John Zilcosky, Former and Honorary President of the Committee, has co-edited, with Teresa Valentini and Angela Weiser, the book Alternative Temporalities: The Emancipatory Power of Narrative. Published with University of Toronto Press, this collection of essays reveals how modern literature can help us rethink temporal categories and practices to resist normative time and foster diverse and inclusive temporalities. The book analyzes literary representations of time that challenge dominant temporalities and intersect different disciplines such as gender and sexuality studies, trauma and Indigenous studies, race and identity, and religion. Ultimately, Alternative Temporalities aims to create new theories as well as practices that may foster more diverse and inclusive ways of perceiving and embodying time.

Djelal Kadir, ICLA Theory Committee Chair, Emeritus has published a new book, Solitude: Apocryphal Posts from Distant Archives (Ethics International Press, UK, 2025).

What is solitude? How does it manifest itself? How is solitude related to writing and reading? How do the core values of ethics, politics, religion, and aesthetics manifest themselves in the face of solitude, whether in mythological time, in history, or in our own era of telecommunications and instant connectivity? This volume explores these questions and, by way of demonstration, dramatizes critical predicaments of solitude through thirty-nine letters.

The letters in this collection, ranging from mythological and epic antiquity through the twentieth century, are based on thorough scholarly research and written through the voices of mythical, literary, religious, scientific, and historical figures as the archival and documentary record allows us to understand them in their respective crises of extreme solitude. The letters aim to capture the perennial attempts to deal with the paradoxes of solitude as timeless, universal human condition, a condition most common, yet one that must be experienced alone. Each letter is introduced with an explanatory context—philological in the case of mythological figures, and historical when writers from the annals of history are purported to be writing.

This unusual and distinctive meditation on the pervasive phenomenon of solitude will resonate productively in the study of philosophy, literature, history, and the arts and humanities in general, as well as with readers who have considered or experienced solitude.

Committee member Ivana Perica is the author of Politics, Literature and Tertium Datur: Socialist Central Europe, 1928–1968 (Bloomsbury). In this alternate framing of Eastern and Western European literary and political afterlives of revolution between 1928 and 1968, Perica combines the transfer of ideas between historical turning points with a comparative reading of political literatures in the European East and West to address the disparity between the abundance of scholarly accounts of 1968 and the simultaneous forgetting of developments in the interwar period that peaked around 1928. Offering new readings of Bertolt Brecht, Ivan Olbracht, and August Cesarec among others, her book excavates a series of problems, optics, and styles characteristic of the forgotten episodes in the literary history of the twentieth century.

28th July – 1st August, 2025, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Committee will convene for a workshop during the 2025 ICLA Congress at Goyang City / Dongguk University (Seoul). The workshop topic is “Literary Theory and Technology” and it is open for audience participation.

Literary theory has always maintained a complex relationship with the technological aspects of the composition and reception of literary texts. In Poetics, Aristotle dismissed the whole technical side of staging a text, from scenography to actor direction, committing it to the inferior skills of “show organizers”. Of course, this neglect of technique was largely compensated for, from the Renaissance onwards, by the inclusion of various discourses of expertise (in architecture, painting, dance, music, as well as politics, morality, science and economics), which de facto intervened in the abstract theorization of literary forms. In Europe, the Romantic period was the one that saw, with the reproducibility of the work of art, the massive entry of technology into the production and circulation of the literary text. But it was in the 20th century that technology itself became a central object of thought for literary theory, as a main factor in power relations between individuals, communities and states, and therefore as a structuring element of their representation in modern cultural imaginaries – particularly in the colonial and then post-colonial contexts.

How does this theorization of the technological in literature play out, before as well as in the age of digital production of texts, before as well as during the emerging presence of artificial intelligence in their composition and processing? How did the technological change our understanding of literature? And does the meaning of the term itself change, now that the material, concrete dimension of the technical gesture in the making of the work is once again being erased, to make way for a new kind of abstraction, characteristic of the “liquid” environment in which stories, images, words, fictions and memes are circulated and exchanged?

The Research Committee’s three sessions at the Seoul ICLA/AILC Congress 2025 workshop will focus on all the issues raised for a comparative literary theory by the fundamental shifts in thinking about technology. We will be enquiring in particular at the way in which literary theory accounts for the technologies and affordances of literary forms (Karin Kukkonen, Marco Caracciolo, Anne Duprat, Mara Santi), at the poetics of data processing (Sieghild Bogumil-Notz, Rok Bençin) and at the complex relationship between literary techniques and technologies and their theoretization (Stefan Willer, Zaal Andronikashvili, Susanne Strätling).

Full workshop programme is available HERE and abstracts HERE.

The proceedings of the 2019 workshop of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory, “Decolonizing the Theory Canon” are out! Guest edited by Divya Dwivedi and Robert J. C. Young, they have been published as a special issue on “Decolonising the Theory Canon: Literary Theory Outside the Norton Anthology” with Parallax 30, Issue 3 (2024).

Current committee member Natalya Bekhta is looking for candidates to fill a funded three-year doctoral position in her research project on “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989” (Tampere University, Finland). The project, funded by the Research Council of Finland, studies utopian imagination of the 20th and 21st centuries in Eastern Europe with a larger aim to deprovincialise literatures of this region by (a) mapping anew the existing geographies of comparison, (b) developing a comparative theory of literary semi-peripheries, and (c) revising the current understanding of the novel as a globally-dominant genre. Thematic focus on utopia serves as a strategic frame and a socio-cultural interest, through which this set of research problems is approached.

Deadline for applications: 7 July 2025. For further details click HERE.

2 June, John W. Boyer Center, Paris

Current Committee President, Anne Duprat (Université de Picardie Jules Verne/IUF), together with former Committee members, Alexandre Gefen (THALIM) and Françoise Lavocat (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle/IUF), will participate in a roundtable, marking the publication of the book Le Hasard. Littérature, arts, sciences, philosophie (eds. Anne Duprat, Alison James, Fiona McIntosh-Varjabédian, and Anne-Gaëlle Weber; CNRS 2025). See also the book’s English edition: Figures of Chance I & Figures of Chance II (Routledge 2024).

Rountable discussion will include contributions from Ariane Bayle (Lyon 3/IUF), Emmanuel Bouju (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle/IUF), Dominique Brancher (Yale University), Anaïs Goudmand (Sorbonne Université), and William Marx (Collège de France). The roundtable will take place on 2 June 2025, at 6 pm at the John W. Boyer Center, Paris. Free entrance but registration is required.

Vladimir Biti, Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, is the author of Perpetrators’ Legacies: Post-imperial Condition in Sebald and McEwan (Routledge). The book presents Winfried Georg Sebald and Ian McEwan as paradigmatic post-imperial writers who strive to disentangle themselves from the hierarchies of power inherited from the age of imperialism. To this end, Biti argues, both writers undertake a subtle detachment from the analogously implicated subject positions of their protagonists. Such a detachment from familiar protagonists, however, requires the consent of unknown readers with whom the writers forge a long-distance solidarity, connective association or complicitous alliance. Thus, in order to exempt themselves from one complicity, Sebald and McEwan in effect enter another one.

28th July – 1st August, 2025, Seoul, Republic of Korea

Committee will convene for a workshop during the 2025 ICLA Congress at Goyang City / Dongguk University (Seoul). The workshop topic is “Literary Theory and Technology” and it is open for audience participation.

Abstract TBA

11-13 March 2025, Berlin

Stefan Willer, Former Committee member and Secretary, has oranised in collaboration with Caroline Sauter an international, multilingual and comparative conference on “Translation and Flight”. The conference will take place on March 11-13, 2025 at Humboldt University in Berlin and will feature presentations by Committee member Tiphaine Samoyault and Honorary Committee President Robert Stockhammer.

Full programme available HERE.