Children's Literature, Children's Lives: The impact of '68 on Children's Cultures (Sophie Heywood)“Why am I talking to you about May ’68?”, asked the children’s publisher Arthur Hubschmid, “well, it changed things for us radically, that’s why”. The years around May ’68 are widely understood to have marked an important moment for children’s literature, particularly picturebooks, in France. This paper argues that the visual transformation, and change in status of picturebooks, were also the product of a wider, political debate around children’s books, and that we should take seriously the role of ’68 in this narrative. This period can also tell us a lot more about the history of the child in the cultural rebellions of the sixties, and how children and their culture became caught up in postwar social and cultural ideals and their counter cultural response.
As part of the linguistics department's Guest Speaker Seminar series, Dr Angelika Kratzer (UMass-Amherst) will present some of her recent research.
As part of the linguistics department's Guest Speaker Seminar series, Dr Brechtje Post (Cambridge) will present some of her recent research.
As part of the linguistics department's Guest Speaker Seminar series, Dr Ghada Khattab (Newcastle) will present some of her recent research.
As part of the linguistics department's Guest Speaker Seminar series, Dr Heather Burnett (Paris 7-Denis Diderot) will present some of her recent research.
BASF Lecture: 'Anglo-German versus Irish-German Relations - Some thoughts on differences, similarities and shared experiences?'
Translation, Transmission, and Cultural Transfer seminar: ‘The Translator's Gaze: Intersemiotic Translation as Transactional Process’ (Dr Ricarda Vidal and Dr Madeleine Campbell)Communication happens on many levels, the gestural, the olfactory, the visual, the linguistic etc. While word-based languages are confined to linguistic borders, which often coincide with national or even regional borders, non-word-based forms of expression can transcend such borders, while, of course still being influenced by cultural traditions. Intersemiotic translation (e.g. the translation of a poem into dance, or a short story into an olfactory experience, or a film into a painting) opens up a myriad of possibilities to map form and sense between cultures beyond the limitations of words. Such exchanges impact on both the translator and the source artefact enriching them with new layers of understanding. At the same time, current terminologies and metaphors associated with translation imply certain unexamined assumptions about the nature of the source, the translator and the transaction between them. Challenging boundaries between source and target, we make a case to reposition Roman Jakobson’s seminal structuralist definition of intersemiotic translation more as a subjective, synaesthetic and relational experience to be rendered, and less as a message or content-and-form package to be carried across modal or medial boundaries. As a transactional process intersemiotic translation is different from adaptation, illustration or interpretation: the artist must adopt the technique of the literary translator, the deep engagement and immersive reading of the source text as well as the loyalty or duty to its prior form. Hence what makes intersemiotic translation ‘translation’ is not so much the end result but the process and the translator’s gaze. As praxis it can be a way of creating new work within the limitations presented by the source text, while at the same time exposing its multiple facets and ‘truths’. We willillustrate our argument with examples from our own practice as (intersemiotic) translators. This talk is based on the first chapter of our edited volume Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders: Intersemiotic Journeys between Media (Palgrave, 2018).
LINKS seminar: Masterclass with Rebecca WalkowitzA workshop for postgraduate and PhD students with Rebecca Walkowitz, Professor and Chair in the English Department and Affiliate Faculty in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University.
BASF Lecture: '‘You will finish this sentence’: the German writer and the English reader'
As part of the linguistics department's Guest Speaker Seminar series, Dr Elizabeth Stokoe (Loughborough) will present some of her recent research.
Translation, Transmission, and Cultural Transfer seminar: ‘How to Write Translation History’ (Prof Theo Hermans)
Russian Play 2019 "The Seagull" by Anton Chekhov2019 Russian play will be a performance of Anton Chekhov's The Seagull and will take place in the evening of 21-22 March 2019, in Arts 2 Film and Drama Studio Arts. If you are interested in coming yourself, or bringing a group, please email Dr Nadezda Bragina n.bragina@qmul.ac.uk
International Conference: The Past, Present and Future of the Literary AnthologyThe power of the anthology as an instrument of knowledge production has long been recognised, and, since the 1980s, the genre has been problematised and contested both within specific instantiations and in scholarly research which takes the anthology as its subject. The anthology as such, however, has yet to be fully theorised, and this conference aims to move toward a more comprehensive conceptualisation of its forms, functions and cultural dynamics.
QM Postcolonial Seminar: reading group