Masculinity, modernist form and the ends of Empire in Virginia's Woolf's fiction

The study traces the development of Woolf's methods for fictional representation of masculinity; it argues that chief among her narrative strategies for defamiliarising the public world of men and for bringing male characters into critical perspective is her use of autoethnography (Pratt 1992). The most explicit statement of Woolf's construction of masculinity is in the polemical, pacifist essay Three Guineas (1938), which makes direct connections between masculinity, war and the rise of Fascism in Europe, and between masculine dominance in the domestic sphere and tyrannical dictatorship in the international sphere of imperial rivalry and war. The study explores connections between the work of Bourdieu, especially his analysis in Masculine Domination (2001) of the persistence in the present of archaic gender divisions and relations of dominance and subordination between men and women, and Woolf's analysis and representation of relations of gender and power in the modern, early twentieth-century world. A reading of the novels shows how Woolf's outside perspective on men and masculinity shapes her thematic focus and formal style, and the development of the autoethnographic method is traced from its early manifestations to a more systematic deployment in the later work. The sequence of novels depicts the slow demise of a Victorian/Edwardian hegemonic model of colonial/imperial masculinity reflecting British imperial decline and the catastrophiC impact of the First World War upon the old order; in the later novels an uncertain new gender order is glimpsed as Woolf demonstrates both continuity and change in the acquisition of gender identities. The study also reviews recent developments in the continuing evolution of Woolf's literary and political reputation with an account of her steadily emerging reputation as a public intellectual

Affording expertise: integrating the biological, cultural and social sites of disciplinary skills and knowledge

The coherence of the concept of mental representations is increasingly in question, and hence accounts of expertise based on mental representation. I argue that such mental representational accounts are, at best, inadequate, and propose that turning to ecological psychology and affordance could provide the answer. However, there is no fully agreed understanding of affordance and so the thesis undertakes three main interrelated tasks: First, I review James J. Gibson's writings on affordance before setting out a revised account of affordance using Jacques Derrida's discussion of differance. Differance, as the generation of differences with the deferral of the meanings of those differences is adopted as a model for affordance. Second, affordance - as differance or difference and deferral - is taken as the minimal form of material agency. Drawing upon the process philosophy of Whitehead, agency is understood to be coextensive with material composition, and on this understanding an ontology of agency in medias res, considered as agency that develops within a pre-existing medium or milieu, is developed as an integrating framework within which biological, cultural and social phenomenon are combined in human agency in medias res. Third, human agency in medias res is explored through the process of acquiring expertise. As affordance is the primary ontology of all material reality. All human activity encompassing tools and instruments, representations and language is a concatenation of such constituents, hence expertise as the normative performance of disciplinary activities to disciplinary standards, is founded upon the proper concatenation of constituent affordance. Gaining expertise, meanwhile, precedes through the development of an ecological relation within activity that is founded upon specialised training and practice, and upon the social institution of someone who is socially legitimated as a master of their domain. By ecological relation, I mean to draw attention to the agency that develops and is sustained within the formation and maintenance of ritualised, instrumental, and discursive configurations that come to be identified as a particular domain of knowledge. The closely interrelated themes of affordance and agency in medias res are brought together in a case study of the development of expertise in archaeology by focusing on learning to identify (type) pottery, and on learning to excavate. In learning to type pottery, a novice is inculcated into the language-games of pottery. The formulation of typologies, meanwhile, shows how such language-games form, and how these language-games afford a semantic field that supports archaeologically mundane communications between archaeologists. The event of an excavation is used to focus on social dynamics seen from a perspective of agency in medias res and to demonstrate how wider social, economic and political influences intervene within archaeological discourse and practice to alter the agency of archaeologists in terms of the cognitive authority, and that of archaeology as discipline

Russian Formalism

Russian Formalism, one of the twentieth century's most important movements in literary criticism, has received far less attention than most of its rivals. Examining Formalism in light of more recent developments in literary theory, Peter Steiner here offers the most comprehensive critique of Formalism to date. Steiner studies the work of the Formalists in terms of the major tropes that characterized their thought. He first considers those theorists who viewed a literary work as a mechanism, an organism, or a system. He then turns to those who sought to reduce literature to its most basic element.<p

Translating the poetry of Cécile Sauvage: love and creativity in practice

This project is composed of a critical discussion about translating the French writer Cécile Sauvage (1883-1927) and a creative translation of selected Sauvage poems into English. Informed by creative critical theories, this project examines the personal stakes residing within this academic framework. Chapter 1 takes up the concept of fannishness as a method of participating in a cultural product. I define fannishness as love for a text, imagine the translator as a fan, and analyze metaphors of spatial distance used to describe creation and criticism. In Chapter 2, I examine the reception of Sauvage’s poetry, arguing that the historical treatment of Sauvage as a ‘woman poet’ has implications for translation. In Chapter 3, I examine how feminist theorists have dealt with Sauvage; drawing upon feminist and queer theories of translation, I connect translation to violence and love. In Chapter 4, I describe my approach to translating Sauvage on the formal level, drawing upon Jean Boase-Beier and Clive Scott to argue that a successful translation is one that embraces the translator’s positioning and extends the source text’s existence in a new way. In Chapter 5, I suggest that anthologizing or editing Sauvage means rewriting her. As I recount my trip to Sauvage’s archives, I bridge translation and editing, arguing that a translation is an extension of a text’s genesis. Chapter 6 discusses the reasoning behind the form, content and presentation of my translated collection, A Sauvage Reader. The Reader follows, interspersed with poetic commentary and quoted intertexts. The six themes that organize the Reader connect to creative critical vocabulary and to metaphors of translation. I conclude that my translation has given Sauvage’s work a new narrative, chronicled a translator’s experience, and brought to Translation Studies a novel articulation of how translators, like scholars, acknowledge relations of partiality, or what I call love

Rethinking Binarism in Translation Studies A Case Study of Translating the Chinese Nobel Laureates of Literature

The theorisation of translation originated in a binary opposition embodied by the debate of word-for-word vs. sense-for-sense translation methods. It is true that by now, theories in Translation Studies (TS) have become significantly more elaborate and sophisticated. However, it cannot be denied that some of its most dominant and pertinent concepts continue to get portrayed in binary concepts, such as translation vs. original, translatability vs. untranslatability and translation vs. interpreting, among many others. This study believes that TS, not different from most intellectual inquiries of the human mind, has been built upon binarism. The current research project aims to identify the traces of this epistemological tradition in the different stages of the discipline’s development, encompassing various theoretical models in the field, while reflecting upon the evolution of TS that marks its departure from such a tradition. It approaches the issue by examining three prevailing dichotomies in the field, namely source vs. target, prescriptive vs. descriptive and translation vs. non-translation. To propose an alternative to the existing binary perspective, this study borrows from the sociological models of Parsons and Giddens to portray translation as a social action. The binary concepts are then evaluated against empirical evidence obtained through a case study of two translators of Chinese Nobel Laureates, Howard Goldblatt and Mabel Lee. Both paratexts and metatexts are consulted to demonstrate that the scenario is much more complex than what is suggested by these dichotomies. It should be clarified that this study does not advocate that scholars discard these terms altogether. Instead, it acknowledges that dichotomies serve a definite purpose in certain contexts, but aims to problematise their uncritical application. Eventually, it seeks to heighten the awareness of binarism in the discipline and strives for a balance between the precision and standardisation of the metalanguage employed in discussing translation

The Oulipo and Modernism: Literature, Craft and Mathematical Form

The Oulipo is known primarily for the use of formal constraints in writing. The constraint is an arbitrary application of rigorously defined formal demands (often drawn from mathematics) in the process of literary or poetic composition. The group was founded in 1960, and their remit was limited to the formulation of constraints rather than literary texts. There is thus no literary theory proposed by the Oulipo, and little in the way of critical interpretation of their methods in terms of its wider significance to the condition of art in the period of their emergence. Their approach is often counterposed to the Surrealists: where the Surrealist response to the conditions of rationalised modernity attempted to explore the unconscious, the non-rational and chance, the Oulipo’s use of constraints is consciously determined and resists the passivity of chance. The counter-model to the Surrealists for the Oulipo is the mathematical collectiveNicolas Bourbaki. Bourbaki’s rigorously abstract axiomaticmathematics provides the formal prototype of the most abstracted rationality for the Oulipo to use as compositional structures. The Oulipo also bear an ambivalent relation to structuralism, but where structuralism tends towards a descriptive identification of ‘deep structures’ of signification, the Oulipo instead deploy structures as historically-specific compositional material. This thesis proposes to read the practice of the Oulipo as a production of the ‘new’ through a form of construction as ‘craft’ that is itself receptive to critical interpretation. It contends that the Oulipo can be seen to offer a distinctive trajectory among the various responses to what Adorno identifies as a crisis of art’s autonomy in the latter half of the twentieth century; in other words, that they pursue an alternative modernism. I argue that the Oulipo’s use of arbitrary rigidified logical structures in literary composition is categorially alien to the latter’s concept, and thus that it forms a kind of resistant material which must be worked with. This model of skilled engagement recalls, in self-consciously paradoxical ways, the outmoded concept of craft which provides an alternative to, on the one hand, the post-romantic idea of artistic freedom, and on the other, full subsumption by technological procedure, maintaining a refracted instrumentality in the logic of method that yet resists pre-determination

Into the noise : anthropological and aesthetic discourses in public sphere

Into the Noise… to zbiór esejów autorstwa Aleksandry Kunce i Marii Popczyk. Są one poprzedzone wstępem napisanym przez Marię Korusiewicz, który porusza problematykę estetyki codzienności, stanowiącej przeciwwagę dla dyskursów instytucjonalnych. Rozważania autorek są efektem antropologicznych i estetycznych eksploracji przestrzeni publicznej. Autorki analizują dyskursy, które nadają kształt wspólnotom przestrzennym. W centrum uwagi znalazły się problemy opisu antropologii punktów, perspektyw antropologii integralnej, instytucji uniwersytetu, tożsamości europejskiej, figur zdziwienia i humanistyki, a także zakorzenienia epistemologicznego. Kluczowe są rozważania estetyczne dotyczące miejsca dzieła sztuki w przestrzeniach publicznych miast (na przykładzie Berlina) oraz zorganizowanych instytucjonalnie wystawach muzealnych. Autorki analizują działania artystyczne będące rodzajem dialogu z zasadami organizacji przestrzeni publicznej. Estetyka jest tu pojmowana jako dziedzina krytyczna nawiązująca do osiągnięć nowej muzeologii i kultury wizualnej, a nie jako filozofia sztuki. Perspektywa antropologiczna i estetyczna uzupełniają się, oświetlając z odmiennych punktów widzenia debaty toczone na temat przestrzeni publicznej

Polish Translation Studies in Action

Translation Studies has been in action in the Polish humanities since 1930s. The book gathers the most important contributions from Polish translation scholars working in the context of Literary and Cultural Studies as well as Linguistics. The essays offer insights into the conceptualisation of translation, stylistics and poetics, history and anthropology of translation. Most of them are made available in English for the first time. The editors’ introduction provides a panoramic backdrop for concepts, methodologies and applications. As part of the tendency to enlarge Translation Studies and include new contexts into its mainstream, this reader gives an overview of a rich area of translation scholarship from the centre of Europe, a crossroads of influences and traditions