{"id":157,"date":"2026-03-23T14:37:52","date_gmt":"2026-03-23T14:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/conferences.leeds.ac.uk\/escl2026\/?page_id=157"},"modified":"2026-08-21T16:27:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T16:27:40","slug":"plenary-lectures","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/conferences.leeds.ac.uk\/escl2026\/plenary-lectures\/","title":{"rendered":"Plenary Lectures"},"content":{"rendered":"

Monday\u00a024\u00a0August\u00a0 14:00<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Duncan Large\u00a0<\/span><\/b> (chaired by Neil Sadler)<\/span><\/p>\n

Translating\u00a0Affect (Ethically) in the Age of AI<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n

In common with many other disciplines, Translation Studies has taken an \u201caffective turn\u201d in recent years.\u00a0 Scholars like S\u00e9verine Hubscher-Davidson and Kaisa Koskinen have refocussed our understanding of the translation process on the affective and the bodily, as part of a wider trend towards a sociological understanding of the translator\u2019s habitus<\/em>.\u00a0 This move towards \u201ctranslator studies\u201d has entailed a corresponding move away from texts, especially literary texts, and their affective content.\u00a0 Yet across the world\u2019s languages, many of the words that are regarded as the most \u201cuntranslatable\u201d (hiraeth<\/em>, hygge<\/em>, saudade<\/em>, Weltschmerz<\/em>, etc.) are also those most laden with affect.\u00a0 When you scale up from individual words to a poem, a play or a novel, is affect what gets lost in translation?<\/p>\n

This paper addresses the nexus of translation and affect in the literary sphere.\u00a0 Specifically, I will consider what it is about affective literature that might make it difficult to translate, and to translate ethically.\u00a0 I will explore these questions using a wide range of literary examples from Homer, the Bible and Shakespeare through Romantic and Modernist poetry to the literature of the Holocaust, Indigenous literatures, and the literature of contemporary conflict zones.\u00a0 I will also address the impact of AI on the translation of affective literature, for the current consensus is that affective content is the area where human translators have the greatest advantage over generative AI, but in an age where AI can now routinely pass the Turing Test and simulate emotion, is this just complacency?<\/p>\n

Duncan Large\u00a0<\/span><\/b> is\u00a0Professor of European Literature and Translation, University of East Anglia \/\u00a0Former\u00a0Director of the British Centre for Literary Translation<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Monday 24 August 16:00\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

Susan Bassnett <\/span><\/b>(chaired by Gigliola Sulis)<\/p>\n

Reassessing<\/span>\u00a0Comparative Literature\u00a0<\/span>Today<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

Susan Bassnett\u00a0is\u00a0<\/span><\/b>Honorary Professorial Research Fellow, University of Glasgow \/ Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Warwick\u00a0\/\u00a0President of the British Comparative Literature Association<\/span>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

This address will look at how comparative literature has changed in the last decades and seeks to answer a question posed to Professor Bassnett as to how a student might become an expert in the field.<\/p>\n

Respondent: Haun Saussy<\/p>\n

Tuesday\u00a025 August\u00a009:00<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Jean-Louis Haquette<\/span><\/b> (chaired by Nigel Saint)<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Le cri de la nature : mises en sc\u00e8ne de la morale naturelle au si\u00e8cle des Lumi\u00e8res\"<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

(The Cry of Nature: Scenes of Natural Morality in the Age of Enlightenment\u2019)<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Jean-Louis Haquette\u00a0est\u00a0<\/span>Professeur des Universit\u00e9s en Litt\u00e9rature compar\u00e9e, Universit\u00e9 de Reims Champagne-Ardenne<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Abstract:<\/p>\n

Les \u00e9motions ont une histoire, comme l\u2019ont montr\u00e9 notamment les travaux d\u2019Alain Corbin ou George Vigarello. C\u2019est dans cette perspective que s\u2019inscrit cette contribution au congr\u00e8s Ethics and Affect: Rethinking the Text and the World. <\/em>Elle aura pour cadre une p\u00e9riode reconnue comme une charni\u00e8re dans l\u2019histoire des sentiments et des id\u00e9es morales, le si\u00e8cle des Lumi\u00e8res. En effet, s\u2019y jouent des transformations dont notre modernit\u00e9 est encore l\u2019h\u00e9riti\u00e8re directe.<\/p>\n

A partir des m\u00e9thodes de la s\u00e9mantique textuelle, dans un corpus en langue fran\u00e7aise, nous prendrons comme fil directeur les avatars d\u2019une expression caract\u00e9ristique de la naturalisation de la morale qui s\u2019affirme au 18e si\u00e8cle : le \u201ccri de la nature\u201d. De l\u2019essai au th\u00e9\u00e2tre en passant par le roman, elle met en sc\u00e8ne une configuration centrale du lien entre \u00e9thique et affect, qui repose sur une \u00e9vidence int\u00e9rieure. Dans les contextes litt\u00e9raires (th\u00e9\u00e2tre et roman) ce cri est \u00e0 la fois sympt\u00f4me et signe. Surgissant avec une force irr\u00e9pressible, dans des circonstances souvent extr\u00eames, il vient d\u00e9signer, en de\u00e7\u00e0 des mots, une \u00e9vidence morale pr\u00e9sent\u00e9e comme incontestable car naturelle.\u00a0 Dans les textes de r\u00e9flexion, sa valeur hyperbolique sert une rh\u00e9torique de l\u2019\u00e9vidence, qui vise \u00e0 \u00e9chapper \u00e0 la contestation discursive. Dans les deux cas, c\u2019est une \u00e9vidence \u00e9thique qui est affirm\u00e9e, dans une logique qui rel\u00e8ve plus d\u2019une communaut\u00e9 suppos\u00e9e des affects que de la r\u00e9flexivit\u00e9 critique. On interrogera les pr\u00e9suppos\u00e9s d\u2019une telle sc\u00e9nographie et ses implications id\u00e9ologiques et esth\u00e9tiques.<\/p>\n

[Emotions have a history, as demonstrated in the works of Alain Corbin and George Vigarello, amongst others. It is within this framework that this contribution to the conference Ethics and Affect: Rethinking the Text and the World is situated. It will focus on a period recognised as a turning point in the history of emotions and moral ideas: the Age of Enlightenment. During this period several transformations took place of which our modern world is still a direct heir.<\/p>\n

Drawing on methods of textual semantics and using a French-language corpus, we shall explore the various manifestations of a phrase characteristic of the naturalisation of morality that emerged in the 18th century: the \u2018cry of nature\u2019. From essays to plays and novels, this expression highlights a central aspect of the link between ethics and emotion, which is rooted in an inner certainty. In literary contexts (theatre and the novel), this cry is both a symptom and a sign. Emerging with irrepressible force, often in extreme<\/p>\n

circumstances, it serves to express, beyond words, a moral certainty presented as indisputable because it is natural. In reflective texts, its hyperbolic value serves a rhetoric of self-evidence, which aims to evade discursive challenge. In both cases, it is an ethical self-evidence that is asserted, within a logic that relies more on a presumed community of affects than on critical reflexivity. We shall examine the presuppositions of such a framework and its ideological and aesthetic implications.]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thursday 27\u00a0August\u00a0circa\u00a016:00<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Elleke Boehmer\u00a0<\/span><\/b> (chaired by John McLeod)<\/span><\/p>\n

Doing comparison across the blue hemisphere: why and how<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>Elleke Boehmer\u00a0is\u00a0Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford \/ Director, Oxford Centre for Life Writing<\/span>\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Abstract:<\/p>\n

My work on \u2018southern imagining\u2019 demonstrates how we might think laterally and comparatively from the far south of the world, the edges of the blue hemisphere, and considers why this is important at this time of climate crisis, and the continuing dominance of the planet by northern institutions, to which that crisis is directly related. The lecture will direct itself to the conference subtitle, \u2018<\/span>Rethinking the Text and the World\u2019, by submitting that we might rethink the world\u00a0through<\/i>\u00a0the text, in particular through our comparative reading of southern hemisphere texts. The question is not the postcolonial one of writing back, or of how the southern text confronts and challenges the north, but rather the question of how southern readings might work contrapuntally to imagine the planet in more holistic ways, \u2018from below\u2019. Drawing on the work of Janet Frame, Randolph Stow, J.M. Coetzee, Mia Couto, Zakes Mda, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriques, and others, I suggest that southern poetics\u00a0<\/span>contribute something distinctive and forceful to our understanding in this time of the Anthropocene, offering a means of seeing at scale, and at multiple scales; of imagining \u2018over there\u2019 as right here, pressing and urgent.<\/p>\n

My reflections are mobilised by the awareness that only 11% of the world's population live in the southern hemisphere. The \u2018edges\u2019 of the planet are 'out of sight, out of mind' for most people\u2014from which comes the assumption that the view 'from below' can be safely ignored. And yet the high southern latitudes are registering many of the effects of the climate acceleration more acutely than elsewhere. Reading the far south through the works of the far south, interactively, I contend, brings these 'faraway' developments into razor-sharp focus, reminding us that the (only seemingly) remote impinges on us all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Monday\u00a024\u00a0August\u00a0 14:00\u00a0\u00a0 Duncan Large\u00a0 (chaired by Neil Sadler) Translating\u00a0Affect (Ethically) in the Age of AI\u00a0\u00a0 Abstract In common with many other disciplines, Translation Studies has taken an \u201caffective turn\u201d in recent years.\u00a0 Scholars like S\u00e9verine Hubscher-Davidson and Kaisa Koskinen have refocussed our understanding of the translation process on the affective and the bodily, as part...","protected":false},"author":81,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-157","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/conferences.leeds.ac.uk\/escl2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/conferences.leeds.ac.uk\/escl2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/conferences.leeds.ac.uk\/escl2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conferences.leeds.ac.uk\/escl2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/81"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conferences.leeds.ac.uk\/escl2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/conferences.leeds.ac.uk\/escl2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/conferences.leeds.ac.uk\/escl2026\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}