Thomas O. Beebee

Shoot the transtraitor!: The translator as homo sacer in fiction and reality

Abstract This essay applies the concept homo sacer, as put forth by Giorgio Agamben, to the social perception of translators and interpreters when they intervene in situations of violent conflict. Examples are drawn from history, from contemporary events (including the investigation of Guantánamo ‘linguists’), from nonfictional writing (such as Daoud Hari’s The Translator), and from fiction (for example, Mia Couto’s Last Flight of the Flamingo). Real and fictional ‘case studies’ agree on the parlous status of the translator. The homo sacer is a literal out-law, that is, someone who is neither punished nor protected by the law. The concept owes much to that of the pharmakos as analyzed by Jacques Derrida, and both philosophers (Agamben and Derrida) claim to be reviving concepts from the classical world, among them the necessity of logos to the polis as posited by Aristotle. The article argues that by the nature of their profession, translators and interpreters in situations of conflict do not belong fully to any of the languages they are translating into and out of; to the non-bilinguals who hired them they seem to be speaking with a forked tongue and in cipher, abandoning logos in favour of mere phoné (voice) and hence moving outside the law of the polis.

Ballad of the apocalypse: Another look at Bob Dylan's “hard rain”

Bob Dylans musical and textual eclecticism is unusual in popular culture, where a single, recognizable persona and style is usually a precondition for success. Dylans career can be analyzed as a continual shifting and synthesis between seemingly incompatible musical and textual genres, creating a “noise” which has political ramifications. Though Dylans song “A Hard Rains A‐Gonna Fall” is often considered to belong to his “protest” phase, there has been little investigation of what sort of musical and communicative structures such generic designations really entail. Though many critics have mentioned the apocalyptic strain in the music of Bob Dylan, and nearly everyone recognizes the influence of Anglo‐American folk music on his early work, this is the first detailed analysis of how Dylan is able to accommodate two such radically different traditions—the biblical imagery and anaphoric lyricisim of apocalypse vs. the hard‐nosed realist narratives of the English ballad—within a single work, and of how th...

Pseudotranslation in the fiction of Akutagawa Ryūnosuke

This paper analyzes the use of pseudotranslation as a literary strategy by the renowned Japanese author Akutagawa Ryūnosuke (1892–1927). Beyond providing further study examples of pseudotranslation to complement those analyzed by Gideon Toury, Emily Apter, Nitsa Ben-Ari, Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçaglar, and others, the Akutagawa texts examined in this essay may nuance and expand the concept of pseudotranslation and the cultural work that it performs. Just as the cultural history of translation should include the phenomenon of pseudotranslation, so too investigation of the relation of pseudotranslation to a more general authorial practice of “mimesis of translation” can be fruitful. The article begins with Akutagawas reading of a pseudotranslation by the German author Goethe as the basis for a discussion of the phenomenon of pseudotranslation. We examine pseudotranslation and the mimesis of polylinguality in a number of texts by Akutagawa, concluding with a discussion of the suitability of this term to describe the variety of cases found in Akutagawas works.

Millennial Literatures of the Americas, 1492-2002

Introduction: Eschatechnologies of the Americas 1. The New Jerusalem - Land Without Evil 2. Hybrid Messiahs 3. Tribulations of the Late Nineteenth Century 4. Kingdoms of This World: Millennial Literature as Reflective Dissonance 5. Golden Flying Saucers: Ernesto Cardenal and Millennial UFO-ology 6. The Old, Millennial America: Bob Dylan and the Tradition(s) 7. The DNA of the Lamb: The Race for the End (Times) in Millennial Fiction Conclusion Notes Works Cited

Can Law-and-Humanities Survive Systems Theory?

Abstract Systems theory, as developed by the German sociologist and legal scholar Niklas Luhmann, presents a challenge to law-and-humanities scholarship. If law and literature, namely, are two autonomous social subsystems—on the analogy of two languages that communicate each within itself and have nothing to say to each other—then what can the “and” in law-and-literature mean? This paper compares the premises of systems theory with Habermasian and poststructuralist views of the law, and adumbrates both the strictures that an acceptance of systems theory would place on explorations of the relationship between law-and-humanities and the opportunities it might provide for new approaches to that relationship.

The remote country of women

In altering chapers, the novel tells the stories of Sunamei, a young woman from a rural matriarchal community, and Lian Rui, a self-absorbed man who is also weary witness to the Cultural Revolution. Through his two protagonists, the author addresses themes of the repression and freedon of sexuality, the brutality of modernity, and the fluidity of gender roles as the novel moves hypnotically and inevitably toward a collision between two worlds.