Textual Encounter Research Articles

From Camelot to Sandlot: Gothic Translation in A Kid in King Arthur’s Court

A Kid in King Arthur's Court is a 1995 Disney modernization of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Whereas Twain’s bizarre Gothic setting frames the narrative and generates magical transformation and ambivalent relationship between the protagonist and the medieval world through a vibrant textual encounter, the Disney version’s fantastic journey is opened up by the familiar baseball field which, while appealing to juvenile audience, does not seem to invite serious inquiry. However, the film demonstrates an intricate process of translation, in which the cinematic rendition of the otherness of Arthurian legend to its prospective viewers involves a twofold gothic translation of both medieval culture and contemporary popular culture. Despite its reductive appropriation of some of Twain’s motifs, the movie witnesses how popularized Arthurian legend as familiarized difference can continue to inspire an-other novel perspective on the everyday. Perhaps Arthurians need to accustom themselves to the uncanny experience in popular culture’s domestication of the medieval/Gothic other in which what is familiar to them becomes unsettlingly unfamiliar. The Arthurian tradition is almost synonymous with Arthurian translation, a vigorously contested process that always reinvents the other side of the legend and explores the dynamics between the familiar and the fantastic.

From the City Looking Out, Out of the City Looking In

The novel Muertos incómodos is subtitled ‘novela a cuatro manos’. It was written in ‘ping‐pong’ style, according to the Web Prologue, by Subcomandante Marcos and Paco Ignacio Taibo II, where each wrote and reacted to the other through alternating chapters. The former is well known for his recourse to the imaginative and cultural tools at his disposal in his communiqués, the latter is one of the most prolific Mexican novelists. In this article, I shall examine the textual encounter of two apparently disparate worlds and show how the city is constructed in this richly layered text.

Who Speaks? Who Listens?: The Problem of Address in Two Nigerian Trauma Novels

Its hero, Tancred, unwittingly kills his beloved Clorinda in a duel while she is disguised in the armour of an enemy knight. After her burial he makes his way into a strange magic forest which strikes the Crusaders' army with terror. He slashes with his sword at a tall tree; but blood streams from the cut and the voice of Clorinda, whose soul is imprisoned in the tree, is heard complaining that he has wounded his beloved once again. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Sigmund Freud refers this moment in Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered as an example of the unconscious repetition of trauma. Tancred's unknowing killing of his beloved not just once, but twice, illustrates for Freud a passive compulsion repeat that makes up part of the dynamics of trauma (16). In Unclaimed Experience, Cathy Caruth expands upon Freud's reading of this moment by drawing attention to a voice that is paradoxically released through the (2-3). Doing so, she reads this scene as an illustration of the latency of trauma and the ethical address delivered through this belated knowing: The figure of Tancred addressed by the speaking wound constitutes, in other words, not only a parable of trauma and of its uncanny repetition but, more generally, a parable of theory itself as it listens a voice that it cannot fully know but which it nonetheless bears (9). Freud's and Caruth's readings of this tale illustrate the difficulty of using trauma theory read the experience of the colonized Other. One dilemma with these readings is that they rewrite one woman's bodily experience of trauma as the trauma of the male consciousness. In Caruth's analysis, Tancred is both the traumatized subject and the witness an enigmatic otherness. Although Caruth's formulation draws attention and attempts listen the voice of the Other, it is Tancred who remains psychoanalytic theory itself. But Tancred does not experience the trauma; Clorinda does. (1) And the voice that cries out from the wound is not a universal voice, nor is it a generic female voice: it is the female voice of black Africa. This episode in Jerusalem Delivered tells of the death of the woman warrior Clorinda who fights against the Christian crusaders led by Tancred. She is the white daughter of the black Christian King and Queen of Ethiopia. Because of Clorinda's color and fear of the King's reprisal, the Queen gives Clorinda away at birth a pagan Eunuch raise. Only at the moment of her first death does Clorinda ask for a Christian baptism. Thus, already in Tasso's story, Clorinda has been whitened and Christianized make her an acceptable lover for his hero. In this act, we witness an early European discursive encounter with a racial and religious Other, a representation that is repeated in Freud's and Caruth's readings of Tancred not as the perpetrator of trauma but as the victim of it. I draw attention this textual encounter in the foundational works of early and contemporary trauma theory because it stages the traumatic relationship between the Western knowing consciousness and the silent, unknowable African Other and demonstrates the difficulty of representing that Other within such theories. In putting together this collection on postcolonial trauma novels, Stef Craps and Gert Buelens ask a number of questions, among them, how trauma studies can redeem its promise of cross-cultural ethical engagement and whether postcolonial trauma narratives present challenges trauma theory. If the story of Tancred is the scene of writing, it reveals, I argue, that the discourse of trauma is founded upon an erasure of the voice of the Colonial Other. Caruth identifies trauma as an ethical discourse of the Other because it opens up and challenges us a new kind of listening, the witnessing, precisely, of (Introduction 10). However, this formulation erects a structural barrier such an understanding in so much as it positions the Other in the place of impossibility while situating the addressee in the illuminated space of knowledge and the possible. …

A pedagogy of mourning: tarrying with/in tragedy, terror, and tension

In this text I offer a narrative reflection, as a teacher-traveler, on my live(d) experiences in a sometimes (always already) violent world. Preoccupied with the possibilities of the work of mourning, in the first two movements I draw on stories of my time teaching in China at the dawn of this millennium to tell tales of tragedy, terror, and tension that provoked strange pedagogical moments. I reflect on the difficulties and passions of live(d) pedagogies that crack open curri/culum to tarry with/in these provocative, generative spaces as places for mourning and connection, ambivalence and ambiguity. During the 3rd movement I join Butler’s questioning of ‘what counts as a grievable life’ as I attempt a textual encounter with an (un)grievable ‘other’. I ask: How might recognition of lives/deaths through the act of inscription and collective mourning be related to understanding human connection? In a pedagogical refrain, I draw Derrida into my conversation with feminist theory to ask seriously about the pedagogical potential of tarrying with/in mourning, particularly for peace education that prioritizes an awareness of human connection. What are the transformative possibilities of returning again to mourning? I conclude with a call from peace educators and other emerging epistemologies that challenge us to think differently about human connection in our pedagogical work. Above all this text is a provocation in/to difficult spaces of mourning and pedagogical movement.

A Glimpse at Dylan through Biermann

Abstract In 2003 the German songwriter-poet Wolf Biermann published Elf Entwürfe für meinen Grabspruch (Eleven Sketches for My Own Epitaph), a textual encounter that places Biermann’s free-form translations in counterpoint to "Eleven Outlined Epitaphs," Bob Dylan’s Beatesque poem that originally appeared in the liner notes of The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964). Donning the identities of poet and folk singer interchangeably, both Bob Dylan and Wolf Biermann have pursued successful careers straddling the high/Iow an divide since their arrival on the respective pop music scenes of Germany and the US. As cultural documents, however, Biermann’s translations not only articulate his poetical affinity to Dylan’s art, but they also underscore the challenges of mediating the ambiguous tropes of Dylan’s vernacular contextuality to a German audience. This article sets out to examine how the reception of Bob Dylan’s music in 1960s Germany comes to bear on Biermann’s Grabspriiche vis-a-vis Dylan’s epitaphs to argue that, despite the concerted German feuilleton criticism, Biermann’s translations promulgate great understanding of Dylan’s poetry and song.

Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries by Loss Pequeño Glazier, and: 21st-Century Modernism: The ‘New’ Poetics by Marjorie Perloff (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 183 For others it may not. The New York school had forAmerican poetry a significance analogous to that of the Metaphysicals or the Romantics. Silly, sad, and solemn by turns, part of its pleasure lies in the facility with which it moves between the ridiculous and the sublime. It is also direct and honest; an uninitiated reader will find itimmediately engaging. Like any poetry itwill respond to theoretical analysis, but the tighter the theoretical framework, the more its spirit is threatened. Avant-garde poets eschew tradition; that is why they are avant-garde. Yet much ofthis poetry fails within American traditions descending from Poe and Whitman, and was written within the context of a background including Stevens and Williams, and even Eliot and Pound, whom Watkin mentions scarcely at all. Moreover, these poets are defined by their wit. Like the Metaphysicals it is through their wit that they most effectivelyengage the world that they inhabit. But Watkin's prose lacks the easy informality which gives rise to it. His fierce discursive rigour marches sternly towards an impenetrability that is hardly helpful in understanding poetry which is itself not easy. For example: 'The avant-garde must now be located not in a metanarrative nor archaeological superposition , but directly within the contemporary event of the textual encounter itself. The avant-garde is a textual event.' Or, as Frank O'Hara says, 'Happening is just like a little play. [. . .] "I'm going to do this delightful thing, I think, and I hope you'll come and thinkit's delightful"' (Standing Still and Walkingin New York, pp. 16-17). Initiated readers will not need reminding that the New York poets knew their Whitman and Williams, nor that they were quick-witted almost to a fault. For them Watkin's book usefully adds to the sum of knowledge. But it is a book that the publishers have allowed to betray its academic origins. To attract readers who are not examiners a little saving vulgarity is wanted. Watkin had to get his book out, and his publishers have virtuously helped him to do so. But they have failed in their responsibility to readers. Few but librarians and specialists will find the money for this well-argued and thoughtful book, which might easily have been, were times not, alas, as they are, much more widely useful. Clare College, Cambridge R. D. Gooder Digital Poetics: The Making ofE-Poetries. By Loss Pequeno Glazier. (Modern and Contemporary Poetics) Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press. 2002. xii + 2i3pp. $54.95 (pbk $24.95). ISBN 0-8173-1074-6 (pbk 0-8173I075 -4). 2ist-Century Modernism: The New' Poetics. By Marjorie Perloff. (Blackwell Manifestos) Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2001. ix + 222pp. ?45 (pbk ?12.99). ISBN o-63i-2i969-2(pbko-63i-2i97o-6). These two books, while they do not engage with each other's material, nevertheless re? late, in that both deal with modern poetry,and in one case with the same poet, Charles Bernstein, whose writing reconstitutes words in what Bernstein calls 'dyraphism'?'a dysfunctional fusion of embryonic poets', a 'mis-seaming'. Marjorie Perloff expands this as 'the collaging of items that are not only disparate but have differentsyntactic orders, shifting voices, source and multiple allusions', combined with punning and word-play (Perloff, p. 172; see also Glazier, p. 36). And with that, we are offinto the territory that Glazier explores. He takes in such experiments as Concrete Poetry in the 1950s and explores the poetry that is written digitally. The model is poetry as the play of words, of language whose aleatory appearance cuts out the pretension of the humanist scholar. Glazier's book works at two levels. First, it is informative about the Web (which began in 1969, for military and research purposes in the USA) and its acceleration after 1991, and it reads partially as a series of fact-sheets, complete with 184 Reviews glossary, forthose who already know quite a bit about the Internet's ways and means. (The glossary is occasionally helpful, but it also assumes a fair degree of knowledge already.) In functioning as information, Glazier's book is useful for those who need what he...

Our preposterous use of literature: Emerson and the nature of reading

Since the mid nineteenth century, the figure and the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson have been used to stand for the essence of America and for closely guarded ideals of the American literary tradition. In more material realms, we can find Emerson or quotations of his works selling everything from insurance policies to tennis shoes. Our Preposterous Use of Literature is a dazzling critique of summary uses of literature and encapsulating methods of reading, methods that in effect limit or destroy the texts they purport to interpret.Using the historical reception of the works of Emerson as a case study, T. S. McMillin conducts a bold inquiry into the political and philosophical nature of reading. He examines the ways in which Emerson's texts have been read in the United States, the myriad methods by which those texts have been pillaged, picked over, and repackaged - in a word, consumed - by biographers, political apologists, self-help proponents, entrepreneurs, and academicians alike.By investigating how these readers have appropriated Emerson's texts to serve their own ends (all the while proclaiming to have produced 'the meaning of Emerson'), McMillin shows how a reductive, consumptive method of reading alters both the process of the textual encounter and the nature of the text itself. A profound meditation on the nature of texts, the office of the scholar, and the use of literature, Our Preposterous Use of Literature proposes a new natural philosophy of reading: a method of reading at once more responsible to the texts we interpret and more closely connected to the worlds in which our interpretations take place.

Calling writers' bluffs: The social production of writing ability in university placement-testing

This article examines the implications for testing of a profoundly social model of writing elaborated over the last 15 years by critical composition scholars. Students' development is seen as a process of socialization into the ways of speaking and thinking considered appropriate within academic or professional communities. Such socialization is fraught with conflict in that the values underlying these ways of speaking may differ radically from those that students bring to the situation. Yet, to develop as writers, students must engage these dominant ways of speaking. In this light, testing becomes a kind of “border checkpoint” in the “contact zone” (Pratt, 1987), where students' identities are defined and contested in this textual encounter between writers and readers. Using this theoretical frame, the article examines one aspect of elaboration in student writing as a product of this encounter. Results of a study of a stratified random sample of student placement tests reveal several patterns in the elaboration of “old” and “new” information that deviate sharply from what would be expected in a “cooperative exchange of information between equals.” (Grice, 1967/1975). Yet, these patterns correlate significantly with readers' evaluations of texts. Analysis of these patterns shows them to be two strategies for managing discursive conflict in this situation.