Conference

Worlds Not So Far Apart:

Contacts and Analogies between Romance and Slavic Literatures

International Conference | July 15-17, 2025  | Sibiu, Romania

If the comparative linguistic study of the three major European language groups (Romance, Germanic, and Slavic) already has a tradition of almost two centuries both in terms of comparisons between the groups themselves and between members of the same group, the same cannot be said for the literatures written in their languages. The widest disciplinary dispersion can be observed in the case of Germanic literatures, where there seems to have been no interest so far either in writing a history covering all these literatures or in recognizing it as a distinct discipline. The picture seems to be more favorable with regard to the Romance and Slavic literatures, where, apart from certain attempts – albeit rather few, such as those of Nicolae Iorga (1920) and Dmitrij Tschižewskij (1971) – to synthesize historically each of these groups of literatures, the tendency to study them as clusters seems to have been institutionalized over the previous century in the form of specialized publications or departments.

However, beyond certain generally acknowledged and thoroughly described “waves” (e.g. the influence of French culture on Eastern European literatures in the 18th and 19th centuries), Romance and Slavic literatures as a whole are still seen as worlds apart, separated typologically by a linguistic barrier and geographically by the Germanic literatures of Central Europe. Of course, there are numerous examples that not only contradict this bias, but also show the complex entanglements between the two groups of literatures. For instance, as Alex Drace-Francis (2006) has shown, the period when the two Romanian principalities were under Russian military occupation (1829-1834) represented a turning point in their modernization process through the assimilation of French culture and ideologies. Another complex example may be the way in which Latin American literatures assimilated more or less simultaneously the critique of capitalism in the works of Soviet writers and the critique of totalitarianism in the writings of Eastern European dissidents. 

With these premises in mind, we invite scholars from various disciplines to submit proposals that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

  • What are the similarities and differences between “Latinity” and “pan-Slavism”? To what extent are they still relevant?

  • The influence of Romance literary models on nation-building processes in Slavic countries;

  • The reception of Romance writers in Slavic cultures and the reception of Slavic writers in Romance cultures;

  • The circulation of models, forms and styles between Romance and Slavic literatures;

  • The role of third-party (e.g., Germanic) cultures in mediating cultural and literary influences between Slavic and Romance literatures;

  • Romano-Slavic literary networks in modernism and the avant-garde;

  • Exile and diaspora of Slavic writers in Romance countries;

  • French self-colonization in Slavic literatures;

  • The role of translations as bridges between Romance and Slavic literatures;

  • Complex cases of Romance-Slavic cultural contact and interference (e.g., Republic of Moldova);

  • Quantitative analyses of data from Slavic and Romance literatures.

Keynote speakers: TBD

Please submit a 250-word abstract and a short biography (100 words) to andrei.terian@ulbsibiu.ro and vlad.pojoga@ulbsibiu.ro by 06.04.2025. Proposals should include the title of the paper, the main arguments, and the methods employed. E-mails should have the title “NETSIM 2025 Conference.” Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15.04.2025.

The conference “Worlds Not So Far Apart: Contacts and Analogies between Romance and Slavic Literatures” is organized within the framework of the NETSIM research grant (https://grants.ulbsibiu.ro/netsim/) .