The Age of Translation is the first English translation of Antoine Berman’s commentary on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Chantal Wright’s translation includes an introduction which positions the text in... more
The Age of Translation is the first English translation of Antoine Berman’s commentary on Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Chantal Wright’s translation includes an introduction which positions the text in relation to current developments in translation studies, and provides prefatory explanations before each section as a guide to Walter Benjamin’s ideas. These include influential concepts such as the ‘afterlife’ of literary works, the ‘kinship’ of languages, and the metaphysical notion of ‘pure language’. The Age of Translation is a vital read for students and scholars in the fields of translation studies, literary studies, cultural studies and philosophy.
Chapter One Why do we translate? This chapter looks at what motivates the act of literary translation, proposing that we translate, both as individuals and as cultures, for a number of reasons. It argues firstly that we translate for... more
Chapter One Why do we translate?
This chapter looks at what motivates the act of literary translation, proposing that we translate, both as individuals and as cultures, for a number of reasons. It argues firstly that we translate for humanistic reasons: to create a world literature and to expose ourselves to difference. We also translate for ideological reasons: to assimilate and exert control, to persuade and manipulate. Finally, translation is also an encounter with literature, an intense mode of reading and a form of creative writing. The chapter gives concrete examples of the implications of these differing motivations for translation practice and for the reading of translations.
Chapter Two How do we read translations?
This chapter considers how we read translations, or how we should read translations, and how the nature of our engagement with translations varies according to whether we read for pleasure, for study, or in order to produce a book review. It begins by briefly reviewing the existing literature on how translations are read before considering whether translations are special kinds of texts and if our experience of reading them differs from reading non-translated texts. It analyses reviews of translated books for evidence of good and bad reviewing practices. It models how students of literature should approach translated works for scholarly purposes, using Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria – better known as the ‘Dora’ case – as its example. It concludes by considering the issue of how we assess the ‘success’ of a literary translation, looking at the two existing translations of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass.
Chapter Three How do translators read?
This chapter draws on the author’s own practice as a translator and has a dual focus, considering the issues surrounding the translation of books written for children and young adults as well as the translation of German exophonic literature – literature written by non-native speakers of German – and specifically a number of German-language poems by Bulgarian native speaker Tzveta Sofronieva. It models the process of translation beginning with the translator’s motivations for translating a particular text or genre and moving on to how she reads, demonstrating that the act of translation encompasses the translator’s interpretation of stylistic phenomena in the text, an awareness of context and intertextuality, and a writerly sensibility.
This chapter looks at what motivates the act of literary translation, proposing that we translate, both as individuals and as cultures, for a number of reasons. It argues firstly that we translate for humanistic reasons: to create a world literature and to expose ourselves to difference. We also translate for ideological reasons: to assimilate and exert control, to persuade and manipulate. Finally, translation is also an encounter with literature, an intense mode of reading and a form of creative writing. The chapter gives concrete examples of the implications of these differing motivations for translation practice and for the reading of translations.
Chapter Two How do we read translations?
This chapter considers how we read translations, or how we should read translations, and how the nature of our engagement with translations varies according to whether we read for pleasure, for study, or in order to produce a book review. It begins by briefly reviewing the existing literature on how translations are read before considering whether translations are special kinds of texts and if our experience of reading them differs from reading non-translated texts. It analyses reviews of translated books for evidence of good and bad reviewing practices. It models how students of literature should approach translated works for scholarly purposes, using Freud’s Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria – better known as the ‘Dora’ case – as its example. It concludes by considering the issue of how we assess the ‘success’ of a literary translation, looking at the two existing translations of The Tin Drum by Günter Grass.
Chapter Three How do translators read?
This chapter draws on the author’s own practice as a translator and has a dual focus, considering the issues surrounding the translation of books written for children and young adults as well as the translation of German exophonic literature – literature written by non-native speakers of German – and specifically a number of German-language poems by Bulgarian native speaker Tzveta Sofronieva. It models the process of translation beginning with the translator’s motivations for translating a particular text or genre and moving on to how she reads, demonstrating that the act of translation encompasses the translator’s interpretation of stylistic phenomena in the text, an awareness of context and intertextuality, and a writerly sensibility.
Research Interests:
‘Porträt einer Zunge’ is the narrator’s portrait of a German woman, referred to throughout only as P, who has lived in the United States for many years. The text is part declaration of love for P by the first-person narrator, part... more
‘Porträt einer Zunge’ is the narrator’s portrait of a German woman, referred to throughout only as P, who has lived in the United States for many years. The text is part declaration of love for P by the first-person narrator, part ‘thinking-out-loud’ about language and languages, and part self-reflexive commentary. The German text assumes that the German-speaking reader will be familiar enough with the English language to be able to follow the text’s reflections on linguistic equivalence. The same familiarity with German cannot be assumed of the English-speaking reader. Since the text invites the reader to interact with it—to go to the dictionary, for example, or to think about why a particular linguistic phenomenon appears odd to the narrator—and since the text often does not complete its own thoughts, a translation that acknowledges and embodies this interaction between the text and the reader-translator, as well as acknowledging and embodying the text’s new geographic and linguistic environment, seemed both an appropriate and a creative approach. Chantal Wright’s translation places Tawada’s text on the left-hand side of the page and her dialogue with the text on the right. The translation therefore occupies the page in a manner which draws attention to the presence of a translator, to her personal experience of two languages and cultures, and to the impact of this experience on the reading and translating process.
Research Interests:
Nonagenarian social scientist Nermin Abadan-Unat describes this English edition of a book previously published in both Turkish and German as the ‘synthesis of [her] life’s work as an academic’ (p. xv). Turks in Europe is, above all, a... more
Nonagenarian social scientist Nermin Abadan-Unat describes this English edition of a book previously published in both Turkish and German as the ‘synthesis of [her] life’s work as an academic’ (p. xv). Turks in Europe is, above all, a descriptive work, containing useful facts and figures pertaining to six decades of Turkish migration. The English title of the book is, perhaps, misleading, giving the impression that Abadan-Unat discusses Turkish migration to a number of European countries, whereas her focus actually lies with Germany. Only from Chapter 6 onwards does she extend her investigation to include some discussion of Turks in France and the Netherlands. The 2005 German edition of this book, entitled Migration ohne Ende: Vom Gastarbeiter zum Eurotürken [Unending Migration: From Guest Worker to Euro-Turk] assigns Europe a different place in the narrative, and scholars who read German will probably prefer to rely on that. Turks in Europe begins with an overview of the phases of Turkish emigration, noting ‘Turkish society’s lack of a historical tendency to migrate for the purposes of settlement in a new place’ (p. 7), the coincidence of Turkish migration with ‘the rebuilding of postwar Europe’ (p. xxiii), and the fact that until a change to the Turkish constitution in 1961, Turkish citizens did not have the right to travel freely in and out of the country (p. 10). Where Abadan-Unat’s account of Turkish emigration differs from German accounts of post-war immigration is, unsurprisingly, in its Turkish point of view. German narratives tend not to consider Turkey’s self-interest in sending its citizens abroad, nor the country’s failure to ensure that its exported workers would acquire skills during their period of ‘rotation’. The book summarises the results of two separate empirical studies in which Abadan-Unat was involved: the first a 1963 field study of Turkish workers in West Germany commissioned by Turkey’s State Planning Department; and the second a DutchTurkish study carried out in Turkey, in the Boğazlıyan district of Yozgat province, in 1975. This latter study was concerned with the ‘effect(s) on regional development policies of both the emigration and return of workers, and the consequences of regional development and types of investment’ (p. 72). Both studies are key sources in the writing of Turkish migrational history. The book’s historical overview continues with a consideration of the effects of migration on Turkish women, both those who left Turkey and those who remained behind at home, reminding the reader that the Turkish diaspora features a complex spectrum of ‘well-educated migrant women with adequate incomes as well as migrant women without schooling and occupational qualifications’ (p. 105). From women, the book proceeds to the family, and specifically to the education of secondand third-generation migrants, summarising the results of several studies on Turkish children in European education systems which emphasise the significance of parents’ socioeconomic status, their proficiency in the societal language and familiarity with the local school system, in raising
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work... more
Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work has had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars and here, for the first time, a selection of these are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. This Reader, featuring fourteen texts covering the core concepts and topics of Meschonnic’s theory, will enrich, enhance and challenge your understanding of language. It explores his key ideas on poetics, the poem, rhythm, discourse and his critique of the sign. Meschonnic’s vast oeuvre was continuously preoccupied with the question of a poetics of society; he constantly connected the theory of language to its practice in various fields and interrogated what that means for society. In exploring this fundamental question, this book is central to the study...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This chapter investigates Antoine Berman’s claim that “ethical” translation – translation that respects the foreignness of the source text – can reveal the essential kernel of the foreign work. The investigation takes the form of a... more
This chapter investigates Antoine Berman’s claim that “ethical” translation – translation that respects the foreignness of the source text – can reveal the essential kernel of the foreign work. The investigation takes the form of a stylistic analysis and a translation of an excerpt from Franco Biondi’s novel In deutschen Küchen (1997). Biondi is an exophonic writer from Italy who was a prominent member of Germany’s Gastarbeiterliteratur generation. His protagonist, Dario Binachi, is a young guest worker from Italy, and the novel narrates Dario’s first years in Germany and his quest to acquire the German language. The chapter argues that In deutschen Küchen is a Bildungsroman where form and content are inseparable: protagonist Dario Binachi’s growth into the German language is narrated in a German which takes “morphological liberties” (Kotsaftis) and explores what Jean-Jacques Lecercle refers to as “the remainder”, the possibilities offered by a language that are unaccounted for by its existing grammar. This results in a text that defamiliarises the German language for its native speakers. The translation of an excerpt from the chapter “Hannes Küche und anderswo” [Hanne’s kitchen and elsewhere] is preceded by a discussion of the issues outlined above and followed by a commentary on the translated excerpt.
Research Interests:
On the Bulgarian poet’s feminist retelling of The Old Man and the Sea in which fishing is reduced to a hobby and Manolin is replaced by a woman
Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work... more
Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work has had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars and here, for the first time, a selection of these are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. This Reader, featuring fourteen texts covering the core concepts and topics of Meschonnic’s theory, will enrich, enhance and challenge your understanding of language. It explores his key ideas on poetics, the poem, rhythm, discourse and his critique of the sign. Meschonnic’s vast oeuvre was continuously preoccupied with the question of a poetics of society; he constantly connected the theory of language to its practice in various fields and interrogated what that means for society. In exploring this fundamental question, this book is central to the study...
Research Interests:
During a 2005 residency at the Villa Aurora in California, Tzveta Sofronieva wrote the cycle of poems 'Über das Glück nach der Lektüre von Schopenhauer, in Kalifornien'. The physical circumstances surrounding the... more
During a 2005 residency at the Villa Aurora in California, Tzveta Sofronieva wrote the cycle of poems 'Über das Glück nach der Lektüre von Schopenhauer, in Kalifornien'. The physical circumstances surrounding the poem's creation are not insignificant. Sofronieva, born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1963, resident in Berlin, Germany since 1992, and an accomplished poet in her native tongue of Bulgarian, took the first steps to becoming a German exophonic poet in the United States. The poems written at the Villa Aurora were published in Akzente (3/2007), and were followed by a volume of German poetry entitled Eine Hand voll Wasser (2008). The poet was subsequently awarded the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Förderpreis in 2009. 'Über das Glück' turns its back on German pessimism (and, not without humour, on Schopenhauer's misogyny) and embraces American freedom and optimism. The immigrant country of new beginnings allows the poet to deterritorialise the German language and claim it as her own, liberated from the lack of acceptance which exophonic writers often experience in Germany, and to explore themes which are neither “Bulgarian” nor “Germanic”. The cycle explores the presence of the old world in the new: the linguistic and cultural translation of the Italian city Venezia into the Los Angelean Venice; the co-existence of a Navaho Indian reserve with the excesses of Hollywood; the awesome natural beauty of Yosemite and the environmentally dubious bottled water drunk by those who traverse it. It also plays with the linguistic possibilities that open up when two languages and their associated systems of thought meet: is Glück more properly 'luck' or 'happiness'? The paper explores this encounter between old and new worlds, between German and English, and argues that the cycle invests the clichéd notion of New World freedom with new energy.
Research Interests:
Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work... more
Henri Meschonnic was a linguist, poet, translator of the Bible and one of the most original French thinkers of his generation. He strove throughout his career to reform the understanding of language and all that depends on it. His work has had a shaping influence on a generation of scholars and here, for the first time, a selection of these are made available in English for a new generation of linguists and philosophers of language. This Reader, featuring fourteen texts covering the core concepts and topics of Meschonnic’s theory, will enrich, enhance and challenge your understanding of language. It explores his key ideas on poetics, the poem, rhythm, discourse and his critique of the sign. Meschonnic’s vast oeuvre was continuously preoccupied with the question of a poetics of society; he constantly connected the theory of language to its practice in various fields and interrogated what that means for society. In exploring this fundamental question, this book is central to the study...
Research Interests:
Routledge Translation Guides cover the key translation text types and genres and equip translators and students of translation with the skills needed to translate them. Concise, accessible and written by leading authorities, they include... more
Routledge Translation Guides cover the key translation text types and genres and equip translators and students of translation with the skills needed to translate them. Concise, accessible and written by leading authorities, they include examples from existing translations, activities, further reading suggestions and a glossary of key terms
... Als Zeus ihr den Rücken kehrte, 2008)(When Zeus turned his back on her), it is because Greekmythology is Europe's common literary ... writers are often faced with the task of shaping the German language to their own expressive... more
... Als Zeus ihr den Rücken kehrte, 2008)(When Zeus turned his back on her), it is because Greekmythology is Europe's common literary ... writers are often faced with the task of shaping the German language to their own expressive needs, just as many post-colonial writers took ...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language... more
Yoko Tawada's Portrait of a Tongue: An Experimental Translation by Chantal Wright is a hybrid text, innovatively combining literary criticism, experimental translation, and scholarly commentary. This work centres on a German-language prose text by Yoko Tawada entitled ‘Portrait of a Tongue’ [‘Portrat einer Zunge’, 2002]. Yoko Tawada is a native speaker of Japanese who learned German as an adult.
Research Interests:
This article argues for the adoption of the term ‘exophony’ (and its derivative adjective ‘exophonic’) as a useful and appropriate description of the phenomenon of writing by nonnative speakers of a language, in this case of German.... more
This article argues for the adoption of the term ‘exophony’ (and its derivative adjective ‘exophonic’) as a useful and appropriate description of the phenomenon of writing by nonnative speakers of a language, in this case of German. ‘Exophony’ avoids the thematic prescriptiveness of older terms used in the German context such as ‘Auslander-’ and ‘Migrantenliteratur’, and of more recent thematically motivated terminology such as ‘axial’ and ‘postnational’. It allows an important distinction to be drawn between the differing contexts of production of writing by non-native-speakers and native-speakers of hybrid identity, calling attention to the politics of style in non-native-speaker writing. The innovative stylistic features observed in the work of writers such as Franco Biondi, Emine Sevgi Ozdamar and Yoko Tawada are analogous to the strategies of appropriation identified in certain postcolonial literatures. They defamiliarise the German language in a manner which is often alienatin...
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
There can be no world literature without translation. Even before Goethe coined the term Weltliteratur in 1827, Schleiermacher in his 1813 treatise ‘Uber die verschiedenen Methoden des Ubersetzens’ ...
Research Interests:
Im Regen stehen, Zoran Drvenkar’s autobiographically informed novel about growing up in Berlin in the seventies, comes from a place that doesn’t exist any more. The hermetically sealed West Berlin of pre-unification days, full of young... more
Im Regen stehen, Zoran Drvenkar’s autobiographically informed novel about growing up in Berlin in the seventies, comes from a place that doesn’t exist any more. The hermetically sealed West Berlin of pre-unification days, full of young men fleeing military service in West Germany proper, Gastarbeiter (guest workers) from Turkey, Yugoslavia, Italy, and Morocco, and avant-garde musicians like the Einsturzende Neubauten (Collapsing New Buildings) coaxing sounds out of industrial fixtures and fittings, provokes its own nostalgia. A Westalgie to match East Germany’s Ostalgie. These days, even the formerly blue-collar Kieze (districts) of West Berlin are bourgeois, and if they’re not yet properly bourgeois, they’re gentrifying. The socio-cultural topography of both halves of the city is profoundly altered.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
An article-length response to Lawrence Venuti's Contra Instrumentalism : A Translation Polemic (University of Nebraska Press, 2019).
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Between 1979 and 1986, the Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprache at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich was active in the promotion of exophonic writing — writing by non-native speakers of German — through the organization of... more
Between 1979 and 1986, the Institut für Deutsch als Fremdsprache at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich was active in the promotion of exophonic writing — writing by non-native speakers of German — through the organization of writing competitions and the publication of anthologies with Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag. The Institute’s efforts culminated in the inauguration of the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize in 1985 and ran parallel to the development of grassroots initiatives such as ‘PoLiKunst’. This paper traces the development of the Institute’s activities and argues that they were neither simply an imperialistic and depoliticizing appropriation of ‘Gastarbeiterliteratur’, nor were they entirely without self-interest, but rather that the Institute was as much reactive as proactive with regard to the goals of its own initiatives, their shape, and the manner in which they were received. The success of the Institute’s activities is assessed against their effects on grassroots publishing and promotional endeavours.
Research Interests:
When writers of literary prose adopt a new language - a phenomenon known as exophony - this often leads them to mould the new language until it becomes suitable for their purposes, in a manner analogous to the strategies of appropriation... more
When writers of literary prose adopt a new language - a phenomenon known as exophony - this often leads them to mould the new language until it becomes suitable for their purposes, in a manner analogous to the strategies of appropriation observed in post-colonial literatures (Ashcroft and Griffiths and Tiffin 1989). This process often results in a defamiliarisation of the new language through stylistic innovation, which, in turn, has implications for the translation of these texts. This article, influenced by Berman's “analytique négative” (1985), proposes a series of guidelines for the translation of exophonic texts and illustrates these with examples taken from German exophonic prose texts by Franco Biondi, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Yoko Tawada.
Research Interests:
This article argues for the adoption of the term ‘exophony’ (and its derivative adjective ‘exophonic’) as a useful and appropriate description of the phenomenon of writing by nonnative speakers of a language, in this case of German.... more
This article argues for the adoption of the term ‘exophony’ (and its derivative adjective ‘exophonic’) as a useful and appropriate description of the phenomenon of writing by nonnative speakers of a language, in this case of German. ‘Exophony’ avoids the thematic prescriptiveness of older terms used in the German context such as ‘Ausländer-’ and ‘Migrantenliteratur’, and of more recent thematically motivated terminology such as ‘axial’ and ‘postnational’. It allows an important distinction to be drawn between the differing contexts of production of writing by non-native-speakers and native-speakers of hybrid identity, calling attention to the politics of style in non-native-speaker writing. The innovative stylistic features observed in the work of writers such as Franco Biondi, Emine Sevgi Özdamar and Yoko Tawada are analogous to the strategies of appropriation identified in certain postcolonial literatures. They defamiliarise the German language in a manner which is often alienating for German readers.
Research Interests:
During a 2005 residency at the Villa Aurora in California, Tzveta Sofronieva wrote the cycle of poems 'Über das Glück nach der Lektüre von Schopenhauer, in Kalifornien'. The physical circumstances surrounding the poem's creation are not... more
During a 2005 residency at the Villa Aurora in California, Tzveta Sofronieva wrote the cycle of poems 'Über das Glück nach der Lektüre von Schopenhauer, in Kalifornien'. The physical circumstances surrounding the poem's creation are not insignificant. Sofronieva, born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1963, resident in Berlin, Germany since 1992, and an accomplished poet in her native tongue of Bulgarian, took the first steps to becoming a German exophonic poet in the United States. The poems written at the Villa Aurora were published in Akzente (3/2007), and were followed by a volume of German poetry entitled Eine Hand voll Wasser (2008). The poet was subsequently awarded the Adelbert-von-Chamisso-Förderpreis in 2009.
'Über das Glück' turns its back on German pessimism (and, not without humour, on Schopenhauer's misogyny) and embraces American freedom and optimism. The immigrant country of new beginnings allows the poet to deterritorialise the German language and claim it as her own, liberated from the lack of acceptance which exophonic writers often experience in Germany, and to explore themes which are neither “Bulgarian” nor “Germanic”. The cycle explores the presence of the old world in the new: the linguistic and cultural translation of the Italian city Venezia into the Los Angelean Venice; the co-existence of a Navaho Indian reserve with the excesses of Hollywood; the awesome natural beauty of Yosemite and the environmentally dubious bottled water drunk by those who traverse it. It also plays with the linguistic possibilities that open up when two languages and their associated systems of thought meet: is Glück more properly 'luck' or 'happiness'? The paper explores this encounter between old and new worlds, between German and English, and argues that the cycle invests the clichéd notion of New World freedom with new energy.
'Über das Glück' turns its back on German pessimism (and, not without humour, on Schopenhauer's misogyny) and embraces American freedom and optimism. The immigrant country of new beginnings allows the poet to deterritorialise the German language and claim it as her own, liberated from the lack of acceptance which exophonic writers often experience in Germany, and to explore themes which are neither “Bulgarian” nor “Germanic”. The cycle explores the presence of the old world in the new: the linguistic and cultural translation of the Italian city Venezia into the Los Angelean Venice; the co-existence of a Navaho Indian reserve with the excesses of Hollywood; the awesome natural beauty of Yosemite and the environmentally dubious bottled water drunk by those who traverse it. It also plays with the linguistic possibilities that open up when two languages and their associated systems of thought meet: is Glück more properly 'luck' or 'happiness'? The paper explores this encounter between old and new worlds, between German and English, and argues that the cycle invests the clichéd notion of New World freedom with new energy.
Research Interests:
This chapter investigates Antoine Berman’s claim that “ethical” translation – translation that respects the foreignness of the source text – can reveal the essential kernel of the foreign work. The investigation takes the form of a... more
This chapter investigates Antoine Berman’s claim that “ethical” translation – translation that respects the foreignness of the source text – can reveal the essential kernel of the foreign work. The investigation takes the form of a stylistic analysis and a translation of an excerpt from Franco Biondi’s novel In deutschen Küchen (1997). Biondi is an exophonic writer from Italy who was a prominent member of Germany’s Gastarbeiterliteratur generation. His protagonist, Dario Binachi, is a young guest worker from Italy, and the novel narrates Dario’s first years in Germany and his quest to acquire the German language. The chapter argues that In deutschen Küchen is a Bildungsroman where form and content are inseparable: protagonist Dario Binachi’s growth into the German language is narrated in a German which takes “morphological liberties” (Kotsaftis) and explores what Jean-Jacques Lecercle refers to as “the remainder”, the possibilities offered by a language that are unaccounted for by its existing grammar. This results in a text that defamiliarises the German language for its native speakers. The translation of an excerpt from the chapter “Hannes Küche und anderswo” [Hanne’s kitchen and elsewhere] is preceded by a discussion of the issues outlined above and followed by a commentary on the translated excerpt.
Research Interests:
Tzveta Sofronieva is a poet who writes both in her native language of Bulgarian and in her adopted language of German. Her poetry rejects the notion that it should function as a ‘bridge’ between cultures, an expectation that arises... more
Tzveta Sofronieva is a poet who writes both in her native language of Bulgarian and in her adopted language of German. Her poetry rejects the notion that it should function as a ‘bridge’ between cultures, an expectation that arises because of her status as a Chamisso-prize-winning exophonic writer. This essay argues that Sofronieva’s recent German poetry is preoccupied with the water under the bridge rather than with the bridge itself: with water as a feminist, non-territorial space; with water as language, water as literature. The chapter focuses its discussion on the poem Der alte Mann, das Meer, die Frau (The old man, the sea, the woman, 2007), Sofronieva’s feminist retelling of Ernest Hemingway’s novella The Old Man and the Sea (1952).
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Written with the suppression of the Tunisian students by their own government in view, Michel Foucault's March 1968 'Linguistics and Social Sciences' opens up a new horizon of historical inquiry and epitomises Foucault's abiding interest... more
Written with the suppression of the Tunisian students by their own government in view, Michel Foucault's March 1968 'Linguistics and Social Sciences' opens up a new horizon of historical inquiry and epitomises Foucault's abiding interest in formulating new methods for studying the interaction of language and power. Translated into English for the first time by Jonathan D.S. Schroeder and Chantal Wright, this remarkable lecture constitutes Foucault's most explicit and sustained statement of his project to revolutionise history by transposing the analysis of logical relations into the history of knowledge.