主讲人：Vladimir Biti（欧洲科学院院士、维也纳大学比较文学荣休讲席教授）
主持人：任洁（浙江大学外国语学院特聘副研究员）
时间：2026年5月27日16:00-18:00
地点：浙江大学紫金港校区东5一楼青荷吧
讲座题目
From Literary History to Literary Theory: From Nation to the World
主讲人介绍
Vladimir Biti is Chair Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the University of Vienna and author of eleven books. He has edited multiple volumes on post-imperial Europe, comparative and world literature. Co-editor of Arcadia: Journal of Literary Culture and Honorary President of the ICLA Committee on Literary Theory, he chaired the Academy of Europe’s Literary and Theatrical Section from 2016-2022.
讲座提要
Modern literary theory was a product of the forced dislocation of predominantly Jewish intellectuals in the German and Russian post-imperial states. The latter encouraged literary historians to nationalize their literatures, but literary theorists, protecting homeless identities, opposed that tendency with their cosmopolitan understanding of literature. They singled out an unruly aesthetic quality, the so-called literariness, that never stops subverting literature’s national substance. Knowingly or not, this resumed the early German Romanticists’ insistence on literature’s deactivation of belonging, which was now adapted to different circumstances. Moving across over a hundred years from Western to Eastern Europe, German conquering cosmopolitanism became the Russian-Jewish emancipating one. After the Soviet political authorities forbade Formalism, the reverse westward relocation of its ideas to Prague and Paris, accompanied by their academic institutionalization, redesigned modern literary theory, renewing its conquering ambitions. I therefore claim that theory’s migrant spirit－convertible and variously implementable－undermines its tendency to consolidate its geopolitical identity and thus empower itself. As soon as it settled in Western academia and established its value criteria, theory started to assign all literary works their “legitimate” identities and locations. But literary works, being themselves of a migrant spirit, surreptitiously subverted such legitimization, forcing theory into a new migration.
浙江大学世界文学跨学科研究中心
2026年5月22日
