Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
Please note that all times are shown in the time zone of the conference. The current conference time is: 1st Aug 2025, 10:11:57pm KST
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Session Overview | |
| Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom |
| Date: Monday, 28/July/2025 | |
| 5:00pm | ECARE Reception Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom Chair: Emanuelle Santos, University of Birmingham ICLA ECARE Committee ReceptionOpening 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 |
| Date: Tuesday, 29/July/2025 | |
| 9:00am - 10:40am |
Keynotes: Uchang Kim & David Damrosch Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom Chair: Hyungji Park, Yonsei University https://youtube.com/live/IfTVjPkFpG0?feature=share |
| 11:00am - 12:30pm |
Special Session I: UNESCO Memory of the World (MoW) Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom Chair: Youngmin Kim, Dongguk University 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 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 Special Sessions What is the Memory of the World program and how does it relate to ICLA? UNESCO Special Sessions The Critical Eye of Comparative Literature Goldsmiths, University of London Special Sessions Memory of the World and Comparative Literature: How We Can Work Together. UNESCO Special Sessions Translation as Palimpsest: From Textual Traces to Cultural Archives Central University of Gujarat, India. |
| 4:30pm | Opening Ceremony Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom 2025 ICLA OPENING CEREMONY - YouTube70th AnniversaryThe 24th Congress of The International Comparative Literature Association
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| Date: Wednesday, 30/July/2025 | |
| 1:30pm - 3:00pm |
Special Session II: Roundtable on Living With Machines: Comparative Literature, AI, and the Ethics of Digital Imagination Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom Chair: Matthew Reynolds, University of Oxford 2025 ICLA SPECIAL SESSION 2 - YouTubeSpecial 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
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| 3:30pm - 5:00pm |
Special Session III: Korean Literature, World Literature, and Glocal Publishing: Celebrating Han Kang's Nobel Prize Award Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom 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)
Special Sessions After the Nobel Prize in Literature: Korean Literature and World Literature Dongguk University |
| Date: Thursday, 31/July/2025 | |
| 9:00am - 10:40am |
Keynotes: Zhenzhao Nie & Wen-chin Ouyang Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom Chair: Byung-Yong Son, Kyungnam University |
| 11:00am - 12:30pm |
Special Session IV: Roundtable Celebrating 70th Anniversary of the ICLA Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom “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) Speakers: Sandra L. Bermann, Princeton U, USA: President of the ICLA (2019-2022) Q&A: |
| 3:30pm - 4:20pm |
Keynote: Sandra Bermann Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom Chair: JIHEE HAN, Gyeongsang National University |
| 4:30pm | General Assembly Location: KINTEX 1 Grand Ballroom 2025 ICLA Congress General Assembly |