Discursive Presence Research Articles

The object of neuroscience and literary studies

ABSTRACTAn investment in the object as unquestionably self-evident and self-defining has for quite some time now been widely critiqued as a central philosophical tenet of crony capitalism in its current economic, material, social, cultural and institutional manifestations. In this article, I trace that appeal to the category of the object in order to claim its discursive presence also in recent critical tendencies in literary criticism in relation to science, specifically evolutionary psychology and its underpinning neuro- and cognitive science. I focus my explorations through the 2010–2012 debate about ‘Literary Darwinism’ in the American journal Critical Inquiry and some selected articles from a 2008 special double-issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies on ‘Beckett, Language and the Mind’, arguing that both illustrate typical, core issues and problems in the critical discourses about science and literature, specifically how both the literary criticism and the science that is drawn on to support it are nevertheless all made to be rooted in a world of an agreed liberal, political and ideological commitment to a subject assumed as an autonomous agent with a transparent consciousness and language to match.

Narration and translation

This opening essay of the special issue on ‘Narration and Translation’ discusses the overlaps between the fields of narratology and translation studies. The fact that translation scholars have merely skimmed the surface of narratological issues relevant for the study of translation can be understood within the context of early developments in translation studies. The first explicit use of narratological models in this discipline has grown out of unease with the extant focus on the macrostructural level of translations. In recent decades, translation scholars have begun to include narrative approaches in their research. Some conceptualize the translator’s discursive presence by referring to a model of narrative communication, or borrow concepts from narratology in order to analyse observed shifts in literary translations. Outside the domain of literary translation studies, scholars have looked into the way translation can refashion narratives in the real world. Conversely, narrative theories have rarely dealt with translational issues, even though they often rely on translations of literary texts. The issue as a whole wants to enhance the dialogue between narratology and translation studies. Each essay explores aspects of the relation between narration and translation.

Forum: Interrogating the use of norms in international relations: postcolonial perspectives

In this forum five scholars bring their particular postcolonial perspectives to bear upon the constructivist concept of norms. Charlotte Epstein introduces the forum by considering what it means to theorise international politics from a postcolonial perspective, understood not as a unified body of thought or a new ‘ism’ for IR, but as a ‘situated perspective’; and how this casts a different light upon the makings of international orders and key epistemological schemes with which these have been studied in International Relations (IR), such as norms. In her contribution Ayze Zarakol argues that the constructivist paradigm of ‘norm diffusion’ commits two fallacies: first, it mishandles the causal explanation because it conflates internalisation, socialisation and compliance. Second it reproduces existing international social hierarchies by treating (bad) non-compliance by non-Western actors as endogenously driven, and (good) compliance as the result of external Western stimuli. She uses Erving Goffman’s concept of stigmatisation to show how our understanding of norm diffusion in the international order – or lack thereof – can be improved. Julia Gallagher’s article examines the norm of good governance as acted out by the World Bank in its policies towards African countries. She uses psychoanalytic object relations theory to show how the Bank employs good governance to structure the world into good and bad objects, thereby overcoming internal ambiguity and creating an idealised self-image. Robbie Shlliam’s contribution challenges constructivism to attend to calls for epistemic justice regarding the delineation of interpretive communities to the ostensibly “moderns”. He does so by explicating the understandings of slavery provided by knowledge traditions inhabited by descendants of enslaved Africans. Vivienne Jabri’s article mobilises Homi Bhabha and Frantz Fanon in a critical engagement with constructivist readings of postcolonial agency in the normative ordering of the international. She argues that a postcolonial reading of the international must account for both the discursive and material presence of the postcolonial subject, a presence at once both constituted and constituting of the international.

The Absence of Ottoman, Islamic Europe in Edward W. Said’s Orientalism

Edward W. Said’s Orientalism has attained canonical status as the key study of the cultural politics of western representation of the East, specifically the imaginative geographies underwriting constructions such as the Middle East and the Islamic world. The Ottoman Empire overlapped both European and exteriorized Oriental space during much of the period that Said dealt with, yet while the existence of the empire is referred to in Said’s study, the theoretical implications of that presence for his critique of Orientalist discourse are not. The material presence of the Ottoman state, in the Arabic-speaking lands, but also crucially, and for a longer period, much of south-east Europe and Anatolia, highlights long-standing Oriental geopolitical and cultural agency in the face of unidirectional narratives of western encroachment. Attention to the specific discursive manoeuvres undertaken by the West to handle that disruptive, intrinsic Ottoman presence in Europe itself may add traction to the notion that the Orient was imagined as a radically exterior point of comparison. It is argued that the history of western representation of the Ottoman Empire constitutes a pre-Orientalist discourse, whose dual, perennial purpose is to make pragmatic accommodation for an Ottoman Oriental material presence in Europe yet never to fully acknowledge its discursive presence as being of Europe. I argue that by supplementing Said’s critique with a full consideration of the Ottoman legacy, a reformulation is possible that integrates the Islamic Orient as an intrinsic component of historically informed notions of European space, while dissolving notions of the absolute distinction of that latter construct from the wider milieus in which it is embedded.

A Savagist Abroad: Anti-Colonial Theory and the Quiet Violence in Twain's Western Oeuvre

Over the past several decades, two concerns have dominated the scholarship around the writings of Mark Twain: interventions into the debate over Twain’s discursive treatment of African Americans, particularly its appropriateness to secondary school learning, and discussion of Twain’s less studied writings with respect to his critique of imperialism. Despite its intricate relation to both of these topics, the “Native presence” in Twain’s writing—a phrase I pointedly borrow from Toni Morrison—has received comparatively little attention. Yet this discursive presence of Native Americans, whether they are actually en-charactered or not, is perhaps one of the most pervasive and apparently hypocritical elements of Twain’s writing, from its inception in the 1850s through the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, as well as beyond (the author’s career importantly spanning the most intense era of U.S. aggression toward Indian nations). Because Twain routinely spoke the unspeakable in ways that helped make the thoughts and attitudes of his land-aggressive western readers toward Native Americans more acceptable in the broader public conversation, his words often serve as a classic illustration of literary savagism as delineated by Roy Harvey Pearce in his pivotal theoretical observations from Savagism and Civilization. 1 Given the persistent split between post-colonial studies (of which in terest in the cultures of U.S. imperialism and Twain’s anti-imperialism is a by-product) and the understudied dynamics of U.S. imperialism, both material and literary, on the North American continent itself, the complexities of Twain’s references to Native America and their contexts merit collective and sustained scholarly inquiry. In particular, scholars working in the field of Native American Studies are poised to contribute significantly to our understanding of Twain’s impact on nonwhites globally. Such scholars can offer specific and credible, rather than generalized and under-theorized, insight into the historical contexts of Twain’s public and private commentary. I will attempt here to situate historically Twain’s regionalist writings—

RURALIZING THE CITY: THE GREAT MIGRATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL REHABILITATION IN BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

This article examines the discursive and material presence of the “rural” in the “urban,” relating it to the historical and contemporary production of African American culture and identity. By using the case of the Great Migration, it discusses how African Americans negotiated and shaped their urban surroundings and formed individual and collective identities by drawing on their rural, southern histories. It then suggests the relevance of these broad historical processes to contemporary analyses and interventions in the urban environment of Baltimore, Maryland. This article challenges assumptions that obscure the agency of urban residents in the formation of identity and the establishment of community. It demonstrates ways in which the historical movement from rural South to urban North was accompanied by a range of cultural resources that have been adapted, discarded, or reconstructed.

Putting painting in the picture (photographically)

It seems to be the case that when photography and painting become entangled, one becoming both a copy and a commentary upon the other, then a series of complex discursive issues get put into play. The photograph always seems to be in excess of the painting, engaging with it performatively, whilst painting is posed in these forms of contemporary practice, not as a single point of reference, to be mimicked or copied, but as a discursive presence troubling the security of the photographic image, producing a differentiated space of representation that opens up a more complex articulation of the way in which photography intersects with the field of the visible.

Point of View in Translation: A Corpus-based Study of French Translations of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse

Narratology does not distinguish between original and translated fiction. Indeed, narratological models, such as the one proposed by Chatman (1990:74) do not pay any attention to the translator. Since the 1990's, the visibility of translators in translated narrative texts has been increasingly discussed and researchers like Schiavi (1996) and Hermans (1996) introduced the concept of the translator's voice, which attempts to recognise the 'other' voice in translation, i.e., the presence of the translator. Corpus-based translation studies have also focused on recurrent features of translated language (see, for example, Baker 1993, Kenny 2001; Laviosa 1997; Olohan & Baker 2000), and corpus techniques and tools are being employed to identify the translators' 'style' in their translations (Baker 2000). Bosseaux (2004) seeks to define the nature of the translator's discursive presence by exploring certain narratological aspects of the relation between originals and translations. This investigation is particularly concerned with the potential problems involved in the translation of linguistic features that constitute the notion of point of view, i.e., deixis, modality, transitivity and free indirect discourse, and seeks to determine whether and how the translator's choices affect the transfer of narratological structures. This paper looks specifically at the translation of free indirect discourse inTo the Lighthouseand its three French translations:Promenade au Phare(1929) translated by Maurice Lanoire, Voyage au Phare(1993) by Magali Merle andVers le Phare(1996) by Françoise Pellan.

“A heart that has felt the love of god and longs for others to know it”: conventions of gender, tensions of self and constructions of difference in offering to be a lady missionary

The article is based on a detailed study of the applications of female candidates who applied to the London Missionary Society for consideration as missionaries to serve in the foreign field, from 1875 to 1900. Drawing on the candidates' own letters, formal applications and the selection process as revealed in the archives of the Ladies' Committee of the Society, the article describes the process of professionalisation of the female missionary's role during this period. A textual analysis reveals how this process of professionalisation negotiated the boundaries of gender and class in late nineteenth-century England, maintaining a conventionality through the religious rubric within which the offer to be a lady missionary was constructed. Critical to this religiosity and its ability to twin convention with iconoclasm was the discursive presence of the imperial and colonial other. The article also reflects on themethodological issues of interpreting and re-presenting the narratives of the past from a secular feminist contemporary location.

The Translator's Voice in Translated Narrative

Abstract When we read translated narrative, the original Narrator's voice is not the only which comes to us. The Translator's discursive presence in the translated text becomes discernible in certain cases, e.g. when the pragmatic displacement resulting from translation requires paratextual intervention for the benefit of the Implied Reader of the translated text; when self-reflexive references to the medium of communication itself are involved; when 'contextual overdetermination' leaves no other option. The ways in which the Translator's discursive presence manifests itself are demonstrated on the basis of different translations of the Dutch novel Max Havelaar (1860).