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LITERATURE, LITERARY TRANSLATION & CULTURAL STUDIES Literature and Daily Life: Looking for Love in All the Wrong (and Right) Places Lester E. Barber, Bowling Green State University The purpose of this paper is to offer a test of the author's ability to communicate to a general, non-academic audience some of the essential personal rewards of reading and studying imaginative literature. The two texts chosen for examination have some interesting things in common, as you would naturally expect. But, they were also chosen, in part, because of their relevance to a general audience. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is widely known around the world by people of all types. For example, in the United States it is taught to a large percentage of all high school students. On the other hand, James Purdy's The Nephew is not widely known, although Purdy was one of America's respected and admired fiction writers during the 1960's and 1970's. However, The Nephew is set in Bowling Green, Ohio, the hometown of the author of this paper. [Parenthetically, it can be added that the setting is on the very neighborhood corner where the author resides.] Thus, it is a good choice for readers in the region where the author hopes to have the most direct general audience impact. Recent years have witnessed many efforts on the part of university English department teachers and other academics to write about literature for general audiences. The resultant essays are all, at heart, efforts to bridge the huge gulf that has developed between college teachers of English and the public at large. Reports in the media, for example, have characterized English faculty as engaging mostly in the study of abstract theory or the politics of feminism, Marxism, gay perspectives and the like. In addition, it is sometimes claimed that all serious literature, even when approached or taught in more familiar ways, is seldom relevant to the lives of ordinary citizens of our communities. However, it is the contention of the author of this paper that good literature is always a joy to read and consider. The ideas conveyed by that literature can guide us, challenge us and reassure us in our daily lives. The challenge for the author of this paper today is to see if he can demonstrate the truth of these claims in practice. The substance of the paper will be comprised of two sections and a conclusion. The first section argues that Shakespeare in his Romeo and Juliet was doing something brand new in renaissance England: presenting love as a deep and sharply felt human emotion, something very different from the ‘game' of love presented in so many earlier works of that period, and its predecessor as well, including plays, treatises of love and the many sonnet sequences of those times. The second, and somewhat longer section, analyzes The Nephew , seeing in it an underlying theme of love's emotional power and redemptive force in the lives of ordinary individuals of all ages. On its surface, The Nephew is a satirical work, so this paper must demonstrate how Purdy builds in a vision of the emotional power of love, working against the odds, it might be said, of the staid, reticent, even laughable small town characters of his novel. The paper concludes with a short commentary on the plenteous ways in which love infects, affects and enriches the daily loves of ordinary human beings. You Actually Read that Stuff? Sports Writing and Literature. Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana Sports writing has a bad reputation. The profession has been described as the ‘newspaper's toy department,' a rogues' gallery of failed athletes, and a daily dalliance that passes the time before the evening pub-crawl. Of course, much of this criticism is deserved, as the sports pages are often marred by sentimental, purple, cliché-ridden prose. Sports literature, in the sense of fictional writing on sports, has also fared poorly. In the English speaking world, there is much complaining about the lack of quality writing on the games people and nations play. In the past century Canadians avoided ice hockey, the English did not write about football, and even the baseball-happy Americans only starting writing about their pastoral sport a few decades ago. In my paper I will consider the factors that led to this ‘lack' of sports literature both in terms of production and reception. I will examine sports literature as a qualitative term that rises above the dime novels and adolescent fiction to which such writing was previously relegated. From there I will work towards a definition of the genre by examining what constitutes sports literature: When can we say that a work is a sports novel rather than a novel that happens to contain sports? Is there a possibility of including non-fiction in a university course on sports literature? And lastly, from a teaching point of view, is there any utility to focusing on the sporting aspects of a text? The City in the Novels of Don DeLillo Stipe Grgas, University of Zadar The theoretical context of my presentation is the turn toward spatiality within the different social sciences and the humanities. As far as the study of literature is concerned the spatial context has enabled intriguing readings of literary texts but has also positioned them in such a way that one can decipher the different ways that various spatialities are valorised and interpreted in specific cultural configurations. As one of the most significant contemporary American writers, Don DeLillo in his novels offers valuable evidence permitting us to trace the fate of the urban and man's placement within it during the historical period of late capitalism. In my presentation I would concentrate on an analysis of his two latest novels, Underworld and Cosmopolis . My reading would not only focus on the work of excavating the city from these texts but would purport to show how the fact that his fictional worlds are networked within the site of the urban has bearings on their narrative strategies. Is Explanatory Power of Critical Statements Predictable? Meta Grosman, University of Ljubljana Critical statements about literary texts discussed in the classroom aim to help students to connect with the text, to enrich students' experience of the text, to increase their insights in and enjoyment of it, and thus to empower students to interact with the text on their own and to help them develop critical thinking and their literary competence. Yet with all these lofty aims and along with teachers' best intentions, critical statements often neither promote students' interests in texts nor contribute to their critical thinking and love of literary reading. On the contrary they may bore students and alienate them from literature. The paper will try to find some answers to the question why this is so and examine the possibilities of establishing what kind of critical statements could be of interest to students and how to promote their interests in critical discussion of literary texts. It will examine the possibilities of analysing the explanatory power of different kinds of critical statements and their relevance to textual analysis and thus raising students' interests in such possibilities and using the same in their own interaction with literary text. Based on action research into critical preferences of Slovene students of English the paper will discuss the reasons for their critical preferences and the possibilities of broadening the same by sensitising the students to the explanatory power of various kinds of critical statements for different purposes, especially their pedagogical use at different levels of teaching literatures in English according to the new Slovene curricula. British Studies: Racism in Children's Literature – Intention – Perception. Margaret Holt, University of Klagenfurt Students of English might ask what the point is of studying children's literature. One possible answer might be because children's books reflect their societies' values better than adult books do; so we can learn a lot about this society by looking at what it gives its children to read. It is inevitable that issues and problems confronting a society at any period in history are going to be dealt with in children's books, intentionally or not. Then there is the question of how these issues are perceived by the readership, child and adult, at the time of publication and at a later time, because perception can change. Race and racism is just one such issue, and I will be looking at a few well know texts, in English and German (Austrian writers) and will also consider the illustrations accompanying the stories, that are equally important and equally revealing. An Examination of Lexical Choices in Older Slovene Translations of British and American Drama Darja Hribar, University of Maribor The article examines lexical choices preferred by some noted Slovene translators of dramatic texts. It is based on the assumption that although lexical choices offer much greater freedom in translation than, for instance, grammatical choices, they are subject to a number of intratextual and extratextual factors defining the genre in general and specific features of individual plays in particular. Examples of shifts, understood as an inevitable part of the process of transposition between two different texts and cultural worlds, are taken from a number of sets (working, published and film versions) of drama translations into Slovene, including Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire , Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf , Miller's Death of a Salesman , Shaw's Pygmalion and Pinter's The Birthday Party . The shifts are set against such contrasting literary theory emphases as formal and dynamic equivalence, text linguistics and skopos, translator invisibility and foreignisation, covert and overt strategy, old and new perception of culture, etc. The author finds that most older Slovene translations of the plays, especially those made in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, lack a more systematic approach to translation, abounding in semantic shifts and disregarding the special demands of the medium. In the author's opinion, this is attributable to a variety of influences, including individual styles, translation policy, ideological considerations and political decisions. In the case of drama these relate not only to translators' choices but also to choices made by other influential participants in the process of staging plays. Astronomical Allusions in Chaucer Victor Kennedy, University of Maribor The history of thought shows periods of progress interrupted by times marked by loss of knowledge and returns to the concepts and belief systems of earlier eras. Today there is social, political, and economic pressure to abandon the gains we have made in understanding the world and our place in it. Such reactionary thinking stems from ignorance and from discontinuities in our view of the world, as people come to regard experts and authority figures with distrust. It is often argued that in our time specialization is necessary, but if specialization results in ignorance outside one ' s own field, what use is progress? Islands Jürgen Kramer, University of Dortmund Islands are something special: they have not only been a vital part of human experience and history, but they have also enjoyed a certain prominent symbolic presence in many cultures. Our Western conception of islands, although conceived of much earlier, was brought to fruition in the colonial ventures between 1500 and 1900. In that context, islands, because of their boundedness, came to be regarded as natural colonies which could be claimed and colonised one by one. Concomitantly, ‘island narratives' were written which (a) describe island societies in which the conditions of utopian collectives (as in Thomas More's Utopia ) address the readers' needs of wish-fulfilment, or (b) represent individual lives on islands in which the isolated individual is challenged to develop his (less often her) physical and psychological potential to the utmost (as in Robinson Crusoe ), or (c) combine these two types of narratives: the Robinson Crusoe story demonstrates that human beings possess resources which can be tapped to bring about a better kind of social order, as envisaged in utopian writings. In my paper I should like to analyse a number of island narratives illustrating their particular Western point of view perspective and confront them with an alternative perspective from the South Pacific. I Was Made in Hong Kong: 1 Character Creation after the Death of the Subject Mojca Krevel, University of Ljubljana Topping the charts of academic hipness for over four decades, the term “postmodernity” finally seems to have lost some of its allure. Yet the craze should have only just started since the construction of (literary) “self” that actually suits the predictions and claims of all the major theoreticians of postmodernity (most notably Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson) can first - and most consistently - be traced in the production of the Avant-Pop literary movement, formed at the beginning of the 1990's. It is with the Avant-Pop generation of writers that reality finally and irreversibly slips into hyper-reality, within which all discourse is hypertextualised and “Cartesian” is merely a link you can choose. In such circumstances, the creation of a literary character is on the one hand synonymous with creation of any postmodern identity, and simultaneously such identity's acceleration on the other. Therefore my presentation will firstly briefly focus upon the shifts we can observe within the paradigm of subjectivity most notably after the 1980's, and then examine the impact of these shifts on character creation in the literature already essentially defined by the postmodern social, political and economic situation. 1 Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (New York: Vintage Books, 1990) 68. Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, and American Book Clubs Mark Madigan, Nazareth College of Rochester/University of Ljubljana This essay will focus on the influence of commercial book clubs in the United States. It will examine the country's oldest commercial book club, the Book-of-the-Month Club (BOMC), Oprah's Book Club (OBC), which bears the name of its founder, television personality Oprah Winfrey, and their roles in the careers of two African-American authors, Richard Wright and Toni Morrison. In the nearly eighty years since their inception, commercial book clubs have proliferated and become more specialized. A recent internet search turned up no fewer than 127 clubs in 20 categories (www.book-clubs.com). In the last decade, electronic media and on-line reading groups have transformed the very concept of the through-the-mail book club established by the BOMC. As I will demonstrate, the BOMC, OBC, and other book clubs like them are positioned at the intersection of American culture and commerce. They are at once commercial enterprises and cultural institutions which can exert significant influence on authors and the reading public. Their roles in the careers of Wright and Morrison underscore a number of literary issues. These include the function of a cultural intermediary in presenting the work of a controversial author, the negotiation of authorial intention and corporate marketing, and the relationship between electronic media, such as television and the internet, and traditional printed books. Although these book clubs have some disadvantages and their associations with authors can be complicated, their importance in the marketplace of both American dollars and ideas is undeniable. The Rack-brain Pencil-push of Hurt-in-hiding: Translating Seamus Heaney's Poetry into Slovene Uroš Mozetic, University of Ljubljana In the paper I intend to present the textual, contextual and intertextual magnitude of Seamus Heaney's poetic voice, specifically from a translator's point of view. To this end, I will focus, primarily, on those peculiarities of Heaney's, which presumably confront the translator into any European language, other than Germanic, with a rather unenviable task of having to pave the way around the author's effective use of old Germanic vocabulary as well as his many allusions and references to literary, biblical, mythological and other sources. Translating Register in Pinter's Drama Tomaž Onic, University of Maribor In living language, particular words or phrases appear in contexts that are possible to anticipate. The individual language user knows – either spontaneously or as a result of learned principles and codes of language – in what circumstances a certain word is to be expected or used. The elements of language – usually expressions or structures – that usually appear in similar situations form language sub-systems that some linguistic handbooks call registers. Whenever such an element is used outside its usual context, being a foreign body it draws the attention of the reader. If the discord in register is deliberate, it can have a certain expected effect, but an unintentional diversion of reader attention will bias the intended perception. When subject to intercultural transfer, texts are exposed to the danger that register will be disregarded or misinterpreted in the process of translation. This paper deals with the issues of preserving the register in the Slovene translation of Harold Pinter's play, The Caretaker , and analyses some existing translation shifts. The purpose of the paper is to draw attention to the importance of considering register as an independent translation category and to illustrate the potential consequences of disregarding this aspect of the translator's task. Beyond Crime and Punishment: Violence as a Metaphor in Iain Banks's Complicity Mirna Radin-Sabadoš, University of Novi Sad By analyzing one of the earlier works by a Scottish writer, Iain Banks, the paper addresses problems of literary interpretation, in the context of European literary tradition, of the issues defining the relationship between an individual and social group at the very end of XX century, in a society where social interlocking is weakened to the point that institutions no longer serve their intended purpose. Within Banks' literary model, the exploring of the phenomenon of power abuse, especially by the media and by the institutions of the establishment, provides the basis for reconfiguring the social roles and establishes individual acts of violence as the only means of affirmation within a society presented to be open, democratic and multicultural, but most of all corrupt and decadent. By defining social reality within this particular literary model, and comparing it to the social realities presented within some other literary models dealing with similar issues, the paper provides arguments for confirmation of the evolution of the literary paradigm influenced by (de)generation of social circumstances. |