Pismo rektorju Univerze v Innsbrucku v podporo tamkajšnjemu Oddelku za primerjalno književnost /
Letter to the Rectorate of the University of Innsbruck (supporting the Innsbruck CL department)

Ljubljana, 27 October 2005

Dear Professor Rainer,

Allow us to express our deepest concern about your rectorate’s intention of closing the Innsbruck Comparative Literature Institute. As scholars working within the same field of research as the Innsbruck Institute, we are aware how important inter-cultural competence and dialogical ethics are not only for the future and present of European Community (if we take this notion seriously, not reducing it to mere economy) but for the globalized world at large. This kind of competence and ethics, so essential for actual understanding and recognizing of the Other in his/her irreducible otherness, as well as for peaceful, fruitful, and prosperous international and transnational policies, can be obtained only by gaining in-depth, accurate, methodologically valid knowledge as produced and disseminated also in the university departments of foreign languages and literary studies. We want to stress that this valuable knowledge is best reflected through comparative methods, which are able to study literary and cultural phenomena in their inter-dependencies and within spaces (areas) that transgress nationally bound delimitations of humanities or social studies. Innsbruck Comparative Literature Institute has great reputation in our country and elsewhere in comparatistic academy because of its promoting the kind of approach we, too, stand for.

Therefore we urge you to reconsider your intentions and give the Innsbruck Comparative Literature Institute the chance to further develop its valuable and internationally recognized legacy.

Prof. dr. Marko Juvan

President of Slovene Comparative Literature Association

 
PS: Also supporting the message of this letter:

Prof. Dr. Darko Dolinar
Head of the Institute for Slovene Literature and Literary Sciences, Scientific Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ljubljana

Ms Jola Škulj, MA
Member of the ICLA/AILC Executive Committee ,  Member of the REELC/ENCLS Executive Committee