Latest issue

We invite you to read Volume 10 of the journal Acta Litteraria Comparativa, which contains articles based on papers presented at the conference "Reviving Memory and Overcoming Oblivion: Comparative Aspects" (2022).

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The participants of the conference analyzed how society understands and reflects the experience of its own historical time, and what ways and forms are used to express the contents of experience and the past in art and culture. And even though the participants discussed different expressions of verbal and visual art, most based their analyses on works of literature. Thus, literature can be considered as an especially convenient and unique medium of individual and collective memory, which can not only (re)construct the worlds of the past but also examine the problematic aspects of memory culture. When the political and cultural situation changes, so does the status of writers: their personalities are overrated, their activities and bodies of work are revised, and memorial museums are renamed or closed altogether. Writers are still seen as standing next to soldiers and government officials; their creative activity and symbolic societal function are equated to the political and the ideological. Creative and literary (auto)biographies and historical narratives put into text emphasize the relationship between literariness and historicity, and the tension between fiction, imagination, and reality.