Dorottya
SZÁVAI
(szavaidorottya@gmail.com)
In my presentation, I will talk about the first comparative literary journal, - the Acta Comparationis Literarum Universarum - that has been published since 1877 in Kolozsvár, in the perspective of bilingualism and plurilinguism. The medium's first and foremost principle of the academic discipline was the polyglottism. In this viewpoint I will reconstruct the history of the journal as well as formulate the historical and theoretical problems.
The two co-founders and chief-editors, Hugo Meltzl and Sámuel Brassai were natives of a multilingual culture, Meltzl with a German-speaking family background was originally born into this multilingual milieu. In the broader context of my train of thoughts, I will try to place the comparative science in the perspective of multilingualism, reflecting on the discipline's 21st-century dilemmas and challenges.
Even more so, as now Europe's first comparative journal is in the focus of great interest in the latest comparative researches (see for exemple Damrosch: Rebirth of a Discipline: The Global Origins of Comparative Studies, 2006, Damrosch, World Literature from Cluj to the World, 2011; Horst Fassel: Hugo Meltzl und due Anfange der Komparatistik Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005).
My lecture is based on firstly, Leonard Forster's book (Forster, George: The Poet’s Tongues: Multilingualism in Literature. The de Carle Lectures at the University of Otago 1968, Cambridge University Press – University of Otago Press, 1970.), on George Steiner's famous volume (After Babel. Aspects of Language & Translation. Oxford University, Press, 1998), furthermore on some newer comparative concepts like Pascale Casanova's 1999 book, La République mondiale des Lettres.