ICLA ECARE Committee Reception

Opening Address

Emanuelle Santos, Chair of ECARE Committee, University of Birmingham, UK

Lucia Boldrinii, President of ICLA, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK

Youngmin Kim, Congress Chair, 2025 ICLA Congress Seoul, South Korea

Open Mike for NEXT.GEN Session Chairs

https://youtube.com/live/IfTVjPkFpG0?feature=share

2025 ICLA CONGRESS SPECIAL SESSION1 - YouTube

Special Session I: UNESCO Memory of the World (MoW)

Memory of the World: A Cooperation between the ICLA and the UNESCO Documentary Heritage Programme

Part I: Podium 

Chair: Youngmin Kim

Chair, Organizing Committee of the 2025 International AILC/ICLA Congress
Chair, AILC/ICLA Standing Research Committee on Translation Studies

Speakers:

1) Jan Bos

Chair, MoW International Advisory Committee (IAC).

Title:

What is the Memory of the World program and how does it relate to ICLA?

Short description of talk:

Vision, mission, short history and present activities of the Memory of the World program

The Memory of the World International Register

Memory of the World and ICLA: areas of common interest

2) Lucia Boldrini

President, International Comparative Literature Association (AILC/ICLA, 2022-2025)

Title:

The Critical Eye of Comparative Literature

Short description of talk:

In my presentation I will consider not only the importance the ICLA’s partnership with the Memory of the World programme, but also how it can provide a necessarily critical eye, thanks to its long history of engaging in and with the criticism and self-criticism of the disciplines of comparative literature, world literature and translation, individually and in their combination, in their histories and their practices. This can bring nuance and complexity to apparently straightforward assumptions about the intrinsic value of activities such as literary comparison, or translation as bridge-building. 

3) Lothar Jordan

Chair, MoW Sub-Committee on Education and Research (SCEaR)

Title:

Memory of the World and Comparative Literature: How We Can Work Together.

Short description of talk:

The Presentation introduces some fields of education and research that are interesting for both Comparative Literature and the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme (MoW) like the history of translators and translations, the reconstruction of Lost Memory, e.g. of dispersed libraries, the relation between oral literature and documentation, and some more.

4) E.V. Ramakrishnan

Chair, AILC/ICLA Standing Research Committee on South Asian Literatures and Cultures

Title:

Translation as Palimpsest: From Textual Traces to Cultural Archives

Short description of talk:

Oral cultures of memory conceive of 'texts' and 'archives' differently. While mediating between 'subcultures' and 'dominant cultures', interculturally or intra-culturally, translation often takes on the role of a legitimating agency, thereby misrepresenting the nature of cosmologies they (subcultures) are founded upon.

Part II: Signing Ceremony of an Agreement: MOU

UNESCO Memory of the World Programme

Signees:

UNESCO Memory of the World

Jan Bos

Chair, International Advisory Committee (IAC)

Lothar Jordan

Chair, Sub-Committee on Education and Research (SCEaR)

Joie Springer

Chair, Register Sub-Committee (RSC)

AILC/ICLA

Lucia Boldrini

AILC/ICLA President (2022-2025)

Ipshita Chanda

AILC/ICLA Secretary (2022-2025)

Youngmin Kim

Chair, Organizing Committee of the XXIV International AILC/ICLA Congress
Chair, AILC/ICLA Standing Research Committee on Translation Studies 

2025 ICLA OPENING CEREMONY - YouTube

70th Anniversary

The 24th Congress of The International Comparative Literature Association
제24회 세계비교문학협회 총회

Opening Ceremony

JULY 29 16:30

KINTEX

Grand Ballroom

Program

16:30

Pre-ceremony Performance by Kim Deok-Soo Samulnori Troupe

17:00

Opening Video Screening

17:03

Introduction of Distinguished Guests

17:05

Opening and Congratulatory Remarks

17:30 ~ 18:15

Lecture of Nobel Laureate JMG Le Clezio

18:15

Korean Traditional Music Performance by Professor Park Ae-ri with Poppin' Hyunjoon

18:30

Special Lecture by the President of Dongguk University

19:00

Reception

2025 ICLA SPECIAL SESSION 2 - YouTube

Special Session II: Roundtable on Living With Machines: Comparative Literature, AI, and the Ethics of Digital Imagination

#5: Wednesday, 7.30, 13:30 am - 15:00 pm 
Location: KINTEX 1, Grand Ballroom 

Session Chair: Matthew Reynolds (University of Oxford, UK)

Speakers: Each speaker will give a 5 minute lightning talk about the paper or project.

Alberto Parisi (Kobe University, Japan)
The Power Not to Think: LLMs as Poetic Impotential Machines

Matthew Reynolds (University of Oxford, UK)
Constraints as a Route to Creativity in AI Translation: the AIDCPT project

Deepshikha Behera (EFL University, India)
“My Language has no School”: Decolonising AI Translation

Nicholas Y. H. Wong (The University of Hong Kong)
Vocational but Vernacular: Forestry Policies and Sinophone Malaysian Literature

Christof Schöch (Trier University)
Multilingual Stylometry: The Influence of Language, Translation, and Corpus Composition on Authorship Attribution Accuracy

Simone Rebora (University of Verona, Italy)
Digital Social Reading and Comparative Literature: Three Case Studies

Translation and the Eco-Techno Turn: Individuation Across Organic and Inorganic Realms
Youngmin Kim (Dongguk University, Korea)

Joseph Hankinson (University of Oxford, UK)
Complementarities: Artificial Intelligence and Language Ontologies

Wen-Chin Ouyang (SOAS, University of London, UK)
Arabic and Chinese Wine Poems: Culture and Ethos

Cosima Bruno (SOAS, University of London, UK)
The Multiverse: AI Poetry Translation in the Network System

Shengke Deng (Tsinghua University, China)
Crisis of Subjectivity in Technological Networks: Bruno Latour and Impersonal Generation in Digital Age

Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek (Sichuan University, China)
Digital Humanities and Publishing Scholarship in the Humanities

2025 ICLA SPECIAL SESSION 3 - YouTube

Special Session III: Korean Literature, World Literature, and Glocal Publishing: Celebrating Han Kang's Nobel Prize Award

Chair:

KWAK Hyo Hwan, Ph.D.

(Poet, Former President of Literature Translation Institute of Korea)

Speakers:

1. KWAK Hyo Hwan, Ph.D. (Poet, Former President of Literature Translation Institute of Korea)

“From 'Globalization of Korean Literature' to 'Korean Literature as World Literature' - The Future of Korean Literature After Han Kang Wins Nobel Prize”

Author Han Kang has been selected as the winner of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is a sudden blessing that has come less than 10 years since The Vegetarian was published in the UK in 2015 and won the Booker International Prize the following year, drawing attention from the world of literature. As stated in the reason for selection by the Swedish Academy, Han Kang’s work “achieved powerful poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life,” the long and extensive world of Han Kang’s works was evaluated. In The Vegetarian, she captivatingly portrayed the violence of norms and customs that bind the family and society through the heroine who refuses to eat meat and tries to become a tree, and in The Boy Comes and We Don’t Say Goodbye, she excelled in dealing with the vulnerability of individuals who were sacrificed in the horrific tragedies caused by great power through the May 18 Gwangju Democratization Movement and the Jeju April 3 Incident, thereby achieving even deeper literary achievements. However, considering that the Nobel Prize in Literature is more of an award for merit that encompasses the author’s entire literary world and literary life rather than a prize for a work, this award cannot be anything but a surprising event. This Nobel Prize in Literature is not only an award for author Han Kang, but also an award for Korean literature and translation. The aspiration of Korean literature in the periphery to move to the center has been fulfilled by going beyond ‘introducing Korean literature overseas’ and ‘globalizing Korean literature’ to ‘Korean literature as world literature’ and ‘Korean literature read together by people around the world’. Now, Korean literature has opened a path for communication without time difference by being simultaneous with world literature, and has reached a turning point where it has transitioned from being a receiver of world literature to a sender. The power of translation, which has enabled readers around the world to read Korean literature without language and cultural barriers, has played an absolute role in this. And the Korean Literature Translation Institute and Daesan Cultural Foundation have made a great contribution to supporting this for a long time and systematically. Now, after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature, it is time to calmly look at the process and meaning of receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature and what Korean literature should do. This is because the Nobel Prize in Literature is an important gateway that Korean literature must pass through, not a goal. Therefore, in this lecture, we will examine the process of Korean literature advancing to world literature, the role and achievements of translation at its core, Korean literary works that have attracted attention in the world literary community, and what Korean literature needs to prepare as world literature.

2. KIM Chunsik (Dongguk U)

“Nobel Prize in Literature, and After”

This essay critically reflects on the global significance of Korean literature in the wake of Han Kang’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Drawing on the author’s personal experiences as a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley (2004) and a participant in an academic conference in India (2009), the paper explores the tension between center and periphery as a persistent framework in literary and cultural discourse. These episodes underscore how Korean literature has historically occupied a marginal position in global literary hierarchies, yet how such marginality also fosters critical reflections on identity, representation, and power.

The essay highlights the Swedish Academy’s appraisal of Human Acts as revealing “historical trauma and the fragility of human life,” arguing that this speaks not only to Han Kang’s literary sensibility but also to the core concerns of contemporary Korean literature. Using the concept of the “politics of mourning,” as theorized by Judith Butler, the author contends that Korean literature engages in an ethical task: to retrieve the voices of the dead and reframe trauma as a shared human condition. Literature thereby becomes a medium that bridges the abyss between human dignity and violence, past suffering and present vulnerability. Ultimately, the author rejects the triumphalist view that Han Kang’s award marks Korean literature’s arrival at the “center” of world literature. Instead, it affirms a longer, ethical trajectory in which Korean literature, shaped by historical wounds and peripheral positions, has always already been global. The essay argues that the true value of Korean literature lies not in global market expansion, but in its sustained engagement with planetary concerns violence, mourning, and coexistence through ethical and imaginative inquiry

3. CHO Hyung-yup (Korea U)

“Significance of Han Kang's Nobel Prize in Literature and Her Status in World Literature History”

1. The significance of Han Kang's Nobel Prize in Literature

Han Kang's Nobel Prize in Literature can be seen as a great feat for the Republic of Korea, achieved through the combination of four factors: Han Kang's creative ability, the power of Korean literature that made it possible, the translator's ability, and institutional support from the government and the private sector.

2. Han Kang's literary achievements

Han Kang's literary achievements are summarized in the expression “powerful poetic prose that confronts historical trauma and reveals the fragility of human life” that the Swedish Academy announced as the reason for her selection when it announced her winning the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 10, 2024.

If I were to interpret this reason for her selection in my own way, I would say that “confronting historical trauma” is a “realistic thematic consciousness,” “revealing the fragility of human life” is a “modernist formal experiment,” and “powerful poetic prose” is an “organic style experiment.” So I think that author Han Kang's creative ability is obtained by successfully fusing these three things that are difficult to coexist. In other words, author Han Kang's literary achievements were obtained by independently fusing realistic thematic consciousness such as feminism, ecology, and historical trauma with modernistic formal experiments such as fantasy, aesthetics, composition, and point of view. In fact, realism and modernism are heterogeneous and conflicting literary trends that are difficult to coexist with. I think that the stylistic experiment called 'poetic prose' played a decisive role in fusing these two poles.

3. Han Kang's status in Korean and world literary history

So I think that the core characteristic of Han Kang's literature is that he exquisitely fused these three items by putting ‘realistic thematic consciousness’ and ‘modernistic formal experiments’ in a crucible and using the catalyst called ‘organic stylistic experiments.’ Another important point here is that the methodology of stylistic experimentation based on ‘physical sensibility and organic imagination’ is partly an inheritance of the tradition of romanticism and symbolism accepted from Western literature, but also partly an inheritance of our country’s ‘traditional aesthetics’, ‘Korean aesthetics’ and ‘shamanistic native culture’.

In the end, Han Kang can be evaluated as having creatively developed a dimension by accepting the three contradictory and conflicting literary lineages of modern Korean literature, realism, modernism, romanticism, and symbolism, which were influenced by world literature, while absorbing Korea’s traditional aesthetics and native culture and creatively fusing them.

Therefore, I think that the status of Han Kang’s works in the history of Korean literature and world literature is that he returns the newly developed high-level achievements to Korean literature and world literature, which provided him with literary nutrients.

Discussants:

CHO Hyungrae (Dongguk U)

JEONG Gi-Seok (Dongguk U)

KIM Eun-seok (Dongguk U)

2025 ICLA Congress - YouTube

2025 ICLA KEYNOTE SESSION 3,4

“Bridging Seventy Years of Comparative Literary Dialogue: Past, Present, and Future of the ICLA.”

Chairs:

Lucia Boldrini, Goldsmiths, UK, President of the ICLA (2022-2025)
Anne Duprat, Picardie-Jules Verne University, France, Secretary of the ICLA (2022-2025)
Ipshita Chanda, EFLU, India, Secretary of the ICLA (2022-2025)

Speakers:

Sandra L. Bermann, Princeton U, USA: President of the ICLA (2019-2022)
Anne Tomiche, Sorbonne, France, Vice-President of the ICLA
Hiraishi Noriko, Tssukuba, Japan, Vice-President of the ICLA
Haun Saussy, Chicago, USA, Vice-President of the ICLA
Macio Seligmann-Silva, UNICAMP, Brazil, Vice-President of the ICLA
E.V.Ramarkrishnan, Central University of Gujarat, India,
Marc Maufort, Editor of Recherche littéraire, USA
He Chengzhou, Nanjing University, China,
Emanuelle Santos, Chair of the ECARE/NEXT GEN, University of Birmingham, UK
Matthew Reynolds, Chair of Research Committees, Oxford University, UK
Stefan Helgesson, Chair of the Nominating Committee, Stockholm University, Sweden
Youngmin Kim, Congress Chair of 2025 ICLA Congress Seoul, Dongguk University, Korea

Q&A:

2025 ICLA Congress - YouTube

2025 ICLA Congress General Assembly

2025 ICLA Congress - YouTube