Call for Papers on #Edward #Said’s legacy in the context of current events-Edited Volume; MLA 2025 conference special session

Twenty years after his death and fifty years after the publication of Orientalism, Edward Said, the best-known Palestinian American public intellectual, seems more relevant and more controversial than ever before. As the middle-east is torn apart by the most horrific violence since the creation of Israel, Said has already been blamed for providing academic cover to Hamas’s murderous actions. Said, these critics say, was a rabid anti-Western, anti-Semitic, Arab extremist who legitimized the use of violence by terrorists calling themselves freedom fighters. But others have recalled the intellectual clarity and moral urgency Said brought to the Palestine question. Those who respect Said see him as a cosmopolitan, liberal, secular humanist who consistently critiqued colonialism, whether Western or Israeli. Both sides, however, acknowledge that something remarkable is happening in the West, particularly the United States: for the first time, a generational divide has opened up between the elders who stand steadfastly by Israel and the youth who are speaking up for Palestinians. This generational battle is being fought on elite college campuses where student protests against unconditional US aid for Israel’s war on Gaza have put college presidents in the crosshairs and upended careers. Articulated in a Saidian language of anti-colonialism and Orientalism, this youth protest is more aligned with the political position of the non-West/global South than the older West/global North which views the conflict largely in terms of its own troubled history of anti-Semitism and the holocaust. What should we make of Edward Said and his legacy at this global conjuncture? How have Said’s intellectual preoccupations and political commitments shaped today’s divided discourse about the middle-east? What is the long-term impact of Said’s literary preoccupations and cultural interventions within and beyond academia?

We invite original scholarly papers for a proposed edited volume that explores the legacy of Edward Said in the wake of the current Israel-Palestine war.

While we would like to include a wide range of topics and perspectives in the edited, the following areas will be of particular interest:Said, democracy, and decolonization in the context of (de)globalization, the rise of China, great power competition

Said, zionism, and the politics of Palestine today

Said’s influence on public opinion in America/the West/other regions about the Middle East

Said’s cosmopolitanism/secularism/humanism/liberalism: scope, relevance, limits

“Orientalism” today

Said’s influence on literary and cultural studies as practiced today

Please send abstracts of 300 words, a 100-word bio, and five keywords by March 15, 2024 to

revathi.krishnaswamy@sjsu.edu

or noelle.brada-williams@sjsu.edu

Let us also know if you’d like your abstract to be considered for inclusion in a proposed special session at the 2025 annual Modern Language Association conference scheduled for 9-12 Jan in New Orleans.

Full articles of 5000-8000 words should be submitted by November 30th, 2024.

revathi.krishnaswamy@sjsu.edu

Call for Articles on The reception of literary works: between translation and paratext - Dec 2024

Poli-femo n. 28

The reception of literary works: between translation and paratext

In a complex and stratified reflection on the reception of a literary work, the role of translation occupies a central position: it often represents a first encounter with foreign literature for the reader. Analysed from the perspective of literary reception, the study of translation may be conceived as a space for linguistic, literary and historical analysis of the phenomenon of translation itself, as the analytical models developed by the group of scholars of the Tel Aviv School, especially during the 1970s, serve to remind us.

We must also consider that in the general space in which the reception of the translated text takes place, we can observe highly heterogeneous factors that affect the work from perspectives that are more or less closely related to it: there are title changes, the publication of shortened editions, and editions in translation for a young audience of works that were originally written for an adult audience. These choices have repercussions on the act of translating and on the reflections it generates on literary and aesthetic issues - from lexical contributions to stylistic changes, through genre crossings from a source literary tradition to a target literary tradition - as well as on socio-cultural issues.

This stratified and heterogeneous overview also requires the consideration of other aspects through which the publishing phenomenon and the dissemination of literary works are explored. This means focusing on phenomena and aspects of the publishing sector, but also of the commercial, material or strictly intellectual spheres, aimed at influencing, conditioning and orienting the reading and 'consumption' of literary works through their translation. These are aspects that support the translation with a parallel, accompanying discourse, which feeds the so-called paratext, through which multiple editorial, authorial, critical, and translation issues can be expressed.

If, on the one hand, every correct interpretative practice reminds us that the translated work does not enjoy a fully autonomous status because it is linked to a source text from which it is inseparable, on the other hand, the palimpsestic nature of the accompanying paratext, rich in accessory information that hybridises the translated work, is configured as a privileged literary space for the construction of a cultural reading of the translated work, an aspect that determines the manner of its reception.

Within this multifaceted and dialectic scenario, the reception of the translated literary work is the product of nodal passages, ranging from interlinguistic transposition to cultural transition, to the representation of what is perceived as "other", in the long-distance dialogue established between the imaginaries of reception and the image of the "other" of which the translated work is the symbol and expression. These are operations that, in fact, in their fulfilment, attest to the at least dual, truly hybrid nature of the literary work in translation, a hybrid nature that can be found in the meshes of the translation itself as well as in the entire paratext accompanying it, as Gérard Genette reminds us in his renowned founding study on this subject.

Reflecting on all this will make it possible to define and position a proposal for reflection on the reception of literary works, understood both as a continuation of the studies and practice of translation, and as a broader cultural reading project, in which, thanks to the voices of the paratext, we find the signs - linguistic, aesthetic, imagological - of the mentalities, ideas, and cultural universes that come into contact in different historical periods and which, through this complex system of voices, converse and produce effects at a textual level.

Topics and issues that may be addressed include:

o The material conditions of the production and dissemination of a translation: ideology, censorship, imagery

o Literary and aesthetic issues: cultural terminology, changes in style, changes in genre

o Reception and image of the "other" in the authorial paratexts of translated texts

o Editorial paratexts and communication strategies of translated texts

o Voices in translated texts: authors, translators, critics, graphic designers, as forms of authorial hybridity

o Plasticity, visual paratextuality and literary reception

o Paratextuality: between text and discourse

o Linguistic and cultural transitions in the translation process: forms of referential hybridity

o Reception of the foreign intertext as a form of poetic hybridity

o Specialist journals, literary blogs, social media and their role in the dissemination and reception of translated texts

Further proposals for study on the subject put forward by those intending to collaborate in the publication will be seriously examined by the Scientific Committee, in order to widen the field of exploration undertaken in this issue of the Magazine. Contributions will be accepted in Italian, English and French.

15%

A Handbook Of Translation Studies

₹350.00

15%

Translation Studies: Theories and Applications

₹795.00

Translation Studies An Introduction

9%

DECENTERING TRANSLATION STUDIES

₹1,075.00

25%

Studies In Translation

₹895.00

TRANSLATION STUDIES READER

INTRODUCING TRANSLATION STUDIES : THEORIES AND APPLICATIONS, 5TH EDITION

26%

Translation Studies [Paperback] ababil

₹195.00

17%

Postcolonial Translation: Theory and Practice (Translation Studies)

₹5,291.00

The Routledge Companion to Translation Studies (Routledge Companions)

To this end, the Editorial Board proposes the following deadlines: a preliminary and essential step is to send an abstract (min.10/max.20 lines), keywords and a brief curriculum vitae of the proposer, to redazione.polifemo@iulm.it by 15 March 2024 (absolute deadline).

Authors will receive confirmation of the acceptance of their contributions from the Editorial Office by 25 March 2024.

The deadline for submitting contributions is 15 June 2024.

All contributions will be subject to double blind peer review. After passing the peer-review phase, the contributions that will be accepted must be no longer than 35,000 characters in length, including spaces and footnotes.

The issue, edited by Prof. Paolo Proietti and Prof. Giovanna Zaganelli, will be published in December 2024.

andrea.chiurato@iulm.it