TT 2017 Week 2 Updates
The shortlist for Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize was released last week. The 2017 shortlist is:
Ben Faccini for Lydie Salvayre’s Cry, Mother Spain (MacLehose)
Philip Ó Ceallaigh for Mihail Sebastian’s For Two Thousand Years (Penguin Classics)
Natasha Wimmer for Álvaro Enrigue’s Sudden Death (Harvill Secker)
Frank Perry for Lina Wolff’s Bret Easton Ellis and The Other Dogs (And Other Stories)
Lisa Dillman for Yuri Herrera’s The Transmigration of Bodies (And Other Stories)
Lisa C. Hayden for Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina (Oneworld)
Rawley Grau for Dušan Šarotar’s Panorama (Peter Owen World Series/Istros Books)
Arthur Goldhammer for Stéphane Heuet’s adaptation of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: Swann’s Way (Gallic)
This year’s judges of the are the academics and writers Eleni Philippou, Adriana X. Jacobs, Sian Gronlie, and Patrick McGuinness (Chair). The Prize will be awarded at Oxford Translation Day, OCCT’s annual crowing event. All events are free but registration is required. More info about the programme and how to book here. If you’re in Oxford in June, do come!
In Week 2 we had the term’s first OCCT Discussion Group. The session was structured as an experiment in reading out of context, examining how we read literature as scholars and laying bare the underlying assumptions and implicit comparisons that inform our approach to literary texts.
Events, Job Adverts, and CFPs
1. Forum for Modern Language Studies: Assistant Production Editor
Forum for Modern Language Studies, a leading academic journal published by Oxford University Press, is seeking to appoint an Assistant Production Editor from 1st July 2017.
Forum for Modern Language Studies publishes high-quality, peer-reviewed research in the field of modern languages and literatures from the Middle Ages to the present-day, including linguistics, comparative literature, translation studies and film studies. Its main language areas are Arabic, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.
The journal wishes to appoint a suitable candidate to the new post of Assistant Production Editor, whose main responsibilities will be:
• proofreading electronic versions of articles, both before and after typesetting, often to tight deadlines;
• ensuring consistent application of MHRA style guidelines;
• working in an online environment with other Editorial Board members and Oxford University Press to ensure that the journal meets its publication deadlines;
• assisting with the administration and production of book reviews.
Working closely with authors, the journal’s General Editor, the Senior Production Editor, the publisher and the typesetters, the Assistant Production Editor’s initial primary role will be to track, correct and coordinate proofs of articles to be published in General Issues of the journal (two per annum, each containing 5–8 articles / approx. 136 pages) from receipt from the typesetters to signing them off for publication. She or he will also advise on the composition of individual issues of the journal.
A further strand of the role concerns book reviews. Tasks include logging and collating book reviews received, proofreading these, and signing them off for publication.
Good word-processing skills will be required, and training in other technical aspects of the role, notably the use of electronic proofing tools, will be provided. Full training will also be given in the use of OUP’s online article submission and tracking system, ScholarOne Manuscripts.
The role requires an estimated 100-130 hours’ work per annum. The number of hours per month is likely to vary according to the journal’s copy flow. The appointment will be on a self-employed basis, initially at an hourly rate of £18.75. There is scope for the role to develop in terms of the number of hours and of the level of responsibility and remuneration involved.
You will work from home and must have access to a computer, an Internet connection, and a telephone. You will be expected to attend two expenses-paid editorial meetings a year in St Andrews (one in mid-June, the other in mid-December).
Requirements
Essential
• A good Honours degree (2:1 or above) in English or Modern Languages
• Excellent command of English grammar, punctuation and spelling
• Keen eye for the details of formatting and style
• Excellent written communication skills
• Ability to schedule and keep track of files
• Expert knowledge of MS Word.
Desirable
• Higher degree (Master’s or PhD)
• Advanced reading knowledge of one or more modern foreign languages (Arabic, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish).
To apply for the post, please send a CV and a statement (no longer than one side of A4) outlining your motivation, suitability and qualifications for the post, to Dr Nicholas Martin, General Editor of Forum for Modern Language Studies (n.c.martin@bham.ac.uk). Applications should arrive no later than Friday 19 May 2017. The selection process will involve proofreading and editing tests.
Shortlisted candidates will be interviewed in St Andrews or via Skype on Thursday 22 June 2017.
To discuss the role informally and/or to request further details, please contact Dr Mary Rigby, the journal’s Production Editor (mary_rigby20@outlook.com).
2. Call For Papers: 'Play, Recreation, and Experimentation: Literature and the Arts since the Early Modern Times', 8-9 Dec 2017, University of Kent, Canterbury
This interdisciplinary conference aims to explore relations between play, recreation, and experimentation by examining their articulations in literature and the arts (broadly understood as the visual arts, architecture, music/sound art, film) from the early modern period to now. There are many instances of engagement with the ludic and experimentation, e.g. early modern literature on the theme of playing with appearances (being and seeming); Duchamp's Fontaine; Dada and Surrealist practices including cadavre exquis, collage, bricolage; Oulipo and pataphysics; postmodern pastiches and hybridity in architecture, and re-inventions of myth and history in contemporary fiction. Nevertheless, we intend to shed new light on these works and probe their implications for a theory of the ludic through considering the interactions and dialogues between play, recreation, and experimentation. The broad chronological and disciplinary scope is meant to accommodate to the comparative and intermedial perspective that this topic involves.
In recent years there has been increasing attention paid to the question of play and recreative practices and emphasis on their importance, as evidenced by studies in literature, critical theory, classics, philosophy, cultural studies, anthropology, cognitive and life sciences, education, and digital humanities. Nevertheless, play and recreation have not been sufficiently examined in the fields of literature and the creative arts, nor in specific connection to the important notions of experimentation and novelty. On the other hand, since Huizinga's groundbreaking study Homo Ludens (1938) and Spariosu's The Wreath of Wild Olive (1997), it has also become a truism to say that all literature and art are play. But to say everything is play is not to say much about play and the creative arts at all. There is the need for more specific and deeper examination that refines the characteristics and problematics of play and recreation within literature and art. This is what this conference purports to do by considering the following research questions, with the aims of revealing new and diverse ways of understanding the ludic and experimentation, and revise our conceptual frameworks about play, literature and the arts.
• How to understand the playful in literature and the arts? Does it involve certain ludic modes of writing and of designing artworks, or does it lie rather in the audience's reception and context of an artwork?
• Is play a type of behaviour or intentionality, and how is it articulated in literature and artworks?
• How may the perspective of 'recreation' shed new light on literary and artistic practices? - firstly, in the sense of how recreative and leisure activities may relate to the production of literature, art, and architectural space; secondly, in the sense of how literature and art-works re-create an existing canon, past experience, an original context and/or language through re-invention, appropriation, or re-performance?
• Although experimental writing and art typically connote modernism and the avant-garde, is experimentation something that is also very present in other periods and styles? Does the raison d'être of experimental play lie in the pleasure and shock of the new?
• Does being experimental necessarily involve a playful mode of engaging with literature and the arts, - a mode in which one is prepared for risk and failure (i.e. losing the game)? What happens when playing with or at something relates to the attempt to try something new without complete commitment? Should this affect how ludic works are critically judged, i.e. the artwork not as end-product but as attempts at and processes of creation?
• Do experimental works tend to involve an interplay of different media? Is intermediality a ludic principle by nature? What about the evocation of another medium by use of only one medium (e.g. imagic poetry)?
Proposals are invited for papers addressing (but not limited to) the following themes:
• ludic language, writing and its techniques and characteristics;
• theoretical discussions on the notion of play, the ludic, laughter, ludic aesthetics, the pleasure and shock that results from experimentation;
• recreative activities, leisure, and experimentation in literary writing, artistic practices, and spatial organisation;
• re-creation in the sense of re-invention, revitalisation, adaptation, appropriation, translation and trans-lingual practices, performance, hybrid genres in play;
• relations between play and experimentation, pleasure and novelty, risk and failure in experimentation;
• appearance, superficiality, and play: playing with appearances, masquerade, imitation; different literary forms such as satire, parody, pastiche; experimenting with the new and dilettantism;
• intermediality and play: play between the senses, language, and abstract thought; different modes of play in different media and mixed media; games in literature and visual arts;
We encourage submissions that engage with creative output in European modern languages and culture, and comparative discussions between European and non-European literatures and arts. Proposals for 20-min papers (maximum 300-word abstract) and a short biography of the author with his/her affiliation and contact details should be sent to the conference organisers Dr Xiaofan Amy Li and Dr Helena Taylor at playconference2017@gmail.com by midnight (UK time) 31 July 2017.
Organised collaboratively between the University of Kent and the University of Exeter
3. "Praxis", the flagship theatre group of the Oxford University Greek Society, presents I Want a Country, a timely exploration of collective identity and immigration in tumultuous times, in the 3rd week of Trinity (11-13 May 2017). The play is written by upcoming Greek playwright Andreas Flourakis , and directed by the award-winning artistic director, Anastasia Revi, of Theatre Lab Company London .
Tickets available here
Click here to view the Facebook event for the premiere.
Dr Eleni Philippou
