MT 2018 Week 2 Updates

In Week 3, Vera Tobin will be speaking about "Shifting the Blame: Some Surprising Cognitive Elements of Narrative Surprise" at the Fiction and Other Minds seminar.

Our friendly discussion group met on Monday of Week 2. In celebration of Adriana X. Jacobs’s book Strange Cocktail, we (fittingly!) enjoyed pomegranate liqueur cocktails at TORCH while discussing translation and Modern Hebrew poetry.

Read Elliot Koubis’s review of Karen Emmerich’s Literary Translation and the Making of Originals here.

 

CFPs and Events

 

1.Comparative Moods: Language, Diversity and Kinship in a Changing World

Tuesday, 13th November 2018, 6pm - 7.30pm

UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, Ground Floor, South Wing,
University College London, WC1E 6BT Gower Street, London, UK

This event is jointly hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and Liverpool University Press. 

All welcome. The event will be followed by a wine reception.

Pre-registration required.

 

2. CFP Shakespeare-Seminar 2019
Shakespearean Translations – Translating Shakespeare

It is a critical commonplace that Shakespeare in many ways relied on and produced various forms of translations – translations of foreign words, translations of literary texts, translations from one medium into another, to name but a few. Over time, Shakespeare’s works themselves have become some of the most widely translated texts in world literature. As of today, his works have been translated into more than 100 languages. Moreover, his plays and poems have travelled across time and space, and they have been re-translated time and again in order to adapt them for contemporary audiences. More often than not, such translations also raise questions about the original works and their socio-cultural as well as literary contexts. Increasingly, translation is regarded not so much as a simple process of linguistic transfer but rather as a form of rewriting. Heinrich Heine once claimed that Shakespeare was a German author. Of course, Heine knew about Shakespeare’s birthplace, but his contention was that the true greatness of Shakespeare only fully emerges in translation. Such views, whether one approves of them or not, have also led to a revaluation of the work of the translator. Instead of celebrating Shakespeare’s originality it has become possible to value him as an ingenious translator (or condemn him as a plagiarist) of well-known materials.

This year’s Shakespeare-Seminar seeks to address the manifold questions that are raised by intercultural and transhistorical translations as well as by Shakespeare’s own role as translator.

Topics may include, but are not restricted to
• The significance of translation, adaptation, and appropriation for and 
in Shakespeare
• Adaptations and appropriations of Shakespeare's works in different 
times and places
• Shakespeare and his sources
• Shakespeare and his audiences
• (Inter-)Medial translations
• Transnational Shakespeare
• Travelling players
• Comparative approaches to Shakespeare translations
• The role of the translator(s)

Our seminar plans to address these issues with a panel of six papers during the annual conference of the German Shakespeare Association, Shakespeare-Tage (26.–28. April 2019 in Weimar, Germany). As critical input for the discussion and provocation for debate, we invite papers of no more than 15 minutes that present concrete case studies, concise examples and strong views on the topic.

Please send your proposals (abstracts of 300 words) by 30 November 2018 to the seminar convenors:
Lukas Lammers, Free University Berlin: l.lammers@fu-berlin.de
Kirsten Sandrock, University of Göttingen: ksandrock@phil.uni-goettingen.de

The Seminar provides a forum for established as well as young scholars to discuss texts and contexts. Participants of the seminar will subsequently be invited to submit (extended versions of) their papers for publication in Shakespeare Seminar Online (SSO). While we cannot offer travel bursaries, the association will arrange for the accommodation of all participants in a hotel close to the main venues. For more information please contact Kirsten Sandrock and Lukas Lammers. For more information about the events and 
publications also see here.

 

3. INGEBORG BACHMANN CENTRE FOR AUSTRIAN LITERATURE & CULTURE
at the INSTITUTE OF MODERN LANGUAGES RESEARCH

Thursday, 18 October 2018, at 6 pm

The 2018 Ingeborg Bachmann Centre Lecture entitled

Giving Life to Objects:  The New Literature Museum in Vienna and the Question of ‘Austrian National Literature’ will be given by Bernhard Fetz (Director, Literary Archives, Austrian National Library)

The lecture will be followed by a reception

Venue: Court Room, 1st floor, Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, WC1E 7HU

Attendance free – all welcome. Please register in advance. 

 

4. Saturday, 20 October 2018 (Room 243, Senate House)

Research Projects in Modern Languages

11.00   Introduction (Katia Pizzi, IMLR)

11.15   Online Research Training: A quick guide (Matt Phillpott, SAS Digital)

An introduction to MOOC’s, training guides, and resources online that can be useful for researchers. This session also looks at offerings from SAS and IMLR on the PORT website and offers help for making the best use of these online resources (interactive session)

12.30   Lunch break

14.00   Research projects in Modern Languages (Katia Pizzi, IMLR)

This session will help you choose, define and structure a research project. The focus will be on identifying and delimiting your material and research questions, as well as structuring content. The session includes ‘top tips’ to help you navigate through the initial stages of your research

15.30   Tea break

16.00   Nuts and bolts of doing postgraduate research in Modern Languages (Allegra Baggio Corradi, Warburg, Francielle Carpenedo, IMLR and Angharad Mountford, IMLR)

 

5. CALL FOR PAPERS: Across Languages: Translingualism in Contemporary Women’s Writing

Deadline: 12 November 2018, 11.00pm

Conference: 30-31 May 2019, Senate House, University of London

This conference is organised by the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women’s Writing (CCWW) in collaboration with the AHRC Open World Research Initiative project ‘Cross-Language Dynamics: Reshaping Community’, Translingual Strand. It follows on from an exploratory workshop that was held at the IMLR in March 2018 (‘A New Language - a New Life? Translingual literature by contemporary women writers’). Our aim is to bring together scholars working on translingual women’s writing in a range of language fields, in order to explore the particular richness of texts produced by writers in languages that are not their mother tongues.

In the current era of mass migration and transnational movement, analysis of translingualism as the mode of expression of this movement is an important area of inquiry. Where static concepts of belonging are questioned and increasingly replaced by hybrid identities and affiliations and by fluid attachments, changing with time, the power of translingual language use and its analysis can become a means to reimagine the identitarian force of language, it can bring to the fore new subjectivities and new forms of community (Kellman, 2000; Yildiz, 2012). Considered in conjunction with questions of gender and power, translingual writing can also reveal powerful ways of conceptualizing emancipatory feminine writing. Beyond concerns of identity formation, furthermore, translingual language use opens up new ways of thinking and of deconstructing established modes of expression through associative cross-language connections.  In so transcending the binaries of language use it is apt to reveal new forms of literary writing.

We are calling for proposals of papers that engage with any of these issues and are particularly interested in research that addresses any of the following issues:

•             The theoretical base: translingualism, multilingualism, heteroglossia, code-switching in literary writing by women
•             Translingual writing and gender
•             Questioning the concept of the mother tongue: cliché or mooring / relationship between language and mothering
•             Identity and belonging in translingual texts (multiple / hybrid?)
•             The relationship between spoken and written language
•             Questions of ‘authenticity’
•             Distance as a creative element
•             Emancipatory potentials of translingual writing
•             Translingual writing and the concept of authorship
•             Translingual writing and the literary market
•             Questions of translatability.

Please send your proposals for papers of 20 mins duration (with a short abstract of your proposed contribution, 200-250 words) to Deirdre Byrnes (Deirdre.Byrnes@nuigalway.ie) and Godela Weiss-Sussex (godela.weiss-sussex@sas.ac.uk) by Monday, 12 November 2018.

 

6. The BCLA invites applications for this year's postgraduate conference. The theme is 'Margins' and the conference will take place on 3 December 2018 at the University of Strathclyde.

The event will also feature a keynote address by Professor Andrew Van Der Vlies (Queen Mary) and our first ever session dedicated to pressures faced by early career researchers in comparative literature.

Call for Papers

The British Comparative Literature Association Postgraduate Conference

3 December 2018

University of Strathclyde

Margins

Keynote by Professor Andrew Van der Vlies (Queen Mary): ‘World Literature’s Margins: Province / Minor / Intertext’

The British Comparative Literature Association invites papers for its annual postgraduate conference to be held at the University of Strathclyde on 3 December 2018.  This conference will bring together postgraduate students from across the humanities to examine how reading comparatively may privilege what is otherwise subordinated to the margins of texts or those texts marginalized by the canon. 

Margins might denote regions that help to delimit text, genre, literature, language, nation, region, and identity.  Margins might also be read as a space of confrontation and fusion with subversive potential.  We welcome broad and creative interpretations of the following themes.

·      Migration, national borders and geographical margins
·      The limit between human and nonhuman
·      Liminal identities
·      Reading marginal details
·      Translating margins
·      Footnotes, epigraphs, post-scriptum, annexes, and other textual supplements
·      The relationship between art and philosophy
·      Queer, non-Western and other marginalized literary histories
·      Marginalized texts

 

7. International Conference 14th-15th June 2019
Canon? Practice? Commodity?
The Past, Present and Future of the Literary Anthology

Department of Comparative Literature and Culture

Queen Mary University of London

Deadline for proposals: 28th February 2019

More information here.

 

8. Comparative Moods: Language, Diversity and Kinship in a Changing World

Tuesday, 13th November 2018, 6pm - 7.30pm

UCL Institute of Advanced Studies, Ground Floor, South Wing,
University College London, WC1E 6BT Gower Street, London, UK

This event is jointly hosted by the UCL Institute of Advanced Studies and Liverpool University Press. 

All welcome. The event will be followed by a wine reception.

Pre-registration required. Please register here.

 

TORCH team

Comparative Criticism and Translation

mt 2018 week