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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?