Anglistik V: Anglophone Literaturen / Literaturübersetzen

The 2026 drupa Prize was awarded to literary scholar Christina Slopek-Hauff for her outstanding dissertation in the field of English and American Studies. With her work Plural Psychologies: Interrogating Mental Illness in Anglophone African and African-Diasporic Fiction, she made an innovative contribution to interdisciplinary literary and cultural studies.

We are pleased to announce that Dr Goutam Karmakar (University of Hyderabad, University of Cologne) will deliver a guest lecture on the topic of "Decolonial Hope: Solidarity, Sustainability and Nigerian Ecodocumentaries as Counter Narratives" in Dr Hannah Pardey's seminar on Nigerian petrofiction. The lecture will take place on 1 July 2026, 12:30-14:00, in room 23.21.U1.95. Everyone interested is warmly welcome! Online participation is also possible, please e-mail Hannah.Pardey(at)hhu.de

Dr Goutam Karmakar teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, in India, with affiliations and research positions at the Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities, University of Cologne, Germany, and the Faculty of Arts and Design, Durban University of Technology, South Africa. He has received several fellowships, including the Alexander von Humboldt in Germany, National Research Foundation awards in South Africa, and the MIASA Individual Fellowship in Ghana. His research spans Global South literature, postcolonial and decolonial studies, cultural studies and environmental humanities. Karmakar edits the journal Global South Literary Studies and the Routledge book series South Asian Literature in Focus.

19/05/2026, 18:15, OASE Forum des Austauschs

“What is World Poetry?” asks Stephen Owen (1990) in regard of a new anthology by the Chinese dissident poet Bei Dao. Owen criticized Bei Dao’s as “a poetry written to travel well,” a kind of international poetry that translates itself. It represents a specimen of a creature that never existed before: “world poetry,” detached from any national context and only accidentally written in one national language. Owen’s criticism pioneered a new wave of discussion on “world literature” since the 1990s. While David Damrosch (2003) asks contemporary works to serve as “windows on the world” to qualify as “world literature,” for which translations serve as passports for them to travel through linguistic spaces, Emily Apter (2013) famously argues against World Literature as an institution as endorsing cultural equivalence and substitutability through translations, or celebrating nationally and ethically branded “differences” that have been niche-marketed as commercialized “identities.”

In this lecture, I propose to reexamine this issue in the digital age. Enabled by digital reading platforms, social media, and AI-translation, “passports” that enable literary works to travel across borders are cheaper than ever. Technology hereby generates a new type of literature that is hypertranslatable, truly “accidentally written in one national language.” We thus need to start reconsidering untranslatability not as a hurdle to, but as an affordance for, reinventing a kind of “world literature” that worlds (welten in Heidegger’s term), that opens up new horizons for our linguistic being in the digital world.

05/05/2026, 17:00, Haus der Universität (BSR 2)

Nuria Molines Galarza (València), Guest Lecture
Moderation: Dr. Bettina Burger (HHU) 

Drawing on Derrida's concept of hauntology and the "spectral turn" in the humanities (del Pilar Blanco & Pereen), this lecture explores the spectral dimension of literature in both original and translated texts. First, it presents a hauntological analytical framework specifically suited for literary fiction. This framework proposes five interrelated dimensions through which spectral elements in literature can be examined (and thus translated): textual, structural, thematic, narrative, and intertextual. As we will see, spectres can trascend the literal "white-sheet ghost" form to haunt literary texts in multiple ways. Secondly, the lecture addresses the spectral space of literary translation. Rooted in Deconstructive Translation Studies (DTS), the coupling of hauntology and translation offers a novel avenue of research and practice. We will explore three dimensions of potential inquiry: 1) The microtextual level; 2) The intertextual level; 3) The polysystemic level. In particular, we will reflect upon the spectralising movements within cultural industries in times of precariousness and technological disruption, as well as "de-spectralising" strategies that foster visibility and agency for translators and researchers. These practical and theoretical efforts aim to preserve the spectral nature of literary texts, ensuring that the haunted house of literature remains forever inhabited by its resident ghosts.