The Rest of the World: Inoperative Modernism and the Conditions of Translatability Pubblico

Abstract

In "The Rest of the World," I study modernist texts united by the difficulty they pose to translation when they braid the Chinese and English languages. At the same time, I show how transnational, global, and comparative critical paradigms depend on and are forestalled by difficult translations between two hegemonic languages in the current globalized world. Where critics of Anglo-American and Chinese modernism have affirmed both translation and untranslatability as enabling, generative, and ethical limit-encounters, I argue that the work of translation in modernist literature is necessarily and always incomplete. This incompletion then calls attention to the conditions of translatability. I situate the theoretical problem of translatability in the intersecting genealogies of modern western philosophy and discourses of Chinese modernity: where the former reposes itself on the putative illegibility of Chinese writing, the latter is legitimized through ready assimilations of western thought. Poised between the two traditions, my non-dialectical account presents a poetics of weak translatability: a minimal gesture politicized by its resistance to both appropriative conventions. To do so, I hone in on the epistemological and contextual constraints on translation in modernist literature: literary and cultural modernity from the west as embodied and rejected by Eileen Chang; event, history, and Yang Lian's excision of "European time" in his theory of Chinese poetic translation; a universalized materiality of language rendered as metaphor in Ezra Pound's revision of Ernest Fenollosa's essay on the Chinese ideograph; and a transnational affect between "America" and its others radically erased in Gertrude Stein's late writing. In these moments, translation is neither an instrument nor a process that creates anew. Rather, it brings a respite from the world-making labor at the encounter with alterity: I have sought to theorize this weak translatability as a means of thinking without force, bound to its conditions of possibility and figured in my title as a plural rest of the world.

Table of Contents

Note on Translation, Script, and Romanization

Introduction: From Work to Work; or, Translation without Force

1. Modernity: Eileen Chang and the Exception from History

2. Event: Yang Lian's History without Time

3. Matter: The Petals of Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound

4. Affect: Building a Steinese Wall

About this Dissertation

Rights statement

• Permission granted by the author to include this thesis or dissertation in this repository. All rights reserved by the author. Please contact the author for information regarding the reproduction and use of this thesis or dissertation.

School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Comparative Literature
Degree	PhD
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, Comparative
Parola chiave	modernist literature comparative literature translation studies
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Bennington, Geoffrey, Emory University
Committee Members	Marder, Elissa, Emory University Saussy, C.P. Haun, University of Chicago White, Deborah Elise, Emory University

Ultima modifica

Primary PDF

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions
	The Rest of the World: Inoperative Modernism and the Conditions of Translatability ()	2018-08-28 15:58:28 -0400	Press to Select an action Download

Supplemental Files

Thumbnail	Title	Date Uploaded	Actions