Marco Caracciolo, member of the ICLA theory committee, has written the book On Soulsring Worlds: Narrative Complexity, Digital Communities, and Interpretation in Dark Souls and Elden Ring. Published by Routledge, this is the first book-length study of FromSoftware games. Arguing that the games are strategically positioned in relation to contemporary audiences and designed to tap into the new digital forms of interpretation, Caracciolo studies the games in the contexts of the posthuman condition and the ethics of gameplay.

Svend Erik Larsen, former member of the ICLA Research Committee on Literary Theory, has authored the book Between Truth and Trust: Forgiveness as a Literary and Cultural Challenge. Published by Ethics Press, the book approaches forgiveness as a speech act based on a precarious mutual acceptance between victims and perpetrators. Literature, as a creative and imaginary medium of expression, is integrated throughout the book as a vehicle of exploring a deeper understanding of the cultural practice of forgiveness. The book draws on literary texts from different cultures and religions across the globe; from antiquity and early Christianity to the present.

Zurich, January 31 – February 1, 2025

This year’s workshop of the Research Committee on Literary Theory of the International Comparative Literature Association will take place in Zurich at the end of January 2025. Co-organised by Divya Dwiwedi (Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi) and Davide Giuriato (Universität Zürich), the workshop will focus on the topic of animals, animal tropes and bestiaries – as lists, concepts, classifications – of literary theory. The workshop venue is the historic “Cabaret Voltaire”.

Programme TBA

Divya Dwivedi in conversation with Matti Kangaskoski, 9 October, Helsinki

In this coversation, organised by the current committee member Natalya Bekhta in co-operation with Tekstin talo, philosopher Divya Dwivedi and writer Matti Kangaskoski will discuss the idea of anastasis. The conversation will take place at Tekstin talo in Helsinki (Finland), 14-16:00, 9 October 2024.

Ana-stasis in its secular sense means: coming over stasis. It is the rising up from the impasse of politics, which comprehends the whole world in its grip today – through global financial institutions and regimes of technology that sustain structural inequality, unemployment, disease, homelessness, and misery. Philosophy must name the laws that comprehend this stasis. Politics must be the fight for freedom for all people without exception. Then revolution would not remain the melancholic name of past events that appear “failed” in the rear view mirror of post-world-war world order, nor the name of counter-movements of identity without teleographs. Then revolution would be the fight to change the comprehending laws rather than merely resist the componential laws of countries, localities, sectors. Revolution would be: Ana-stasis.

The event is sponsored by Tekstin talo and the Research Council of Finland (via the research project “Utopia and Eastern European Literature after 1989“).

Workshop, 16–17 January 2025, Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin (ZfL)

This workshop is part of the European Union-sponsored Horizon Europe-project “The Cartography of the Political Novel in Europe”, involving current Committee member Ivana Perica. Organised by the ZfL in cooperation with the University of Nicosia, it will take place in Berlin as a hybrid event.

The workshop organisers seek short input presentations (10 min max) based on pre-circulated papers that engage with the proposed topic through theoretical or methodological considerations, analyses of novels, or studies of literary fields. Each presentation will be followed by a response to leave plenty of room for discussion.

Please check the full CfP for details HERE.

Deadline for abstracts: September 15th 2024; full papers are expected before December 10th 2024.

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.