Graduate Student Conference: Slavic and World Literatures

Over the past two decades, the concept of "world literature" has been in the spotlight of scholarly attention. This influential discourse, which can be traced back to Goethe's idea of Weltliteratur, was put forth by three groundbreaking studies that came out at the turn of the 21st century: Pascale Casanova's La République mondiale des Lettres (1999), Franco Moretti's pair of essays "Conjectures on World Literature" (2000) and "More Conjectures" (2004), and David Damrosch's "What Is World Literature?" (2003). With the exception of a few notable scholars like Galin Tihanov, Katerina Clark, and Anne Lounsbery, Slavicists either are absent from these discussions or focus solely on the Soviet model, whose best expression is the activity of the Gorky Institute of World Literature. With this conference, we aim to bridge this "communication gap" and bring these conversations into the present. 

8:45 | Breakfast

9:00 | Panel 1: World-Literary Theory

• Maria Dabija, Harvard University, Russia and Its World (Literature)
• Sylvie Vidan, University of California Los Angeles, The Poetics of Liminal Seas: Creolization and Balkanization
• Aleksandar Momcilovic, Columbia University, The Interliterary Process: A World-Systems Reading
• Michael Makarovsky, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Alexander Goldstein’s Parting from Narcissus and Late Soviet Nostalgia for the World

10:30 | Panel 2: Popular Literature

• Meghan Cooper, New York University, Framing Lear: A Parody of Shakespeare in Ivan Turgenev’s King Lear of the Steppes;
• Yana Zlochistaya, University of California Berkeley, The Effect of Living Backwards: Disobedient Soviet Translations of Alice in Wonderland;
• Ekaterina Tutatina, McGill University, The Publication and Reception of Chinese Boys' Love Novels in Russia;
• Melaniia Kalinina, Oxford University, Orthodoxy and the Wizarding World: Iulia Voznesenskaia’s Iulianna and the Reception of Harry Potter in Russian Christian Circles

12:00 | Lunch

1:00 | Keynote Address by Prof. Anne Lounsbery, New York University.

2:00 | Panel 3: National Literatures

• Polina Zhiltsova, University of St. Petersburg/independent scholar, Between The Eye and the Screen: The Accompanist by Nina Berberova/Claude Miller
• Mariusz Kaliciński, University of Warsaw, Various Aspects of Freedom in 20th- and 21st-Century Belarusian Literature Based on Yakub Kolas’s, Vasil Bykaŭ’s and Victor Martinovich’s Works
• Yuliya Charnyshova, Yale University, Dragomoshenko as World Literature: How Scholarship Neutralizes Ukraine in ATD: The Case of «Расположение в домах и деревьях»
• Nadiia Chervinska, Central European University (Austria), Introducing Eroticism to Ukrainian Literature: The Case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover Translation

3:30 | Coffee break

4:00 | Panel 4: Legacies of Romanticism

• Aleksandra Pchelintseva, University of Southern California, Role of Paratext in (Re)shaping Author and Reader in Antioch Kantemir’s Translation of Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds
• Oleg Larionov, Oxford University, Transmission of Sensibility: Translations and the Formation of Sentimental Meditative Prose in Late 18th-Century Russian Literature
• Veronika Schmitt, Northwestern University, Two Hours in an Empty Tank”: Brodsky’s Transnational Reinterpretation of Faust
• Ziyan Lin, University of Illinois Chicago, Mapping Mickiewicz’s Dziady in China: Romantic Ideals, Postcolonial Dialogues, and the Revival of Peripheral Narratives

5:30 | Panel 5: Institutional Mediations

• Alice Volfson, Harvard University, Penning a New World: Cross Cultural Exchange in the Asia-Africa Writers Conferences
• Nick Paraschis, European University Institute (Sweden), Strength-giving Motors: The Reception and (re)Production of Soviet Literature among Greek Communists in War and Exile, 1946-1968
• Maria Glukhova, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The Steppe and the Pen: Dostoevsky’s Legacy in Kazakhstan
• Marina Sivak, Freie Universitat Berlin, Invisible Soldiers of Paper: Literature, Census, and Bureaucracy in Boris Lapin’s Pamir Narratives