Globalization, Translation, and the University Tradition

Abstract

thinking in Latin. Orality and Literacy: Technologtzing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), 114. 24 Casanova, World Republic of Letters (hereafter cited as WRL). 25 Evelyn Torton Beck, Kafka and the Yiddish Theater: Its Impact on His Work (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1971). 26 Jacques Derrida, Monolingualism of the Other, or Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998) (hereafter cited as MO). 27 This appears in my essay, The of Reading, New Literary History 37, no. 3 (2006): 613-16. Hamann went against the grain of his time by recognizing both textual and oral language use as a series of unified gestures rather than as combinations of symbol and meaning. 28 Mary Ann Caws, Surprised in Translation, gives examples of how translation may use such a license in appealing ways. Translators may omit passages or add new ones in the process of reading the works in other languages. 29 Critics have already noted the fundamental role of Jewish life and values in Derrida's achievements. Readers interested in pursuing this theme might review Susan Handelman's Slayers of Moses: Emergence of Rabinic Interpretation in Modern Literary Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 1982). Gideon Ofrat's Jewish Derrida, trans. Peretz Kidron (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2001), is a comprehensive, up-to-date, and provocative review of Derrida's various connections to Jewish writings and values. 30 Some might say that two cultural parties of European Judaism, the Chasidim and the Mitnagdim, represent, respectively, play and worship through joy and dance, and struggle and worship through solemn study and serious devotion to practices. 31 Typically: hyperbole will have rushed a French Jewish child from Algeria into feel ing, and sometimes calling himself, down to the root of the root, before the root, and in ultra-radicality, more and less French but also more and less Jewish than all the French, all the Jews, and all the Jews of France {MO 49). Apply this description to Kafka's uses of German: the hyperbole is equally present, but in a different idiom altogether. 32 See my Do You Have to be Jewish to Read Kafka? n Journal of the Kafka Society of America 20, nos. 1-2 (1996): 6-13. 33 Discussed in my essay, Materiality of Reading,607-30. 34 This theme is discussed in Derrida, The Law of Genre, in On Narrative, special issue, Critical Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1980): 55-81. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.153 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 04:57:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms GLOBALIZATION, TRANSLATION, AND THE UNIVERSITY TRADITION 517 35 As the Heideggerian she remains in this respect, but like many Germans, Jewish or not, Arendt reaffirms the mother tongue, that is to say, a language upon which a virtue of originality is bestowed. 'Repressed' or not, this language remains the ultimate essence of the soil, the foundations of meaning, the inalienable property that one carries within oneself (MO 91). This content downloaded from 157.55.39.153 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 04:57:23 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms