Are you still looking for a class for the Spring 2024 Semester?
Why not consider English 208S: Novels in Translation, “Lost in Translation? Contemporary and Popular Novels in Translation,” taught by Eun-hae Kim? Kim shared what their students should expect from the course:
Without translation, English speakers would be deprived of the pleasures of reading classics like The Odyssey and watching international shows like Squid Game. Unlike other artistic modes like painting and music, literature depends on translation to circulate worldwide. Yet, translation is usually sidelined as the invisible counterpart to literature. In this course, we will bring translation back to the center of debates on contemporary literature as we explore the key ethical, social, and political questions animating the practice of translation. What does it mean for a novel to get “lost in translation”? Or does a novel gain something in translation? Can translation be conceived as a creative and interpretive act? How does translation complicate the national categorizations of literature? Why do certain books get translated at the cost of others?
To answer these questions, we will read various recent novels written by authors worldwide. We will engage with rises in global bestsellers such as Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend (2011, Italian), which claims that the English translation enhances Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem (2008, Chinese); charges of mistranslation surrounding Han Kang’s International Booker Prize winner, The Vegetarian (2007, Korean); deployments of strategic exoticism in Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red (2001, Turkish); and experiments of a multilingual and vernacular novel in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007, English-Spanglish). Secondary material will include TV series adaptations (Netflix’s Three-Body Problem and HBO’s My Brilliant Friend), translators’ commentaries, and philosophical essays. This course integrates literary and translation studies to enable us to become attentive readers and informed and empowered agents who can influence global cultural production.
This course meets English majors’ Criticism, Theory, or Methodology requirements.
Or consider English 390S W. G. Sebald and Bernardine Evaristo: Lives in the Long Duration taught by Professor Corina Stan?
Professor Stan description of what she envisions and has planned for the course:
Is there a more gratifying intellectual pleasure than immersing oneself in the entire body of work of a brilliantly imaginative, knowledgeable, and wise author? Perhaps pairing two such authors, reading them side by side, and engaging in conversation with them—in writing, figuring out what we think about their worlds, in a friendly community of research and writerly exchange and collaboration. In this seminar designed for advanced students passionate about literature, research, and writing, we are going to read most of the novels, as well as poetry and some nonfiction, by two exquisite writers who engage with themes of cultural and personal memory, history, and human life in the long duration: W. G. Sebald (1944-2001) and Bernardine Evaristo (b. 1959). While familiarizing ourselves with their (very different) sensibilities and archives, we’ll piece together not only their respective literary careers but also their conjoined, thus expanded, vision of European history, as shaped by colonialism, wars, Nazism, and the Holocaust, migration, decolonization, and various reckonings with the past. Sebald and Evaristo share a keen interest in visual art and have been the subjects of documentaries.
Rather than split the syllabus into two separate units, one dedicated to each author, we’ll move back and forth between their creative worlds. We’ll read and analyze Sebald’s novels Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001), selections from After Nature (1988) and On the Natural History of Destruction (1999), poems from For Years Now (2001), Unrecounted (2003) and Across the Land and the Water (2008). While immersed in his perambulatory texts, we’ll reflect on his insights into visual art and his use of photography.
Whereas Sebald’s explorations are mostly continental European, Evaristo’s work reflects her extended family’s rich heritage (English, Irish, and German on her mother’s side, Brazilian and Nigerian on her father’s) as well as her interest in the African diaspora and the presence of Black people in Europe since Roman times. In addition to her novels, some of them in verse, The Emperor’s Babe (2001), Soul Tourists (2005), Blonde Roots (2008), Lara (1997, exp. 2009), and Girl, Woman, Other (2014), we’ll engage with her 2021 memoir Manifesto: On Never Giving Up, her essay Look Again: Feminism (2021, on the representation of women of color in British art), and a selection of writings on the theater.
This course meets the Modern & Contemporary requirement for English Majors.
