postmodern literary theory and translation by marthapulido

7/29/2019 Postmodern Literary Theory and Translation by MarthaPulido

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Postmodern LiteraryTheory and Translation

byMartha Pulido

Graduate Programme on Literary and

Humanistic Translation

August 2004


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Based on:Niall LucyPostmodern Literary

TheoryBlackwell, Oxford 1997

and

Collier and Geyer-Ryan (ed.)

Literary Theory Today PolityPress, Cambridge, U.K. 1992


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Questions we shall discuss:

What is literature?

What is the value of a literary work?

What is a text? What is a translated text?

What is an author? What is a translator?

How influential are concepts like otherness,

poststructuralism, postcolonial studies for

the practice of translation?


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For Roland Barthes:

A Text is self-conscious

and productive.The Text is an activity of

production that is endless.


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Barthes makes the difference between:

An answering work (modernism)

A questioning text (postmodernism):

a text that never stops producing itself astextuality;

a text that never ceases to be a question;

that is inexhaustibly questioning andquestionable;

Isnt it the definiton of a translated Text?


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Modernism

Characterized by a

loss of faith.

Human sensibility hasbeen destroyed by

industrialized mass

culture.

Multiple points ofview.

Discontinous narrative

Fragmentary structure

Absence of authorial

centre.

Experiments withtextual means (work)

The most famous of

these is Stream-of-

consciousness.From meaning-to-

say to meaning-as-

play


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Postmodernism

Everything is a text

as differentiated from

a work.

Denying special value

to literary texts.

Nothing is central.

Texts are assemblagesof surface.

Meaning-as-play.

Literary Studies

should be seen as the

pragmatics of writing.

Such an object is

closer to a text.

A text that allows

pragmatics to beunderstood as ethics.


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For Lyotard (The Postmodern

Condition):Postmodernism is:

rule producing

as opposed to rule imitating.Postmodern theory is always:

postmodern literary theory

even when it is about

architecture

television...

as it privileges the auto-poesic text over all

others


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For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy:

Postmodernism in Literature means That

something new, which is:

the literary absolute orthe absolute of literature, that is

poiesy

production

process

inspiration


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The Death of History

The Death of CriticismThe Death of Theory


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The Death of History

For language to have meaning, culture has

to have value and history have to matter:

But, history is a lie by which culturedisguises the fact of its naturally savage

interests and practices in the name of human

progress and welfare.Then it cannot be possible to have faith in

the power of language to convey plain truth.


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The absence of history as a

metanarrative gives rise to:The dehistorization of contexts

The reconception of:

literary texts

knowledges

signs

The production of something new(romanticism).


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The Death of Criticism

Quixote imitating Amadis of Gaul

Cervantes pretending to be the Cid Hamete

BenengeliAlonso Quijano pretending to be Don

Quixote

Pierre Mnard pretending to substituteCervantes


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The Death of Criticism

Texts are more than writing due to the

multimedia possibilities.

Literature then, cannot be regarded as astable structure.

Any literary text cannot be exhausted by

any act of reading or interpretation.Literature has no essence.


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The Death of Theory

To apprehend the aesthetic value of

literature

theory is an obstacle if it pretends to beprescriptive:

it obstructs the passage to a love or a feeling

for the aesthetic.


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For Foucault

Theory is an art

Politics is an art

Ethics is an art (a practice of Concept Creation)

Pragmatics is an ethics

they require skills on how to proceed;

they require certain judgment as opposed to

determining laws;

dispersion as opposed to synthesis;

from the what to the how.


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What is an ethical decision in

translation?It is an aesthetic and/or textual practice

It is both appreciation and obligation

If through translation we can show how it ispossible to appreciate the cultural values of

literature we are thus engaged in a social

practice.Such an ethics is based on the knowledge

that every system is dysfunctional.


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What is then a text?

A text is an assemblage, not anessence, that relates theory and

pragmatics establishing relations with

history, politics and society?


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What is then a translated text?

A translated text is an assemblage,

not an essence, that relates theory of

translation and pragmatics of

translation, establishing relations withthe historical, political and

sociological context of the text, and

establishing relations with the historyof translation, the politics of

translation and the sociological

context of translation?

postmodern literary theory and translation by marthapulido

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