This paper investigates the portrayal of the Korean peninsula in Arabic periodicals from 1880 to 1920, with a particular emphasis on the role of translated articles authored by foreign travelers. During this period, these translated accounts became vital conduits for introducing Korea to Arab audiences, as they provided some of the earliest and most significant insights into Korean culture, society, and geography at a time when direct engagement was minimal.

Utilizing Erving Goffman's frame analysis methodology, this study closely examines the narratives constructed by these translations and how they framed perceptions of Korea within the broader context of the geopolitical dynamics existing at the time. The research indicates that the representation of Korea in Arab media was significantly influenced by the relationships and interests of countries like Japan and Russia, which had established connections with the Korean peninsula. This influence often led to portrayals that aligned with the political agendas of these nations, coloring how Arab readers understood Korea.

Moreover, the translated articles often emphasized aspects of Korean culture and history that resonated with Arab audiences, creating a narrative that celebrated certain qualities of Korea while omitting others. As a result, the study highlights the importance of these early translations in shaping the foundational views of Korea in the Arab world, as they laid the groundwork for further cultural exchanges and literary adaptations in the years that followed.

Through the lens of Goffman's frame analysis, this paper elucidates the mechanisms by which these texts not only informed but also shaped the perceptions of the Korean peninsula in Arabic literary and cultural discourse. By focusing on this transformative period, the research underscores the critical significance of translation in facilitating cross-cultural understanding and establishing initial connections between Korea and the Arab world, which would evolve into more robust diplomatic and cultural relations in subsequent decades.

Thanks to the Internet, the Hallyu wave has spread throughout the Arab world. In this context, South Korean literature has captivated Arab readers by offering them a fresh perspective on the aesthetics, life, and culture of the Korean people. The translation of Korean novels into Arabic has been increasing year after year and, in a short time, has surpassed that of certain European languages, such as Italian. Considering that the Nobel Prize serves as a significant indicator of Arab translators' interest in foreign literatures, this trend is likely to continue following the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature to South Korean novelist Han Kang in October 2024.

This promising situation has motivated me to study the movement of contemporary Korean novel translation into Arabic, aiming to provide an overview of the translations completed so far and to highlight the factors that promote and ensure the success of aesthetic and cultural interaction between South Korea and the Arab world in this field.

To analyze this emerging phenomenon within the Arab cultural context, I will attempt to answer the following questions:

• What genres of Korean fiction are being translated?

• Who are the translators, in the Bermanian sense of the term, responsible for bringing Korean literature closer to Arab readers? Are they all Arab translators, or are there also Korean translators who specialize in Arabic? In the case of Arab translators, do they translate directly from the original language, or do they rely on an intermediary language?

• Which Arab publishing houses are committed to promoting Korean literature, and for what purpose? Are these independent publishing houses, or do they receive support from Korean institutions?

World literature recognizes the contribution of all cultures on the basis of equality. However, the discourse on literary theories, the history of ideas, and the literary awards system more often than not reflect a centering around Western literature. Arab readers, not unlike the majority of the reading public around the globe, have generally turned to European and Western literature, with a growing interest in Latin American literature after Gabriel Garcia Marquez won the Nobel Prize for Literature. However, a few decades ago, Korean literature attained maturity and emerged independent of the European models, critical theories, and literary trends that dominated the Korean literary scene in the middle and late 20th century. Modern Korean giants like Han Kang captivated readers worldwide with their esquisite style, provoking social critiques and literary prowess. In the Arab world, the number of literary works translated from Korean into Arabic has increased significantly especially since 2001 (Yi Sang, Min Jin Lee, Choi In-ho). In this context, this paper seeks to explore the reception of South Korean literature in the Arab world, especially the reception of Han Kang's Nobel Prize in Literature and her translated works into Arabic (The Vegetarian 2007, Human Acts 2014, and The White Book 2016).

Thus, the research will study the forms of cross-cultural and literary relations between Korea and the Arab world with reference to the aesthetic specificities characterizing the culture of each. The research will explore two complementary factors that have contributed to the celebratory reception of Arab readers of Korean literature, namely, the awareness of a mutual belonging to the East, in the broadest sense, and the surprise of discovering the uniqueness of South Korean literature which makes it quite distinct from western culture.

The researcher, adopting a descriptive-analytical method, will collect and compile electronic responses from the reading public and critical circles found on digital articles that constitute the sample of the study. The researcher classified these responses according to their causal, geographical, and cultural nature. The researcher relied on two main axes which are as follows:

1. A descriptive study of the electronic Arab reactions: forms and nature.

2. An analytical study: explicit and implicit discourses.

In an age of computer-mediated communication, the verbal visual elements of language are being remixed within new systems of codification. Against this backdrop, this paper will challenge the “purist” approach to comparative literature by incorporating Egyptian and Korean composite media practices within a comparative perspective. This endeavor recalls the past controversy surrounding the comparison of literatures written in local vernaculars alongside those in standard languages. Currently, the relevant issue pertains to the feasibility of including digital composites as new processes of language codification in a comparative perspective that transcends geohistorical and visual verbal divides. This proposal addresses the significant debate surrounding whether Arabic is a fixed or evolving language, an intervention that determines the inclusion or exclusion of other languages, epistemologies, and methodologies in the study of its expansion.

Visual verbal creations in Arabic and Korean languages go back several centuries. The Hieroglyphs, Amazigh scripts, and Korean calligraphy predated Arabic calligraphy, in merging visual verbal writing systems that have evolved since their early phases. They merge technology and art, mathematics and text, as seen in contemporary design. Based on these premises, current digital composites by Korean and creators in Arabic,who blend software, media narratives, and metafiction can be considered as evolving elements of assembly and dispersion, reminiscent of the art of calligraphy. This suggests a rhizomatic irreducibility that transforms reading as an interactive process.

The verbal visual divide has increasingly been challenged by philosophers and critics since the mid-twentieth century. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida, considers ideogrammatic, pictographic, phonetic or alphabetic marks—along with the digital images—as manifestations of “arche-writing” (1976: 9-10). In Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell posits that language functions as a visual verbal medium, an imaging process wherein theory and practice converge. This interplay fosters and exchange between the cognitive and the hermeneutic (Mitchell 1994, 33). Recognizing that literature is now regarded as a medium—serving as a mode of communication—it has been mediated through the computerized memory banks that facilitate software intermediation systems. In Deep-Remixability (2007), Lev Manovich discusses the evolution of what he terms “hybrid media,” transitioning to “media remixability,” and presently as “composites,” which refer to the co-presence of multiple media (2007). Consequently, modes of reading through software intermediations becomes a means of engaging with theory in practice or understanding the epistemological within the contextual. This approach enables the reader to communicate with diverse Korean and Arabic post-media creators as they challenge institutionalized images that have lost their invigorating potential.

In recent years, there has been a clear increase in digital travel contents produced by young Arabs who have devoted all or part of their time to travelling and making videos which aimed primarily at YouTube viewers, after the latter became a major source of income for many of them.

The present paper focuses on the East/East (or Middle East/Far East) cultural interaction achieved by young Arab travellers who travelled to South Korea and were able to get to know its personal culture very close through videos posted on their YouTube channels. These travellers embody the journey in its new dimensions, which have been shaped by globalization and technological development that enabled them to document their personal travel experiences, which, in fact, turned into cultural experiences that can serve as initial grounds for studying Arabs’ constructed images of Korean culture and its people. Among the issues to be analyzed in this paper are: (1) the meaning of new Arab travellers, and examples of those who have arrived in South Korea, (2) the choice of Korea as a destination, (3) South Korea through Arab eyes, (4) reception of Korean culture in the Arab world, and (5) finally challenges. Among those new Arab travellers whose videos will be explored in this paper is a Jordanian YouTuber named Joe HATTAB, a Saudi man named Ahmed ALSHAMMARI, a young Moroccan woman named Sara.

The popularity of Korean culture in recent years, has attracted the attention of the Arab viewers and travellers who wanted to get closer to its culture. This is why South Korea was one of the first destinations chosen by a number of young Arab travellers to start the adventure of travelling and introducing the local culture to the Arab audience. Thus, the channels of these travellers turned into the most popular and accessible source of knowledge and culture among Arab and foreign viewers.

The elements that new Arab travellers focus on, while documenting their trips to South Korea, reflect a variety of cultural and other aspects that they find interesting. The videos, filmed by these travellers on YouTube, about South Korea, are of great interest to the Arab viewer, which is reflected in the high viewership rates, and the great interaction between viewers and travellers through various comments and questions.

Overall, the new Arab travellers on YouTube are a cultural phenomenon that reflects the technological development and the growing interest in discovering the world and adopting the culture of travel for many people who see it not only as a way to entertain themselves, but also as a way to understand the world and promote critical thinking based on rejecting intolerance and accepting the difference which is the basis of life.

Since the late twentieth century, Arab comparative literary studies have undergone a significant shift in direction and focus, fostering the exploration of new research areas and the ambition to establish further interdisciplinary domains. One of the emerging horizons in Arab comparativism is its interaction with South Korean literature and culture. This development is driven by the growing economic and cultural exchanges between South Korea and the Arab countries, as well as the widespread influence of the Korean cultural wave, Hallyu, in the Arab world. This highlights the intricate relationship between literary and cultural capital and economic power.

Despite an awareness of its significance, Arab comparative studies of South Korean literary and cultural productions remain in their early stages, represented primarily by the individual efforts of a limited number of Egyptian scholars interested in imagology, translation studies, women's writing, and bilingual comparisons. The scarcity of Arab specialists proficient in Korean within the field of comparative literature contrasts with the more established contemporary Korean comparative studies that engage with the Arab world, within an interdisciplinary framework that reflects South Korea’s openness to engaging with global history and culture.This is due to the fact that South Korean comparativists have benefited from the institutionalized interest in Arabic studies since the mid-1960s and early 1970s.

In alignment with the theme of the Arab panel, this paper aims to expand the scope of emerging Arab-Korean comparative studies for the benefit of young Arab comparativists who are currently eagerly learning the Korean language in all Arab countries including Morocco .It seeks to explore new areas of inquiry, including the intersection of cultural and creative industries with technology, as well as comparative analyses of the aesthetic and thematic foundations that shape the contemporary Arab imaginary in the context of the socio-historical Arab- Korean transitions. It will specifically examine:

1. The relationship between transnational texts, transcultural identity, and sustainable development in the digital age, with a focus on Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Journey in the Korean context, the first Moroccan application for Korean language and culture, and the recently published book Teaching Korean in Arabic (Tangier, Morocco).

2. The evolving sources of Arab literary creativity, illustrated through Mrs. Korea by Abir Hamdi (Egypt) and Korean Scheherazade Tales by Inès Abbassi (Tunisia).

While narratology flourished in European languages academia from the late 20th century onwards, shifting its emphasis on the structure per-se to the action of telling/narrating, similar studies also developed in East Asia around the turn of the century. Examining literary texts in East Asian languages, scholars adopted, refined, and sometimes modified narratological concepts and frameworks created based on mostly Western literatures. More recently, they started taking up diverse cultural artifacts and expanded their scopes including socio-historical issues. Regrettably, though, such rich studies of narratives in these languages are still underrepresented in global academic forums. This session revisits narratological approaches using Korean and Japanese examples, while showcasing latest developments in studies of narratives in East Asia and the Asia-Pacific region with a particular emphasis on their sociocultural contexts.

- Presenters (*: chairs): (1) AN Young-hee (Keimyung University)." The Discovery of the Inner Self: The Establishment of Narrative Style in Modern Japanese and Korean Novels." This paper addresses how two writers in East Asia, Iwano Hōmei and Kim Dong-in, established the fundamental style for a confessional novel in Japanese and in Korean respectively, which is related to the issues of subjectivity and objectivity.; (2) KOSAKA Eliko* (Toyo University). "Kibei Literature in Translation: Reexamining the Narratives of Minoru Kiyota's War Memoirs." This paper examines Minoru Kiyota’s memoir of his WWII and Korean War experiences written in Japanese and in English translation, exploring what their use of different narrative styles may convey and concurrently occlude.; (3) MAESHIMA Shiho* (University of Tokyo). "Changing Expression/Perception of ‘Reality’: Narratological Transitions in Modern Japanese Journalistic Reporting.” Taking up a modern practice of news reporting, this paper examines how narrative techniques to report current affairs changed in Japan from the late 19th century until the interwar period, which, concomitantly, led to transitions in perceptions of “reality.”; (4) PARK Jin-su (Gachon University). “The Narratology of Japanese and Korean Popular Music: The Function of Perspective in Enka and Trot.” – Popular music formed in the 1910s and 1920s in the Korean peninsula and Japan developed separately since the 1960s onwards out of their need to establish national identities. This paper addresses its cultural implications by analyzing perspectives in their representative songs.; (5) TAKEUCHI Akiko (Hosei University). “Narratological Approach to Noh Drama: Narration, Fusion of Voices, and Representations of Salvation.” – In noh, not only characters’ speeches but also narration is enunciated on stage, and the boundary between the two is often fused, making the voice ambiguous. This paper examines the use of such a unique language in the representations of hell and salvation, with the aid of narratology.

- Discussant: SAKAKI Atsuko (University of Toronto)

Notre communication vise interroger l'écriture dans son rapport à l'image dans une perspective comparatiste, dans le croisement de la littérature, l'histoire de l'écriture, l'histoire de l'art, la philosophie, à partir de l'examen de l'oeuvre d'écrivains modernes et contemporains. La base de notre argument est que l'image est le soubassement médial (Moser, 2006) privilégié de l'écriture. L'écriture fait remonter à la surface ce soubassement qui demeure souvent invisible, transparent à un premier regard, nous rappelant également que, dans le processus ontologique d'invention de l'écriture, l'image a joué un rôle de premier ordre ("l'écriture est née de l'image", nous rappelle Christin, 1995/2001). Ancrée sur différents supports, l'image survit donc dans l'écriture, soit comme fait de mémoire, soit dans sa matérialité même, en tant que fait graphique et visuel. Ce sont les traces de cette survivance matérielle du visible (Didi-Huberman, 2018) que nous comptons interroger, à partir d'exemples puisés dans les jeux typographiques, dans le collage ou montage des textes, dans les écritures "inventées", où la technique rejoint la techné dans l'invention de nouvelles formes, en élargissant par conséquent les supports, du papier à l'écran. Dans ce sens, nous allons examiner certains exemples de relation texte/image pratiqués dans la poésie et dans la prose (Mallarmé, Augusto de Campos, Michel Butor, Georges Perec, Le Clézio), mais accessoirement dans les arts (Masson, Dermisache).

“Otherness” is a strangeness beyond human experience. In architectural texts and images, it searches for interpreting similarities and differences in its (in)tangible elements that lead to unity-diversity. While the recognizable elements provide meaningful senses of symbolic richness, the alien becomes “otherness.” Their juxtaposition delivers the unexpected, contradicting its intentions and engaging in a dialogical tension between them.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the voice of the Cistercian Order, opposed mythical creatures in Romanesque capitals with suspicion. In his “Apologia” to Abbot William of St. Thierry (1124), he attacked the Cluniac. “But in the cloister…what profit is there in those ridiculous monsters, in the marvelous and deformed comeliness, that comely deformity?…we are more tempted to read in the marble than in our books, and to spend the whole day wondering at these things rather than in meditating on the law of God.”

Questions arise: Did the Church allow monks to use the perception and interpretation of architectural texts and images in worshipping God? Gestalt principles reinforce the notion that the world is built into perception. With Augustine’s sign theory, the spectator’s perceptive experience, interpretation, and contemplation should be flexible in the daily work of God.

Architecture provides a sacred space of the primaeval site in togetherness beyond time and space. When (in)tangibility is put together in diversity-unity, they deliver unforeseen characteristics to reveal variations and recognition of differences and questions in the works. It is a semiotic process between traditions and new arrivals in perception. Empathetic and flexible interpretations can identify “otherness.”

Tintern Abbey was built in 1131 adjacent to Tintern village in Monmouthshire, on the Welsh bank of the River Wye. It was the first Cistercian foundation in Wales. The abbey fell into ruin (16C), and its remains are a mixture of building works (1131–1536). Tintern has a decorated Gothic style. It ended monastic life under Henry VIII; its surroundings became industrial wireworks (1568). Tintern ruins became a visiting spot (mid-18C) in the romantic, picturesque Wye Valley.

Tintern calls Cistercian followers collective memories and curious tourists. It does not replace the tangible loss of the ruins but is traced in “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour,” written by the Romantic poet Wordsworth (13 July 1798).

The term “wilderness” in the Old Testament describes various social-ecological contexts from an uncultivated area to an abandoned ruin. The wilderness transformed into a hostile environment of danger, devils, and chaos. Being the liminal location, the desert desolation was not intended to be a site of punishment; rather, it was a place of encounter with God. Moreover, the “sublime” was not joyous. Wordsworth’s The Prelude (1798) depicts his experience of the terrifying feeling of being in the divine, surrounded by crags and waterfalls in the Alps.

It wonders: Wordsworth’s reflection on the glorious Cistercian Order that invoked the Second Crusade (1146–1149). This paper interprets the text (Wordsworth) and images (Tintern) through subjective-objective attitudes: how they support each other to transcend into wildness-sublime.

This presentation clarifies the reality of literary-cultural crossing borders by Japanese WWII repatriate-writers through the case studies of Gotō Meisei (1932–1999) and Itsuki Hiroyuki (1932–) analyzing their novels and essays. Gotō and Itsuki are famous Japanese monolingual writers that were awarded many literary prizes. They are also in the same age, which were repatriated from the Northern part of Korean peninsula and grew up in Fukuoka prefecture, the Southwest part in Japan after WWII. Moreover, they were deeply interested in Russian literature, entered the Department of Russian literature at Waseda University (Gotō enrolled in the evening course, on the other hand, Itsuki entered the daytime course, however, left the university for financial reasons), and described Russia and the former Soviet Union in their novels and essays. The previous research on Gotō and Itsuki (most of them are included in Japanese literature studies, not in the studies on comparative literature) have only focused on their repatriation from Korea from the point of view of the Japano-Korean relationship, though have overlooked that the northern part of the colonized Korea by Imperial Japan was also an important place to encounter the former Soviet Union for them because of the invasion and occupation by the Soviet troops right after WWII. It could be considered that this fact influenced their literary careers that we mentioned above. It is important to take “the hidden crossing borders” to former Soviet Union and Russia into consideration to examine the literary works of Japanese WWII repatriate writers.

As AI technologies advance, language departments face questions of relevance, while exophonic writing by authors like Jhumpa Lahiri and Yoko Tawada flourishes.

The etymology of the term “exophony”: “exo” (from Ἐξ [ex] = “outside, external”) and “phony” (from Φωνὴ [phōnē] = voice) can be understood as the voice from outside. Yet, what’s "outside"? Every “exo” inherently implies an “endo”.

As Yasemin Yildiz suggests, languages are shaped by nationalistic frameworks that confine their identity to the nation-state with which they are associated. Primarily articulated by Tawada in her 2003 essay Exophony: Travels Beyond the Mother Tongue, exophony aims to transcend such restrictive assignments. However, it remains a theoretically under-explored field, with limited research dedicated to it. While “migrant literature” and “translingualism” engage with related themes, they are not interchangeable concepts. Further investigation could thus unveil new avenues of inquiry and significantly advance this area of study. Additionally, exploring the definition of exophony may serve as a heuristic tool for examining and understanding the evolving landscape of language technologies, particularly in relation to artificial intelligence.

We welcome papers aiming at defining exophony by engaging with, but are not limited to, the following themes:

1. Exophony in the Digital Age: How does the rise of AI-powered translation and language learning tools impact the practice and reception of exophonic writing?

2. The Politics of Linguistic Choice: What are the political and philosophical impacts of writing in a non-native language in AI-driven globalization?

3. Exophony and Translation Studies: How does exophony challenge or complement current approaches to translation, in light of advancing AI translation capabilities?

4. Future of Linguistic Diversity: Reflections on how exophonic practices might influence the preservation and evolution of linguistic diversity in an AI-dominated future.

Dans un contexte où les technologies d’intelligence artificielle (IA) redéfinissent les pratiques linguistiques, cette recherche propose d’examiner comment des étudiants francophones en cours de traduction et de rédaction en coréen intègrent les outils de traduction automatique (ChatGPT, DeepL, Papago, etc.) dans leurs productions écrites. Plus précisément, elle s’appuie sur le concept d’exophonie, qui désigne l’acte d’écrire dans une langue étrangère et interroge la créativité, l’identité et la voix de l’auteur.

Au sein d’une classe de traduction dans un établissement d’enseignement supérieur en France, nous recueillerons deux versions de travaux écrits : une première rédigée sans aide d’IA, et une seconde réalisée avec l’appui d’outils automatiques. Nous procéderons ensuite à une analyse comparative de ces textes afin de mesurer l’incidence de l’IA sur la qualité linguistique, la diversité lexicale, mais également sur les aspects exophoniques tels que l’appropriation créative d’une langue non maternelle. Des entretiens semi-directifs permettront en outre d’approfondir la perception qu’ont les étudiants de leur propre « voix » lorsqu’ils se reposent sur l’IA pour produire un texte en coréen.

Par cette double approche, quantitative (analyse des écarts linguistiques) et qualitative (étude des discours d’apprenants), nous souhaitons mettre en lumière la tension entre standardisation des productions écrites et maintien d’une spontanéité exophonique. L’enjeu de cette étude est d’élaborer des stratégies pédagogiques qui encouragent à la fois l’autonomie et la créativité des apprenants, tout en reconnaissant l’apport potentiel de l’IA dans la correction et la fluidité linguistiques.

En définitive, cette recherche contribue à éclairer la manière dont l’IA peut reconfigurer, enrichir ou, au contraire, uniformiser l’exophonie, ainsi qu’à proposer des pistes pour l’enseignement du coréen dans un environnement technologique en pleine évolution.

Exophony begins with the recognition that writing need not be anchored in a singular, “pure” literary heritage, challenging the entrenched notion that one’s so-called mother tongue—or a stable, inherited literature—constitutes the exclusive domain of authentic creative production. In exophonic practice, an author’s “voice from the outside” disrupts the myth of a monolingual text through code-switching, stylistic experimentation, and deliberate cultural boundary-crossing. These techniques expose the plasticity of literary forms, revealing that traditions once perceived as fixed can, in fact, accommodate new idioms, hybrid genres, and intertextual dialogues.

In a parallel yet distinct manner, artificial intelligence decentralizes familiar literary models by creating what can be termed “algorithmic interweavings.” Rather than drawing upon a personal or cultural lineage, AI relies on vast multilingual datasets and stochastic pattern-matching. In the process, it may produce mistranslations, dissonant registers, or unexpected textual mash-ups—anomalies that can challenge conventional understandings of literary style and coherence. Far from mere technical glitches, these moments highlight how creative potential may arise from processes not guided by a single authorial vision. By placing AI’s outputs alongside exophonic writings, we begin to see a shared disruption of any strictly “inherited” literary framework. What once seemed like errors can instead become generative sites for renewing our sense of what literature can be.

This shared framework of productive “accidents” grows more vivid in diasporic exophony, where authors may adopt new languages due to familial relocations or economic pressures rather than through explicit ideological choice. Korean-Zainichi author Ook Chung, for example, did not embrace French to resist a dominant culture; instead, his family’s move to Montreal led to an “accidental” adoption of the French language. Much like AI’s stochastic reassemblies, Chung’s linguistic path complicates neat literary categories—whether “Francophone,” “Zainichi,” or “Korean”—and shows how unplanned collisions can yield innovative modes of expression. These diasporic tensions echo AI’s algorithmic interweavings by illustrating how new literary voices emerge when traditional boundaries are disrupted by circumstance or design.

Therefore, whether it is the deliberate boundary-crossing of an exophonic writer, the stochastic textual mixing of AI, or the “accidental” linguistic shifts characteristic of diasporic authors, each demonstrates that literary expression thrives in the tensions and interweavings among languages, cultures, and technologies. By embracing these "voices from the outside"—be they human or machine—comparative literature can cultivate a space that not only acknowledges the fluid, shifting terrain from which new forms, genres, and narratives continually emerge but also renegotiates the very boundaries that define its fields.

As an anthology horror comic with a main target group of girls aged 10–15 and featuring a relatable female heroine for (pre-)teens, Vanessa – Die Freundin der Geister [‘friend of the spirits’] (1982–91) was an exception within the comics market in German-speaking countries in many ways.

Other comics for a young audience such as Bessy (1965–1985), Lasso (1965–85), Silberpfeil [Silver Arrow] (1970–88), Gespenster Geschichten [‘Ghost Stories’] (1974–2006), and Spuk Geschichten [‘Spook Stories’] (1978–95), might have been read by all genders, but their dominance of male protagonists and marginalizing depictions of helpless female supporting characters offered more potential for identification for boys than for girls.

The main story of the anthology was always written by Peter Mennigen and featured the teenager Vanessa as its central character.

In addition to the main story, all formats of the series contained up to four translations of horror comics and short stories with female protagonists.

With its constant heroine and a mixture of recurring and new characters, mostly Vanessa’s adventures intertwined aspects of everyday teenage life with paranormal elements. The stories about Vanessa were designed as a hybrid as they also include (mild) romance and (slapstick) humour as continuous elements. Alongside her boyfriend Harold, a teenage spirit from the middle ages, Vanessa fights many sorts of supernatural villains, mostly gothic archetypes such as demons, ghosts, vampires, or witches. However, troubles in Vanessa’s teenage life not only result from her contact with the other world: The stereotypical evils housekeeper, Mrs. Hagglon, and her sidekick, the butler Brady, are eager to get rid of the teenager and her parents to have the castle and its hidden treasure to themselves. Whereas Vanessa's heroism in the interaction with the supernatural always terminates a threat and sometimes even establishes new friendships, the everyday life adversory with Mrs. Hagglon as personification of the trope of the evil houskeeper permanent.

In my talk, I will discuss the series' manyfold concepts of heroism and villainy in the context of the intertwinement of the natural and the supernatural sphere.

My intersectional analysis of adversary in the comic focuses on age, gender, class, and species.

I argue that the demonification of Mrs. Hagglon leads to a domestification of the supernatural villains and vice-versa - and that Vanessa's female heroism party has a problematic ageist and mysogenic downside.

In the dissertation I will propose the concept of Asian-futurism inspired by Afrofuturism, which consider the present and the future of the African diaspora community through reflecting the past. In the dissertation, I will employ Afrofuturism and “Asian-futurism” to analyze the issues of history, social justice, and colonization in post-colonial theory, especially in settler colonization, in the genres of films, novels, and graphic novels. In Asian-futurism, I will focus on the literary works of Taiwanese indigenous, including Chiu Ruo-Long’s graphic novel Seediq Bale (2011) and documentary Gaya (1998) of Seediq tribe, Huang Ming-Chuan’s film The Man from Island West (1990) of Atayal tribe. I will argue that Taiwanese Indigeneity is like “The Wretched of the Earth”; African American is like “Black Skin, White Masks” via Frantz Fanon’s post-colonial theory.

Afrofuturism, according to John Jennings, is “a theoretical framework, aesthetic and cultural movement, and it attempts to address these questions and many more through electronic music, visual and performance art, speculative fiction and poetry, and an Afrocentric view of what the days to come hold for individuals of African descent.” In Afrofuturism, the term “Sankofa” is from Akan tribe in Ghana and it means “retrieve” and literally “go back and get” (san-: return; -ko-: go; -fa: look, see and take). According to Patricia Metoyer, “the Akan believe the past serves as a guide for planning the future; to the Akan, it is this wisdom in learning form the past which ensures a strong future.” In African American art and literature, “Sankofa” represents the need for the African American community connect to the past in order to reflect better future possibilities. What inspired me to “Sankofa” (retrieve) my own ancestors’ history and to comprehend how the past accomplished the present and consider how to build a potential future was the protagonist in Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred. Butler’s Dana adventures in time travel between Los Angeles in the year of 1976 and Atlanta in the year of 1815. However, contemporary scholarship lacks research on a lineage of significant Taiwanese and African American literary works in the perspective of post-colonialism: including Huang Ming-Chuan’s The Man from Island West (1990), Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Good Men, and Good Women (1995), Göran Hugo Olsson’s Concerning Violence (2014), and Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979). Doing so, I argue that colonial nostalgia is not only for the colonizer but also for the colonized; the more colonial figures in literary works are forgotten, the closer relationship the colonizer and the colonized of the post-colonial period are. Most specifically, I will revisit the aforementioned Taiwanese and African American films, literary works, and graphic adaptations and analyze the following shared elements:

(1) Representation of fragmented history and of use of ellipsis;

(2) Cultural conflicts and hybridity.

Lee Kyung-son is recognized as "one of the early film directors in the Korean film industry" and was a significant figure who formed the Shanghai Film Group with Jung Gi-tak, Jeon Chang-geun, Han Chang-seop, and others in Shanghai during the 1930s. Having entered Shanghai in early 1929, Lee spent three years there, until he escaped to Thailand following the outbreak of the Shanghai Incident in 1932. While Lee Kyung-son's achievements in his domestic life, films, and playwriting have been extensively researched and acknowledged in academia, his career during the three years he spent in Shanghai has received relatively little attention. His activities in China are only briefly mentioned in collective studies on the Shanghai Film Group by some scholars, and there has been no comprehensive exploration or research on this period. In particular, there is a notable lack of investigation into the Chinese literary movement during that time, his interactions with notable figures in the Chinese theatre and cultural circles, and his Chinese play "Taiwan," for which bibliographic information has yet to be uncovered. This study aims to organize and analyze Lee Kyung-son's essays related to the Chinese literary movement published in the Korean press during his time in Shanghai, translations of his works, and his Chinese play "Taiwan," which has never been publicly acknowledged. Additionally, it will examine his activities in Shanghai along with his ideological and cultural exchanges with prominent figures in the Chinese theatre and cultural fields. Through this research, I intend to explore Lee Kyung-son's understanding of Chinese literature, how his perspectives differ from those of contemporary Korean writers, his insights into the literary theories of Lu Xun and Zhang Ziping, and how these influences are reflected in his translations. Furthermore, I will conduct a detailed analysis of the creation intent, plot, characters, language, and ideological content of his play "Taiwan."

During the Five-Mountain Period, the center of Sino-Japanese communication shifted from Chang 'an to Lin 'an. The Five-Mountain poets who entered China during the Song Dynasty imagined Lin 'an as the "capital of Buddhism" based on paintings, artifacts and systems; After the collapse of Song Dynasty, through the legacy literature transmission, the Five-Mountain poets read Lin 'an as the "Unorthodox Capital". Lin'an had a wide-ranging impact on Sino-Japanese communication, nevertheless, Lin 'an is absent from Japanese Five-Mountain Literature, replaced by the revival of Chang 'an, forming the "Misplaced" capital writing. This dislocation corresponded to the trend in Medieval Japan of replacing the Confucian view of China as the center of the world with a Buddhist "Three Kingdoms" worldview, reflecting Japan's political intention to reconstruct the "world" order with itself at the center.

In ancient China, the notes' primary purpose was to document facts. Its primary goal at first was to document and preserve experiences and occurrences. Argumentation, emotional expression, and other ways of expressing one's own goals are just a few of the more varied roles that this genre has progressively taken on over time. Since the Song Dynasty, literati have been constructing study rooms more frequently, which has resulted in the growth of study room records, which are now a significant window into literati thought and life. Study Notes served as a conduit for owners' emotional expression and ideological exchange at this time, in addition to being a chronicle of life.

With strong Chinese cultural impact, Japan has also seen a lot of Study Notes in Gozan Bungaku. The majority of these pieces were made at the request of others, indicating a certain social and cultural backdrop, even though they also portray the life of a study room. Gozan Bungaku's Study Notes are especially adept at fusing narrative and reasoning, since the Zen monks not only delve into the deep depths of Zen Buddhism but also share their own insights and grasp of Confucian and Taoist ideas. The complexity of the two nations' cultural integration and interchange is reflected in this form of creation, which differs from the Study Notes of the same era in China in terms of creative style and depth of thinking.

The myth of Tan Jun（壇君） is the founding myth of Korea, and since the 13th century, Tan Jun（檀君） has been the standard writing style. But in reality, this standard writing is incorrect and must be corrected as Tan Jun. There are two reasons for this: first, the earliest version recorded Tan Jun, and second, there is no sandalwood tree in the living world, so the Tan Jun myth should be a record of the Korean living world, so it cannot be Tan Jun. Tan Jun and Tan Jun present two different worlds of life, one is Buddhist mythology and the other is altar mythology.

The acceptance and dissemination of Wenxin Diaolong overseas is an important proof of the international influence of Chinese culture. As early as in the Tang Dynasty, Wenxin Diaolong had already spread eastward to Japan. The long history of the dissemination of Wenxin Diaolong was started with the History of Chinese Literature in Japan in 1897, when it was published in the Meiji period by Kojyou Sadakichi. Subsequently, there emerged some great scholars of the studies of Wenxin Diaolong like Suzuki Torao and Toda Hiroshiakatuki. Modern Japanese scholars have studied Wenxin Diaolong in many ways, both macroscopically and at micro level. In particular, the characterization of the work’s genre and its historical status is an important reference for Chinese scholars: Japanese scholars first identified Wenxin Diaolong as “Six Dynasties prose” and “critical literature”, and later praised it as “a masterpiece of the thinking of rhetoric”, and finally called it “the culmination of early Chinese literary criticism”.

Formation and development of Comparative studies in 20th century Georgia depended on the ideological atmosphere in the country since it was forcibly incorporated into the Soviet Union in 1921 and, therefore, subordinated to Soviet ideology.

Comparative Literature, a university discipline as understood in the West, was not popularized in the curriculum of Soviet universities, including the Georgian universities. As much as Comparative Literature tended to expand the borders of literary research towards the literatures of non-Soviet and non-socialist countries, it was a risky prospect for Soviet research. Contrary to this notion was activated the term Literary Relations, widely used within Soviet and Socialist countries. The main difference between the Comparative Literature and Literary Relations was the lack of methodologies, which could bond Soviet literary studies with international one.

In the Post-soviet period enthusiastic efforts to fill this gap showed up: in the Post-soviet period the process of expanding the boundaries was followed by the process of deepening literary studies and leading Georgian universities were ready to implement Comparative Literature programs. However, the problem of a different kind was raised: the shortage of specialists and text-books. Therefore, universities faced a complex need, like – translating textbooks, creating syllabuses, training specialists, producing original research. But, despite difficulties the result was nevertheless successful: today Comparative Literature is part of the teaching and research process in major Georgian universities and Academic centers presented with various researches and initiatives.

The presentation will explore the topic, focusing on the past experience, current practices and future possibilities.

The presentation highlights the characteristics, perspectives, and challenges of creating Georgian literary corpora through two multilingual corpora: the European Literary Texts Collection (ELTeC) and the European Drama Corpus (DraCor). Additionally, the initial results of using digital analysis for Georgian literary corpora will be presented.

The electronic versions of the texts were obtained through retro-digitization, which involves scanning published books, extracting text using OCR technology, and text correction. The presentation will discuss the possibilities for automating this process for the digitization of Georgian literature.

The presentation will also address the limitations that small literatures face in comparison to major European literatures. To this end, the criteria for selecting texts in the European Literary Collection will be discussed in detail, and it will be clarified which criteria Georgian literature does not meet.

Before presenting the preliminary results of the digital analysis of Georgian literature, the significance of corpus analysis conducted through the distant reading method for literary studies will be briefly discussed.

The presentation will introduce two variants of digital analysis for Georgian literary corpora: stylometric analysis and topic modeling.

This paper investigates the quantitative analysis of a key aspect of the poetics of the eminent medieval Georgian Romance The Knight in the Panther's Skin of Rustaveli—specifically, the semantics of color. The study treats color as a linguistic entity, examining its application through the lens of linguistic and literary theoretical frameworks.

While this topic has been explored qualitatively within Georgian scholarly literature, particularly in the field of Rustvelology, the objective of this quantitative study is to simplify the complex semantic representation of color in The Knight in the Panther’s Skin through modeling. Additionally, the collection and visualization of quantitative data will facilitate the identification of patterns and interrelations in the symbolic significance of color. The research aims to address the following central question: What are the chronological,symbolic, theoretical, and linguistic foundations of color's role within the poetics of The Knight in the Panther’s Skin?

The primary methodological approach of the study will involve quantitative and statistical analysis. Data collection will be conducted via the digital annotation platform Catma, and the quantitative data will be interpreted through various diagrams.

This research examines the Georgian-French literary and cultural relationship during the Soviet period, with a focus on developing archival methodologies and ensuring accessibility through digital platforms. Extensive archival work has already identified and cataloged French plays translated into Georgian, as well as personal letters and unpublished manuscripts from the 17th century to the early 20th century. The nature of these materials required a specific approach to cataloging, resulting in their systematic organization into a comprehensive database, which was subsequently published in book form and serves as a foundational resource.

The current project expands this scope to explore translations, adaptations, and personal correspondence from the Soviet era, during which the nature of cultural exchanges was reshaped by political and ideological constraints. This shift necessitates a revised approach to cataloging and categorization to reflect the altered forms of Georgian-French interactions. Newly discovered archival materials—such as unpublished translations, letters, and documents from Soviet censorship committees—will be collected, analyzed, and incorporated into an expanded digital repository and electronic book.

This paper will analyze the methodologies used to categorize these unique archival materials, including translated plays, correspondence, and censored texts, while addressing challenges in making them accessible to a broader audience. By leveraging digital tools and creating an accessible platform, the project aims to preserve these cultural artifacts and highlight the evolving relationship between Georgian and French literature within the broader framework of European intellectual history.

The early version of the Life of Saint Nino has been selected for this research. The text preserves ancient elements (dating from the mid-4th century) and is based on the narrative of Saint Nino herself, as well as the high-status women who were her companions. The text contains dozens of symbolic-allegorical names, most of which refer to Saint Nino, along with references to Christ and the Virgin Mary.

The goal of this study is to analyze these names within the historical and cultural context of the Saint’s life, explore the reasons for their use by the narrators, and highlight the qualities of the Saint that they emphasize. References to the Virgin Mary and Christ will also be examined to understand their significance. This version of the Life of Saint Nino can be considered one of the earliest examples of "women's literature" in Christian hagiographical texts. In this context, analyzing the names used in the narrative by female authors offers an interesting perspective on the study.

To make the results more systematic and visible, we will use the CATMA platform. After marking the symbolic names, we will generate a Wordlist, identify keywords, and categorize the names for analysis based on the teachings of well-known ecclesiastical writers on divine names, Christian perfection, and other theological issues (such as Dionysius the Areopagite, Gregory of Nyssa, and others).

Finally, the CATMA Visualizer will allow us to visually present the results of the analysis, observe the frequency and hierarchical distribution of specific names in the text, and draw conclusions. By decoding the names using critical discourse and comparative methods, we can fully reconstruct the hermeneutics of the symbolic-allegorical names presented in the text and explore the scope of their use.

Shota Rustaveli’s The Knight in the Panther’s Skin alternates between two meters: low shairi (3/5/3/5) and high shairi (4/4/4/4). Scholars have noted that transitions between these meters serve to clarify or reinforce ideas, particularly in lyrical sections such as Nestan-Darejan’s letters to Tariel. This study employs CATMA (Computer Assisted Text Markup and Analysis) and ViS-À-ViS to analyze meter, rhyme, and alliteration, identifying structural and stylistic patterns in these sections.

We first annotate Nestan-Darejan’s letter to Tariel upon his return from Khataeti, in which she requests a battle trophy—a veil. The first and fourth stanzas use low shairi, while the second and third employ high shairi, introducing a rare homonymic rhyme scheme (ushenosa-ushenosa-ushenosa-ushenosa, arideno-arideno-arideno-arideno), not found elsewhere in the poem. Alliteration analysis reveals dominant consonants (sh, n, s in one stanza; r, d, n in the other), with n—the initial letter of Nestan-Darejan’s name—common to both. ViS-À-ViS’ visualization highlights the structural relationships between these phonetic elements.

Further analysis of low shairi rhyme units (e.g., mtenisa – shenisa – tskhenisa – denisa) and verb-based rhymes (gshvenodes – mshvenodes – gagaghvelondes – ar dagtenodes) reveals a shift in poetic focus. While shenisa refers to Tariel, the homonymic rhyme in high shairi (ushenosa) redirects attention to Nestan-Darejan. A key finding is that the over-dactylic, five-syllable rhyme in low shairi (ts'remlta denisa – "the flow of tears") appears to inspire the homonymic rhyme in high shairi (ar ideno – arideno), linking the cessation of tears to the offering of the veil.

Expanding the study, we analyze Nestan-Darejan’s second letter from the fortress of Kajeti (stanzas 1480–1496). This 16-stanza letter begins with two in low shairi. Given its slower rhythm, we hypothesize a lower verb density compared to high shairi. Using ViS-À-ViS, we measure the proportion of verbs, nouns, and adjectives, finding verb-based rhymes indicative of movement and cognitive intensity—key to understanding the protagonist’s psychological state. Additionally, one-syllable words in low shairi stanzas slow the narrative tempo, reinforcing rhythmic contrasts.

The second letter concludes with a low shairi stanza where shenisa and denisa reappear in sheneulisa ridisa ("the veil that once belonged to you"), establishing continuity between the letters. This recurrence underscores the poem’s thematic interplay between possession and absence. By visualizing these patterns, we uncover systematic repetitions of verbs and epithets across the two texts, deepening our understanding of Rustaveli’s versification and its expressive function.

This paper examines the translational journey of One Thousand and One Nights into the Chinese cultural context during the late Qing and early Republican periods, focusing on its reappropriation and reinterpretation by translators such as Zhou Guisheng and Zhou Zuoren. Through an analysis of The Fisherman and the Genie and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves in their respective Chinese adaptations—Arabian Nights’ Laughter and The Heroic Slave Girl—the study explores how these texts were imbued with new meanings and values to reflect the transformative currents of modern Chinese society.

Adopting Homi Bhabha’s theory of the "Third Space," the paper argues that translation served as a site of cultural hybridity where the original narratives were deconstructed, appropriated, and rehistoricized to align with Chinese intellectual and political agendas. Zhou Guisheng’s portrayal of The Fisherman and the Genie echoes the moralizing tone of traditional Chinese fables, transforming it into an allegory of social critique. Similarly, Zhou Zuoren’s adaptation of Ali Baba recasts the slave girl as a Chinese-style heroine, using her story as a metaphorical resistance against colonial oppression and feudal traditions.

By situating these translations within their historical and cultural milieus, the paper reveals how One Thousand and One Nights transcended its Arab origins to become a vehicle for political and cultural resistance in modern China. This study contributes to the understanding of cross-cultural flows and the transformative power of translation as a "Third Space" that challenges fixed notions of cultural identity while fostering new dialogues between the Middle East and East Asia.

The portrayal of women in South Asian literature, particularly in Bengali texts, is intricately shaped by socio-political, historical, and cultural contexts. In the digital age, Artificial Intelligence (AI), especially Large Language Models (LLMs), is increasingly employed for translating such complex narratives. However, AI-based translation systems face significant challenges in conveying the nuanced, gendered expressions and cultural subtleties that define the roles of women. This paper examines the limitations of AI in translating Bengali literature, focusing on its inability to accurately represent female agency, resistance, and identity in works like Rabindranath Tagore’s Naukadubi (The Boat Wreck), Mahasweta Devi’s Hajar Churashir Ma (Mother of 1084), and Taslima Nasrin’s Lajja (Shame). These texts feature women who confront patriarchal norms and embody evolving identities within a socially dynamic environment.

AI translation systems often fail to capture the intersectionality of gender, class, and socio-political oppression inherent in these works. For instance, Tagore’s nuanced depiction of female characters navigating both gendered and class-based struggles in Naukadubi often becomes oversimplified due to AI’s reliance on generalized training data. Similarly, Devi’s portrayal of maternal resilience amid political unrest in Hajar Churashir Ma is reduced to surface-level translations, missing the emotional and socio-political depth crucial to understanding the female experience. This failure risks erasing the complexity of women’s voices or reinforcing stereotypical representations.

The paper emphasizes the irreplaceable role of human translators, whose cultural and gendered insights are essential for preserving the integrity of these literary works. By incorporating human expertise, especially in capturing emotional and cultural nuances, translations can better reflect the lived experiences of women. A collaborative model, where AI’s computational efficiency supports human translators’ cultural sensitivity, can produce more accurate and contextually rich translations, ensuring that marginalized voices, particularly those of women, are faithfully represented in global literary discourse.

One of the promised benefits of the internet and AI tools is the democratization of information: they seem to make the world’s knowledge available to anyone with a web browser and suggest that anyone can become a translator by relying on the extensive resources they offer. But as the limitations and dangers of LLMs have become more apparent, it is increasingly clear that users, especially college students, need careful guidance in using these tools in ethical and effective ways. As Wharton professors Ethan and Lilach Mollick have argued, teachers can help students use LLMs to learn evaluative skills and become more attentive readers and writers. José Antonio Bowen and C. Edward Watson repeatedly emphaisize in their book Teaching with AI that AI tools are most effective when coupled with thoughtful reflection and expert mentoring. This is as true for translation as for other skills, especially given the ways that LLM-assisted translations can both challenge and perpetuate biases and existing power dynamics. This paper outlines specific methods for helping college students learn how to create, evaluate, revise, and reflect on AI-supported translations that balance fidelity to language and meaning with awareness of the ethical concerns that such translations can and should raise. I will share the experiences of my students (at a large public American university in a conservative Western state) with LLM-assisted translation as they moved through a sequence of assignments that builds from comparing existing translations of a text, then engaging with the original source (using AI translation as necessary), evaluating LLM-assisted translation results, revising prompts for AI-based translations, evaluating new results, and reflecting on the process throughout. Mentoring students through this sequence can help them become not only more effective translators but also more ethical and self-aware technology consumers inside and outside of the academic setting.

The term "influence" in English comes from Old French "influence," which means "emanation from the stars that acts upon one's character and destiny" (13th C). Mediaeval Latin ‘influentia’ means ‘a flow of water, a flowing in.’ France is where the ‘idea of littérature comparée’ became a necessary and full-fledged discipline, and the institutional establishment there is based on the concept of ‘influence’ which lies at the intersection of ‘relations’ and ‘inspirations.’ Initially the French School of Comparative Literature focussed on the contributions of French literary texts and authors to other European literatures and vice versa, so it's easy to see the implicit colonialist project in its formation. The present paper will question how, through the rise of ‘la littérature comparée,’ the French language, literature, authors, texts and culture played the role of ‘emitter,’ which was acting upon the European character and destiny, which would further ‘flow into’ the veins of colonial territory and like water, a regenerative force, attempting invigoration of the ‘stagnated’ literary culture through generic influence, literary morphology and cultural imitation.

René Wellek's 1958 address “The Crisis in Comparative Literature” and René Étiemble's 1963 monograph "Comparaison n'est pas raison" opened the floodgates to using ‘crisis’ and ‘anxiety’ as starting points for Comparative Literature discussions. This research will examine Wellek and Étiemble's political historical contexts—the totalitarian regime in Germany during World War II and the political crisis in France during the Algerian War of Independence—to determine how their comments on the discipline's vulnerability were influenced. Ulrich Weisstein's patronage of "Comparative Arts," Susan Bassnett's switch to "Translation Studies," and Gayatri Spivak's intellectual investment in "Planetarity" will be examined in the paper, along with institutional/disciplinal politics and Comparative Literature's crisis.

The present paper will also look at the beginning of the disciplinal journey of Comparative Literature in India by investigating the literary history of the establishment of the first Department of Comparative Literature in India as well as in Asia at Jadavpur University in 1956 and trace how the American School of Comparative Literature impacted Buddhadeva Bose during his teaching tenure at Pennsylvania College for Women. Taking inferences from the above-mentioned critical investigations across French, American and Indian schools of Comparative Literature, I will argue that it is time to question the over-generalizations of terms like ‘inter-disciplinary’ and ‘in-disciplinary’ especially in the present decade. This research acknowledges the inevitable presence of ‘binary pitfalls’ in ‘comparison’ and argues to explore fluidity as a conceptual metaphor to understand the ‘in-comparative’ framework.

This presentation will focus on the ways in which heterolingual texts reveal their author’s rapport with the languages they use and speak, through a case study of Cia Rinne’s work. Heterolingualism refers to the practice of using multiple languages simultaneously within a single text (Grutman, 1997), also referred to as translanguaging with code-switching as the norm rather than the exception (Domokos, 2021). Louis de Saussure speaks of a “particular relationship” speakers develop with the languages they speak, based on degrees of familiarity and intimacy (Saussure, 2024). Linguist Aneta Pavlenko has stated that emotions have been severely undertheorized in the study of multilinguals (2006) and questions that arise in heterolingual literary theory may be a step in addressing this gap. Recent literature on language memoirs and linguistic autobiographies (Sampagnay, 2024) has delved into how multilingual writers such as Jhumpa Lahiri, Xiaolu Guo and Elif Batuman engage with their languages in narratives explicitly addressing how they learn and use their languages, and how they feel about them, but the subject matter need not be so explicit for this “relationship” to become apparent. This talk will argue that it can be glimpsed through heterolingual texts, which are capable of giving insights into their author’s linguistic autobiographies, through tone, theme, vocabulary…

Within the contemporary heterolingual poetry scene, few poets in the last years have been as vocal about their practice as the prolific Cia Rinne, who has written, curated, and performed many of her pieces around Europe and across the world. Her minimal, visual and audio pieces consist of interlingual sound play and striking list-like layouts. She has attended several interviews in which she addresses her own creative practice and motivations for her unique practice. However, these explicit accounts of her own process aren’t necessary for a reader to grasp how Rinne interacts with, relates to and considers her own multilingualism, or for the study of heterolingual texts in general. This presentation will perform a case study of Cia Rinne’s work, applying the framework of Suchet’s notion of ethos (2014) – the way in which an author implicitly presents themselves through their writing – to demonstrate some of the ways heterolingual poetry is revealing of their author’s rapport with their languages.

The presentation adopts the term “linguistic landscape” to refer to a part of a writer’s linguistic identity, how they’ve interacted with languages throughout their lives – either geographically, thematically, or contextually –, and how their own subjective experience of language contact inspires their writing.

Karolina Pavlova (1807-1893), Russia’s foremost female poet of the nineteenth century, was a polyglot writing in Russian, German and French. Her native trilingualism facilitated a fluid and performative ethno-linguistic identity at odds with the tenets of monolingual nationalism that pervaded at the time. While Pavlova has received considerable attention from feminist critics, her multilingualism remains an understudied topic. This paper addresses Pavlova’s polyglot upbringing, her multilingual romance with the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz, the strategic stakes of her career as a trilingual poet and translator, the perception of her as a non-Russian by her Slavophile contemporaries, and her own conflicted attitude toward her Russianness. In a wider sense, the paper argues that the nineteenth century should be put on the map of the emergent field of literary multilingualism studies.

The interdisciplinary project Rájácummá – Kiss from the Border (2017–2018) by Niillas Holmberg, Jenni Laiti, and Outi Pieski merges environmental community art, poetry, and visual media to address themes of language contact, cultural identity, and sovereignty. Comprising eight poetic lines installed within the Deatnu River valley—the borderland between Finland and Norway—alongside eight photographs and a lithograph, the project critically examines the dynamics of Sámi self-governance and the sustainable use of land and waterways.

This work positions language as a bridge between culture and environment, emphasizing reciprocity and respect as foundational principles for life in the border region. Through its poetic and visual narratives, Rájácummá reimagines mobility and coexistence, rejecting the rigidity of national borders in favor of practices rooted in the region’s natural and cultural characteristics. By granting equal status to nature and humanity, the project advocates for a model of sustainable living informed by Sámi traditions and perspectives.

This presentation will explore how Rájácummá reflects language contact not only in its multilingual Sámi and Nordic context but also in its broader cultural and ecological implications. It highlights how literature and art can transcend linguistic and national boundaries, fostering dialogue about environmental justice, cultural resilience, and decolonial futures.

Our proposal focuses on contemporary “Basque” literature and the staging of contact between languages in a particular diglossic context, namely when the Basque-speaking community is divided along a Basque/Spanish and Basque/French border. We will question the literary and stylistic strategies of two works that respond in very different ways to the contact of different and rival idioms, caught in the competition of minor local languages and national languages with strong symbolic power on the global literature market. Frédéric Aribit’s novel Trois langues dans ma bouche (2015) highlights an example of linguistic autobiography that supports a more general reflection on the disappearance of minor languages on a global scale. The author compares the situation of the Basque language with local indigenous endangered languages. This comparison produces a hybrid writing between languages that plays on effects of sliding, polysemy, literal translation and etymological wordplay that are all ways of bringing into play the "contact" of languages. The originality of Aribit's writing consists in the maximum broadening of the contact between different languages. Basque/French bilingualism is only a starting point for the more general consideration that every language is constantly in contact with a plurality of other languages. The situation of the minor Basque language will be mirrored with a language in the process of extinction, Ayapaneco, spoken in Mexico. A stylistics anchored in wordplay and etymological roots allows other languages to emerge (Nahuatl, Taino), just as the Basque language will be imaginatively compared to Corsican and Japanese, in a form of exophony that can recall the writing of Yoko Tawada. A completely different strategy is chosen by Itxaro Borda for her truculent 100% Basque written and published in Basque in 2001 then self-translated or rather rewritten in French in 2003. This work (winner of the Euskadi Prize for Literature in 2001) is made up of a series of sarcastic texts on Basque identity, its clichés and stereotypes developed on and by the Basques. In the case of Itxaro Borda, it is the choice of self-translation as contact between two languages that is interesting. Frederik Verbeke was able to show to what extent the strict refusal of self-translation is frequent in the Basque literary field, Basque not having to rub shoulders either imaginatively or practically with Spanish or French. Although Itxaro Borda initially rejected any form of self-translation, in line with the ideological position so common in the Basque literary field, she ended up making the self-translation gesture and the contact between the dominated and the dominant language the place where she pursued her reflections on both the minoritized languages and the hypocrisy of Basque nationalism. A parody of “first contact” with a Martian also allows us to thematize the question of contact between historically and ideologically opposed idioms.

Many post-colonial authors, including Russophone ones, adopt strategies to minoritize majority languages by infusing them with realia, barbarisms, and innovative narratives. Varvara Nedeoglo’s multi-media work, however, resists easy classification within this framework. While Russian is her first and main language, her poetry presented alongside her visual art, estranges and fractures Russian through heterographics (Lock) - use of different scripts within one text with an emphasis on non-phonetic aspect of writing.

The paper will examine the use of multiple languages and scripts in Varvara Nedeoglo’s poetry. First, I’ll describe Nedeoglo’s heterographic experiments and will situate them within the broader context of linguistic and discursive changes in contemporary Russian language and literature.

For instance, typographic symbols like blank squares, tildes, and asterisk signs reflect practices of censorship and self-censorship, while Roman characters such as ‘Z’ and ‘I’ have acquired socio-political connotations tied to the war in Ukraine. Moreover, Nedeoglo’s “expanded alphabet,” which incorporates characters from minority languages such as Chukchi, Gagauz, and Komi, consciously blurs the distinction between major and minor languages.

Then, I’ll offer a close reading and translation of a few excerpts from Russkiie devochki konchaiut svobodnoi zemlei (Russian Girls Come (with/onto) Free Soil) published in 2023. One of the translation challenges stems from the central role of Slavonic languages in conveying the core themes of the volume. Modifying the Roman - or any other - script would reshape the narrative and tell a completely different story of violence, domination, and self-identification. Nedeoglo’s use of hybrid scripts counters the dominant discourse of purity revealing the inherent complexities and power differentials embedded in scripts. Her work invites a multimodal reading that merges interpretation with a purely visual engagement - an experience that should be preserved in translation.

A9-13

The newly established ICLA Research Committee on Language Contact in Literature: Europe (LCLE) intends to revisit translation, literary multilingualism and related fields as sites of linguistic contact and change within the literary realm. We thus reconsider literature with a focus on the multiple ways in which languages interact and influence each other when they come into contact, both at the level of individual speakers and that of linguistic communities. A number of scholars have proposed to apply a contact linguistics paradigm to translation (Kotze 2020; Malamatidou 2016); this Committee’s goal is to reinvent this approach for the global literary context (e.g. Hassan 2022). As many contemporary scholars of comparative literature (e.g. Yildiz 2012, Gramling 2016) recognize, the traditional focus on national literatures is insufficient to capture the global dimensions of the literary process. We therefore propose language contact in literature as a unified framework that can encompass and facilitate dialogue across several fields: the study of literary translation, multilingual and translingual literature, minor and borderland literature, influence across language boundaries, postcolonial literature, international literary movements and potentially others. Our aim is to identify and distinguish the diverse elements that contribute to literary language contact in its various guises, including linguistic and sociological factors, techniques and processes, as well as aesthetic and stylistic considerations. At the same time, we aspire to understand how different settings of language contact relate to one another, how they interact and what distinguishes them. To achieve these purposes, linguistics offers valuable theoretical support.

We invite original research papers that address the following areas and topics:

- The notion of language contact and how it can be productively applied to literature

- The array of elements/factors involved in a language contact in literature framework and their modulations

- The stylistics of language contact

- Manifest and latent multilingualism as an expression of language contact

- Translation as language contact

- What linguistic theories and approaches can contribute additional perspectives and nuance to the study of literary language contact

- The role of the author’s linguistic background and of the reader

- Potential challenges and limitations, notably in terms of particular language pairs, integrating and reconciling existing terminologies and extending the approach beyond the European context

- Specific case studies on literary translation, multilingual and translingual literature, minor and borderland literature, influence across language boundaries, postcolonial literature or international literary movements

- Additional areas in literary study where a language contact framework may apply

Any questions should be addressed to Eugenia Kelbert (eugenia.kelbert@savba.sk) and Marianna Deganutti (marianna.deganutti@savba.sk).

The paper presents the case study of a literary production in a minority language that exists in a borderline between two important literatures in Europe: Italian and Greek. The language called by its native speakers Griko, is a mixture of the medieval Greek and southern Italian dialects. It is almost not used in everyday life anymore and can be defined as a ‘performative post-linguistic vernacular’ (Pellegrino 2016). After its existence in an exclusively oral form after the fall of Constantinople, several attempts by local activists to promote literary creativity in this language have been made from the second half of the 19th century onwards. The paper analyses the main strategies adopted by the authors, such as translations from Latin, Italian, Ancient and Modern Greek; borrowings from the local folklore and its elaborations; bilingual works; novels written in Italian but including specific words and phrases in Griko; musical and theatrical performances facilitating the understanding for the audience not familiar with the language. It also takes into consideration the activities of the local authorities who organized poetry festivals and competitions to stimulate the literary creativity of residents who speak the language. The study identifies the folklore genres that are productive for local writers. Thus, funeral laments occupy a special place in the local heritage, often compared with the Ancient Greek texts (Romano 1979; Montinaro 2004), and are considered an important cultural identity marker of the Greek-speaking villages (Figlieri 2023: 302-304). Other productive genres are children's entertainment poetry (nursery rhymes and lullabies), epideictic speech, and prayer. The religious texts attracted the attention of numerous authors who tended to restore, at least to some extent, the liturgical and ritual function of the Greek idiom that lost it with the local population’s conversion to Catholicism in the 16 century (Aprile 1994: 61-72). The corpus of the religious texts in Griko includes translations from Latin and individual creative works elaborating different examples from the canonical writings. One more aspect of the process of a literary creation in the minority language is the translation of canonical texts from the ‘big’ literatures (Haller 1999). Here, the choice of the works to translate is as interesting as the stylistic features of the translation dictated by the limitations of the language in which the authors write. To study all these aspects of the borderline literary tradition, it is necessary to pay respect to the multilingualism of the authors and the readers, their linguistic competencies, the limitations of the language, and the influence of the neighbouring literatures and cultures, so the language contact framework seems to be fruitful for such analysis.

Roberto Bazlen is a pivotal figure in Italian publishing and cultural history. Hailing from Trieste, he belonged to a generation of plurinational and multilingual literates who found intellectual freedom in the spaces between rigid national labels such as “Italian” or “Austrian.” Bazlen’s intellectual identity was shaped by the experience of the border, allowing him to bridge cultures during an era marked by wars and mass displacement. His cultural mediation played a crucial role in founding the publishing house Adelphi and in the enduring dissemination of Central and East-Central European literature in Italy. The multilingualism of Central European authors in the Adelphi canon, such as Elias Canetti, Johannes Urzidil, the Singer brothers, and Joseph Roth, became emblematic of the intellectual tradition of “Mitteleuropa” as popularised in Italy, serving as a key example of cross-cultural influence.

This paper explores the multilingualism of Adelphi’s “Mitteleuropa” catalogue, starting with its founder, Bazlen—“the writer who does not write”—and his role as a mediating polyglot reader. It examines the resemanticisation of the term “Mitteleuropa” in Italy and considers in which way the linguistic background of this combined author-reader figure informs an editorial approach rooted in a style shaped by the border. This style, grounded in the singularity of writing-producing human experience, underpins a literary conception which aims to an inner transformation of the reader—the “singular book” (it. “libro unico”).

I argue that Bazlen’s conception arises from a stylistics of language contact, shifting focus away from national, classical, and pedagogical canons toward what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “minor literature,” emerging from linguistic and cultural margins. While the myth of national irrelevance or equivalence in Austria-Hungarian literature has been critically deconstructed by generations of scholars, this paper underscores the contemporary importance of fostering multilingual authorship and readership that transcends the notion of literature rooted in a homogeneous linguistic framework. Such an approach cultivates an appreciation of language contact as a productive force in literature, offering valuable insights for overcoming cultural provincialism through book selection and publishing, and resisting reductive tendencies such as fandom. Ultimately, this vision of literature prioritises diversity, transformation, intellectual exploration, and the creative act of mediation.

In my presentation I will focus on specific literary phenomena, which are saturated by manifest and latent multilingualism. Hungarian transborder literature and émigré literature have come to form two distinct categories in the literary historical discourse, and they are a result of two distinct forms of mobility. Transborder Hungarian literature came to denote works produced in the Hungarian language within the territories of Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Serbia (the former Czechoslovakia, USSR, and Yugoslavia respectively), where significant Hungarian minority populations exist as a result of the post-WWI redrawing of the region’s borders. This conceptual categorization could be seen as an example of what Brubaker calls “the movement of borders over people” (2015, 136). Émigré literature, or as it is often referred to locally, the Hungarian literature of the West – as “the movement of people over borders” (Brubaker ibid.) – has been produced by authors who left Hungary in 1946-48 during the consolidation of state-socialist rule and the aftermath of the 1956 revolution.

Firstly, I will concentrate on these two literary phenomena from the institutional categorization perspective: how the inherent linguistic otherness, i.e. the coexistence of these literatures with other, surrounding languages dislocates both the traditional descriptive categories with which Hungarian literary history operates, and the viability of a literary canon based on the borders of the nation state.

Secondly, through analyzing István Domonkos’s Rudderless (1971) poem and Andrea Tompa’s The Hangman’s House (2010I) novel, I elaborate a nomadic poetics that challenges the normative frames of grammar, syntax, genre, and medium by creating diverse multilingual language contacts.

This paper examines two nineteenth-century literary texts by authors of Romani background in different regions, Ferenc Sztojka Nagyidai (1855-1929) and Martin J. Mathiassen Skou (1849-1919), and discusses the languages present in them. Both works employ the majority language alongside Romani, with the latter appearing in specific contexts within the narratives or parts of the editions. These texts do not follow a bilingual publication model but rather a multilingual one, where the choice of language reflects the cultural dynamics within the narrative. Romani sections appear without translation in these instances, which demonstrates the significance of Romani within the literary and cultural framework.

Drawing on these early examples of original literary texts by Romani authors, this paper explores several interconnected themes: the early development of Romani literature alongside other European literary traditions, highlighting authorial agency and literary expression; the inherently multilingual nature of (early) Romani writing, shaped by the linguistic repertoires of its authors and their communities; and the crucial role of the Romani language as both an identity marker and a means of depicting cultural settings within literature.

Situating these works within broader discussions of literary multilingualism and language contact, this paper contributes to a deeper understanding of how linguistic diversity shapes literary production. On the one hand, it challenges traditional, monolingually framed perspectives on literary history, while on the other, it highlights the early history and inherently multilingual nature of early Romani literature.

David Cronenberg’s 1993 film M. Butterfly is a subversive rewriting of Giacomo Puccini’s classic opera Madama Butterfly. Focusing on the film’s capacity to shift between characters’ subjective shots, the essay argues that as multiple internal focalizors coexist in M. Butterfly, their respective takes and shots combine to form a kind of “synergy” to constantly configure and reconfigure the power hierarchies of gender, sexuality, race, etc. in the storyworld. In this way, the film deconstructs the rigid male/female, West/East oppositions delivered by the original opera through, among other factors, the highly fixed focalization typical of stage performance. A more universal claim based on the case study thus emerges: the dynamic nature of cinematic focalization could be visual cues inviting the audience to enter various ideological perspectives and unwittingly engage with their mutual dialogues.

This paper attempts a comparative analysis between Korean Sijo Poetry and ‘Indian traditions of haiku’ – particularly in sijo poems composed by Korean poet Yi Un-Sang and translated by Jaihiun Kim; and Indian author Rabindranath Tagore’s haiku poems in his book Stray Birds (1916). In the poetic world of short ‘verse libre’ where imagist poems of Western modernism may have held central attention for decades, an Asian turn has foregrounded Japanese ‘haiku’ and Korean sijo poetry in a new way. Yi became an influential figure in the history of today’s sijo and contributed largely to the nation’s literature. However, in Indian subcontinent, Rabindranath Tagore explored ‘haiku-like’ epigrammatic verses in his Stray Birds (1916) – a work that was translated by Tagore himself from his poetry collections Kanika (1899) and Lekhan (1926). Within their form and structure, both sijo and haiku evoke one single image/ concern in each poem; but the difference lies in their literary traditions as well as cultural variations. Both haiku and sijo poetry explore deep observations on natural phenomenon or regular life activities and offer perspectives of literary wellbeing in this process. From recent studies of positive cross-cultural psychology (PCCP), wellbeing scholar Tim Lomas proposes a model of “universal relativism” that includes “a universalising stance that looks for commonalities between people of different cultures, and a relativistic perspective focused on particularity, pluralism and difference.” (Lomas 69). The present paper offers a cross-cultural reading of both Yi Un-Sang and Tagore’s works to examine if readers can find textual tools for mindfulness practice. It also invites further exposure towards holistic wellbeing through shared human nature despite diverse cultural values.

This panel comprises 04 (four) essays, each reading select Bangladeshi and (South) Korean literary and cultural texts with a view to exploring the network of genetic and typological inter-animation. It is an initial phase of a longer project that intends to explore the known and the chiefly unknown connections between (South) Korea and Bangladesh that many literary and cultural texts in Korean and Bangla languages testify to. The idea of this panel was triggered by two recent events: first, once Han Kang won her Nobel in 2024, the iconic status of Rabindranath Tagore, a Nobel Laureate, in Korea resurfaced, and, second, a recent revaluation of Birangona (women raped during the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War) brought to the fore the Korean translation (by Seung Hee Jeon) of shaheen Akhtar’s novel, Talaash.

Culling insights from Dionýz Ďurišin’s concepts of interliterariness, this panel defines ‘genetic contact’ as the elements of similarities/ connections due to factual contact and ‘typological affinity’ as the elements of similarities in spite of no evidenced factual contact.

The panel broaches four dimensions in order to render its study range interdisciplinary and accommodative:

1. Korean and Bangladeshi aesthetics: Aynun Zaria’s paper takes resource from Byung Chul-Han’s Saving Beauty (2017) with a view to underscoring the ways Bangladeshi consumers received and postprocess the concepts and notions of ‘plastic beauty’ generated chiefly through K-drama that has a huge fan-following in Bangladesh.

2. Korean and Bangladeshi poetics: Jarin Tasneem Shoilee’s paper explores how Korean sijo poetry has impacted the generation and updating of haiku- and sijo-styled poetry in Bangla. Situating the poems in the transcultural planetary nexus of ideas and praxis, the paper locates ways in which literatures offer mental wellbeing across cultures.

3. Korean and Bangladeshi narratives on trauma 1 – sexual violence: Mashrur Shahid Hossain’s paper offers a long awaited comparative reading of narratives about and by women who were sexually abused in times of conflict – Korean ‘Comfort Women’ during the rule of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces and Bangladeshi ‘Birangona’ during the 1971 Liberation War. The essay concentrates on women’s management of rage, resistance, and resilience in response to sexual abuse.

4. Korean and Bangladeshi narratives on trauma management 2 – diaspora: Redwan Ahmed’s essay compares novels by two diaspora writers to explore commonalities that migration-induced trauma generates across time and space. The essay contends that both Zia Haider Rahman’s In the Light of What We Know and Min Jin Lee's Pachinko testify to the common means through which migrant people manage their identities and lives in the hostlands.

The panel wishes to initiate an affirmative critical-affective dialogue on the potential of increasing trans-cultural and inter-lingual exchange between South Korea and Bangladesh.

The paper utilizes three award-winning biofictions in English, French, and Chinese, namely Blonde by Joyce Carols Oates from the US, La Septième Fonction du Language by Laurent Binet from France, and the Yanxia Alley by Wei Wei from PRC, to discuss how these novels do in narration from a comparative approach. In regard to narration, it is found that three biofictions do the narration in a chronically timed sequence, in which the novels begin with the start of the hero’s life at a certain stage or heroines’ life. Regarding the narration techniques, flashbacks as well as the plain prose is utilized in telling the story about the hero or heroines. The plots and characters bildung are considered worthy of researching into these three biofictions in which major events or interesting episodes have illustrated and expanded different lives of hero and heroines in the works. It is concluded that biofiction as a genre of novels is differentiated from biography, autobiography or autobiographical novel in that biofiction is a fiction genre based on the essence of the hero or heroine with fiction as the major elements.

This paper analyzes the experimental expressions that intentionally reveal the objectifying capability of film in Masahiro Shinoda’s Double Suicide (1969) and Toshio Matsumoto’s Demons (1971) to argue that the formal practices of defamiliarization in both films elicit a sense of uncanniness and disorientation as well as present an aesthetic of non-humanness. These formal practices involve manipulations of elements such as time, visibility, and human bodies, thereby showcasing mechanical performativity and multiple layers of visual objectification. The aesthetics of objectification or alienation transform filmic images into a potential platform for dialogues between Marxist materialism and New materialism.

The two films will be discussed in the contexts of post-war avant-garde art, Japanese New Wave cinema, and sociocultural movements during the 1960s and 1970s in Japan. Both Double Suicide and Demons were funded by Art Theatre Guild and adapted from theatrical plays; they exhibit an intended incomplete fusion of theatrical and filmic conventions, presenting themselves as attempts at anti-naturalism cinema and the exploration of artistic expressions. The repetitions of similar or entirely distinct shots within a single scene in Demons disrupt the linear narrative, illustrating the distortion of time and the inversion of life and death achieved through film editing. The exposure of the artificiality and plasticity of the images also serves as a critique of historicism in relation to the grand narrative. Double Suicide uncovers the hidden labor of puppeteers, who are deliberately ignored in Bunraku puppet performances and can be interpreted as representatives of the working class. These puppeteers are invisible to the diegetic world as they guide the human characters toward the conclusion of suicide, thereby implying the spectral nature of the unseen agents. On the one hand, the objectifying depictions of human beings in these two films are reminiscent of the Marxist critique of alienation, which aligns with the sociopolitical resistance movements of that time. On the other hand, by reducing human images to graphical elements, such as lines and color blocks, these cinematic portrayals render humans as manipulable and inorganic as non-human entities and inanimate objects. This simultaneously uncanny and visually pleasing aesthetic reflects the central idea of Object-Oriented Ontology, which considers all beings as objects.

In addition, the uncanny performativity exhibited by both films is closely tied to film as a medium. The perceivable cinematic apparatus functions as an interventional supernatural force, introducing a surreal dimension to the images. This paper further explores the connections between critical thoughts on the film medium’s potential and the aforementioned aesthetic expressions.

It is hardly controversial to state that we are living in a post-European world, given the pressures on Eurocentric perspectives to become more inclusive, especially toward the Global South. What is equally true—and provides the impetus behind my paper—is that the division between center and periphery within Europe has become more porous. However, the intra-European dialogue between Western and Eastern literary/publishing establishments observed since the fall of the Berlin Wall, exciting though it is, continues to be hampered by assumptions and stereotypes. On the one hand, there is lots to cheer on, including new book prizes, chief among The European Union Prize for Literature (EUPL), supported by the Creative Europe program of the European Union, and the Grand Continent Prize, which aims to make the winning title widely available in translation (the title must be written in either French, Spanish, German, Polish, or Italian, which are also the languages the title is then translated into). On the other hand, it seems that Western European readers continue to expect a certain type of narrative to come out of East Central Europe, mainly, and not unlike during the Cold War, a book written by a dissident or depicting the trials and tribulations of living under an oppressive government. Ironically, today’s East Central European writers have themselves to blame, at least in part, as many of them embraced what Andrew Wachtel has called “new internationalism,” which is about getting translated as well as obtaining legitimacy. For his part, David Williams uses the term trümmerliteratur (“rubble literature” or “literature of the ruins”) to designate writers who continue to feed the West a cocktail of political tribulations or historical narrativizing (Poland’s Andrzej Stasiuk, for example, became immensely popular in Germany for his travelogues depicting East European backwaters). Is there a way forward out of this? Absolutely. To foster a truly pluralistic literary ecosystem, Europe must both engage with global literary developments under the banner of “world literature” and support avant-garde and migrant voices within its borders. This includes redefining paradigms for translation—such as reconsidering the notion of “native” translators—and reviving policies like the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize. By embracing linguistic and cultural diversity, Europe can not only counterbalance the dominance of English-language literature but also model a sustainable approach to literary inclusivity that values both global and regional voices.

We have been used to discuss technology in the sense of new communication technoogies, often linked to the digital medium. This is the discussion today with comparative literary studies, when we address its relation to technology. This field is mostly discussed in the relations between new communication and creation technology and research, gathering the uses of the digital, the possiblities of artificial intelligence, and the new distribution media or social networks. This is a very relevant take on technology, especially because it is still very uncertain. These techological phenomena are directly linked to discourse and languages, and, therefore, to the production and circulation of literature. However, technology is a much wider theme, and so are the relations between literature and technology. In particular, I will pay attention to a particular relation between the history of European languages, fishing tehcnologies, and literature.

While the prominence of some literary languages over the others has changed in the history of European literatures, their various uses continue to both producing the idea of Europe itself as well as resistances to it. This paper looks at narratives of fishing that contrast the Eurpoean fishing policy frameworks with the specific local experiences of the changing fishing practices in the margins of Europe. In particular, the paper delves into the narrative essay Laberinto de mar: un viaje por la vida y la historia de nuestras costas by Noemí Sabugal’s, which employs multilingualism in its tracing of the technological changes that have transformed and eroded the fishing sector in Spain. The book continuously uses minorized languages of the Iberian Peninsula to account for a resistance to the homogeneization that European policy frameworks have encompassed as the sector progressively evolved technologically towards a more industrial, international-scale fishing. Through the uses of Spanish, Galician, Basque, and Catalan, the book invites us to interrogate the changing ideas of Europe and the tensions between a Post-European cultural and literary panorama and the enclosing European governance policies. In sum, Laberinto mar invites us to interrogate other forms of cultural discourse that, while not necessarily centered in literary production and circulation, nonetheless involve the linguistic uses of technology in the creation of and resistances to European ideologies and imaginaries.

Few researchers are interested in Bruno Latour’s reflections on literature, probably due to his apparent devaluation of language, which he often considers as a veil preventing access to beings. Consequently, this presentation explores the possibility of approaching literature through Latour’s ontology, focusing on the (x-)morphism he values for analyzing protagonists in fictional works. First, we will show how Latour reassesses the conventional opposition between “fact” and “fiction”, giving privileged status to “beings of fiction.” We will then analyze how these beings exist, paying particular attention to female protagonists such as Thérèse Raquin in Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin and Marie-Ève in Henri Lopes’ Sur l’autre rive. Indeed, Latour discusses a series of multiple “morphic” transformations experienced by Adie, the protagonist of Richard Powers’ Plowing the Dark, at the moment when she recites a poem by Yeats, with her words coexisting and interacting with other human and non-human entities. We argue that this way of writing and reading novels allows female protagonists to exist in a different way than before.

Peu de chercheur·euse·s s’intéressent à la réflexion de Bruno Latour sur la littérature, probablement en raison de sa dévalorisation apparente de la langue, souvent considérée par lui comme une voile empêchant l’accès aux êtres. Dès lors, notre communication explore la possibilité d’aborder la littérature à travers l’ontologie de Latour, notamment en focalisant sur le (x)-morphisme qu’il valorise pour analyser les protagonistes dans des œuvres de fiction. Nous montrerons d’abord comment Latour réévalue la relation opposée entre le « fait » et la « fiction », en accordant plutôt un privilège aux « êtres de fiction ». Nous analyserons ensuite la manière dont ces derniers existent, en portant une attention particulière aux protagonistes féminines telles que Thérèse Raquin d’Émile Zola (Thérèse Raquin) et Marie-Ève de Henri Lopes (Sur l’autre rive). En effet Latour évoque une série de multiples transformations ‘morphiques’ que connaît la protagoniste Adie de Richard Powers (Plowing the dark) au moment où les mots d’un poème de Yeats qu’elle récite sont prononcés, coexistant et interagissant avec d’autres entités humaines et non humaines. Nous pensons que cette façon d’écrire et lire les romans fera exister les protagonistes féminines romanesques autrement qu’auparavant.

This paper examines an ecofeminist comparative analysis of Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwan and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, investigating how both novels delve into the intertwined oppression and resistance of women and nature under patriarchal, capitalist, and colonial systems. By applying an intersectional ecofeminist framework, the study reveals how solitude—manifested as isolation, estrangement, or transcendence—functions both as a mechanism of control and as a space for resistance and regeneration in these narratives. While both novels depict women and nature as marginalized and commodified, their critiques differ in scale and narrative style. Whale focuses on local industrial capitalism in Korea, illustrating how domestic systems of economic development exploit natural resources and female labor, culminating in nature’s material reclamation of industrial ruins. In contrast, One Hundred Years of Solitude critiques global colonial capitalism in Latin America, using magical realism to depict nature’s cyclical resistance to foreign corporate exploitation and historical erasure, particularly through the allegorical destruction and renewal of Macondo. The paper also investigates how female characters—Chunhui’s physical endurance and Remedios the Beauty’s mystical transcendence—embody divergent forms of ecofeminist resistance, ranging from embodied defiance to ethereal withdrawal. This analysis extends beyond gendered oppression, integrating critiques of class, colonialism, and environmental degradation to offer a multifaceted exploration of power and resistance. Ultimately, the paper argues that both novels, while culturally and narratively distinct, converge in their portrayal of women and nature as resilient agents capable of challenging and subverting systems of domination, providing valuable insights into contemporary ecofeminist discourse.

Kantatare Projapati stands at the cross roads of biofiction and left social historical fiction which has a long tradition in Bengal. It is set in the period of the final bid for freedom from British colonial rule, the partition, and the massive peasant movement in Bengal known as the tebhaga movement. While novels by Sabitri Roy (Paka Dhaner Gaan /Harvest Song) and Akhtaruzzaman Ilyas (Khwabnamah) cover broadly the same terrain, Kantatare Projapati is distinctive because the central figure, Ila Mitra, was a historical figure, a leader of the tebhaga movement in Nachol in East Bengal, subsequently a leader of the Communist Party of India, multiple times Member of the Legislative Assembly in West Bengal. This has given rise to an almost inevitable misconception. As Michael Lackey points out, biographical novelists do not see the paper person and the real person as one and the same. But readers have sometimes assumed differently. Jaya Bhattacharya reviewing a work on gendered dimensions of the partition of Bengal (Bagchi and Dasgupta 2003) unselfconsciously refers to Kantatare Projapati as "evidence" of the nature of violence on women. This paper will argue that the political and historical context (both sides of Bengal had a strong left) put some pressure on authors writing about those historical persons and periods to conform to the ‘historical truth’, yet given the contested nature of that truth one need not take a completely agnostic stance, nor accept Lukacs’ strictures about the weaknesses of biographical novels. It is possible, instead, to read the novel, at one level in conjunction with those by Roy or Ilyas mentioned earlier, and at another level as the image of Ila Mitra that developed among the poor peasants of Nachol as well as the left leaning intelligentsia, rather than as an archival image of Ila Mitra.

Colm Tóibín’s The Master is a richly textured biofiction that interrogates the complexities of Henry James’s inner life, offering a nuanced portrayal of identity as a dialectical process shaped by experience, reflection, and artistic creation. This paper situates Tóibín’s novel within John Dewey’s pragmatist framework, particularly his concepts of experience, identity, and the reconstruction of self, to argue that James’s life and work exemplify Dewey’s assertion that the self is not a static entity but a dynamic, ever-evolving construct. Dewey’s Art as Experience posits that identity emerges through the interplay of lived experience and reflective engagement, a process mirrored in Tóibín’s depiction of James’s struggles with intimacy, creativity, and self-understanding.

Tóibín’s James is a figure perpetually in flux, his identity reconstructed through a series of existential and artistic negotiations. The novel’s episodic structure, which mirrors the fragmented nature of memory and experience, brings new light to Dewey’s emphasis on how a continuity of experience can be constructed as the basis for selfhood. James’s relationships—with figures such as Constance Fenimore Woolson and his family—are not merely biographical details but sites of existential reckoning, where his sense of self is continually challenged and reconfigured. Tóibín’s portrayal of James’s creative process further underscores this Deweyan dynamic: writing becomes a means of synthesizing disparate experiences into a coherent, though provisional, sense of self.

This paper will offer a close reading of key scenes in The Master—such as James’s haunting reflections on failure, his ambivalent relationships, and his meticulous crafting of narrative—to illuminate how Tóibín’s biofiction aligns with Dewey’s philosophy. It will argue that Tóibín’s James embodies Dewey’s vision of the self as a work in progress, perpetually reconstructed through the interplay of experience, reflection, and artistic expression. By framing The Master within Dewey’s pragmatist lens, this analysis seeks to deepen our understanding of both Tóibín’s novel and the philosophical underpinnings of identity as a lived, experiential process. Ultimately, the paper contends that Tóibín’s biofiction not only reimagines James’s life but also enacts a profound meditation on the dialectics of selfhood, resonating with Dewey’s assertion that the self is always in the process of formation.

Introduction

The “Catkin LuXun” sketches a decentered, universal world of Southeast Asian literature via the agency of LuXun’s literary tradition. This transcultural project aims to transcend the existing regional patterns of Sinophone literature by presenting a diverse and complex cultural-political dynamics of LuXun’s literature flowing in the contexts of Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Malaysia.

The term“catkin (荑tí)” addresses a specific methodology, which is a“creative transformation” of Professor David Der-wei Wang’s“post-loyalist”(後遺民) theory. In Chinese, “catkin (荑tí)” is derived from the character 「艸」, which originally meant to be “growth and development”. On one hand, it echoes the idea of 「後夷民」, which is used by scholars as means of transforming the barbarians「夷」 into ethnic Chinese「華」. On the other hand, it symbolises a literary way to “rise from the dead” in works of the three selected writers in East-Asian literature, Lee Waiyi, Nieh Hualing, and Chia Joo Ming. They should not only be regarded as the“others”in relation to Greater China, but also critical challengers to the orthodoxy of Chineseness through writing “from memory to history” rather than “from history to memory”. These writers use literary language to express remembrance as new forms of reality that penetrates the blind spots obscured by political discourse, as well as the way to carry on the redemptive nature of LuXun’s literature in the contemporary.

The world of "catkin LuXun" is constructed on the basis of Goethe's concept of “cosmopolitan literature,” while specifically following on the concept of "Chinese cosmopolitanism” by Leo Ou-fan Lee and Pheng Cheah's theory of "cosmopolitan literature". The idea of “heterotopia” is an organic compound of the above concepts, redefining reality by transgressing the heterogeneous and intertwined liminal space of “fiction” and “reality”, “freedom” and “order”. This paper aims to put Foucault's blueprint of "heterotopia" into practice by constructing the world of "Catkin Lu Xun" as a “reflexive mirror” for regional literature, so that historical memories from different places can be compared and contrasted, as well as jointly performing the “disturbing potentials” of literary space in relation to Reality and Western colonial utopia: using language to express one's own history as a kind of existence, in order to challenge the status quo, the irrational political situation; and to bring into play the “Messianism” of literature. The writing of ‘memory-history’ transcends the dichotomy of "colonial/post-colonial", "marginal/centre", thereby fundamentally revolutionizes the worldview of "Sinophone", then continues the tradition of literary revolutions (鼎革以文), from Zhang Taiyan to Lu Xun. Therefore, Lu Xun's heterotopia is not only a literary unit, but also a“prototype of a new form of governance” which have been constructed through literature. By interpreting Li, Zhu, and Zhang's post-descendants “memory-history” narratives as a form of “creationism” (Jacques Lacan), and to discuss how “post-descendants” writings create a “heterotopia” that is intermingled with reality, fiction and “extraterritoriality.” This is a literary-political revolution to reconstruct memory and redeem history through words.

3.1 The Return of the Soul in “Dark Tradition”（幽傳統）: Li Weiyi's “Selfless” Heterotopia

If LuXun’s Old Tales Retold has initiated the “dark tradition” through rewriting folktales from a “post-May Fourth” standpoint, then, the “word cultivator,”（文字耕作者） Weiyi Li, has inherited LuXun's “literary-social” dual identities in the “post-1997” context. She intervenes in social issues via novel, cultivates history with words, explores the possibilities and specific forms of “memory-politics” through a combination of realism and magical literary devices.

“A Trying Journey”（《行路難》） and “Chen Xiang”（《沉香》） point out that the new experience of enlightenment comes from the people, and the novels are mostly written from the perspective of ghosts and small histories that are “full of the breath of people's life” , in which ghosts and phantoms are used to create a postulate of writing that goes beyond one's own experience and subjectivity, a “selfless” postulate of “stand by and watch” . Through the creative transformation of LuXun's dark tradition, Lee Wai-yee established a literary heterotopia of “do-it-yourself” based on the centerless ideology constructed between the two post-colonial ideologies of “the crevice theory”（夾縫論） and “the theory of imagining Hong Kong moving North”（北進論） in post-1997 Hong Kong. By doing so, she liberates Hong Kong from the dilemma of self/other dichotomy induced by nationalism and utilizes the constructive function of literary devices to reconstruct Hong Kong's historical memory. The “selfless” heterotopia of “Chen Xiang” illustrates that when one’s free will is imprisoned by the language of power, literature can loosen the fetters by symbolically cutting down the reality/truth, so that historical memory of the community can be spared from the current time and be retained in the heterotopia of literature. This is undoubtedly a localization of Lu Xun's “Moroism” （摩羅主義） and his Philosophy of life（生命哲學）, which emphasizes the truthfulness of visceral feelings. However, in the eyes of the word cultivator, life is not only about truths, but the imagination of literature can also change one's “conception of the individual self and the world outside”, making a “better world” comes true.

 

3.2 History, Memory, and Cultural Politics: Zhu Tianxin's Imagination of Communities in the context of post-diaspora.

In the midst of social contradiction and incompatibility of provincial and local communities, Zhu Tianxin strives to find the local positioning for the provincials and to rewrite Taiwan history. Like Lu Xun, the “old soul” （「老靈魂」，指朱天心） style of memory-history writing, is in fact an ethnic politics of history.

The nostalgic narrative of The Old Capital（古都） restores the beautiful “ruins”（Walter Benjamin’s allegory of history） of Old Taipei（老台北） by reversing the past and the present, the documentary and the fictional. It is an imagined community constructed by the writer with the historical memories condensed from their personal experiences. Among them, Zhu summarizes and transforms Taiwan's national experience in the form of “spatialization of history,” demonstrating the historical energy of Meta-historical poetics that assembles freedom of thought, skepticism, intellectual curiosity to transform and elevate. Zhu maps Taipei amid memory and fiction. In The Old Capital, she had dialogues with the past self, the fading era, and the dwindling community, exemplifying the spirit of “post-modern witch”（後現代巫者） who creates a sacred space for daily life, an open habitat for Taiwanese diasporas in the contemporary. This cultural heterotopia is a result of “Horizontverschmelzung” between the provincial and local communities through the second-person narrative, which has the meaning of universality, and utilizes the “plurality and universality” to form “community without community”. True communion is composed of differentiation.

3.3 Affective Narrative History of “Post-humanity”: Zhang Guixing's Association and Circulation from Human to Non-human

Zhang Guixing's imagination of primitive ecological history and his writing of cultural memories is a remix that projects anti-colonial consciousness. This essay interprets Zhang’s writing as an alternative politics of time and memory. Zhang's Wild Boars has crossed is in fact the long river of history that has emphasized enlightenment and rationality since the May Fourth Movement, in which he has inherited part of Lu Xun's dark consciousness and the avant-garde thinking of the madman's（「狂人」） to the times and history, as well as the part that has been creatively transformed and subverted against the spirit of Lu Xun's “Cultivation of people”（「立人」精神）. Zhang has no intention of enlightenment, but he reveals the possibility of practicing Enlightenment in a reverse way: to return animal nature from humanism, and to reassess human civilization in the heterotopia of literature by means of the non-human affect This contributes the possibility for Zhang Guixing to surpass Lu Xun.

The “post-human affective narrative” in Wild Boars Cross the River（《野豬渡河》） demonstrates a new perspective to enter the world of post-colonial literature, which helps to respond to related political, ethical and ecological problems. Both Zhang and his wild boars “transcend” the boundaries of colonial/post-colonial and local/dissociated identities and politics, demonstrating the “desire to cut off language from ethnicity and nation,” shattering the illusion of self-certainty for human beings. From “object” to “thing”, Zhang invites us to reflect on the inhumanities that historians have overlooked, revealing the “lost hell”——- the human condition in which subject coexists with the other. Zhang's post-human affective narrative is precisely a literary reconstruction of the relationship between the subject and the coexistence of the other. At a literal and symbolic level, Zhang uses objects to induce emotions and to spark off a tendency by reintroducing affect into rationalized political space, using narrative to reconstruct reader's political perception and war memory of Malaysia. Zhang transforms repressed wilderness into first-hand historical materials that recall human inwardness, reconstructing a historical world that transcends the dichotomy of humans and non-humans, thereby diconstructing the colonial hegemony and Malay cultural hegemonic blockage of Chinese history. In his novel, Zhang constructs Borneo as a heterotopia where multiple ethnicities, subjectivities (human and non-human), reflexive history narrative collaborates, calling out the world through literature. Through literature, he roars upon the world to return to the natural status of life, to associate with animals, and to regain the true experience of living. This is not only a continuation of Lu Xun's “fire on the eternal life” of retelling ancient history/nation’s history from memories, but also a political ecology of “thing-power”: by transforming the experience of survival in the rainforest into an ecological-political resource that evokes emotions, he re-interprets the “universa humanity” in a series of dialectical interactions between humans and objects, nature and civilization, colonialism and post-colonialism, also between memory and history. On the ground of these, Zhang transcends the regional boundaries of Mahua Literature and Taiwanese Literature; beyond dispersion and naturalization, he strikes a chord with the universality of World Literature, opening up the liminal space of Sinophone literature. Since the history told in Wild Boars Cross the River is the history of anti-Japanese resistance shared by Chinese people all over the world, it is a traumatic complex of history. Therefore, the memory-history writing of “direct, existential, and physical engagement” not only breaks through Lu Xun's dark tradition, but also revolt as a political spirituality to construct a heterotopia in Chinese history.

Conclusion

To summarize, the emotion-based, virtual-real world of Chinese catkins, is precisely the literary heterotopia that this paper ultimately seeks to create. The construction of a heterotopia must be centered on the life-based historical emotions, and through literature, emotions can be summoned to transform the virtual into the real, constructing a place-based historical community. In this paper, we believe that this is a possible way out of the theoretical deadlock in Sinophone studies. The light that leads the way in dark, is the“fire on the eternal life” inherited from Zhang Taiyan, Lu Xun, to the Chinese catkins: Lee Waiyi, Zhu Tianxin and Zhang Guixing.

The functioning of ekphrasis, the description of an object of art in the text of a literary work has been the subject of research by scholars, especially in the field of interdisciplinary studies. The question of the functioning of ekphrasis in the text of travel literature seems interesting in terms of the functions and qualities that ekphrasis acquires in such texts. Ekphrasis is a symbol of material culture, a bearer of the signs of national culture. In time and space, ekphrasis becomes an element of aesthetic transit between peoples and eras.

In the literature of travel, from an interdisciplinary point of view, ekphrasis can fulfil distinct functions. The object of material culture can be a point of orientation for the journey. For example, in the case of pilgrimage, for François-René de Chateaubriand it is the journey to sacred places, for Theophile Gautier it is a quest for new cultural experiences, for Jules Verne, it is the creation of new worlds. This, in turn, breaks down into a number of more descriptive elements of both contemporary and antique art for the traveller. One could say that one can observe an aesthetic change in the way ekphrasis works, depending on the place and time of the journey.

Ekphrasis as a point of reference between eras and cultures has an amalgam nature, which in turn gives it the power to transform the description of an art object for the reader into an element of travel. Journeys of an abstract nature for the more educated reader will reveal ekphrasis in its full force. A text presented to a person from another reality will not be as effective as the author originally intended. But it may lead to an entirely different creation of reality in the matter of acceptance of aesthetic criteria.

The study of ekphrasis in the text of French travel literature is a necessary element in understanding the interdisciplinarity of the work in terms of the modification of aesthetic criteria across time and space.

Under the context of AI as compounded in the form of Large Language Models (hereinafter referred to as LLMs), there have resulted in the decreased translation rates and work volumes in respect to the consequences of issues related to translation ethics. In the age of AI, translation ethics have re-emerged as an issue that is worthy of researching in order to improve the performance and effectiveness of the industry. Now with the convergence of AI and LLMs, as well as the exceedingly and ever-increasingly fierce competition amongst all translation companies and linguists, those professionals and entities in the translation industry cannot compromise the issue of the new translation ethics. The paper discusses the aforesaid issues and provides solutions to the problem of the new translation ethics in the age of AI and LLMs. The new translation ethics comprises integrity; originality, efficiency, and the respect for IP protection, which are considered as the effective translation training and practice for a win-win situation accomplished amongst translators, the translation companies, and clients.

Since the 2000s, a revised understanding of Goethe’s concept of World literature has shaken the study of comparative literature. As Theo D-haen summarizes in his volume The History of World Literature (2024), „No other approach to literary studies has known as spectacular a success in the new millennium as that which goes by the name of ‘world literature’”. In this scholarly field, we are experiencing an expansion to a global perspective (focusing on Asia and Africa), the idea of the masterpiece and the canon has been abandoned, and more attention is paid to translations and to the socio-economic conditions of the literary market. Briefly, the end of Eurocentrism was proclaimed. But what consequences does this movement have for research and scholarship in European literatures, and what perspectives does it open up?

On the one hand, I would like to focus on the increasing importance of literatures in languages other than the traditionally important ones such as English, French, German, and Spanish. On the other hand, I would like to open up the perspective of networking European literatures with non-European literatures. Thus, I will focus on Central European literatures (post-colonial aspect exemplified on the remarkable number of Nobel Prize winners from this region, in particular Olga Tokarczuk, Wisława Szymborska, Elfriede Jelinek, Herta Müller) and on writers such as Mohamed Mbougar Sarr and Fiston Mwanza Mujila writing in and creatively transforming the language of the former colonizer, and thus gaining world-wide recognition (post-colonial aspect & aspect of the international literary market).

Literature written by authors “no longer European, not yet African”: this was J. M. Coetzee’s definition of “white writing” in his study of the Cape in South Africa and its literary history (1988). For European-language writers – and not only “white” writers – in the southern hemisphere, a residual connection with or even dependence on Europe has been a foundational condition. In the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, this connection prevailed in a world largely dominated by European powers, at first in a direct political sense, later through economic and cultural means. The literary orientation towards Europe remained powerful and problematic for African and Latin American authors, not least when it was resisted and negated. Even today, publishing and reception infrastructures in Europe remain strong, but the cultural prestige of Europe has waned in an age of greater pluralism and literary self-confidence in the ”global South”. Rather than speak of “European-language” literatures of the South in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, we should perhaps think of them as operating in “post-European languages”.

All of this has implications for how we account historically for modernisms in the southern hemisphere. With the Mozambican-Portuguese poet Rui Knopfli as my example, this paper will discuss how his high-modernist project – with its dual commitment to sothern Africa and an imagined Europe – reads differently today than it did in the 1960s. “My Paris is Johannesburg”, a line from one of his most famous poems, speaks with precision to his ambivalent positioning. To say that “My Paris is Johannesburg” superimposes the poet’s imagined geography – a Eurocentric orientation towards the cultural capital of Paris – onto his lived geography, putting the value of both geographies, and hence of a European vs. an Africa-based modernism, at stake in this formulation. Yet, there is a further complication: both city names express a sense of distance and yearning, given Knopfli’s own location (until 1974) in Mozambique. Johannesburg, in other words, is also presented here as a centre, which tends to regard its regional neighbours as peripheries. In addition, Knopfli’s language of poetry was Portuguese, which connects him not just to Portugal, but to the cultural imaginary of Brazil. The modernist project of Knopfli was in other words not binary, and this is what enables a renewed “southern” reading of his work. In this way, I intend to situate Knopfli in a post-European world-literary framework in which Euro-American modernism no longer operates as the exclusive aesthetic-historical point of reference.

Various ‘post(s)-’ can be attributed to the phenomenon, materiality, and interpretation of the post-European world, specifically in relation to its literary production and circulation. I propose the term postdiasporic dispersion as a theoretical model apt to approach the post-European condition. A part of my wider project of developing a theory of postdiasporic sociocultural dispersion, this model explains some major features of the literary production in various media in European languages in a post-European world, toward a better understanding of the global literary landscape.

I started the project from the question how to probe the experiences and roles of (post)war migrants at the individual level and apply it to multiscalar identity wars in postnational settings. As new cycles of violence are being justified by referring to the memory of past ones, it’s crucial to study the memories of collective violence with mechanisms to move past such legacies. Since the destructive dynamic of communism’s aftermath in the 1990s Yugoslav wars is renewed in catastrophic warfare elsewhere in/around Europe, I reconsider how the people who disconnected from ethnic groups and narratives managed to memorize those events creatively, to demonstrate that new paths have opened, beyond violent ethnonational discourses/imagery. Comparing the cultural productions of authors and artists who moved as of 1990s from Croatia and from Bosnia-Herzegovina to Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and integrating into that nomadic philosophy, I propose a new model of postdiasporic diffusion and a dispersion theory. I describe dispersion as both moving and knowledge-production, with the transforming role of memory and its political materialization. Such theorization explains how individuals move on from ethnic traumas and rework the critical points of collective memorabilities.

Even if the concept of postdiaspora emerged recently, up to now dispersion has not been differentiated clearly from diaspora (group or origin related). I will take up this point in the Panel, focusing on an emerging, interactive global–local dynamic, where migrants in postdiasporic dispersion tend to localize and the accommodating societies tend to globalize the common and new societal and cultural concerns, so also political and linguistic concerns. On the basis of my fieldwork, literary and artistic production, I suggest a theoretical vocabulary that captures both sides of the postdiasporic situation: refugees/exiles and hosts. I will exemplify creative interventions in the aftermath of ethnic rifts, an affirmative-affective relatability bolstering integrative practices, and indicate the applicability of this model to new dispersions shaping world societies, heritage, economy. This involves game-changing cognitive tools for refugees to detach from pain, restructure their memory and affect, and for policy-makers to revalue refugees as culture carriers, avoiding the stereotype of powerless victims.

This paper sets out to explore the question of what it means to write in European languages in a post-European world. In particular, it will examine the reasons that lead to the adoption of a language other than the native tongue, and to what extent political and historical crises contribute to this process. Additionally, it will consider the impact that oeuvres belonging to small literatures can have. To address these questions, the paper will examine narratives belonging to life writing, which recount quotidian events as experienced by two women writers within a dictatorial regime. One of these authors is Iranian (Azar Nafisi), and following the exile from her country, she adopted English as her literary language. The other is Georgian (Zaira Arsenishvili), and it is from Georgia, still under Soviet regime at the time, that she writes about the Stalinist purges. The objective of this study is to examine how these two perspectives, of women witnesses writing from an 'I' and the form adopted (life writing), reveal questions linked to writing. In the context that has been stated, the following questions will be examined: what does 'post-European' mean in the present, specifically in terms of an "encounter with that which is culturally superior"? (Chow 2004: 299) How does the comparative paradigm "Europe and its Others", alternating with that of "Post-European Culture and the West" (Chow 2004: 305), function in relation to small literatures, notably Georgian?