Interlitteraria
Datos de la Revista
| Tipo | JOURNAL |
|---|---|
| Editorial | University of Tartu Press (EE) |
| ISSN | 1406-0701 / 2228-4729 |
| Wikidata | Q12364608 |
| OpenAlex | S4210223999 |
| MAG | 4210223999 |
| Sitio web | http://ojs.utlib.ee/index.php/IL/ |
| Total de publicaciones | 199 |
| Periodo de cobertura | 2011 - 2025 |
| País | EE |
| Idioma | EN |
| Acceso | Open Access |
| Indexación | Indexada en DOAJ |
| Factor de impacto | 0.035 |
Interlitteraria is a journal of literary studies, focusing on comparative literature and literary theory. While not directly anthropological, literary analysis can intersect with cultural studies and critical theory, which are cognate fields with regular anthropological intersection
Comparative and World Literature · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Diverse Scientific and Economic Studies · Eastern European Communism and Reforms · European Cultural and National Identity · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · German History and Society · German Literature and Culture Studies · Historical and Literary Analyses
Kaléidoscope de la lecture dans "Par Dieu, cette histoire est mon histoire !" de Abdelfattah Kilito
Cette contribution se concentre sur le kaléidoscope qui caractérise l’oeuvre de Kilito, Par Dieu, cette histoire est mon histoire ! L’oeuvre s’articule autour de trois histoires. La première, celle de Hasan al-Basri, est tirée des Mille et Une Nuits. La seconde, celle de Hasan Miro avec sa femme Nora, problématise le statut d’un livre prétendument maléfique, La satire des deux vizirs d’Abu al-Hayyane al-Tawhidi, oeuvre qui souligne l’échec de la …
Formal Analysis in Research on Small/Minor Literatures
This article compares two studies on small/minor literatures: one by Fabienne Gilbertz on Luxembourgish in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg and one by Clà Riatsch on Rhaeto-Romanic in the Swiss Confederation. The design and the argument of the article are based on two methodological considerations. First, both studies take a fairly comprehensive view of their literatures, thereby taking advantage of the benefits that studying small/minor literatures…
Why I Record Interviews with Ukrainian Refugees
In this article I try to explain the main reasons for my project: people want their stories to be preserved. In interviews with them, people said for example, “although someone is interested in this”, “now [after the interview] it’s a little easier for me”, “at last I can talk about it”. The interviewees were the people I met in Ukrainian refugees help centres. They are people who have decided to live; many people are depressed and are silent. I …
Acceptance, Healing and Reflective Nostalgia in the Works of Elin Toona and Agate Nesaule
The Estonian and Latvian diaspora communities that formed in the United States after World War Two anchored their identity and cultural practices in hopes of survival and eventual freedom for their occupied homelands. Younger generations, increasingly distanced from direct ties to these homelands, often faced tensions and pressures within their communities to maintain ethnic and cultural continuity. The arts have served both as a means to affirm …
The Poetics of Postmemory
Focusing on postmemory, the memories of the third generation of Estonian refugees in Sweden today, tracing remnants of family tales in the aftermath of World War Two and the flight from Estonia to Sweden in 1944, this paper analysis the concept of ‘afterness’ in memory work and the role of imagination in rendering memories legible and visible. Framed as witnesses of the master narrative of history, a narrative focusing the chain of events, establ…
Poetics of Trauma in Olga Ravn’s My Work
Over the past two decades, numerous novels and memoirs have explored contemporary motherhood. In contrast to idealised portrayals of mothers, new narratives of motherhood have emerged that foreground the subjective maternal experience. The evolving discourse often invokes ironic and critical self-consciousness, addressing questions related to work, sexuality, and identity. The works frequently explore the more complex and often troubling aspects …
Paper Life
My Ukrainian grandmother Nadia Olijnyk lived in Adelaide, South Australia, from the time she arrived as a postwar refugee in 1949 until her death at the age of 95 in 2009. She left a bundle of notebooks in which she had written down her memories, mostly in the final decade of her life. They include stories about her life in Ukraine, including from the early 1940s when her home city of Kharkov was at the epicentre of a series of momentous battles.…
“I’m not one of those strong people”
Letters exchanged between people encourage a shift from emphasising individualism and separation to highlighting relationships. Even in complex traumatic situations, it is helpful to view them as shared experiences, as this increases ways to cope with trauma and demonstrates that correspondence can be a form of healing. Based on a collection of Gulag letters gathered by Lithuanian museologist Kazimiera Galaunienė (Kairiūkštytė) (1924–2016), this …
Fake Healing and Popular Biopolitics
This article seeks to conceptualise the nexus of vernacular narratives and biopolitics and unpack it using the empirical material of pro-Russian video bloggers operating in the occupied territories of Ukraine, namely in the city of Mariupol. Our theoretical focus is a combination of biopolitics and critical media studies. Our main research question is: how – through what semantic tools – does the occupier propagate narratives and imageries suppor…
Estonian Elegy
This article examines how contemporary Estonian poetry engages with the experience of death and mourning. Focusing on seven twenty-firstcentury collections devoted entirely to the loss of a loved one, it shows how bereavement generates distinct poetic strategies that reshape both the lyric form and the self. The study proposes a fourfold typology of mourning poetics: memorial, which sustains the presence of the deceased through memory and image; …
Thresholds to Infinity
Stories of houses that are somehow wrong have a long history across languages, cultures, and time. Broadly speaking, a haunted house requires two primary characteristics: a distinct atmosphere of unease and a historical context. The latter of these, as might be expected, changes over time, meaning that at different points, some types of haunted house narrative are more prevalent than others. Moreover, the haunted house narrative has not been limi…
The Possible Wor(l)ds of Healing
The Possible Wor(l)ds of Healing: Poetics and Politics of Repair
Somatic Syntax
In her “failed” novel Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil claims that the text is a “novel-shaped space” that not only resists narrative but investigates the dangers of literature related to stories of trauma. In traditional, linear books that include trauma, violence is inevitable and often portrayed as a spectacle, easily leaning toward objectification. Instead, Kapil’s work suggests that fragmented, non-linear narratives can be more representative of…
The Lithuanian High School Literary Canon
This paper reconstructs the developments of the Lithuanian high school literary canon from 1918 to 2018. Drawing on the theoretical framework of descriptive canon research, attributed to the theoretical field of cultural sociology, we investigate how ideological shifts have shaped education policies as well as the selection and interpretation of literature taught in secondary education over the past hundred years. We argue that the school, more t…
Traumas Caused by Racism in Kashmeera Lokuge and Hyppe Salmi’s Novel Ilmatilaa
The article examines Kashmeera Lokuge and Hyppe Salmi’s migration novel Ilmatilaa (Airspace 2021) as trauma fiction. I will examine the target text with the help of trauma studies in literature, racism studies and emotion studies. The subjects of my analysis are the racism-related traumas of the main character and first-person narrator of the novel Shehani, a young woman who moved to Finland from Sri Lanka as a teenager. I investigate her emotion…
Trauma and Healing in Zef Pllumi’s Live to Tell Trilogy
Humanity has periodically faced tragic events, with studies seeking to explain each case. History has shown that wars, pandemics, and totalitarian regimes can brutally take the lives of innocent people. They also leave lasting trauma for survivors, making the healing process lengthy. A totalitarian regime is an overcontrolling government that interferes unnecessarily in citizens’ lives. It deforms, alienates, and destroys individuals. The Live to…
The Authenticity of Trauma and Depression in Drama
Trauma and depression often go hand in hand. Depression can develop without traumatic events, but with trauma there are almost always depressive episodes. Going through trauma is dreadful, but the real challenge is to live with the memories. That is where depression, flashbacks and anxiety come into focus. Depression and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) are treated by psychotherapy and antidepressants, but culture can add a lot to the coping…
Between Wounds and Witness
This editorial examines trauma as a multidimensional phenomenon – psychological, cultural, political, and embodied – that profoundly shapes individual lives and people’s sense of connection to shared histories. Situating the discussion within contemporary global crises and scholarly debates, it draws on key concepts from trauma theory, including Caruth’s understanding of trauma as “unclaimed experience”, Hirsch’s postulation of “postmemory”, and …
The Phenomenon of Memory in Leonardas Gutauskas’ Novel A Wolf-Teeth Necklace and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
This study explores the phenomenon of personal memory as human experience in two modernist novels: Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and A Wolf-Teeth Necklace by Leonardas Gutauskas. Using the phenomenological approach of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edward Casey, Gaston Bachelard and Paul Ricoeur, the article aims to discuss the various interpretations of memory and its effect on human existence. Proust’s prose provides one possible context for a…
Le critique et le romancier
Qui, du critique ou du romancier, est le plus libre ? À l’origine de cette question se trouve un roman, La saga de Youza, du Lituanien Youozas Baltouchis. Pour moi qui rêve d’écrire le livre que je porte en moi, il m’a fait comprendre la difficulté que j’éprouverais à être romancier. Pour quelle raison ? Parce que le romancier est contraint d’accepter l’ambiguïté, là où le critique a au contraire la possibilité de stabiliser un sens. Expliquons-n…
Healing Echoes
This article explores the transformative potential of public storytelling in healing collective trauma, drawing on the case study of the author’s mother, a Cypriot refugee’s experience following the 1974 Turkish invasion. It examines how the shift from private to public narration of traumatic memories can facilitate healing by creating a collective witness and enabling projective identification as a form of communication and psychological change.…
El proceso místico en Cómo me hice monja (1993) de César Aira
The aim of the paper titled The mystical process in César Aira’s Cómo me hice monja (1993), is to show how Cómo me hice monja by César Aira playfully emulates a mystical discourse. Analyzed from this perspective, the apparent dispersion and strangeness of the anecdotes narrated, the language used, and the title of the novel are framed in a structure that corresponds to processes described in mystical texts according to the studies carried out by …
Albanian Lyrical Poetry and the Healing Process after the Fall of the Communist Regime
Albanian literature is considered to be a domain of epic genres. The reason is strongly related to the historical and social context in which art and literature were developed. Having the ideological function as the main reason why most literary works were written, made epic genres strongly connected with the narrative of the nation and national awareness. From the Albanian Renaissance onward, epic poetry and later short stories and novels were t…
Detached Holocaust Memory
In the decades immediately following the Second World War, the Lithuanian-American community in the United States exhibited a complex and often contentious relationship with Holocaust memory, characterised by divergent interpretations of Jewish-Lithuanian relations and events during the Nazi occupation of Lithuania. This complexity arose largely due to the heterogeneous nature of the diaspora, combining earlier waves of economic migrants with pos…
Abissology
In her book Rombo (2022) Esther Kinsky traces the devastating earthquakes in north-east Italy in 1976 on the basis of natural and cultural observations and the memories of those affected. Earthquakes suddenly open up chasms that shake our certainties. They are caused by underground displacements and collapses of so-called abissi, that is, abysses or cavities in the rock. In structuring her novel, Kinsky quotes writings from abissology, a branch o…
Sin publicaciones prominentes en esta página.
Latvian Comic Science Fiction 1960–1990
The theme of the present paper is a tendency in Latvian literature that flourished from 1960s to the late 1980s and has so far not been subjected to research. It is the phenomenon of short stories with science fiction elements appearing in humor magazines of Soviet Latvia, mainly in Dadzis (The Thistle) and Dadža kalendārs (The Thistle’s Almanac) as well as in the short story collections by the regular authors of these periodicals. In these stori…
In The Eye of the Beholder – Attitudes towards Visual Poetry in Latvian Literature
Visual poetry in Latvian literature is still an extraordinary phenomenon. In this case, by extraordinary is meant its scarce appearance among the corpus of Latvian literary texts – only very few examples of it exist in Latvian literature even in the 21st century, though it has gained a visible presence in other literatures of the world since at least the era of Modernist poetry, and experienced in most cases a turn of critical attitude towards it…
Small Literature as a Problem. Could It Be Solved
Th e article discusses the status and functioning of so-called small literatures, including Lithuanian literature, in the global system of world literature. Referring to Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova’s interpretation of world literature system as based on the principle of inequality, the author discusses the conception of belonging to small literatures as a destiny and interprets the onecentric world literary system as hegemonic. Being domi…
The Call of the Wild
The article will look at how John Buchan (1875–1940) has traced the decline of British aristocracy in his novels that cover the time period when the power radically shifted from the landowning to the middle class, with concomitant feelings of confusion, loss, disillusionment and inadequacy on the part of the class whose very existence was being undermined. Buchan wrote at the time when the spirit of chivalry, so carefully cultivated by the Victor…
About Authors

 
 
Writing of Contemporary National Literary History in Finland and Hungary – a Comparative Approach
The discourse on the writing of national literary histories is still in progress due to the postcolonial and transnational turn. In the frameworks of these literary theories, the meaning of national has been reshaped by focusing on the territorial, ethnic and language borders of contemporary literature. The theory of literary history writing had to face the issues of defining the phenomenon of migrant, emigrant and minority literature. A new Hung…
Deictic Close Reading
Inspired by practical didactics, this article suggests using pragmapoetic deictic analysis as a method to enrich close reading of poetry. When applying the pragmalinguistic theory of deixis and the analytic philosophical theory of indexicals to poetic texts, it soon becomes apparent that, in addition to traditional spatial, temporal, and personal deixis, it is also necessary to speak about emotional, or modal, deixis. The latter functions on a sc…
Oh, of course, one accepts the Gospels, naturally’
When Graham Greene wrote Monsignor Quixote (published in 1982), one of his aims was to reflect critically on the role of the Catholic Church in the Spain of the late 1970s, as well as on the support this institution offered to the former dictatorship of Franco within the so called ‘National Catholicism.’ In this novel, the reader witnesses the evolution of the protagonist, Father Quixote, from a religious living a complacent life in a small villa…
Quelle littérature pour l’évaluation des professeurs de français dans la Roumanie communiste ? Canon scolaire, savoirs disciplinaires et interactions institutionnelles
Literature in the Assessment of Teachers of French in Communist Romania: School Canon, Disciplinary Knowledge, and Institutional Interactions. Drawing on a series of original sources (the tenure exam syllabi for the teachers in the Romanian system of secondary education), the article aims to analyze the ways in which literature was employed in the assessment and ranking of teachers who wanted to become tenured in this discipline. The development …
Mapping Literature Through Quantitative Instruments. The Case of Current Romanian Literary Studies
Following a two-pronged line of argumentation, our article seeks to analyze and evaluate the current state of quantitative approaches applied to Romanian literature within the context and framework of one of the most prominent emergent fields of literary studies: quantitative formalism. Thus, on the one hand, the paper will attempt to present the most well-known lexicographic instruments currently used in quantitative studies in Romania (The Chro…
Ubi caritas et amor. Une lecture comparée du Baiser au lépreux et de O Veleiro de Cristal
Ubi caritas et amor. A Comparatist Reading of Le Baiser au lépreux and O Veleiro de Cristal. Le Baiser au lépreux (The Kiss to the Leper), by François Mauriac, and O Veleiro de Cristal (The Crystal Sailboat), by José Mauro de Vasconcelos, are a priori aimed at two different audiences. Le Baiser au lépreux is indeed generally considered to be Mauriac’s first important book, whereas O Veleiro de Cristal belongs to “children’s literature”, like O Me…
Metamorphoses of Oedipus in Modern French Literature. From an Intellectual Drama to a Psychoanalytical Reflection on Ideal Love
Oedipus Rex, a tragedy created twenty-five centuries ago, is still a source of inspiration for many writers. However, the overall message of modern interpretations of the Oedipus myth differs considerably from the message of Sophocles’ play; these works are no longer the stories of a man punished by gods for his haughtiness (hybris). André Gide modernizes Sophocles’ tragedy, transforming it into a lesson in secular humanism. The play by Jean Coct…
War is (not) Our Home. Andrei Konchalovsky’s House of Fools (Dom Durakov, 2002) as a Russian Literary and Cultural Archive
The article focuses on the film House of Fools (Dom Durakov, 2002) of Andrei Konchalovsky, who is one of the most recognized contemporary Russian directors. The selected work is analyzed from the point of view of its intertextual relationships with Russian literary texts and cultural phenomena. The motif of the train, the paradigm of jurodivyj and the reference to the artistic worlds of acclaimed Russian writers (Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky…
Littératures migrantes
Migrant Literatures: Concept from an Excentric Literary Field. This article focuses on the concept of migrant literatures as it was developed by literary studies in Quebec at the beginning of the 1980s. It examines the conditions that led to the emergence of the notion, such as the historical evolution, immigration policies and linguistic specificity, and compares it with the situation in France, where such a concept was not considered by literar…
Representation of Places in Etel Adnan’s In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country and Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz)
This article will take a close look at two books of Etel Adnan which are strongly tied to the representation of places. References to nature found in both books link the places she is physically present in to her inner-spaces. Additionally, the people she encounters in these locations also become elements with which she weaves different places together. In Of Cities & Women (Letters to Fawwaz), the notion of place is particularly enriched by the …
Enchanted
The Finnish-Estonian writer Aino Kallas lived in London between 1922 and 1934, being the wife of the first Estonian ambassador to the Court of St James’s. In 2011 her memoirs of these years were published in Estonian translation under the title Londoni võlus (Enchanted by London). Being a romantic and a modernist, Kallas in her memoirs combines a heightened sensitivity with the rigours of the modernist style in order to convey in striking images …
Why Was It the Ming Dynasty that Engendered the Guanxi Motif in Fiction
Compared to other informal social network mechanisms, guanxi is more common in China and is the most typical. Even in daily life, it is indispensable. Hence, in Chinese fiction, the guanxi motif is prevalent and important. Interestingly, before the Ming dynasty, guanxi was not a literary motif in fiction. This article suggests that three factors contributed to the rise of the guanxi motif in fiction in the Ming dynasty. The first was the boom in …
The Gnostic Hunters in Nabokov’s 'The Real Life of Sebastian Knight'
Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight presents the ambiguous identities of the two heroes, V. and Sebastian, attracting great attention among Nabokovian scholarship. The present article intends to reveal that Nabokov’s design of Sebastian and V. pertains to his own Gnostic faith and the ambiguous identities of V. and Sebastian, in light of certain Gnostic tenets and concepts, are the representation of their spiritual evolution and their mer…
Genre Studies in Russian Literary Research
Genre has been one of the key categories for Russian literary studies ever since the late nineteenth century, creating a long tradition of artistic, critical and scientific interpretation. The present paper aims to outline major findings of Russian scholars in the field of genre studies and to account for current pitfalls, suggesting a solution. Russian scholars have contributed noticeably to both constructing the theory of genre in general and e…
L’essence éthique du dialogue culturel
The ethical essence of cultural dialogue. The definition of comparative literary studies in Slovakia. Historical poetics in the works of D. Ďurišin, focused on the typological essence of literary phenomena on the basis of interrelating theoretical and developmental aspects of national literature. The differences of Slovak methodology from Western positivist models of the study of interliterariness. Parallel existence of the principles of literary…
Non-Centricity and Apathy
Hong Kong literature, with particular historical and social factors, can be regarded as a non-centric literary form. While the majority of Hong Kong people speaks Cantonese as their mother tongue, they are required to write in Mandarin. Additionally, Hong Kong literature struggles to attract attention from an apathetic audience, to produce local writers, and to resonate with foreign readers. As serious literature continues to lose its purchase, m…
Argentine Literature as Part of the Latin-American
The article will suggest that the texts and ways of reaching some materials and perspectives in Argentina, remains at a national level. It is important to notice that in order to read criticism and theory regarding Latin American literature, Spanish from Río de la Plata separates at some point the fields. In that regard, one of the greatest assets and achievements of Argentinian literary research concerns the relationship between politics and fic…
When Books Speak of Books
The present article will analyze the intertextual dimension in the work of the Lithuanian essayist G. Radvilavičiūtė, especially focusing on her most successful book, Šiąnakt aš miegosiu prie sienos. In the introduction a brief review of U. Eco’s ideas on intertextuality will be presented, paying special attention to the notions of metafiction, dialogism, double coding, and intertextual irony. Within this theoretical framework, the main intertext…
Albanian Literature in Its Critical Evaluation Process. Case Study
The aim of this article is to analyze the process of evaluation of Albanian literature in literary periodicals (print or online). The research aims to explain the nature of criticism of Albanian literature in accordance with three main periods of Albanian literary history (1920–1944; 1945–1990; 1991–present). The paper has a short chronological presentation of the main periodicals which deal with literature. It also deals with the reception of Al…
“The Scar Will Always Be There”
The article discusses the cultural and narratological aspects of melancholic understanding of history in postmodern Latvian fiction. The first part of the study offers a brief overview of Latvian fiction of the 1990s and early 2000s with a special attention to the interrelated questions of history, trauma, and representation. The second part shifts from cultural contextualization to defining melancholic temporality and highlighting narrative ways…