Gender, Ethnicity, Class: Literary and Cultural Representation in English
Summary
This course explores the representation of gender, ethnicity, and social class, mainly in literary texts in English and some of their translations, through a theoretical perspective that includes different approaches within Translation Studies and Reception Studies.
What Do We Study
The course starts from a multidisciplinary theoretical approach articulated around the approaches of the Cultural Turn (Bassnett, Lefevere, Tymozcko, Venuti), the Sociology of Translation (Bourdieu), paratextuality (Genette), censorship in translation and Reception Studies.
These theoretical contents are applied to the analysis and comparison of translations into Spanish and/or Catalan carried out in the 20th and 21st centuries from authors in English language from different contexts and historical periods. In addition to Charlotte Brontë, Louisa May Alcott, Rosamond Lehmann, Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville West, and Sandra Cisneros, students suggest translations of texts originally written in English that examine the treatment of gender, ethnicity, and social class.
Which is the Line of Thought
The theoretical background that informs the course is based on the so-called "Cultural Turn" in Translation Studies. This is completed with Bourdieu’s sociology applied to the analysis of the agents involved in the translation activity. Likewise, the study of paratextuality and censorship complete the examination of the works in their reception contexts.
Theoretical and Practical Approaches
Each of the course’s sections comprises its own theoretical bibliography and a selection of texts in English and translations that will be analyzed.
Bassnett, Susan. “Preface to the Third Edition”. Translation Studies. 1980. Routledge, 2003, p. 1-10.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital”. Handbook of Theory of Research for the Sociology of Education. Edició de J. E. Richardson. Translated by Richardson Nice. Greenword Press, 1986, p. 46-58.
Curry Jansen, Sue. Censorship. The Knot That Binds Power and Knowledge. Oxford University Press, 1991.
Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. 1987. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Wolf, Michaela, & Alexandra Fukari, eds. “Introduction”. Constructing a Sociology of Translation. John Benjamins, 2007, p. 1-36.