Jednodenní workshop spoluorganizuje CEFRES, Koordinační výbor pro srovnávací historii literatur v evropských jazycích (CHLEL), Mezinárodní asociace srovnávací literatury, Mezinárodní akademická unie a Stockholmská univerzita.
Kdy: 28. května 2026, 10:00 – 16:00
Kde: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Praha 1
Jazyk: angličtina
Program
10:00 Přivítání a úvodní poznámky
10:15 Atinati MAMATSASHVILI (Ilia State University Tbilissi)
Real-time Poetry: Life Writing in Ukraine in Response to the Russian Occupier
11:00 Arvi SEPP (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Mural Inscriptions as Life Writing: Prisoner Graffiti in Gestapo Prisons in the Third Reich and Occupied Europe
11:45 Petra JAMES (Université libre de Bruxelles)
Engaged l’art pour l’art?
12:30 Oběd
13:45 Florian MUSSGNUG (University College London)
Plotting Planetary Time, with Hans Blumenberg
14:30 Gesine MÜLLER (Universität zu Köln)
World Exhaustion and Creation Beyond the Market: Hybrid Latin American Literatures
15:15 Stefan HELGESSON (Stockholms universitet)
Macro-narratives as Method: Intersecting Temporalities of Literature and History
Abstrakt
What is, what are literature/s beyond the literary field and its rules? While literary sociology continues to explore mechanisms behind careers (and failures) of the so-called “world” authors (from Casanova 1999 to Sapiro 2024), contemporary literature scholars express a parallel interest in forms and functions of literature beyond the traditional limits of literary field: subverting, expanding, transgressing its conditions.
Over the past decades an important number of studies has adressed hitherto marginalised realms Jacques Dubois described as “savage” in his seminal Institution de la literature (1978). A particular interest in exploring this direction can be seen e.g. in France and Belgium (see Saint-Amand 2016). To quote just a few recent studies on “exposed literature” (Rosenthal & Ruffel 2018), scholars have addressed: grafitis and mural inscriptions (Sepp & de Mûelenaere 2025), monuments (Gheerardyn 2015), revolutionary slogans in history (Carle 2019) or the ones of recent protests (Saint-Amand 2019), as well as poetry on social media (Bloomfield 2024), self-published & -illustrated books (Martinelli 2021) or studies on samizdat practices behind the Iron curtain (Camarade et al. 2023, Glanc 2019…), including supports such as X-ray plates or cassettes (magnetizdat, Pehlmann et al. 2023), etc. And the list of new directions continues to expand since artificial intelligence has entered (and perturbated) the scene (e.g. Gefen 2021).
What are the reasons behind the interest in forms of literary production outside of usual circuits? Is there a corelation between the weight of the late-capitalist globalised book market with its mechanisms, hierarchies, literary prizes, etc., and the will to explore what’s literary outside of market boxes? How can we, as comparative literature specialists of European languages, address this rapidly expanding amount of directions, forms, medias addressed under the “literature” label? What historical or contemporary forms of the institution called literature are thus being questioned: from the media to its languages, from production to reception? What methods, tools, concepts in comparative literature can be mobilised to address those rapidly expanding galaxies of cultural production observed by comparative literature?
With these examples, I hope that you will be able to find a case, a literary work, a medium that in one way or another, delves into this broad theme that is of particular interest for a Prague audience with strong interest in the sociology of literature, an inspiring past of self-made & -illustrated books, not to mention the samizdat history and archives currently being (re)discovered.