Deadline: December 15, 2024
We are delighted to announce a Call for Papers for an upcoming graduate student conference “Slavic and World Literatures,” hosted by the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University on March 8th, 2025.
Over the past two decades, the concept of “world literature” has been in the spotlight of scholarly attention. This influential discourse, which can be traced back to Goethe’s idea of Weltliteratur, was put forth by three groundbreaking studies that came out at the turn of the 21st century: Pascale Casanova’s La République mondiale des Lettres (1999), Franco Moretti’s pair of essays “Conjectures on World Literature” (2000) and “More Conjectures” (2004), and David Damrosch’s What Is World Literature? (2003). They each propose a distinct conceptualization and theoretical method: adopting a sociological perspective, Casanova analyzes the diffusion of literary ideas from peripheral locations to the center, which she clearly identifies with Paris; Moretti describes an opposite route of circulation: from a European core to a global periphery; and Damrosch comes up with a threefold definition of the discipline, which states that world literature is “an elliptical refraction of national literatures,” “writing that gains in translation,” and “a mode of reading” rather than a set canon of mostly Western texts (281). This approach to world literature, which pays close attention to foreign reception of works and the mobility of literary artifacts, has become a subject of lively debate in academia, stirring up reactions from scholars of national literatures, area studies, postcolonialism, and translation studies. Slavicists are often absent from these discussions or focus solely on the Soviet model of world literature, whose best expression is the activity of the Gorky Institute of World Literature. For its own part, world literature as a field of study has not tended to incorporate Slavic literatures into the discussion. With this conference, our aim is to bridge this “communication gap” and bring these conversations into the present of Slavic Studies, while also bringing Slavic literatures into focus for scholars of world literature.
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