The list of national projects SAS
Institute of World Literature SAS
Memory, Space and Identity in German-Speaking (Transcultural) Literature from Modernity to the Present
„Pamäť, priestor a identita v nemecky hovoriacej (transkultúrnej) literatúre od moderny po súčasnosť“
| Duration: |
1.7.2025 - 30.6.2027 |
| Program: |
SRDA |
| Project leader: |
Mgr. Mikuláš Roman PhD. |
| Annotation: | Lived space in its broadest sense has been influenced by time with all its collective events and individual experiences, it is the core of our cultural memory and it seems that literature takes on an important role as the medium of cultural memory in the landscape of remembrance. We want to contribute to investigating the relations between memory, identity and space in the works of (transcultural) German-speaking authors who are biographically connected to the historic and contemporary geographical areas of the Slovak Republic, the Czech Republic and Croatia. The three partnering countries in this project are historically, geographically, politically and culturally connected with and through German-speaking culture, but are in the geopolitical context somewhat “other” to the central European position of the German culture so the proposal offers a new insight into German literature (other than the “Inlandgermanistik”). Theoretically, our project is grounded in the context of life writing studies, memory studies, identity studies, cultural studies, regional studies. The project thus aims to devise a sketch of a “map of self-experience” of authors, containing both processes of memory as well as those of forgetting on the one hand, and a “conceptual map” of these spaces/regions on the other. These regions were once characterized by dynamic cultural exchange and vitality, whereas today, they represent quasi palimpsests or eroding landscapes, containing many traces of individual and collective experiences, often represented through the medium of literature. These literary works are thus traces characteristic of the memory and the knowledge of the |
Aporias of human memory research in literary studies and life sciences
Apórie výskumu ľudskej pamäti v literárnej vede a vedách o živote
| Duration: |
1.1.2026 - 31.12.2029 |
| Program: |
VEGA |
| Project leader: |
Mgr. Mikuláš Roman PhD. |
| Annotation: | oday, we can observe an increase in the number of literary texts dealing with human memory. This is often done with reference to research in the life sciences and in relation to pathological manifestations in neurobiological or biomedical discourses. Literary representations of issues related to memory dysfunctions also touch fundamentally on the foundations of personal identity and reveal different perspectives of thinking about personal identity, especially with regard to the controversial postulate of its biological nature. By focusing on the question of identity and its disruption or loss through pathological memory disorders, we aim to uncover the possibilities of linking memory processes to notions of identity in contemporary literature from French and German-speaking countries, as well as to trace the traditions of their representation in specific discourses and interdiscourses. We will also examine ways of thinking about memory and identity in the research traditions of both cultures. |
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Biopolitický obrat k posthumánnej politike života
What is European literature?
Čo je európska literatúra?
| Duration: |
1.1.2025 - 31.12.2028 |
| Program: |
VEGA |
| Project leader: |
prof. Mgr. Bžoch Adam CSc. |
| Annotation: | The aim of the project is a holistic description of the changing contours of European literature as a unity in multiplicity, which in the 20th century was grasped by literary-historical schools and individuals in syntheses (history of European literature) and in criticism, while the starting point of literary-historical and aesthetic reflection did not have to be an autonomously reflected Europeanness. We identify three clusters of criteria according to which the coherence of European literature and its history was perceived in the 20th century: 1. themes, motifs, topoi; 2. epochs, developmental series, innovations; 3. ethical, religious, political, or value context. The project explores the potential and limits of reflection on European literature in authors such as E. Auerbach, E.R. Curtius, W. Benjamin, A. Jolles, G. Lukács, A. Szerb, L. Földényi, F.X. Šalda, V. Černý, J. Felix, M.M. Bakhtin, M. ter Braak, Cz. Miłosz, T. Boy-Żeleński, W. Gombrowicz, Th. Mann, J. Ortega y Gasset, A. Gide, J.-P. Sartre, a. o |
Fragile Futures: A Critical Investigation of the Intersections between Fictional and Non-fictional Accounts of the Long-term Future
Krehká budúcnosť: Kritické skúmanie prienikov medzi fiktívnymi a nefiktívnymi opismi dlhodobej budúcnosti
Narrative of History in 21st Century Hungarian Literature in the Context of (Central) European Literature
Naratív o dejinách v maďarskej literatúre 21. storočia v kontexte (stredo)európskej literatúry
| Duration: |
1.1.2025 - 31.12.2028 |
| Program: |
VEGA |
| Project leader: |
Mgr. Görözdi Judit PhD. |
| Annotation: | Scepticism about the validity of grand historical narratives brought about at the turn of the millenium a boom of ways of telling history in literature. The forms of narratives of history pointed out that history is not a coherent phenomenon expressing a particular point of view, and emancipated the perspectives of various actors of historical events. Emphasis was put on microhistorical perspectives and the questions of memory, remembering, and forgetting history. The project builds upon the previous research of the principal investigator on historicity in Hungarian postmodern novels, extending it to additional aspects and literary texts. It also includes comparative research, which puts the phenomena of Hungarian literature in the context of (Central) European literature and brings analyses from the field of other, especially Romanian and French literary representations of history. |
Translation and aspects of reception of social science and humanities texts as cultural and literary transfer in the 20th century
Preklad a aspekty recepcie spoločenskovedných a humanitnovedných textov ako kultúrny a literárny transfer v 20. storočí
| Duration: |
1.7.2022 - 30.6.2026 |
| Program: |
SRDA |
| Project leader: |
prof. PhDr. Bednárová Katarína CSc. |
| Annotation: | The primarily literary studies and translation studies focused project will explore ways and means of disseminating scientific knowledge, research results, theories and concepts in the social sciences and humanities, such as philosophy, literary science and its borderline and interdisciplinary overlaps (literary essay, translation studies, theory, and art history), in broader cultural and sociological contexts through translations (from English, French, German, Russian and partly from Polish, Spanish and Italian) and their reflection in the Slovak cultural space in the 20th century. It will try to answer the question to what extent the social and scientific valorization of circulating translation texts was / is present in the receiving (Slovak) scientific and socio-cultural environment, to what extent translations saturated the social demand in the 20th century, and whether and how they contributed to the development of individual researched disciplines (to their enrichment, innovation, reception), or, alternatively, what role the fact of non-translation or translation of irrelevant texts or the fact, of erroneous / poor / incompetent / translation played. The project will examine the conditions for translations in the historical context as well as the status, function, and roles of translators as mediators, the institutional background and the functions of translations in the wider literary transfer framework with the aim of creating a more comprehensive picture of this type of translation as a scientific and creative activity. The material (social sciences and humanities translations) will be strictly selective, and the project has no ambition to cover all thematic and linguistic areas. |
Translation and translating in the history and present of the Slovak cultural space. Transformations of forms, status and functions: texts, personalities, institutions.
Preklad a prekladanie v dejinách a súčasnosti slovenského kultúrneho priestoru. Premeny podôb, statusu a funkcií: texty, osobnosti, inštitúcie .
| Duration: |
1.1.2023 - 31.12.2026 |
| Program: |
VEGA |
| Project leader: |
prof. PhDr. Kusá Mária CSc. |
| Annotation: | The project continues the tradition of translatological research that has contributed to the creation of a real Slovak translatological community over the last twenty years. The direction of the interdisciplinary translatological discourse will go (in the sense of current tendencies in thinking about translation) also into the context of reflections on world literature, as well as into the expansion of knowledge in confrontation or synergy with the discourses of other humanities (philosophy, history of culture, sociology, "oral history"), but also natural sciences (human geography, interpretive statistics, ecology, etc.). The object of research should be a) interpretations of translations and receptions of literary texts in Slovak cultural space (forming the canon?), but also b) of culturally significant various, e.g. also educational, pragmatic, audiovisual, or popular culture texts or sacred texts. The scholarly outputs of the project will be monothematic issues of WLS, as well as personal monographic nature. |
Translation and cross-lingual stylistic transfer: Towards a theory of language contact in literature
Preklad a transfer štýlu naprieč jazykmi: k teórii jazykového kontaktu v literatúre
| Duration: |
1.11.2023 - 31.10.2028 |
| Program: |
IMPULZ |
| Project leader: |
Kelbert Rudan Eugenia PhD |
| Annotation: | Language boundaries are not transparent; recent advances from translation to psycholinguistics make it clear that they cannot be crossed without sacrifice and a complex negotiation of gains. A growing body of research on literary multilingualism, including my prize-winning doctoral thesis, show that moving a text, or indeed an author, into a different language leads to shifts in semantic, emotional and stylistic emphases. However, unlike the transfer of meaning (the initial impetus for the hugely successful discipline of translation studies), the transfer of style in language contact settings has received little critical attention. To change this status quo is to take issue with comparing in comparative literature. Rather as translation was ‘noticed’ in the 1960s, it is time to notice the patterns, losses and gains whereby stylistic features are re-created between languages as a decisive step towards a comprehensive theory of language contact in literature.
My goal is to tackle cross-lingual stylistic transfer as a methodological challenge shared by several fields but largely unacknowledged outside translation studies. This project consequently reframes literary translation as the best understood among several distinct kinds of language contact reliant on cross-lingual stylistics. Hence the twofold structure of this project: from exploring the relationship between the translated text and the original text to an alternative paradigm for the study of literary language contact explored through case studies in areas such as translation, self-translation, influence, multilingualism and international literary movements. |
Slovak literature in inter-literary and transcultural contexts
Slovenská literatúra v medziliterárnych a transkultúrnych súvislostiach
| Duration: |
1.1.2023 - 31.12.2026 |
| Program: |
VEGA |
| Project leader: |
Dr. Pucherová Dobrota D.Phil., Privatdoz. |
| Annotation: | The project proposes to consider selected works of Slovak literature through the lens of theories of world literature. Through such re-reading of selected works of the accepted Slovak canon, but also those that are not yet part of it, we will analyze how this kind of thinking contributes to the ideas of world literature, the canon, „minor“ and „major“ literatures, the relations between the local and global, the centre and periphery, the national and postnational; and whether it has a potential to alter the history of the development of Slovak literature in any way. Our investigations will be based on various criteria: textual elements, such as genetic relations or typological analogies (thematic, stylistic, generic, ideological, etc.); intertextual and transcultural phenomena (e.g., synchronicity); or extra-textual determinants (the reception of Slovak literature in translation), according to which it is possible to perceive certain works as part of wider inter-literary communities or indeed world literature. |
The total number of projects: 10
