Communication, Translation, and Community in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period


Book Description

Die neue englischsprachige Reihe zur Mediävistik strebt eine methodisch reflektierte, anspruchsvolle Verbindung von Text- und Kulturwissenschaft an. Sie widmet sich den kulturellen Grundthemen der mittelalterlichen Welt aus der Perspektive der Literatur- und Geschichtswissenschaft. ‚Grundthemen' sind die kulturprägenden Denkbilder, Weltanschauungen, Sozialstrukturen und Alltagsbedingungen des mittelalterlichen Lebens, also z. B. Kindheit und Alter, Sexualität, Religion, Medizin, Rituale, Arbeit, Armut und Reichtum, Aberglauben, Erde und Kosmos, Stadt und Land, Krieg, Emotionen, Kommunikation, Reisen usw. Die Reihe greift wichtige aktuelle Fachdiskussionen auf und stellt ein Forum der interdisziplinären Mittelalter-Forschung dar. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture steht Sammelbänden ebenso offen wie Monographien. Intention ist immer, kompendienhafte Werke zu zentralen Fragen der mittelalterlichen Kulturgeschichte vorzulegen, die einen soliden Überblick über einen geschlossenen Themenkreis aus der Perspektive verschiedener Fachdisziplinen vermitteln. Im Ganzen bietet die Reihe so eine Enzyklopädie der mittelalterlichen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte und ihrer Hauptthemen. Es werden ca. zwei Bände pro Jahr erscheinen.




Text Performances and Cultural Transfer / Textperformances und Kulturtransfer


Book Description

As is well known, a text is a speech act, namely the realisation and initiation of linguistic potentialities. Although a text can be described as an independent entity, it only becomes effective in concrete situations of use. One and the same linguistic product can form the basis of different communicative events. Every text can be understood as part of a performance that has a unique and unrepeatable character thanks to its connection to the presentation and reception situation: a text is read (aloud), staged, declaimed or solemnly spoken, sung, etc. in different ways. Every text reception is also a unique event that is affected by a wide variety of variables. In this regard, the eminently hermeneutic activity of the translator can also be understood as an intercultural performance in which the role of the source text recipient and the role of the target text recipient converge. This leads to a language product that shows clear traces of this individual performance. Different translators, that is to say, perform in different ways. This volume aims to show that assessing the performative change of perspective, a matter which is gradually gaining importance in textual studies as well as in translation studies, opens up an area in which different disciplines can enter into conversation. Ein Text ist bekanntlich ein parole-Akt, d. h. eine Realisierung sprachlicher Potentialitäten. Er lässt sich zwar als eigenständige Entität beschreiben, wirksam wird er allerdings erst in konkreten Gebrauchssituationen. Ein und dasselbe Sprachprodukt kann Grundlage unterschiedlicher kommunikativer Ereignisse darstellen. Jeder Text kann als Teil einer Performance begriffen werden, die in ihrer Bindung zur Präsentations- und Rezeptionssituation einen einmaligen und unwiederholbaren Charakter aufweist: Ein Text wird unterschiedlich (vor-)gelesen, in Szene gesetzt, deklamiert oder feierlich gesprochen, gesungen etc. Auch jede Textrezeption ist ein einmaliges Ereignis, das von unterschiedlichsten Variablen affiziert wird. Schließlich kann auch die eminent hermeneutische Tätigkeit des Übersetzers als interkulturelle Performance aufgefasst werden, in der die Rolle des Ausganstextrezipienten und die Rolle des Zieltextrezipienten konvergieren. Sie führt zu einem Sprachprodukt, das deutliche Spuren dieser individuellen Performance aufweist. Unterschiedliche Übersetzer performen in jeweils unterschiedlicher Weise. Der Band möchte aufzeigen, dass der performative Perspektivenwechsel, der in den Textwissenschaften sowie in der Übersetzungswissenschaft allmählich an Bedeutung gewinnt, ein Gebiet eröffnet, in dem unterschiedliche Disziplinen ins Gespräch kommen können.




Translational Hermeneutics


Book Description

This volume presents selected papers from the first symposium on Hermeneutics and Translation Studies held at Cologne in 2011. Translational Hermeneutics works at the intersection of theory and practice. It foregrounds both hermeneutical philosophy and the various traditions -- especially phenomenology -- to which it is indebted, in order to explore the ways in which the individual person figures at the center of the mediating process of translation. Translational Hermeneutics offers alternative ways to understand the process of translating: it is a holistic and strategic process that enhances understanding by assisting the transmission of meaning in and across multiple social and cultural contexts. The papers in this collection accordingly provide a preliminary outline of Translational Hermeneutics. Gathered together, these papers broach a new discipline within Translation Studies. While some essays explain the theoretical foundations of this approach, others concentrate on practical applications in diverse fields, for example literary studies, and postcolonial studies.




Schleiermacher’s Icoses


Book Description




The Reconciled Body


Book Description

What is elegance? Is it a quality of movement or gesture? Or is it rather connected to the way someone dresses up? Can we think of an elegant object or an elegant speech? These questions point at the ambiguity elegance presents any person wanting to reflect on it. The Reconciled Body responds to this challenge by looking at the birthplace of elegance: a subject’s experience. From movement consciousness to dreaming, from attention to the upright posture, this book presents the reader with first-person moments that are fundamental in shaping someone’s intimate sense of elegance. In the end, the reader is invited to reflect on the value of elegance and its potential in reconfiguring someone’s I-world relation: is it worth opposing the nature of consciousness to experience the self and other in a radically different manner? *** Simionescu’s brilliant formula on elegance conveys a sense of measure and a self-limitation in one’s unconventional conducts, fulfilling the characteristic, albeit subtle, moral nuance carried by the meaning of the word “elegance.” Following the main methodological rule of classical phenomenology, and at the same time drawing on contemporary research about embodiment and movement, the author finds his way to “material” axiology by a bottom-up analysis of the intuitive, lived matter of this value, laying the foundations of a phenomenology of elegance. (Roberta de Monticelli)




The Brothers Seven


Book Description

Seitsemän veljestä (The Brothers Seven), the 1870 Finnish novel by Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872), is one of the most (in)famously unknown classics of world literature—unknown not only because so few people in the world can read Finnish, but also because the novel is so incredibly difficult to translate, the Mount Everest of translating from Finnish. It is difficult to translate not only because it blends a saturation in Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, and the Bible with a brilliantly stylized form of local dialect, but because it is wild, grotesque, carnivalistic, and laugh-out-loud funny on every page. It has been translated 58 times into 34 languages—but somehow the translations always seem to fall short of their flamboyant original. Douglas Robinson’s new translation is a bold attempt to remedy that. He aims to make Kivi as rhythmic, as alliterative, as brash, as grotesque, and as funny in English as he is in Finnish. Since Kivi deliberately used an archaic Finnish, but used it playfully—and since Kivi was steeped in Shakespeare, to the point of memorizing whole plays—Robinson translates him into a playful Shakespearean register. As he notes in his Preface, this makes the translation a bit difficult to read—but the original is difficult for Finns to read as well, and the Finnish readers who love Kivi (and that is most of them) read him with pleasure despite the words they don’t know, because his prose is so intensely alive.




The art of experimental natural history


Book Description

Francis Bacon introduced his contemporaries to a new way of investigating nature. He called it "natural and experimental history." Despite its rather traditional name, Bacon's natural and experimental history was a new discipline: it comprised new ideas, new practices and new models of collaborative research. This new discipline was, in many ways, a surprisingly successful project. It provided early modern naturalists with tools, methods and models for both investigating nature and writing about their subject. It also offered a set of norms and values for guiding research. And yet, this new discipline was not a science of nature -- it was more like an art. This book aims to trace the emergence, evolution and reception of Francis Bacon's art of experimental natural history.




The Time is Now. Essays on the Philosophy of Becoming


Book Description

The time for what? The title of Mihaela Gligor’s edited collection is wonderfully flexible, as anything having to do with time should be. There is something not only boundless about time, but also raw and untamed. In its pure form, time would be too much for us to handle. We would be crushed by the sheer immensity of it, or else we would lose our minds trying to make sense of such unmediated time. Luckily, for the most part we don’t experience time in its pure form. Time comes to us already processed: shaped, engineered, tamed. The volume does fine justice to the notion that we experience time as already shaped by religion, politics, and culture. Whether its contributions cover religious or political figures, philosophers or poets, mystics or physicists, they show – sometimes explicitly, sometimes more discreetly – how difficult it is to deal with time in a pure, unmediated form. The contributors’ cultural, religious, and intellectual rooting inform the way think about time, just as about anything else. Which, far from being a weakness, is something to be recognized and celebrated. (Costică Brădățan, Texas Tech University, U.S.A.)







Living Superior, Arizona, from 1930 to 1950


Book Description

This book tells the history of Superior, Arizona, from the years 1930 to 1950. Superior is located in the central part of the state just inside the southern boundary of the Tonto National Forest. The town was the home of the Magma mine, which was owned by the Magma Copper Company. The Magma mine was an underground, or “hard rock,” copper mine. It operated continuously from 1910 to 1982, was one of the most productive mines in US history, and also included a smelter, mill, and railroad. The book hermeneutically (interpretively) merges into a single narrative the oral histories of 15 persons who were born between 1923 and 1934 and lived in Superior during all or most of 1930 through 1950. The purpose of combining the contributions into a single story was to yield a thicker, more corroborated history of the town than otherwise would have been possible by presenting them separately. Supplementing the narrative are a (1) historiographical description of the town and mine, (2) sociological analysis of their relationship, the community’s solidarity, and the segregation experienced among Mexican, Caucasian, Native American, and African American residents, (3) description of the personal meaning of underground mining, and (4) review of methods.