Creative Rewriting Research Articles

A Feminist Study of the English Translation of Can Xue’s The Gloomy Mood of Ah Mei on a Sunny Day

From the perspective of feminist translation, this study makes an analysis of the English version of Can Xue’s The Gloomy Mood of Ah Mei on a Sunny Day translated by Ronald R. Janssen and Zhang Jian. The conclusion shows that the translators adopt the two feminist translation strategies—supplementing and hijacking—in the process of translation. By these means, Ah Mei’s feelings, thoughts, and attitude to marriage are revealed. The translated works not only reproduces feminism presented in the source text, but also makes the implied feminist consciousness of the author obviously conveyed. It shows the creative rewriting of the translators, which enhances the value of the English translation and benefits its dissemination and acceptance in the English world.

Echolation as Modulation: A Case Study of Chus Pato and Erín Moure’s Secession/Insecession, Accompanied by a Fan Fiction of Moure’s Work More Generally

ABSTRACT This article takes a creative-critical approach to reading Erín Moure’s Secession/Insecession, a translation and echolation of Chus Pato Secesión, originally written in Galician. It subversively adopts the different species of Jean Vinay and Jean-Paul Darbelnet’s procedure of modulation from their 1958 comparative treatise Stylistique Comparée du français et de l’anglais to look at the way translator’s voice, somatic experience and political situation are shifted in Moure’s translation and creative rewriting. Across the different species of modulation, it charts the way that Moure’s echolation is a metacommentary as well as an archive of her translational experience and upon translation itself, modulating author with translator, writing with translation, but also modulating time and space between Pato’s realities and her own. Woven throughout these readings are connections to Moure’s work as a whole, in particular to the provocative heteronymic figure of Elisa Sampedrín, her intertextuality and translation techniques, and how they tell another story for translation. Finally, the body of the article is interrupted with prose-poetical passages in French that carry this reflection into the fan-fictional.

Relating the Gospels: Memory, Imitation, and the Farrer Hypothesis by Eric Eve

Reviewed by: Relating the Gospels: Memory, Imitation, and the Farrer Hypothesis by Eric Eve Daniel Glover eric eve, Relating the Gospels: Memory, Imitation, and the Farrer Hypothesis (LNTS 592; London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2021). Pp. viii + 247. $115. Eric Eve's Relating the Gospels is a new study on the Synoptic Problem, arguing in favor of the Farrer Hypothesis. E. proposes that offering attention to memory and the scribal and authorial practices of imitation in the ancient world help to demonstrate the plausibility of Luke's use of Matthew and Mark. He dialogues with recent advances in memory studies and scribal compositional practices to argue in seven chapters for the plausibility of Luke's use of Matthew. The first chapter introduces the book and specifies that E. has confined this study to "comparing the viability of the Farrer hypothesis with that of its principal competitor, the Two Document Hypothesis" (3). It is somewhat disappointing that the more recent Matthean [End Page 356] Posteriority Theory did not feature prominently in this book. While no book can do everything, even a surface level engagement with this recent literature in the footnotes would have been desirable. The next two chapters supply the book's method. In chap. 2, E. establishes different models of engagement with memory studies in relation to the Synoptic Problem and how these models can help support the assumption of Marcan priority. Most interesting here is the discussion of scribal composition. E. offers evidence that scribes had a profound capacity for memory and the memorization of texts. The literary elite valued not only rote memorization of lines of text for recitation but also creative memory, which allowed for an interaction with texts even amid their performance. The best scribes could recite passages from a given text that shared a theme, word, or character, rework passages around other and different themes, sometimes recite a narrative in reverse order, and all of these on demand. Those interested in composition would often practice the same sorts of recollecting techniques just described but in combination with other literary works in order to produce a new, creative retelling or reworking of those older sources. These sorts of practices of creative rewriting, therefore, challenge Alan Kirk's argument (Q in Matthew [LNTS 564; London: T&T Clark, 2016]) that the Gospel authors would have been restrained by the logical ordering of written materials. (E. helpfully complicates this argument by pointing out that whatever rearranging would be necessary on Luke's use of Matthew, would also be necessary on Matthew's use of Q.) To be sure, E. does not attribute to the Gospel authors the same level of ability as those elite scribes, but he takes for granted that they would have had access to some of these same practices. In chap. 3, E. places this vision of scribal practice into conversation with recent work on ancient paideia. E. suggests that, while progymnastic exercises of reordering and rearrangement cannot account for every instance of Luke's use of Matthew, they do help the reader to anticipate the types of changes Luke would have made to Matthew, especially once one considers Luke as engaging in typical scribal practices of creative memory. The next three chapters wade "into the weeds" as close, comparative, and exegetical studies of the double and triple tradition. In chap. 4, E. discusses and evaluates significant similarities between Matthew and Luke, especially in the sayings material, but also between the first few chapters of Matthew and Luke. E. himself lists eight thematic and verbal parallels that are difficult to explain without some sort of literary dependence. He finds much the same sort of information in their narratives of John the Baptist, the temptation, and the resurrection. Luke's scribal creativity manifests throughout his Gospel, but E. observes the significance of Luke's imitative rewriting of the narrative of Samuel's infancy narrative in the composition of Jesus's birth and early years. There we find an analogue for the kind of creative alterations to Luke's Septuagintal source that we may observe in Luke's Matthean source under the Farrer Hypothesis. Eve's last two chapters deal with problem passages in Luke, including...

Сюжеты рассказов из «Азбуки» Льва Толстого

The purpose of the research is to systematise the sources of the plots of stories from Leo Tolstoy’s “Alphabet”. The history of studying “Alphabet” and its role in the writer’s creative work are also consi-dered. Scientific novelty of the paper lies in presenting a theoretical understanding of “Alphabet” as an em¬bodiment of the global literary and cultural heritage. Examples of a creative rewriting of classic plots into new author’s stories are given by way of illustration. As a result, it has been found that Leo Tolstoy’s “Alphabet”, which was created on the basis of various folklore, Russian classical, oriental and European plots, is an authentic anthology of world literature aimed at children’s audiences.

Metafiction Meets Migration: Art From the Archives in Rabee Jaber's Amerika

The subject of this article is Rabee Jaber’s novel Amerika (2009) recounting the migration of a group of Syro-Lebanese to the United States on the eve of the First World War. It demonstrates how metafictional techniques—ironic narrator figures, flashbacks, dream-like scenes—allow Jaber to address the fine, yet shifting, line between fiction and history in the accounts of Arab migrations to the Americas. The article explores the creative rewriting of an essential intertext for Jaber, Kafka’s Amerika (The Man Who Disappeared) and asserts that the novel’s reflective uncertainty pervades both the way that a historical past can be represented and the way that the past is presented to a contemporary Lebanese audience. The article concludes by suggesting that the contrast between the two main characters, Martā Ḥaddād and Alī Jābir, is not only indicative of distinct kinds of migration, but, more abstractly, points to contrasting ideas about reading and writing the past.

"Córki powietrza. Sen Balladyny": Calderón spotyka Słowackiego w polu literackim, czyli hiszpańsko-polska comedia colaborada XXI wieku

Literary relations between Poland and Spain are not only the subject of some purely theoretical considerations of this essay, but also a space for creative practice within the literary field, in the sense proposed by Pierre Bourdieu, as a complex network of positions, relations, and rivalries between its participants, individuals, and institutions. The main subject of the article is the process of creating a Polish-Spanish dramatic collage called 'Daughters of the Air. Balladyna’s Dream' (2019) based on Calderon’s and Słowacki’s dramas, grounded in the historical context, from the Polish-Spanish dramaturgical assumptions to the bilingual libretto of the play, which premiered first in Opole and then in Almagro. Such a process of creative rewriting of our classic literature can be compared to the forgotten comedias colaboradas, which were extremely popular in Spain during the Golden Age: those multi-author dramatic adaptations often resulted from a fruitful collaboration between two, three, or even more writers and dramaturges, which nowadays seems somehow more challenging.

Reading and rewriting the classics of literature at the time of distance learning

This paper aims to reconstruct the phases and the development of a didactic module created in the spring of 2020, when schools were closed due to the health emergency, and e-learning was introduced in a second year class of a lower secondary school. The focus is on reading, analysing and creative re-writing of two literary classics, Orlando furioso and Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Names Deeply Chiseled

Abstract This article provides the first comprehensive study of the use of ancient Greek and Roman allusions and motifs in the poetry of Yang Mu. By focusing on representative works from Yang's oeuvre, the study sheds light on how the poet's appropriations of Greco-Roman materials are a powerful and creative expression of his poetics as a whole. Going beyond the traditional model of influence study, the article proposes a theoretical framework of cross-cultural intertextuality, creative rewriting, and cultural translation.

Die spore van Raka: oor herskrywing en kanonisering (Deel 1)

Every literary system possesses a canon with the classical canon as the most stable and simultaneously the one with the most restrictive access. Writers and texts can only maintain their position within the canon through continuous rewriting: critical rewriting by literary critics (as shapers of taste and gate-keepers) and creative rewriting by fellow writers. In this study the critical rewriting (and rerealisation) of one of the most acclaimed and seminal texts in Afrikaans literature, Raka (1941), by N. P. van Wyk Louw is scrutinized. Since its publication this verse epic has been firmly entrenched in the classical Afrikaans literary canon and its continuous rewriting / rerealisation can act as a case study of how a literary “masterpiece” is dependent on institutional relationships, relevant characteristics and strategic position-taking within a literary field in order to retain this status. Against the backdrop of a theoretical framework set out in part one of this study, the specifics of Raka’s rewriting / rerealisation is discussed in the second part.

Die spore van Raka: Oor herskrywing en kanonisering (Deel 2)

Every literary system possesses a canon with the classical canon as the most stable and simultaneously the one with the most restrictive access. Writers and texts can only maintain their position within the canon through continuous rewriting: critical rewriting by literary critics (as shapers of taste and gatekeepers) and creative rewriting by fellow writers. In this study the critical rewriting (and rerealisation) of one of the most acclaimed and seminal texts in Afrikaans literature, Raka (1941), by N. P. van Wyk Louw is scrutinized. Since its publication this verse epic has been firmly entrenched in the classical Afrikaans literary canon and its continuous rewriting / rerealisation can act as a case study of how a literary “masterpiece” is dependent on institutional relationships, relevant characteristics and strategic position-taking within a literary field in order to retain this status. In this second and concluding part of this study, the specifics of Raka’s rewriting / rerealisation is discussed utilising two supplementary typlogies as heuretical tools. In this survey of the rewriting / rerealisation the focus is on the continuallly changing ideological and poetical paradigms underpinning such processes.

Engaged Reading Through Creative Rewriting: An Innovative Approach to Making Literature Accessible

In a liberal arts education, literature is a central component of a student's required course of study. Literature appears on the syllabi of traditional English courses, interdisciplinary humanitie...

Reading Backwards, Reading Forwards, and Abiding: Reading John in the Spirit Now

ABSTRACT The figural reading approach of Richard Hays can be developed further in various ways through consideration of the Gospel of John. The narrative focus can be broadened to encompass other aspects of the analogical imagination. As all four Gospels, in Hays's reading, take up and transform Israel's Scriptures, so the Gospel of John can be read as taking up and transforming the Synoptic Gospels, with John learning from a culture of creative rewriting. John's own rewriting encourages readers to improvise in thought and action on what he writes. This “reading forwards” takes up what Hays calls “reading backwards” into the ongoing drama of following Jesus in the Spirit. John's temporality reaches beyond linearity by integrating the eternal life of God, and human participation in that, with the incarnate drama of learning and loving in history.

The Literary Prestige of the Translated Text: Collodi’s Re-writing of Perrault’s Contes

Literary translation gives birth to texts which acquire their own prestige and autonomy. Translated texts enter the receiving culture, literature and language, founding a relationship of mutual exchange with it. In particular, what is called into question in this paper is the influence of translations on the development of the receiving language, especially in historical periods of cultural and social changes. In this perspective, Collodi’s translation of Perraultian fables (1875) turns out to be a significant case of study for many reasons. First of all, it surely can be labelled as a belle infidèle translation. Indeed, Collodi’s aim is not an accurate rendering of the original texts, but a re-writing of them which could be suitable for a different socio-cultural context. Accordingly, Collodi endeavoured to create a new linguistic system able to fulfil the expressive and communicative needs of recently-united Italy. This operation is interesting from at least two points of view. On one hand, it represents a non-trivial supporting evidence for the recognition of the translation as a semiotic process. On the other hand, it is extremely useful for reflecting on the responsibility of the translator in the development and renovation of a language. Indeed, through this experience of literary translation, Collodi refined the efficient and meaningful language that would have become the language of Pinocchio, which played such a heavy influence in the formation of modern Italian. In the first part of this paper, the author highlights the importance of translations for the growing of different cultures and languages, going through some pivotal steps of the history of translational studies. Then, she introduces the case of I Racconti delle fate, underlining the exceptional characteristics of Collodi’s translation. Describing the Italian historical context in the second half of the 19th century, the author sheds light on the significance of this background for Collodi’s fables, considering some of the main theories about the influence of social, cultural and anthropological factors on both the creation and the reception of literary products. The core section of this work is represented by the analysis of a selection of textual examples taken from the collodian fables, aimed at displaying both the operation of creative rewriting of the French texts and the effort for the creation of a new Italian language. This analysis is made by comparing Collodi’s text with the Perraultian one and referring to the dictionaries of the spoken use of the 19th century. Thereafter, the Collodian translation is compared with the one of Cesare Donati, in order to draw attention on Collodi’s peculiarities. Precisely the comparison between two translations which are contemporary but so different reveals the fundamental function of idiomatic expressions in the formation of Collodi’s language and, consequently, in its influence on the Italian language of use.

“Give the devil his due”: Freedom, Damnation, and Milton’s Paradise Lost in Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman: Season of Mists

In their collection Milton in Popular Culture (2006), Laura Lungers Knoppers and Gregory M. Colón Semenza have established the importance of Miltonic intertextuality in popular culture, while recognizing the importance of William Blake to the field. Blake’s definition of Milton as “a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793) lies at the centre of a main concern of Milton criticism since the poem’s original publication. The debate between Satanists and anti-Satanists goes back even further than Blake and the Romantics, and this central ambivalence is representative of the “discontinuities” and “irresolvable complexities” which Peter C. Herman and Elizabeth Sauer (2012) argue are the focus of interest of the New Milton Criticism. Following this strand of critical thought, this article proposes to show how the introduction of Miltonic intertext into Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman , in issues 21–28, serves to structure the series’ theme of change and death — which involve questions of freedom and teleology, free will and damnation — through a critical dialogue with, and creative rewriting of Miltonic theodicy in the epic poem. Gaiman draws upon the ambivalent theological dimensions of Paradise Lost not to present his own concept of good and evil but rather to discuss the freedom to change and the damnation inherent in the inability to change as part of the human condition.

A Sociolinguistic Study of Deviant Orthographic Representation of Graduating Students' Names in a Nigerian University

It is habitual for graduating students of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria, to roll out the drums the very day they finish writing their final examination. Characteristic of such a ritualistic exercise, among other things, are the brand names the students coin for themselves from their original names. This study focuses on the creative rewriting of the names on such an occasion and examines the linguistic habits exhibited therein. It analyses the phonological/graphematic features that mark the rewritng of the names and discusses the sociolinguistic implications for the phenomena of social identity construction and language contact situation. Data for the study was sourced mainly through participant-observation technique with a supplemment of an oral interview conducted for some of the subjects between year 2007 and 2009. The data was selected through a purposive random sampling technique which yielded fifty names that were considered representative of the respelling conventions. The paper employs mainly Hempenstall's (2003) Phonological Sensitivity Skills to analyse the linguistic practices in the reconfigured names and then applies Tajfel's and Turner's (1979) Social Identity Theory to explain how it is that people develop a sense of membership and belonging in particular groups. The article reveals that the deviant orthographic conventions are a major fallout of youth culture with great influence from computer-mediated communication. It also shows that their linguistic experimentation foray in the discourse greatly undermines the orthographic system of the indigenous language (Yoruba) and the cultural values embedded in the original names.

<i>Writing Daughters: August Strindberg's Other Voices</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Writing Daughters: August Strindberg's Other Voices Susan Brantly Eszter Szalczer . Writing Daughters: August Strindberg's Other Voices. London: Norvik, 2008. Pp. 254. So much has been written on Strindberg, many must despair of finding a new angle. Eszter Szalczer has come upon the fresh idea of looking at Strindberg through the lens of his daughters and his relationship to them. The book is divided into two parts. The first part offers readings of an assortment of Strindberg's works, and the second takes a biographical look at Strindberg's four daughters. The first chapter is fascinating. Szalczer locates the presence of a feminine voice in Strindberg's writing by demonstrating how he viewed the process of writing as akin to spiritualist mediumship. Mediumship was generally viewed as a female undertaking in the nineteenth century in that the medium is inhabited by the voices of others. Compare this to the masculine view of authorship as "the singular and unified creative source of a self-assertive utterance" (19). Szalczer amply demonstrates that Strindberg described his own process like a "feverish trance state" (29) during which he is possessed by the characters to whom he gives a voice. She further concludes, "The attraction/repulsion of this feminine creative side of himself acts like an irritant in his writing: a grain of sand that produces the pearl in an oyster" (48). The second chapter on the theme of child sacrifice in Strindberg's work is just as intriguing. As Szalczer lists example after example, the trope becomes one of those obvious things that no one seems to have noticed before. Szalczer performs readings of The Father, Miss Julie, The Ghost Sonata, Crimes and Crimes, Inferno, The Dance of Death, Easter, and A Dream Play, all of which are thought provoking. What is missing in this section, however, is an engagement with what others have said about the same texts. Szalczer discusses at some length Margaret Wirmark's reading of Easter, but that is the only substantial mention of another Strindberg [End Page 99] scholar in this chapter. This would have been an especially good place to engage Ross Shideler's approach to Strindberg in Questioning the Father (1999). Although Shideler's book is listed in the bibliography, it is not mentioned once in the text itself, which is hard to understand, given the resonant focus on fathers. Szalczer has read a good many books on Strindberg, but her bibliography is far from exhaustive. Not a single book by Egil Törnqvist is listed, which is truly remarkable, since one can scarcely think of anyone who has written more on Strindberg than he. Generally, Szalczer seems to have an aversion to journal articles. If it is anthologized in a collection, then she has probably read it, but otherwise not. Göran Stockenström's article on The Ghost Sonata (Scandinavian Studies 50.2 [1978]: 133-49) might have been of interest to this chapter as well, but it too is not listed in the bibliography. Chapter 3 consists of a "textual performance," a creative rewriting of A Dream Play form the Daughter's perspective placed in dialogue with excerpts from other Strindberg texts as well as Hélène Cixous's "The Laugh of the Medusa." I regret to say that this chapter did absolutely nothing for me. It should not have been included in the volume. The fourth chapter is an instructive close reading of The Stronger. Szalzcer seems confident that Mrs. X is the titular stronger character in the play, a view bolstered by Strindberg's letter to Siri von Essen in which he declares Mrs. X the stronger because of her ability to be flexible. She claims, "Critics have often interpreted The Stronger as being centred on the absent male (X's husband and Y's lover) as the driving force of the action" (116). A footnote listing said critics and where they made these arguments would have been welcome. Here is where Szalczer has ignored Törnqvist at her peril. Back in an article from 1970 (Scandinavian Studies 42.3 [1970]: 297-308), Törnqvist performed a brilliant close reading of The Stronger inspired, in part, by a...

Never Been Properly Jung

Beckett's attendance at one of Jung's lectures and his adoption of a phrase he heard there have long been well known in Beckett Studies. By returning to the transcript of the lecture, however, I demonstrate that the nature of this incident has long been misunderstood. Beckett's creative rewriting of what he saw and heard at the Tavistock Institute is outlined, and I explore the consequences of this. I also consider the way in which some critics have sketched the relation between Jung's theories and Beckett's writing, and emphasise that the difference between the two needs to be recognised.

Encounter with Sacred Eros

Situating art therapy within a cultural feminist postmodern framework, has taught me how valuable it is to re-write and re-image our histories, so that we are not imprisoned in the story. Veronique's art therapy process was a creative re-writing, imaging, and singing her song alive, which grieved the loss of her innocence. In honouring her grief she was able to embrace life again, and give personal and collective meaning to her suffering. This article has attempted to contextualise the impact of real relationships on psychic life. My therapeutic experience of relationship with Veronique, represented a most profound encounter with another, which was about grounding the journey of exploring the emotional waters of the heart and finding the place of soul.

The Aeneid Revisited: The Journey of Pompey in Lucan's Pharsalia

Andromaque, je pense à vous! Ce petit fleuve, Pauvre et triste miroir où jadis resplendit L'immense majesté de vos douleurs de veuve, Ce Simoïs menteur qui par vos pleurs grandit, A fécondé soudain ma mémoire fertile, Comme je traversais le nouveau Carrousel. Le vieux Paris n'est plus (la forme d'une ville Change plus vite, hélas! que le coeur d'un mortel) --Baudelaire, "Le Cygne" THE AENEID MAY BE DEFINED, among many other things, as the tale of a journey from the East to the West that becomes, at the same time, a journey from capitulation to foundation. 1 This idea is well summarized in the structure of the proem of the poem: Arma uirumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Lauiniaque uenit litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto ui superum, saeuae memorem Iunonis ob iram, multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae. (Virg. Aen. 1.1-7) I sing of arms and of a man: his fate had made him fugitive; he was the first to journey from the coasts of Troy as far as Italy and the Lavinian shores. Across the lands and waters he was battered beneath the violence of High Ones, for the savage Juno's unforgetting anger; [End Page 571] and many sufferings were his in war-- until he brought a city into being and carried in his gods to Latium; from this have come the Latin race, the lords of Alba, and the ramparts of high Rome. 2 Troy, the point of departure for this journey, is in a conspicuous position in the opening hexameter of the proem; the city of Rome, the point of arrival, brings the proem to its closure. True enough, the foundation of the city of Rome lies outside the primary temporal setting of the poem. Its foundation, nevertheless, is anticipated in the various external prolepses that bring the narration beyond the limit of the temporal field of the first narrative. 3 Moreover, in the poem, Aeneas himself will be the founder of a new set of moenia in Latium, starting the process of city foundation that will culminate in the construction of the ramparts of high Rome. That Virgil's Aeneid is in its basic structure a poem of journey and foundation did not go unnoticed by the long line of his literary successors. As Hardie (1993, xi) has shown, Virgil's successors were all sharp and informed readers of the Aeneid, and their epic works should be read and interpreted as a creative rewriting and continuation, at once respectful and at times rebellious, of the Aeneid. Following this line of interpretation, I will argue that Lucan's Pharsalia, the so-called anti-Aeneid, 4 presents itself in the journey of Pompey as a critical, almost antiphrastic revisitation of Aeneas' journey. 5 The stages of Pompey's journey retrace some crucial stages of Aeneas' in the Aeneid, both [End Page 572] thematically and geographically. But Pompey's journey is "reversed"; it is turned "upside down." 6 It moves symmetrically backward, bringing the journey of the Aeneid back to its point of departure: from the West back to the East, from Rome back to Troy. In a comprehensive work on Lucan's Pharsalia, Ahl points out that among the many characters of the Pharsalia, Pompey is the one most closely modeled on Aeneas. 7 The first appearance of Pompey in the poem is symptomatic. At the beginning of the Pharsalia, Pompey is compared to an oak tree (like Aeneas in Aeneid 4). 8 But unlike Aeneas' firmly rooted mature tree, Pompey's tree is decayed and rootless. 9 Aeneas' roots are established in the very bowels of the earth, unshakable and immovable, and allow him to withstand the storm (Aen. 4.445- 46, ipsa haeret scopulis et quantum uertice ad auras / aetherias...

Creative Rewriting

Creative Rewriting