The charm of multilingualism
On 21 November 2025, the "Concepts and Methods" cluster and the Institute of Slavic Studies jointly hosted an event entitled "The Charm of Multilingualism: Multilingualism in Slavic Literatures". The event, which took place at the Institute of Slavic Studies, provided a comprehensive insight into current research trends and the diverse spectrum of literary multilingualism in a Slavic context.
After a welcoming address by Nadja Grbić and Andreas Leben, the literary scholars Anja Burghardt (LMU Munich) and Eva Hausbacher (University of Salzburg) led through the evening in the form of a double conference, which consisted of a lecture section and the presentation of their anthology Die Vielsprachigkeit der Sprache, recently published in the series Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit/Literary Multilingualism edited by Till Dembeck and Rolf Parr.
The two speakers traced the development of literary research on multilingualism and the changes in the associated approaches and research questions. In their remarks, they argued in favour of a sustainable change of perspective in the sense of a philology of multilingualism, which questions the generally prevailing idea of the monolingualism of literature linked to national languages and subjects conceptually problematic terms and binary oppositions such as "mother tongue" vs. "foreign language" to a critical revision.
Subsequently, the various forms of manifest, latent and excluded forms of literary multilingualism were presented in more detail and the potential functions of literary multilingualism were examined. The vivid presentation of individual contributions to the anthology, which spans a wide range of Slavic languages and literatures, impressively demonstrated how widespread and multifaceted the phenomena of multilingualism are in Slavic literatures in the past and present.
To be read in: Anja Burghardt, Eva Hausbacher (eds.): Vielsprachigkeit der Sprache. Multilingualism in the Slavic Literatures. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto, 2025 (Literarische Mehrsprachigkeit / Literary Multilingualism 7).
