The History of Comparative Literature in Central Europe

Prepared by Dr. Blaž Zabel and Blaž Gselman, organisers of the 22nd International Comparative Studies Colloquium

The Slovenian Society for Comparative Literature, in cooperation with the University of Ljubljana and the research group “Towards a History of Comparative Literature in a Global Perspective: Matija Murko and his International Collaborators (J6-4620),” is organising the international conference “The History of Comparative Literature in Central Europe.” The conference will take place from 5 to 7 September 2024 as part of the Vilenica International Literary Festival.

Although Central European thought has been crucial to the emergence of comparative literature as a new humanistic discipline and to its subsequent development, intellectual production from the region also known as Mitteleuropa has remained generally understudied and rarely examined within academia. The conference seeks to fill this gap, at least in part, by focusing on four main themes or topics.

The first theme will be devoted to the history of the discipline in Central Europe. We are interested in which schools, topics, or methods have been most influential in Central European comparative literature. At the same time, we will ask which of has been historically overlooked, and why. We will also have to address the question of why Central European comparative literature has remained under-represented in academic discussions on the history of the discipline.

The second theme will consider the broader intellectual context and reflect on the links between comparative literature in Central Europe and comparative literature in other regions of the world. We will look at the interactions between French littérature comparée and the comparative literature of Central Europe. As well, we will reflect on the interaction or exchanges between Central European and Russian literary studies. Lastly, we will be interested in what Central European comparative literature contributed to American comparative literature in the periods before and after the Second World War.

The third theme will reflect on the relations between centres and (semi-)peripheries within Central European comparative literature and will aim to find the main reasons for the asymmetries that have emerged in the development of comparative literature in Central European academia. In doing so, we will try to explain how inequalities in intellectual exchanges between various regions have emerged. At the same time, we will look at how comparative literature has reflected on the multilingual literary traditions of Central Europe

The fourth and final theme will be devoted to the thought of Matija Murko as an overlooked Central European scholar. We will be interested in how his work has been significant for the development of comparative literature in Central Europe and his role in the development of comparative Slavic studies. We will also consider how Murko envisaged philology as a humanistic discipline and the significance of his research on oral literature for contemporary literary studies.

Participants of the 22nd International Comparative Literature Colloquium

Varja Balžalorsky Antić is a literary theorist, poet, and translator. Between 2009 and 2021 she taught at the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the University of Ljubljana. Since 2022, she has been assistant professor of literary theory at the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature at the University of Maribor. Currently, she is a visiting professor at the Institute for Slavic Studies at the University of Vienna. Her research interests include the theory of the lyric, subjectivity in literary discourse, rhythmanalysis, modern world poetry, medieval French literature and women writers. She is the author of the monograph Lirski subjekt. Rekonceptualizacija (ZRC SAZU, English translation, Peter Lang, 2022) and of numerous scientific articles, published in international academic journals. She edited a collective volume Razprave o sodobni slovenski književnosti (ZRC SAZU, 2021). She translates form French (P. Bourdieu, J.-N. Nancy, H. Lefebvre, L. Febre, H. Michauxum, P. Quignard) and Serbian (A. Tišma, M. Pantić, L. Blašković, I. Antić). Balžalorsky Antić is the author of the poetry collection Klobuk Vere Revjakine (LUD Šerpa, 2018). 

Norbert Bachleitner (1954) is Professor emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna. He was visiting professor at various universities including the Sorbonne nouvelle in Paris and is a member of the Academia Europaea. His fields of interest include the reception of English and French literature in the German speaking area; literary translation and transfer studies; social history of literature; censorship; literature in periodicals; intertextuality, and digital literature. His most recent book publications are (ed., together with Achim Hölter and John A. McCarthy) Taking Stock – Twenty-Five Years of Comparative Literary Research (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2020); (ed.) Literary Translation, Reception, and Transfer (Proceedings of the ICLA Conference in Vienna 2016, vol. 2, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020); (ed., together with Juliane Werner) Popular Music and the Poetics of Self in Fiction (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2022); and Censorship of Literature in Austria, 1751–1848 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2022).

Ștefan Baghiu is Lecturer of Romanian Literature and Literary Theory with the Department of Romance Studies at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu and the editorial secretary of the Transilvania journal. He is also one of the coordinators of the Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel (1845-1947), the first digital archive of the Romanian modern novel available for research and public access. He has edited and coordinated several collective volumes, such as Ruralism and Literature in Romania (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019), Beyond the Iron Curtain: Revisiting the Literary System of Communist Romania (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021), and Oddities and Orthodoxies in the Philosophy of State Socialism: Science, Social Engineering, Global Dialectics (Vienna: CEU Press, forthcoming). He has published articles in Comparative Literature Studies, World Literature Studies, Studies in East European Thought, Primerjalna književnost, Transylvanian Review, Metacritic Journal, etc. In 2024 he has published his latest article on Central Europe, “Capitalist Heterotopia & Lost Social Utopia: Documenting Class, Work, and Migration in Post-Communist East-Central European Fiction.”

Max Behmer studied History and Germanic philology in Heidelberg and Krakow. Currently employed in a research group on the Polish scholar Zygmunt Lempicki (1886-1943).
He is also a doctoral candidate (Heidelberg and Wrocław) in a project focusing on the history of philology in the interwar period. 

Vladimir Biti is Chair Professor Emeritus at the University of Vienna. He is the author of twelve books, with Tracing Global Democracy: Literature, Theory, and the Politics of Trauma, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2016 (second, paperback edition 2017), Attached to Dispossession: Sacrificial Narratives in Post-imperial Europe, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018, and Post-imperial Literature: Translatio Imperii in Kafka and Coetzee, Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2021 (second, paperback edition 2024), and Perpetrators’ Legacies: Post-imperial Condition in Sebald and McEwan, New York and London: Routledge (to be published on September 30, 2024) among the most recent. He is the editor of the volumes Reexamining the National-Philological Legacy: Quest for a New Paradigm, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2014, Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017, and co-editor of The Idea of Europe: The Clash of Projections, Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021. In addition, he is co-editor of arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture and Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory. From 2016-2022, he has been the Chair of the Academy of Europe’s Literary and Theatrical Section. 

Milena Mileva Blažić is a Professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Ljubljana. She studied Comparative Literature and Slovene studies, and earned her PhD in literary studies. Her research interests include children’s literature, comparative children’s literature, fairy tales, picture books and Holocaust literature. She has participated in research projects on children’s literature and children’s rights (ethical literary criticism).  

Dr Alexandre Burin is Lecturer in French at Queen Mary University of London. He specialises in C19/C20 Francophone literatures, cultures, and the media. Before joining QMUL in September 2023, Alexandre has taught at Durham University, the University of Manchester, the University of Oxford, and King’s College London. He has published numerous articles in international journals and edited volumes, and he was the guest editor of ‘The Return of the Author’, special issue of French Studies Bulletin (Oxford UP, 2020). He also contributed to the critical editions of texts by Jean Lorrain and Maurice de Guérin. Alexandre became a Fellow of the Higher Academy in 2023. His new project is about Music, Language, and Society.

Dr. Alenka Jensterle Doležal was born in Slovenia, but from 2002 lives in Prague. At the University of Ljubljana she graduated from Slovene studies, Comparative literature, and Philosophy, and in 2000 she obtained there a PhD with a dissertation on Antigone in South- and West Slavic Drama after the Second World War. She is as an associate professor at the Institute of Ethnology and Central European and Balkan Studies at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague (Czech Republic). She lectures on Slovene literature, Slavic literatures and theory of literature. She is also the author of sex monographs (four in Slovene, one in English, one in Czech), she edited (and co- edited) five collective volumes and she published more than one hundred academic articles in the Czech, Slovene and English language. Her topics are: myth in literature, Slovene “moderna”, Slovene-Czech relations and Slovene women writers.  She is member of the Slovene-Czech project “Transfomations of intimacy in the literary discourse of Slovene “moderna”. She is also a writer: she has published five poetry collections  and three prose works. 

Sylva Fischerová initially studied philosophy and physics at Charles University but eventually switched to Classics. She is an associate professor at the Department of Greek and Latin Studies at Charles University, Faculty of Arts. Her research interests include Greek epic poetry, ancient medicine, the orality/literality problematics, the ancient novel, etc. She also writes poetry and prose (short stories, novels, and children’s books). Some of her poetry books were published in the U.K. and the USA. She is the only Czech woman writer to have been awarded the Karel Čapek Prize of the Czech PEN Club.

Róbert Gáfrik is a senior researcher and director at the Institute of World Literature of the Slovak Academy of Sciences. His research interests include theory of comparative literary studies, comparative poetics, world literature, and cultural encounters between India and Europe. His most recent books are a monograph on the image of India in Slovak literature (Zobrazovanie Indie v slovenskej literatúre, 2018) and a translation of the principal Upanishads into Slovak (Upanišady, 2024).

Blaž Gselman is a comparatist and doctoral candidate at the ZRC SAZU postgraduate school. His dissertation focuses on the literary radicalism of the American-Slovenian interwar writer Louis Adamic. His other research interests include the representation of the working class in literature, radical fiction, gender, race and class, and the theory of literary discourse. He is currently a junior researcher at the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, where he is a member of the research project Towards a History of Comparative Literature in a Global Perspective: Matija Murko and his International Collaborators (J6-4620).

Suman Gupta is Professor of Literature and Cultural History at the Open University, UK. Recent books include:  Digital India and the Poor: Policy, Technology and Society (Routledge India 2020); What is Artificial Intelligence? A Conversation between an AI Engineer and a Humanities Researcher (World Scientific Europe 2020, co-authored with Peter Tu, General Electronics Research); Political Catchphrases and Contemporary History: A Critique of New Normals (Oxford University Press 2022);and The Practical Philosophy of AI Assistants: An Engineering-Humanities Conversation (World Scientific Europe 2023, co-authored with Peter Tu).  

Jernej Habjan is a fellow at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, where he is the PI of the project “World War Literature: Historicizing the Debate on World Literature as a Debate on World War.” The project is a continuation of the work he undertook in 2020–21 as a Fung Global Fellow at Princeton University. His past essays on world literature theory have appeared in the Journal of Global History, the Journal of World Literature, Neohelicon, and South Atlantic Quarterly. Habjan’s book on Ordinary Literature Philosophy appeared in 2020 with Bloomsbury.

Péter Hajdu studied Literature, Greek and Latin at the Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary, and wrote his dissertation on late Roman epic poetry. He is a Distinguished Professor  of literary studies at Shenzen University. He is also Member of advisory boards of four international journals on literary studies (Proudy, Czech Republic; Frontiers of Narrative Studies, Germany; Recherche Litteraire/Literary Research, Belgium, Primerjalna književnost, Slovenia).

Paweł Marcinkiewicz PhD, Dlitt., Associate Professor and Director of the Institute of Literatures at the University of Opole. His interests focus on American literature and translation theory. He published three monographs: The Rhetoric of the City: Robinson Jeffers and A.R. Ammons (Peter Lang 2009), ‘Colored Alphabets’ Flutter’. John Ashbery and the Twentieth Century American Avant-Gardes (University of Opole Press 2012), and recently Literature, Translation, and the Politics of Meaning. Polish, American, and German Literary Traditions (V & R unipress, 2024). He is also a poet and translator, recipient of the prestigious Czesław Miłosz Prize, author of 10 collections of poetry and several volumes of translations from English and German.

Antoni Martí Monterde (1968) is Professor in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature at University of Barcelona. He has published several articles on Catalan and European authors: Eugeni d’Ors, Joan Estelrich, Guillermo de Torre, Feliu Formosa, Walter Benjamin, Joseph Texte, among others. As an essayist, he has published the books J. V. Foix o la solitud de l’escriptura (1998), Poética del Café. (2007, 2021 Un somni Europeu. Història intel·lectual de la Literatura Comparada (2011), El Far de Løndstrup. Assaig sobre la memòria moral els espais (2015), Joan Fuster. La paraula Assaig (2019) and París, Madrid, New-York: Les ciutats de lluny de Josep Pla (2019). As a travel writer, L’erosió / La erosión (2001-2021); L’home impacient (Diaries 1996-1998) (2019). He has edited Xavier de Maistre, Joseph Texte, Victor Klemperer, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Robert Curtius, Joaep Pla, Joan Fuster, among others. His latest books are Stefan Zweig i els suïcidis d’Europa (2020) Nosaltres, els europeus (2022) and Joseph Texte. Una història trista de la literatura comparada, (2023), El falso cosmopolitismo (2024) and Capitals Culturals. Entre pedres i literatura (2024).

Daniel Pietrek, PhD, Dlitt., Associate Professor at the University of Opole, Head of the Department of German Literature at the Institute of Literatures and Vice-Rector for scientific development. His main fields of research include German literature and culture of the 20th century, Polish-German literary and cultural relations, Germanlanguage Silesian literature and comparative literary studies. Multiple scholarship holder (between 2010 and 2011, and in 2015 and 2021 ) of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Between 2002 and 2011, he compiled the legacy of Horst Bienek in the Archives of Horst Bienk, which resulted in a 562-page monograph entitled Ich erschreibe mich selbst. (Author) Biografisches Schreiben bei Horst Bienek, published in 2012 by Thelem Verlag publishing house in Dresden, for which he received the 2014 Horst Bienek Award from the Bavarian Academy of Arts. In the Winter semestr 2023/2024 he worked as Visiting Professor at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. E-mail: danielpietrek@poczta.onet.pl

Irena Samide is a Professor at the Department of German, Dutch and Swedish at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Her teaching and research interests include German-Slovenian mutual relations, 19th-century German literature, literary didactics, the history of German studies, and literary canonisation. She studied Comparative Literature and German Studies at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Vienna, Munich, Berlin and Mannheim.

Tone Smolej is a professor at the Department of Comparative Literature and Literary Theory at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. He has published three books in the field of French-Slovenian literary contacts (Slovenska recepcija Emila Zolaja, 2007; Iz francoskega poslovenjeno, 2008, and Slovenska recepcija francoske književnosti od klasicizma do simbolizma, 2018). In two monographs, he has researched the history of Slovenian writers who were students at Austro-Hungarian universities (»Kaj večega poskusiti in postati«. Slovenski pisatelji dunajski študentje, 2015; Slovenska književnost in visoka šola, 2020). Together with Majda Stanovnik, he wrote a biography of Anton Ocvirk (2007). He is a co-author of the book Zgodovina Filozofske fakultete Univerze v Ljubljani (2019). He also contributed to several Slovenian editions of French classics.

Kaitlyn Sorenson is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary European Thought & Literature at Binghamton University, State University of New York. Her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of Central and Eastern Europe, and she has published articles in Slavic Review, Forum for Modern Language Studies, European Review and South Atlantic Quarterly. She is currently finishing a monograph on the intellectual history of the Ljubljana School, which is tentatively entitled The Cutting Edge: Theory and the Avant-Garde in Ljubljana. 

Jasmina Talam earned her PhD degree in ethnomusicology from the Academy of Music, University of Sarajevo, where she currently serves as Professor of ethnomusicology and Head of the Institute for Musicology. In 2018, she was awarded a scholarship from the Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture for postdoctoral research. Her recent publication is a book, Bosnians in Sweden – Music and Identity (Svenskt visarkiv and Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien, 2019). She is a member of the Executive Board of the ICTM and a corresponding member of the Kungl. Gustav Adolfs Akademien för svensk folkkultur (Royal Gustavus Adolphus Academy for Swedish Folk Culture).

Andrei Terian is Professor of Romanian literature and Vice Rector for Research, Innovation, and Internationalization at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. His specialties are 19th-21st centuries Romanian literature, digital humanities, cultural heritage, comparative and world literature. He has published essays in international journals such as Textual Practice, Life Writing, Studies in the Novel, CLCWeb – Comparative Literature and Culture, Slovo, World Literature Studies, Interlitteraria, ALEA: Estudos Neolatinos. His latest books include the coedited volumes Romanian Literature as World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons (Bloomsbury, 2021; AATSEEL Prize for Best Edited Multi-Author Scholarly Volume). He is the PI of the ERC Consolidator Grant “A Transnational History of Romanian Literature” (TRANSHIROL; 1.45M €; 2021–2026; https://grants.ulbsibiu.ro/transhirol/) and general manager of the Horizon Europe Twinning project “Establishing a Cultural Heritage Lab in Central Romania” (ELABCHROM; 1.1M €; 2023–2025; https://grants.ulbsibiu.ro/elabchrom/).

Snejana Ung is a Research Assistant at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. Her main research interests are post-Yugoslav literature, migrant and exile literature from Eastern Europe, and the inter-peripheral circulation of the novel in South-Eastern Europe between 1918 and 1989, with emphasis on the Romanian and Yugoslav cultures. Her PhD dissertation investigated the literature written about the Yugoslav wars as world literature. She has published articles in journals such as Primerjalna književnost, Transilvania and Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, as well as chapters in collective volumes. 

Zoltán Z. Varga (1970) is the head of the Department of Literary Theory at the Institute for Literary Studies, Research Center for the Humanities, Budapest, Hungary, and associate professor in the French Department of the University of Pécs, Hungary. His research covers the fields of comparative literature, life writing studies, and modern French and Hungarian literature. He is the author of 2 books, co-editor of 6 collected volumes and special issues of scholarly journals (one in English). He serves on the editorial boards of the Neohelicon (managing editor between 2013–2018) and the European Journal of Life Writing. He is a member of the International Auto/Biography Association (IABA), the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA). He served as secretary of the Hungarian Comparative Literature Association between 2013 and 2023.

Blaž Zabel is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the president of the Slovenian Comparative Literature Association. He works on the history of scholarship, particularly Homeric scholarship, philology, and comparative literature. He is currently leading a research project titled Towards a History of Comparative Literature in a Global Perspective: Matija Murko and his International Collaborators (J6-4620).

Miloš Zelenka was born in Aš (Czech Republic) in 1961. In 1980-1985 he studied at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University, Prague where he worked at the Department of Czech Studies. Since 1992 he has been working at the South-Bohemian University in České Budějovice and in the Slavonic Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic in Prague. In 1996 he became a docent (assistant professor after the habilitation) of Slavonic literatures and in 2001 he was awarded the scientific degree of the doctor of sciences (DrSc.). Since 1997 he has been the editor of the journal Slavia for the sphere od Slavonic literary scholarship; at the same time he works as a secretary of the Czech Committee of Slavists. He deals with the theory and history of comparative studies and Slavonic literary scholarship. He participated with his papers in the last two international congresses od slavists in Bratislava and Cracow (1993, 1998). His bibliography of scholarly works contains approximately 300 items, out of which 100 studies published in the Czech Republic and abroad (Russia, Poland, France, Italy, Japan, Germany, Slovakia etc.).

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek‘s research, teaching, and publications are in comparative literature, comparative cultural studies, and media and communication studies. Currently, he is Yangtze River Scholar and Senior Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and World Literature at Sichuan University. 1984-2016 he had faculty appointments at the University of Alberta, Purdue University, University of Halle-Wittenberg, and Northeastern University. His publications include 6 single-authored books, 253 articles, bibliographies, book reviews, research resources, 35 edited volumes & guest-edited issues of learned journals. 1998-2016 he was editor (founding) of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb (AHCI indexed) and editor of a monograph series at Purdue University. Tötösy de Zepetnek’s work is also published in Chinese, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Mahrati, Polish, Portuguese, and Spanish translation.