Rabih Mroué, and the Spectator,” Contemporary Levant 7.1: 39–53;

Ulrike Kistner, “(Un)Doing Critical Theory in Pretoria, 1981–1987,” History of Humanities 7.2: 195–213;

Karin Kukkonen (w. Dorothee Birke & Eva von Contzen), “Chrononarratology,” Narrative 30.1: 26–46;

Renate Lachmann, Rhetorik und Wissenspoetik: Studien zu Texten von Athanasius Kircher bis Miljenko Jergović (Bielefeld: transcript);

Svend Erik Larsen (co-ed. w. Steen Bille Jørgensen & Margaret R. Higonnet), Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives. Volume II: Pathways through Realism (Amsterdam: John Benjamins);

Xiaofan Amy Li, “A Post-Orientalist Turn: Pascal Quignard, Michèle Métail, and China,” in The Western Reinvention of Chinese Literature, 1910–2010, ed. Zong-qi Cai & Stephen Roddy (Leiden: Brill), 195–222;

Sowon Park, “Deixis and Dissociation: On the Adaptive Power of Dissociated ‘I’s,” Modern Fiction Studies 68.4: 668–86;

Ivana Perica, “The Revolutionary Pulp Fiction,” Wiener Digitale Revue 4: doi.org/10.25365/wdr-04-02-04;

Anders Pettersson, “On Literary Meaning,” Neohelicon 49.1: 167–81;

Ruth Ronen (co-ed. w. Rona Cohen), After Life: Recent Philosophy and Death (= Angelaki 27.1);

Robert Stockhammer, “Die Dorfgeschichte in Zeiten von Globalisierung und Anthropozän, ” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 47.2: 403–12;

Susanne Strätling, “Wärmelehren der Literatur: Energiemetaphern in Lev Tolstojs Krieg und Frieden,” Figurationen 23.2: 43–64;

Galin Tihanov (ed.), Universal Localities: The Languages of World Literature (Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler);

Stefan Willer, “Verhinderte Zukunft,” in Figurationen von Unsicherheit, ed. Eryk Noji et al. (Wiesbaden: Springer VS), 65–84;

Robert J. C. Young, “Resituating Nikolai Marr,” Interventions 24.5: 621–37.

Galin Tihanov, Former and Honorary President of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory, is the editor of Universal Localities: The Languages of World Literature. The latest volume of J. B. Metzler’s “Schriften zur Weltliteratur / Studies on World Literature” book series, this collection of essays discusses world literature in the context of bilingualism, supranational languages, and dialects. The chapters examine the larger social and political stakes of articulating ideas of world literature in the intellectual interplay between philology, anthropology, law, and ecohumanities. Categories such as universality, locality, difference, foreignness, and openness are viewed in their relation to language and its embeddedness in history.

ICLA theory committee member Alexandre Gefen has teamed up with data designer and cartographer Guillemette Crozet to co-author the book La littérature : une infographie (Literature: An Infography). Published by CNRS Èditions, the book offers a new kind of graphic writing that is as rich as it is playful. Thanks to data visualization, readers have the opportunity to immerse themselves in the universe of literature, meeting its history, its genres, its authors, its works and their circulation, but also its readers.

Svend Erik Larsen, former member of the ICLA theory committee, is co-editor, with Steen Bille Jørgensen and Margaret R. Higonnet, of Volume II of Landscapes of Realism: Rethinking Literary Realism in Comparative Perspectives. Subtitled Pathways through Realism, this collection of essays is the thirty-third tome of the Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, the ICLA sponsored book series published by John Benjamins. Pathways through Realism shows in its four core essays and twenty-four case studies four major pathways through the landscapes of realism: the psychological pathways focusing on emotion and memory; the referential pathways highlighting the role of materiality; the formal pathways demonstrating the dynamics of formal experiments; and the geographical pathways exploring the worlding of realism from the nineteenth century to the present.