Paul Bandia, "Theory and Practice of Translation in Postcolonial Contexts"
It is generally acknowledged that, thanks to the “cultural turn” in the humanities and social sciences, translation studies has evolved from a normative or prescriptive discipline involving direct or conventional transfer or exchange between stable linguistic entities to include other scenarios where languages and cultures coexist in relations of inequality and power differentials. A main scenario that has contributed immensely to broadening and enhancing translation theory and practice has been the study of literary and cultural transfer in contexts of imperialism, colonization and postcolonialism. This seminar will explore the intersection of translation, postcolonialism and cultural studies through the reading of major texts on translation and postcoloniality, and the discussion and analysis of translations performed in postcolonial and other minoritized contexts. Attention will be given to the treatment of cultures of orality, minority languages, and contexts that are marginalized within the global literary system.
Paul Bandia is Professor of French and Translation Studies at Concordia University, Montr
eal, Canada. His interests include translation history and theory, postcolonial studies and cultural theory. Professor Bandia has been awarded many prestigious research grants by the Social Science and Humanities Council (SSHRC) of Canada and the Quebec Fonds de recherche sur la société et la culture (FRQSC). He has published widely in the fields of translation studies and postcolonial literatures and cultures. He is the author of Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa (Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing, 2008), editor of Writing and Translating Francophone Discourse: Africa, The Caribbean, Diaspora (2014), co-editor of Charting the Future of Translation History (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), Agents of Translation (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), and Rencontres Est-Ouest/East-West Encounters, TTR (Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction : Études sur le texte et ses transformations), vol. 1 (2010).
Session 1: Postcolonialism and translation
- Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, eds. 1999. “Introduction” to Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge.
- Tymoczko, Maria. 2006. “Reconceptualizing Western translation theory: integrating non-Western thought about translation,” in Theo Hermans, ed. Translating Others, Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
- Kathryn Batchelor, “Postcolonial Issues in Translation: The African Context,” in Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter, eds. 2014. A Companion to Translation Studies, Wiley Blackwell.
Session 2: Translation and the politics of language
- Ngugi wa Thiong’o. 2009. “Translated by the Author: My Life in Between Languages.” Translation Studies 2, no. 1.
- Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler, eds. 2002. “Introduction” to Translation and Power, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
- Gayatri C. Spivak. 1993. “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine, New York: Routledge.
Session 3: Postcolonial writing as translation
- Samia Mehrez. 1992. “Translation and the Post-colonial Experience: The Francophone North African Text,” in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, ed. Lawrence Venuti, London: Routledge.
- Moradewun Adejunmobi. 1998. “Translation and Postcolonial Identity: African Writing and European Languages,” in Translation and Minority, ed. Lawrence Venuti, Manchester: St. Jerome.
- Paul F. Bandia. 2008. “Intercultural Writing and Inter-European Language translation,” in Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa, Manchester: St. Jerome, chapter 6.
Session 4: Translation and identity
- Annie Brisset, “The Search for a Native Language: Translation and Cultural Identity,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition, 2004, ed. Lawrence Venuti, New York & London: Routledge.
- Pascale Casanova. 2004. “The Tragedy of Translated Men,” The World Republic of Letters, translated by M. B. DeBevoise, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Session 5: Postcolonial multilingualism and translation
- Lawrence Venuti, "Heterogeneity," in The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Difference, 1998, London and New York : Routledge.
- Paul F. Bandia. 2012. “Postcolonial Literary Heteroglossia: A Challenge for Homogenizing Translation, in Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, vol. 20, Issue 4, 2012. Routledge.
- Christine Raguet, “Translating Heterophony in Olive Senior’s Stories,” in Intimate Enemies. Translation in Francophone Contexts, eds. Kathryn Batchelor and Claire Bisdorff, Liverpool University Press.
Session 6: Translation, migration, globalization
- Lawrence Venuti. 1998. “Globalization,” in The Scandals of Translation. Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge.
- Paul F. Bandia. 2014. “Translocation: Translation, Migration, and the Relocation of Cultures,” in A Companion to Translation Studies, eds. Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter, Wiley Blackwell.
Session 7: Postcolonialism and translation ethics
- Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Thick Translation,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition, 2004, ed. Lawrence Venuti, New York and London: Routledge.
- Paul F. Bandia. 2008. “African Europhone Literature and the Ethics of Translation,” in Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa, Manchester: St. Jerome.
- Antoine Berman, “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd edition, 2004, ed. Lawrence Venuti, New York and London: Routledge.
Session 8: World literature, postcolonialism, translation
- Robert C. Young, “World Literature and Postcolonialism,” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, 2014, eds. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, London and New York: Routledge.
- Lawrence Venuti, “World Literature and Translation Studies,” in The Routledge Companion to World Literature, 2014, eds. Theo D’haen, David Damrosch and Djelal Kadir, London and New York: Routledge.
- Ben Conisbee Baer, “What Is Special about Postcolonial Translation?,” in A Companion to Translation Studies, 2014, eds. Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter, Wiley Blackwell.
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Margaret Cohen, "Imagining the Oceans"
This seminar will look into how the world’s oceans have been imagined in literature in the 18th-20th centuries, with an emphasis on the oceans’ complex relationship to land-based identity. The oceans are at once a planetary space beyond human control and an arena where national, international and non-national societies and cultures take shape, come into contact and into conflict. The oceans are also textured, granular environments whose practice depends on the specifics of the environment, rather than a frictionless blue zone of travel. The course will set out some important ways of reflecting on these different facets of the ocean’s challenge to land-based paradigms in literature and critical theory.
Primary selections include texts by Mark Twain, James Cook, Joseph Conrad, Edgar Allen Poe, Olaudah Equiano, Herman Melville, Daniel Defoe, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, and Virginia Woolf, as well as poetry by John Keats, Samuel Coleridge, Friedrich Schiller, Lord Byron, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore, and Adrienne Rich. Critical selections include Karl Schmitt, Marcus Rediker and Peter Linebaugh, Ian Baucom, Stephen Best, Alain Corbin, W.H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Hans Blumenberg and Daniel Heller-Roazen. These will be supplemented by clips that involve the undersea environment and also surfing, such as clips from Jean Painlevé’s L’Hippocampe, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Louis Malle’s Le Monde du Silence, Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot, George Greenough’s Crystal Voyager, Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Margaret Cohen is Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization
and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Stanford University. Her mo
st recent book is The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), which was awarded the Louis R. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the George and Barbara Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of the Narrative. Her current research investigates the impact of innovations in science and technology on literary and visual fantasies of the depths, since the opening of the underwater environment as a frontier of modernity in the middle of the nineteenth century. She is also the author of Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). Margaret Cohen co-edited two collections of scholarship on the European novel: The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel with Carolyn Dever (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002), and Spectacles of Realism: Body, Gender, Genre with Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995). She edited and translated Sophie Cottin's best-selling novel of 1799, Claire d'Albe (New York: Modern Language Association, 2003), and has edited a new critical edition of Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary that appeared with W.W. Norton in 2004.
Session 1: The Poetic Ocean
Session 2: The Romance of Navigation
Session 3: The Work of the Sea
Session 4: Shipwreck with Spectator
Session 5: Routes of Slavery
Session 6: Routes of Freedom
Session 7: The Undersea Frontier: Utopias and Dystopias
Session 8: Gone Surfin’
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Eric Hayot, "The Small and the Large"
This seminar begins with the proposition that several of the major new directions in the recent study of comparative literature—world literature, planetarity, deep time, world-systems, the digital humanities, sociological analysis, and others—belong collectively to a more general shift in literary studies towards what one might think of as the very “large.” These large geographies, long histories, large amounts of data, or large totalities (whether imagined as networks or systems) have in many cases been mediated by the word “world.” But what if “world” merely stands in for a more general interest in the large, in the radical expansion of the scale of humanistic analysis—what is, that is, “world” is not a cause but an effect of another, larger shift in critical and philosophical direction? Reversing figure and ground, we will plumb the historical reasons for this renewed interest in the large and its actual and potential impact on the idea of literature, considering this latter both as a field of social production and as an ontologically particular object of analysis.
Eric Hayot, whose work addresses worldedness, narrative, and transcultura
l comparison, is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and Asian Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. His books include Chinese Dreams (2004), The Hypothetical Mandarin (2009), On Literary Worlds (2012) and, most recently, The Elements of Academic Style (2014). With Haun Saussy and Steve G. Yao, he served as co-editor of Sinographies: Writing China (2007); he is currently co-editing A New Vocabulary for Global Modernism with Rebecca Walkowitz (forthcoming 2016). He is past president of the American Comparative Literature Association.
Please note: So that all students have one literary text in common, please read Kate Tempest, Brand New Ancients, before the session begins.
* = optional reading
Session 1: Scale
Session 2: World Literature
Session 3: System
Session 4: World
Session 5: Affect
Session 6: History
Session 7: Data
Session 8: Reading
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Lital Levy, "Conflict and Comparison"
This seminar reconsiders ideas of world literature through multiple frames of conflict and comparison. From notions of global war to language wars and image wars, we will consider how both the “world” and the word are continuously made and remade, redefined and reimagined through war, partition, and their aftermaths. In particular, the seminar strives to theorize discursive responses to war and conflict in terms of comparison. Recent discussions of world literature emphasize the problems of comparison, equivalence, and translatability as sticking points. Similar epistemological issues underscore our thinking on conflict: the notion of asymmetric warfare, for example, entails a fundamental problem of equivalence. Thinking through this problem can help us better unpack the work (and the limitations) of comparison as it animates the discourse on world literature. While we will investigate such questions through aestheticized representations of conflict, this seminar also looks into the roles of poetry, translation, and visual culture in actual situations of conflict. We will consider theorizations of these questions in tandem with stories, poems, and photographs from Pakistan, El Salvador, Lebanon, Ireland and alongside examples of the instrumentalization (or weaponization) of literature, art, and translation by combatants in conflict (e.g., the Viet Cong, Hamas/ Israel, the Islamic State). Critical readings include work by Freud, Spivak, Butler, Apter, and W.J.T. Mitchell.
Lital Levy is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where she teaches Hebrew and Arabic literatures, Jewish studies, and literary theory. 
Previously, she was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She specializes in contact zones of Arabic and Hebrew. Her research encompasses the intellectual history of Arab Jews; literature and film from Israel/Palestine; the question of Jewish literature as world literature; and comparative modern non-Western "renaissance" and "enlightenment" movements. Her book Poetic Trespass (2014), which examines questions of multilingualism, translation, and the cultural politics of language in Israel/Palestine, was awarded the .Jordan Schnitzer Book Award in the category of Jewish literature and linguistics from the Association for Jewish Studies and the Salo Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish studies. For 2015-2016 year she is a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.
Session 1: War, Cultural Memory, Futurity
- Sigmund Freud, “The Disappointments of War” (1915)
- Paul Saint Amour, Tense Future, excerpts
- Amir Eshel, Futurity, excerpt
- Selected poems of the First World War by Guillaume Apollinaire, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen
Session 2: Partition and Literature
- Joe Cleary, Literature, Partition, and the Nation State, excerpts
- Images by Willie Doherty
- Saadat Hasan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh”
Session 3: Conflict and Comparison, I: In Extremis
- Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Rethinking Comparison”
- Judith Butler, Frames of War, excerpts
- Medoruma Shun, “Hope”
Session 4: Conflict and Comparison, II: Multidirectional Memory
- Michael Rothberg, “From Gaza to Warsaw: Mapping Multidirectional Memory”
- Waltz with Bashir
Session 5: Language Wars
- Emily Apter, The Translation Zone, excerpts
- Sayed Kashua, “Cinderella”
- Almog Behar, “Ana min al-yahud”
- Optional: Lital Levy, Poetic Trespass: Writing between Hebrew and Arabic in Israel/Palestine, excerpts
Session 6: Poetic Warfare: Propaganda and Parody
- Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel, “Battle Lines” (on poetry in the Islamic State; read article and watch embedded video)
- Dana Healy, “Poetry, Politics and War: Representations of the American War in Vietnamese Poetry”
- Three poems by Huu Thinh
- Yoram Hazony, “How a Hamas Anthem Became a Hit in Israe.”
- Clip of Hamas music video (on Youtube)
- Clip of Israeli response (Youtube)
Session 7: Image Wars: Frames, Surveillance, Media
- Judith Butler, Frames of War , excerpts
- Gil Z. Hochberg, Visual Occupations, excerpts
- W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror, excerpts
Session 8: Extreme Visions: War and the Limits of Representation
- Carolyn Forché, “The Colonel,” The Country Between Us
- Julio Cortazar, “Apocalypse at Solentiname”
- Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, excerpts
- Joe Sacco, Palestine, excerpts
Closing discussion
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Bruce Robbins, "Cosmopolitanism, Atrocity, and Time"
In the past few decades, there has been a major shift in how the concept of cosmopolitanism is used. The concept has been separated off from Western universalism, pluralized, associated with non-elite and non-European constituencies, and qualified by adjectives like “vernacular,” “rooted,” “already existing” and “patriotic.” This shift has been welcomed by scholars, and properly so. But it leaves certain questions unanswered. Among them are (1) if cosmopolitanism remains an honorific, what about the detachment from the society of origin that had been a defining element of it? Is that too still being honored? And (2) if cosmoplitanism has had a revolutionary impact on our understanding of world space, hasn’t it also had a less visible impact on our understanding of world time? If the modern geography of core-and-periphery, colonizer-and-colonized is no longer central to the larger time scales in which criticism is working, the moral and political judgments based on that geography will obviously become less central to our practice as well. Will political critique fade away, or will the old political-critical terms and habits be replaced by new ones, better adapted to the expanded temporality in which both cosmopolitanism and the rising field of world literature are now operating?
This seminar proposes to address these questions by viewing cosmopolitanism from the perspective of atrocity--that is, violence that is collective and (for that reason or others) is judged to be indiscriminate and unnecessary. How has literature represented atrocity? Where and when, how and why did such a project of representation become conceivable? What are the representations like? By what criteria should they be evaluated? One is naturally curious to know when and if a given society became capable of recording not only atrocities it suffered, but also atrocities it may have committed at the expense of others. Is this a proper, necessary mark of cosmopolitanism’s defining detachment from the society of origin? Should the representation of atrocity dictate a different trajectory for literary history--or even for a moral history of humankind?
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor of the Humanities
in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include Perpetual War: Cosmopolitanism from the Viewpoint of Violence (Duke, 2012), Upward Mobility and the Common Good (Princeton 2007), Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress (1999), The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below (1986), and Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture (1993). He has edited Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, Academics (1990) and The Phantom Public Sphere (1993) and co-edited Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation (1998) and (with David Palumbo-Liu and Nirvana Tanoukhi) Immanuel Wallerstein and the Problem of the World (Duke UP, 2011). His essays have appeared in n+1, The Nation, Public Books, the London Review of Books, and the LA Review of Books. He is also the director of a documentary entitled “Some of My Best Friends Are Zionists,” available on Amazon.
Session 1: Introduction
Session 2: Cosmopolitanism in Deep Time
Session 3: Atrocity in History
Session 4: The Moral Implications of Distance
Session 5: Aerial Bombardment
Session 6: Europe and the Test of Colonialism
Session 7: Japan and the Test of Colonialism
Session 8: Conclusion
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Nirvana Tanoukhi, "The Scale of World Literature"
This seminar engages the decisive shift in humanistic analysis since the late 1990s, in response to the rise of globalization studies, from the study of cultural migration as it registers in challenges and ruptures with nation-states and national traditions, toward a new interest in the conceptualization of culture and study of cultural forms on the “world-scale.” To understand this shift, we will examine various conceptualizations of scale as a way of exploring possible paths to a scale-sensitive critique of cultural contexts and literary forms.
Wisconsin-Madison and specializes in postcolonial literature, the history and theory of the novel, narrative theory, literary geography, and world literature in theory and method. She coedited the volume Immanuel Wallerstein and Problem of the World: System, Scale, Culture with David Palumbo-Liu and Bruce Robbins (2010) and currently is working on a book that rethinks the geography of the African Novel.- Chimamanda Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun (Anchor books, 2006)
- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (Plume 2003)
Session 1: World as Concept
Session 2: World as Scale
Session 3: World as Totality
Session 4: World as/of Network(s)
Session 5: World as Place
Session 6: World as Setting
Session 7: World in Words
Session 8: World as Context
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Rebecca Walkowitz, "Close Reading and World Literature"
How does thinking about the expansive translation and circulation of literary texts change the way we operate as readers? This seminar will take up a number of important discussions about close reading and world literature, including ongoing conversations about the scale of the literary work, the relationship among editions and translations, multilingualism, reading in translation, collaborative reading, reading at a distance, very close reading, distant reading, not-reading, etc. We’ll consider these critical statements alongside literary works that address themselves to multiple audiences, to translators, and to readers in translation. We’ll also consider how concepts such as fluency, native reading, foreign reading, and indeed “reading” as such are shaped and transformed by new paradigms of world literature.
Rebecca L. Walkowitz is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the English Department and Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature a
t Rutgers University. She is the author of Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature (2015) and Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation (2006), and the editor or coeditor of seven other books, including Immigrant Fictions: Contemporary Literature in an Age of Globalization (2007), Bad Modernisms (2006, with Douglas Mao), and The Turn to Ethics (2000, with Marjorie Garber and Beatrice Hanssen). She is also coeditor and cofounder of the book series “Literature Now,” published by Columbia University Press. She has served on the executive boards of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Society for Novel Studies, and the Modernist Studies Association, for which she currently serves as President. Her current research focuses on transnational approaches to literary history, the concept of the Anglophone, and ideas of scale in modernist literature.