New Books in Language and Translation

Latest Episodes:

Michelle R. Boyd, "Becoming the Writer You Already Are" (Sage, 2022) Dec 13, 2022

Show notes

Becoming the Writer You Already Are(Sage, 2022) helps scholars uncover their unique writing process and design a writing practice that fits how they work. Author Michelle R. Boyd introduces the Writing Metaphor as a reflective tool that can help you understand and overcome your writing fears: going from "stuck" to "unstuck" by drawing on skills you already have at your fingertips. She also offers an experimental approach to trying out any new writing strategy, so you can easily fill out the parts of your writing process that need developing. The book is ideal for dissertation writing seminars, graduate students struggling with the transition from coursework to dissertation work, scholars who are supporting or participating in writing groups, and marginalized scholars whose writing struggles have prompted them to internalize the bias that others have about their ability to do exemplary research.

Michelle R. Boyd is the founder of the InkWell Academic Writing Retreats.

Armanc Yildiz is a doctoral candidate in Social Anthropology with a secondary field in Studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor.

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Jason Ananda Josephson Storm, "Metamodernism: The Future of Theory" (U Chicago Press, 2021) Dec 12, 2022

Show notes

For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous categories—such as religion, science, and art—has collapsed under the weight of postmodern critiques, calling into question the possibility of progress and even the value of knowledge. Jason Ānanda Josephson Storm aims to radicalize and move beyond these deconstructive projects to offer a path forward for the humanities and social sciences using a new model for theory he calls metamodernism.

Metamodernism: The Future of Theory(U Chicago Press, 2021) works through the postmodern critiques and uncovers the mechanisms that produce and maintain concepts and social categories. In so doing, Storm provides a new, radical account of society’s ever-changing nature—what he calls a “Process Social Ontology”—and its materialization in temporary zones of stability or “social kinds.” Storm then formulates a fresh approach to philosophy of language by looking beyond the typical theorizing that focuses solely on human language production, showing us instead how our own sign-making is actually on a continuum with animal and plant communication.

Storm also considers fundamental issues of the relationship between knowledge and value, promoting a turn toward humble, emancipatory knowledge that recognizes the existence of multiple modes of the real. Metamodernism is a revolutionary manifesto for research in the human sciences that offers a new way through postmodern skepticism to envision a more inclusive future of theory in which new forms of both progress and knowledge can be realized.

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Jane Stevenson, "Women and Latin in the Early Modern Period" (Brill, 2022) Dec 10, 2022

Show notes

Jane Stevenson’s newest book, Women and Latin in the Early Modern Period (Brill, 2022), tracks the history and historiography of women Latinists in the early modern period. She relates how the first early modern women Latinists lived in mid-fourteenth century Italy, and were educated as diplomats. By the fifteenth century, other upper-class women were educated in order to perform as prodigies on behalf of their city. Both strands of education for women spread to other European countries in the course of the sixteenth century: the principal women humanists were either princesses or courtiers. In the seventeenth century Latin lost its importance as a language of diplomacy and was no longer needed at court, but there was still a place for the ‘woman prodigy’, and a variety of women performed in this way. However, the productions of seventeenth and eighteenth-century women Latinists are more extensive and more varied than those of their predecessors, and include scientific writing and ambitious translations. By the mid-nineteenth century the integration of studious women into the wider academy was well under way.

Elspeth Currie is a PhD student in the Department of History at Boston College where she studies women’s intellectual history in early modern Europe.

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Hilan Bensusan, "Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox" (Edinburgh UP, 2021) Nov 29, 2022

Show notes

In Indexicalism: The Metaphysics of Paradox (Edinburgh UP, 2021), Hilan Bensusan clarifies the logic and structure of an essentially situated and indexical metaphysics that is paradoxical and can also be regarded as a chapter in the critique of metaphysics. Bensusan articulates a metaphysical view of the other – both human and non-human, in what Meillassoux calls 'the great outdoors' – that can never be totalised into a single or univocal whole. He develops an innovative account of perception, as a matter of our irreducibly situated relationship to this non-totalisable outdoors. In the book's coda, Bensusan underscores the social-political implications of this radical metaphysics in a postcolonial context in a meditation on the sites of Potosi in the Andes and Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Equally at home with analytic and continental philosophy, Bensusan enlists Levinas, Whitehead, Heidegger, Kripke, Deleuze, Derrida, Benso, Harman, Garcia, Cogburn, McDowell and Haraway. He does so in a way that proves to be transformative for crucial aspects of their work, for contemporary approaches to thinking about what it means to be in our world, and for reckoning with the responsibilities that press upon us from the outside.

Adam Bobeck is a PhD candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leipzig. His PhD is entitled “Object-Oriented Azadari: Shi’i Muslim Rituals and Ontology”. For more about his work, see www.adambobeck.com.

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4.6 Translation is the Closest Way to Read: Ann Goldstein and Saskia Ziolkowski Nov 18, 2022

Show notes

In our season finale, Ann Goldstein, renowned translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, gives a master class in the art and business of translation. Ann speaks to Duke scholar Saskia Ziolkowski and host Aarthi Vadde about being the face of the Ferrante novels, and the curious void that she came to fill in the public imagination in light of Ferrante’s anonymity. In a profession long characterized by invisibility, Ann reflects on her own celebrity and the changing orthodoxies of the book business. Where once having a translator’s name on a book cover would be sure to kill interest, now there are movements to display author’s and translator’s names together.

Ann reads an excerpt in Italian from Primo Levi’s The Truce, followed by her re-translation of the autobiographical story for The Complete Works of Primo Levi. She then offers an extraordinary walk through of her decision-making process by honing in on the difficulty of translating one key word “scomposti.” Listening to Ann delineate and discard choices, we are reminded of Italo Calvino’s assertion (echoed by Ann) that translation is indeed the closest way to read. This season’s signature question on “untranslatables” yields another brilliant meditation on word choice and the paradoxical task of arriving at precise approximations. Plus, Ann and Saskia reveal some of their favorite Italian women writers, several of whom Ann has brought into English for the first time.

Mentions:

--Elena Ferrante

--Jennifer Croft

--Primo Levi, The Periodic Table

--Primo Levi, The Truce, from The Complete Works of Primo Levi

--Stuart Woolf, original translator of Levi, If This is the Man

--Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story

--Italo Calvino

--Marina Jarre, Return to Latvia

--Elsa Morante, Arturo’s Island

--Emily Wilson, only female translator of The Odyssey

--Jenny McPhee

--Cesare Garboli

Find out more about Novel Dialogue and its hosts and organizers here. Contact us, get that exact quote from a transcript, and explore many more conversations between novelists and critics.

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Kavita Bhanot and Jeremy Tiang, "Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation" (Tilted Axis Press, 2022) Nov 17, 2022

Show notes

Frantz Fanon wrote in 1961 that 'Decolonisation is always a violent phenomenon,' meaning that the violence of colonialism can only be counteracted in kind. As colonial legacies linger today, what are the ways in which we can disentangle literary translation from its roots in imperial violence? In Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation (Tilted Axis Press, 2022), twenty-four writers and translators from across the world share their ideas and practices for disrupting and decolonising translation.

Gargi Binju is a researcher at the University of Tübingen.

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James Griffiths, "Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language" (Zed Books, 2021) Nov 15, 2022

Show notes

As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity leaping towards extinction. The science of how languages are acquired is becoming more advanced and the internet is bringing us new ways of teaching the next generation, however it is increasingly challenging for minority languages to survive in the face of a handful of hegemonic 'super-tongues'.

In Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language(Zed Books, 2021), James Griffiths reports from the frontlines of the battle to preserve minority languages, from his native Wales, Hawaii and indigenous American nations, to southern China and Hong Kong. He explores the revival of the Welsh language as a blueprint for how to ensure new generations are not robbed of their linguistic heritage, outlines how loss of indigenous languages is the direct result of colonialism and globalisation and examines how technology is both hindering and aiding the fight to prevent linguistic extinction.

Introducing readers to compelling characters and examining how indigenous communities are fighting for their languages, Griffiths ultimately explores how languages hang on, what happens when they don't, and how indigenous tongues can be preserved and brought back from the brink.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose doctoral work focused on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

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Tristan Grøtvedt Haze, "Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity" (Routledge, 2022) Nov 10, 2022

Show notes

In 1980, the philosopher and logician Saul Kripke published a small but hugely influential book, Naming and Necessity, in which he argued that some claims that we discover empirically to be true are also necessarily true – true not just in our world, but in any possible world in which the objects or kinds referred to by the words in the sentence exist. In Meaning and Metaphysical Necessity(Routledge, 2022), Tristan Grotvedt Haze revisits the concept of the necessary a posteriori. He uses a method of “factorization” to explain the sort of a priori philosophical analysis that can give us insight into modal status, but – in contrast to Kripke – defends a neo-Fregean theory of meaning. Grotvedt Haze, who is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, also considers the nature of metaphysical necessity itself, and ends up being a skeptic about strong metaphysical necessity.

Carrie Figdor is professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa.

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92 Janet McIntosh on "Let's Go Brandon," QAnon and Alt-Right Language (EF, JP) Nov 03, 2022

Show notes

Elizabeth and John talk with Brandeis linguistic anthropologist Janet McIntosh about the language of US alt-right movements. Janet's current book project on language in the military has prompted thoughts about the "implausible deniability" of "Let's Go Brandon"--a phrase that "mocks the idea we have to mince words."

The three of them unpack the "regimentation" of the phrase, the way it rubs off on associated signs, and discusses what drill sergeants on Parris Island really do say. They speculates on the creepy, Dark Mirror-esque similarity between the deciphering of "Q-drops" and academic critique. Turning back to her work on basic training, Janet unpacks the power of "semiotic callousing."

Mentioned in this episode:

"Code Words and Crumbs," Brandeis Magazine
"Crybabies and Snowflakes," Download from Language in the Trump Era: Scandals and Emergencies, edited by Janet McIntosh and Norma Mendoza-Denton, Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth.
Hofstadter, Richard The paranoid style in American politics." 1964.
Lepselter, Susan, The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny. University of Michigan, 2016
Trollope, Anthony. Marion Fay: a Novel. Vol. 29. Chatto and Windus, Piccadilly, 1883.
Silverstein, Michael. "Language and the culture of gender: At the intersection of structure, usage, and ideology." In Semiotic mediation, pp. 219-259. Academic Press, 1985.

Listen to the episode here

Read the transcript here.

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Online Sanskrit Study Resources Oct 31, 2022

Show notes

A conversation with Michael Fiden about University of Texas at Austin’s new open access online resource for second-year Sanskrit students, either for self-study or as a supplement to instruction.

Raj Balkaran is a scholar of Sanskrit narrative texts. He teaches at the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies and at his own virtual School of Indian Wisdom. For information see rajbalkaran.com.

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