Summers Examining Text and Authorship in Translation

What Remains of Christa Wolf?
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-3-319-40183-6
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland
Format: PDF
Kopierschutz: 1 - PDF Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 268 Seiten

Reihe: Progress in Mathematics

This book, the first in-depth study of authorship in translation, explores how authorial identity is 'translated' in the literary text.  In a detailed exploration of the writing of East German author Christa Wolf in English translation, it examines how the work of translators, publishers, readers and reviewers reframes the writer's identity for a new reading public. This detailed study of Wolf, an author with a complex and contested public profile, intervenes in wide-ranging contemporary debates on globalised literary culture by examining how the fragmented identity of the 'international' author is contested by different stakeholders in the construction of a world literature. The book is interdisciplinary in its approach, representing new work in Translation Studies and German Studies that is also of interest and relevance to scholars of literature in other languages.


Caroline Summers is Lecturer in Comparative Literary Translation at the University of Leeds, UK. Her research focuses on the literary text as an object of cultural exchange and on the construction of authorial identities through literary translation, especially the status of the text as a point of intersection between the activities of different agents in the translation process.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Summers, Caroline

Inhaltsverzeichnis

1;Acknowledgements;6
1.1;© Caroline Summers, 2016;7
1.2;Permissions;7
2;Contents;9
3;List of Abbreviations;10
4;List of Figures;12
5;List of Tables;13
6;1: Introduction;14
6.1; Es geht (doch) um Christa Wolf;14
6.2; Wolf in English Translation;21
6.3; What Remains? Understanding Wolf’s Anglophone Authorship;27
7;2: Understanding Translated Authorship;35
7.1; Narrating Authorship in Translation;39
7.1.1; Types of Narrative: The Personal, the Institutional and the Abstract;40
7.1.1.1; Personal Narratives: Stories of the Individual or the Self;41
7.1.1.2; Institutional Narratives;43
7.1.1.3; Abstract Narratives;46
7.1.2; Features of Narrative: Relation and Selection;49
7.1.2.1; Temporal and Causal Relationships;50
7.1.2.2; Selection, Emphasis and Exclusion;55
7.2; Framing Authorship: Texts, Peritexts and Epitexts;58
7.2.1; Textual Framing: Narrative Voice;59
7.2.2; Paratextual Framing;64
7.3; Towards a New Understanding of Translated Authorship;68
8;3: The Subjective Narrator: Nachdenken über Christa T.;70
8.1; Nachdenken über Christa T.;73
8.2; “Contemporaneousness”: Narrative Time and Space;78
8.2.1; Temporal Specificity: Isolating Christa in the Past;81
8.2.2; Spatial Universality: Framing Christa in Supra-national Narratives;87
8.3; “Engagement”: Narrative Level;94
8.3.1; Stabilising the Narrator’s Extradiegetic Authority: Explicitation;96
8.3.2; Unifying the Language of the Narrative Voice: The Loss of Heteroglossia;100
8.4; “Depth”: Narrative Person;105
8.4.1; Focalisation Through Erlebte Rede;109
8.4.2; Focalisation Through Mimetic Language;115
8.5; Conclusion: From Subjective Authenticity to Authentic Subjectivity?;119
9;4: The Author as Feminist: Kassandra;123
9.1; Framing Wolf as a Feminist;139
9.1.1; Journalistic Epitexts and Narratives of “Feminism”;141
9.1.2; Scholarly Epitexts: A Narrative of Female Germanistik;144
9.1.3; Factual Epitexts: Wolf and a Dissident Narrative of “Women Writers”;149
9.2; Losing the Third Way? Consequences of Framing Wolf as a Feminist;157
9.2.1; Framing Wolf’s Protagonists as Fictional Figures;158
9.2.2; “East or West Makes Little Difference Here”: From Socialist Humanism to Feminist Pacifism;163
9.3; Feminist Poetics and the Hypertext: Karen Malpede’s Cassandra;167
10;5: Politics, Morality and Aesthetics: Two Translations of Was bleibt;171
10.1; The Periodical as Overt Author(ity): Granta;178
10.1.1; External Peritexts: Front and Back Covers;181
10.1.2; Internal Peritexts;185
10.1.3; Periodical Contributions as Peritexts;194
10.1.4; The “Granta Effect” on Wolf’s Anglophone Author-Function;200
10.2; The Publisher as Covert Author(ity): Farrar Straus Giroux and Virago;203
10.2.1; External Peritexts: Front and Back Covers;204
10.2.2; The Publisher’s Internal Peritexts;214
10.2.3; “Other Stories” as Peritexts;218
10.2.4; The Power of the Publisher’s Narrative of Authorship;222
10.3; Visible and Invisible Authorities: Constructing Authorship in the Peritexts;223
11;6: Conclusion: What Remains?;226
11.1; Narrating Authorship: Looking Beyond Christa Wolf;231
12;Bibliography;238
12.1;Christa Wolf’s Texts in German;238
12.2;Christa Wolf’s Texts in English Translation;238
12.3;Secondary Sources and Paratexts;240
13;Index;261