Current Status and Contemporary Academic Perspectives of Comparative Literature in Slovakia

Abstract

The paper seeks to offer an expert examination and brief overview of the development of Literary Comparison as a separate scientific discipline in the Slovak Republic, to present its current status and to consider the possibilities for its further realization in the future. The beginnings of Literary Comparison understood as a methodological paradigm in Slovakia can be traced back to the early works of Mikuláš Bakoš from the early second half of the twentieth century, whose primary researches are in the domain of historical poetics, formalism and structuralism. Decades later, the well-known Slovak theorist Dionýz Ďurišin reflects, and at the same time creatively shapes the postulates of his papers by building on his already well-known theory of special inter-literary communities, inter-literary centers and of characteristics of the inter-literary process. Drawing on national literature as a concept, Dionýz Ďurišin develops a whole theoretical model of rethinking world literature, and his terminological categories also inspire the academic sculptor Ludwig Korkoš, who “revives” them in an artistic way in the nineties of the 20th century. Today, in the Slovak Republic there is a Center for Research on the Heritage of Dionýz Ďurišin at the Faculty of Pedagogy at Comenius University Bratislava under the leadership of prof. Maria Bátorová; while the subject of Literary Comparatics is taught as a compulsory subject at the Faculty of Arts at the same University in Bratislava under the guidance of prof. Zvonko Taneski, and also an elective at the Universities “Constantine the Philosopher” in Nitra, “Matej Bel” in Banska Bystrica and “Pavol Jozef Šafárik” in Prešov. In 2015, the Czech-Slovak Association for Comparative Literature was formed, which recently became a full member of the International Association for Comparative Literature AILC / ICLA. The Slovak headquarters of the Association are at the Institute of World Literature at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, and the president of the Slovak section of the same Association is prof. Róbert Gáfrik. The Association organizes domestic scientific conferences and congresses and regularly participates in appropriate scientific symposia abroad. In the last decade new representative collections have been published devoted to literary comparison in several academic centers in Slovakia. A good platform for presenting and publishing new posters from comparative literary science has become the prestigious scientific journal World Literature Studies, which is periodically published by the Institute of World Literature in Bratislava, and its status and prospects are growing as the magazine is registered, i.e. indexed in several important world scientific databases.