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Postmodern Literary Theory and Translation

by

Martha Pulido
Graduate Programme on Literary and Humanistic Translation August 2004

Based on:

Niall Lucy Postmodern Literary Theory Blackwell, Oxford 1997


and

Collier and Geyer-Ryan (ed.) Literary Theory Today Polity


Press, Cambridge, U.K. 1992

Questions we shall discuss:


What is literature?
What is the value of a literary work? What is a text? What is a translated text?

What is an author? What is a translator?


How influential are concepts like otherness,

poststructuralism, postcolonial studies for the practice of translation?

Literary Theory has tried to answer the question: What is Literature?


In postmodern world, literature is just another text.

For Roland Barthes: A Text is self-conscious and productive. The Text is an activity of production that is endless.

Barthes makes the difference between:


An answering work (modernism)
A questioning text (postmodernism): a text that never stops producing itself as textuality; a text that never ceases to be a question; that is inexhaustibly questioning and questionable; Isnt it the definiton of a translated Text?

Modernism
Characterized by a Absence of authorial

loss of faith. Human sensibility has been destroyed by industrialized mass culture. Multiple points of view. Discontinous narrative Fragmentary structure

centre. Experiments with textual means (work) The most famous of these is Stream-ofconsciousness. From meaning-tosay to meaning-asplay

Postmodernism
Everything is a text Literary Studies

as differentiated from a work. Denying special value to literary texts. Nothing is central. Texts are assemblages of surface. Meaning-as-play.

should be seen as the pragmatics of writing. Such an object is closer to a text. A text that allows pragmatics to be understood as ethics.

For Lyotard (The Postmodern


Condition):
Postmodernism is: rule producing
as opposed to rule imitating.

Postmodern theory is always: postmodern literary theory


even when it is about
architecture television...

as it privileges the auto-poesic text over all

others

For Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy:


Postmodernism in Literature means That

something new, which is:


the literary absolute or the absolute of literature, that is
poiesy production process inspiration

The Death of History The Death of Criticism The Death of Theory

The Death of History


For language to have meaning, culture has

to have value and history have to matter: But, history is a lie by which culture disguises the fact of its naturally savage interests and practices in the name of human progress and welfare. Then it cannot be possible to have faith in the power of language to convey plain truth.

The absence of history as a metanarrative gives rise to:


The dehistorization of contexts
The reconception of: literary texts knowledges signs The production of something new

(romanticism).

The Death of Criticism


Quixote imitating Amadis of Gaul
Cervantes pretending to be the Cid Hamete

Benengeli Alonso Quijano pretending to be Don Quixote Pierre Mnard pretending to substitute Cervantes

The Death of Criticism


Texts are more than writing due to the

multimedia possibilities. Literature then, cannot be regarded as a stable structure. Any literary text cannot be exhausted by any act of reading or interpretation. Literature has no essence.

The Death of Theory


To apprehend the aesthetic value of

literature
theory is an obstacle if it pretends to be prescriptive: it obstructs the passage to a love or a feeling for the aesthetic.

For Foucault
Theory is an art

Politics is an art
Ethics is an art (a practice of Concept Creation)

Pragmatics is an ethics they require skills on how to proceed; they require certain judgment as opposed to determining laws; dispersion as opposed to synthesis; from the what to the how.

What is an ethical decision in translation?


It is an aesthetic and/or textual practice
It is both appreciation and obligation If through translation we can show how it is

possible to appreciate the cultural values of literature we are thus engaged in a social practice. Such an ethics is based on the knowledge that every system is dysfunctional.

What is then a text?


A text is an assemblage, not an essence, that relates theory and pragmatics establishing relations with history, politics and society?

What is then a translated text?


A translated text is an assemblage, not an essence, that relates theory of translation and pragmatics of translation, establishing relations with the historical, political and sociological context of the text, and establishing relations with the history of translation, the politics of translation and the sociological context of translation?

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