This book promotes interdisciplinary dialogue about untranslatability and its implications within the context of globalization. It examines at the pragmatics of translation practice, the role of the translator’s voice and the translator as author in specific literary works, and case studies across a variety of genres and traditions across regions.
While English has become the lingua franca in science, business, and other fields, scholars still grapple with the implications of its adoption in many other settings and cultures. To what extent should English be introduced and taught in schools around the world? Who “owns” the English language and can therefore shape its structure and aims? What are world Englishes and how can teachers demonstrate them to their students? Is English the language of the oppressor, an imperialist tool, or does global English offer an opportunity for greater understanding and cooperation amongst peoples and cultures? This volume of critical essays explores these and other questions surrounding language, education, and culture in the globalized world. Honoring students’ cultures while trying to prepare them for an uncertain and constantly changing future is the resounding theme of this book. The contributors to this volume are as multi-cultural and multi-faceted as such a volume would demand. The essays include authors and studies from Algeria, India, Iran, Ghana, Germany, Poland, Tunisia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, the United States of America, and Yemen. The perspectives offered in this volume contribute greatly to the ongoing conversations on language, education, and globalization.
Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of “World Literature”—a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal—Apter proposes a plurality of “world literatures” oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.
Into our Labours explores the literary representation of work across the globe since 1850, setting out to show that the literature of modernity is best understood in the light of the worlding of capitalism. The book proposes that a determinative relation exists between changing modes of work and changes in the forms, genres, and aesthetic strategies of the writing that bears witness to them. Two aspects of the ‘worlding’ of modernity, especially, are emphasised. First, an ‘inaugural’ experience of capitalist social relations, whose literary registration sometimes makes itself known through a crisis of representation, as the forms of space- and time-consciousness demanded by life in contexts in which market-oriented commodity production has become the dominant form of social labour are counterposed with inherited ways of seeing and knowing, now under acute pressure if not already obsolete. Second, a moment corresponding to the consolidation, regularisation and global dispersal of capitalist development. Into Our Labours focuses on the naturalisation of capitalist social relations: forms of sociality and solidarity, ideologies of familialism, individualism and work, relations between the sexes and the generations. Arguing that the only plausible term for the vast body of literary work engendered by the worlding of capitalist social relations is ‘modernist’, the book proposes that it is then important to challenge the still-entrenched Eurocentric understandings of modernism. Modernism is neither originally nor paradigmatically ‘Western’ in provenance; and its temporal parameters are much broader than are usually assumed in modernist studies, extending both backward and forward in time.
Bringing together the latest studies on Japanese pragmatics, this edited volume showcases the breadth of research conducted in this ever-expanding, interdisciplinary field, with the introductory chapter providing a useful summary of developments in the field in the past decades. The twelve chapters address a variety of traditional and emerging topics by adopting diverse theoretical and methodological frameworks and presenting a range of perspectives on grammar, interaction and culture. They demonstrate a wide scope of pragmatics research informed by, as well as informing, usage-based grammar, cognitive linguistics, conversation analysis, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and literary and cultural studies. Chapters also consider future directions as to how the study of Japanese language in use will continue to offer critical data and analyses to the field dominated by the study of English and other European languages. This volume is certain to be of interest to students and scholars engaged in pragmatics in general and the Japanese language in particular.
Feeling It brings together twelve chapters from researchers in Chicanx studies, education, feminist studies, linguistics, and translation studies to offer a cohesive yet broad-ranging exploration of the issue of affect in the language and learning experiences of Latinx youth. Drawing on data from an innovative social justice-oriented university-community partnership based in young people’s social agency and their linguistic and cultural expertise, the contributors are unified by their focus on a single year in the history of this partnership; their analytic focus on race, language, and affect in educational contexts; and their shared commitment to ethnography, discourse analysis, and qualitative methods, informed by participatory and social justice paradigms for research with youth of color. Designed specifically for use in courses, with theoretical framing by the co-editors and ethnographic contributions from leading and emergent scholars, this book is an important and timely resource on affect, race, and social justice in the United States. Thanks to its interdisciplinary grounding, Feeling It will be of interest to future teachers and to researchers and students in applied linguistics, education, and Latinx studies, as well as related fields such as anthropology, communication, social psychology, and sociology.
'The memory of a particular image is only regret for a particular moment...' The Swann Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time (1913-27), one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. The work is a portal to Proust's novel and an introduction to its unforgettable first-person narrator-protagonist. Immersed in themes of time, memory, identity, art, sensation, love, and jealousy, the narrator embarks on the story of his life and the paths he takes towards fulfilling his vocation as a writer. Principally focused on the narrator's childhood, this volume lays the foundation of Proust's extraordinary literary edifice. The first volume in a major new translation of In Search of Lost Time, co-edited by Brian Nelson and Adam Watt. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
Translating Picturebooks examines the role of illustration in the translation process of picturebooks and how the word-image interplay inherent in the medium can have an impact both on translation practice and the reading process itself. The book draws on a wide range of picturebooks published and translated in a number of languages to demonstrate the myriad ways in which information and meaning is conveyed in the translation of multimodal material and in turn, the impact of these interactions on the readers’ experiences of these books. The volume also analyzes strategies translators employ in translating picturebooks, including issues surrounding culturally-specific references and visual and verbal gaps, and features a chapter with excerpts from translators’ diaries written during the process. Highlighting the complex dynamics at work in the translation process of picturebooks and their implications for research on translation studies and multimodal material, this book is an indispensable resource for students and researchers in translation studies, multimodality, and children’s literature.
This groundbreaking work is the first full book-length publication to critically engage in the emerging field of research on the queer aspects of translation and interpreting studies. The volume presents a variety of theoretical and disciplinary perspectives through fifteen contributions from both established and up-and-coming scholars in the field to demonstrate the interconnectedness between translation and queer aspects of sex, gender, and identity. The book begins with the editors’ introduction to the state of the field, providing an overview of both current and developing lines of research, and builds on this foundation to look at this research more closely, grouped around three different sections: Queer Theorizing of Translation; Case Studies of Queer Translations and Translators; and Queer Activism and Translation. This interdisciplinary approach seeks to not only shed light on this promising field of research but also to promote cross fertilization between these disciplines towards further exploring the intersections between queer studies and translation studies, making this volume key reading for students and scholars interested in translation studies, queer studies, politics, and activism, and gender and sexuality studies.
Clarice Lispector: From Brazil to the World explains why the Brazilian master was so transformative of modern Brazilian literature and why she has become such a celebrity in the world literature arena. This book also shows why Lispector is not one writer, as many think, but many writers. By offering close readings of her novels, stories, and nonfiction pieces, Earl E. Fitz shows the diverse sides of her literary world. Chapters cover Lispector’s devotion to language and its connection to identity; her political engagement; and her humor, eroticism, and struggle with the concept of God. The last chapter seeks to explain why this most singular of modern Brazilian writers commands such a passionate global following.
