Paris and the Art of Transposition

Paris and the Art of Transposition
Author: Angie Chau
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 227
Release: 2023-12-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0472903926

A brief stay in France was, for many Chinese workers and Chinese Communist Party leaders, a vital stepping stone for their careers during the cultural and political push to modernize China after World War I. For the Chinese students who went abroad specifically to study Western art and literature, these trips meant something else entirely. Set against the backdrop of interwar Paris, Paris and the Art of Transposition uncovers previously marginalized archives to reveal the artistic strategies employed by Chinese artists and writers in the early twentieth-century transnational imaginary and to explain why Paris played such a central role in the global reception of modern Chinese literature and art. While previous studies of Chinese modernism have focused on how Western modernist aesthetics were adapted or translated to the Chinese context, Angie Chau does the opposite by turning to Paris in the Chinese imaginary and discussing the literary and visual artwork of five artists who moved between France and China: the painter Chang Yu, the poet Li Jinfa, the art critic Fu Lei, the painter Pan Yuliang, and the writer Xu Xu. Chau draws the idea of transposition from music theory where it refers to shifting music from one key or clef to another, or to adapting a song originally composed for one instrument to be played by another. Transposing transposition to the study of art and literature, Chau uses the term to describe a fluid and strategic art practice that depends on the tension between foreign and familiar, new and old, celebrating both novelty and recognition—a process that occurs when a text gets placed into a fresh context.

A World History of Chinese Literature

A World History of Chinese Literature
Author: Yingjin Zhang
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 553
Release: 2023-07-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1000895068

Providing a broad introduction to the area, A World History of Chinese Literature maps the field of Chinese literature across its various worlds, looking both within – at the world of Chinese literature, its history, linguistic, cultural, local, and regional specificities – and without – at the way Chinese literature has circulated throughout the world. The thematic focus allows for a broad number of key categories, such as authors, genres, genders, regions, as well as innovative explorations of new topics and issues such as inter-arts performativity and transmediation. The sections cover the circulation and reception of China in world literature, as well as the worlds of: Chinese literature across the globe Borders, oceans, and rainforests Comparative literary genres Translingual writers and scholars Gender configurations Translation and transmediation With a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first century, this collection intervenes in current debates on global Chinese literature, Sinophone and Sinoscript studies, and the production and reception of literary works by ethnic Chinese in non-Sinitic languages, as well as Anglophone literature inspired by Chinese literary tradition. It will be of interest to anyone working on or studying Chinese literature, language and culture, as well as world literatures in relation to China.

Translation and the Arts in Modern France

Translation and the Arts in Modern France
Author: Sonya Stephens
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2017-07-10
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0253026547

Translation and the Arts in Modern France sits at the intersection of transposition, translation, and ekphrasis, finding resonances in these areas across periods, places, and forms. Within these contributions, questions of colonization, subjugation, migration, and exile connect Benin to Brittany, and political philosophy to the sentimental novel and to film. Focusing on cultural production from 1830 to the present and privileging French culture, the contributors explore interactions with other cultures, countries, and continents, often explicitly equating intercultural permeability with representational exchange. In doing so, the book exposes the extent to which moving between media and codes—the very process of translation and transposition—is a defining aspect of creativity across time, space, and disciplines.

Transpositions

Transpositions
Author: Alison Rice
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2021-10-15
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1800345526

This publication benefited from the support of the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame. This collective volume concentrates on the concept of transposition, exploring its potential as a lens through which to examine recent Francophone literary, cinematic, theatrical, musical, and artistic creations that reveal multilingual and multicultural realities. The chapters are composed by leading scholars in French and Francophone Studies who engage in interdisciplinary reflections on the ways transcontinental movement has influenced diverse genres. It begins with the premise that an attentiveness to migration has inspired writers, artists, filmmakers, playwrights and musicians to engage in new forms of translation in their work. Their own diverse backgrounds combine with their awareness of the itineraries of others to have an impact on the innovative languages that emerge in their creative production. These contemporary figures realize that migratory actualities must be transposed into different linguistic and cultural contexts in order to be legible and audible, in order to be perceptible—either for the reader, the listener, or the viewer. The novels, films, plays, works of art and musical pieces that exemplify such transpositions adopt inventive elements that push the limits of formal composition in French. This work is therefore often inspiring as it points in evocative ways toward fluid influences and a plurality of interactions that render impossible any static conception of being or belonging.

Gerardo Diego’s Creation Myth of Music

Gerardo Diego’s Creation Myth of Music
Author: Judith Stallings-Ward
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 216
Release: 2020-01-29
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 100002847X

Since its publication nearly eight decades ago, the consensus among scholars about Fábula de Equis y Zeda, by the Spanish poet Gerardo Diego (1896-1987) remains unchanged: Fábula is an enigmatic avant-garde curiosity. It seems to rob the reader of the reason necessary to interpret it, even as it lures him or her ineluctably to the task; nevertheless, the present study makes the case that this work is, in fact, not inaccessible, and that what the anhelante arquitecto, intended with his masterpiece was a creation myth that explains the evolution of music in his day. This monograph unlocks the fullness of the poem ́s meaning sourced in music’s mythical consciousness and expressed in a poetic idiom that replicates aesthetic concepts and cubist strategies of form embraced by the neoclassical composers Bartok, Falla, Ravel, and Stravinsky.

Language Et Ses Contexts

Language Et Ses Contexts
Author: Pierre-Alexis Mével
Publisher: Peter Lang
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2010
Genre: Context (Linguistics)
ISBN: 9783034301282

Inspired by a postgraduate French studies conference (University of Nottingham, 10 September 2008), this volume explores linguistic form and content in relation to a variety of contexts, considering language alongside music, images, theatre, human experience of the world, and another language. Each essay asks what it is to understand language in a given context, and how, in spite of divergent expressive possibilities, a linguistic situation interacts with other contexts, renegotiating boundaries and redefining understanding. The book lies at the intersection of linguistics and hermeneutics, seeking to (a) contextualise philosophical and linguistic discussions of communication across a range of media and (b) illustrate their intimate relations, despite differing strategies or emphases. Puisant son inspiration dans un colloque de French studies pour doctorants (Université de Nottingham, 10 septembre 2008), cet ouvrage étudie forme et contenu linguistiques en relation avec différents contextes, considérant le langage conjointement avec la musique, les images, le théâtre, l'expérience du monde et un autre langage. Chaque chapitre dissèque la compréhension du langage dans un contexte donné, et se demande comment, en dépit de possibilités expressives divergentes, une situation linguistique interagit avec d'autres contextes, redessinant leurs frontières et redéfinissant la compréhension. Ce livre, situé à l'intersection entre la linguistique et l'herméneutique, a pour but de (a) contextualiser les discussions philosophiques et linguistiques sur la communication dans une gamme de médias et (b) démontrer leur relation intime, malgré des stratégies ou intentions différentes.

Translation and Transposition in the Early Modern Period

Translation and Transposition in the Early Modern Period
Author: Karen Bennett
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2023-12-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1003831354

This volume makes an important contribution to the understanding of translation theory and practice in the Early Modern period, focusing on the translation of knowledge, literature and travel writing, and examining discussions about the role of women and office of interpreter. Over the course of the Early Modern period, there was a dramatic shift in the way that translation was conceptualised, a change that would have repercussions far beyond the world of letters. At the beginning of the period, translation was largely indistinguishable from other textual operations such as exegesis, glossing, paraphrase, commentary, or compilation, and theorists did not yet think in terms of the binaries that would come to characterise modern translation theory. Just how and when this shift occurred in actual translation practice is one of the topics explored in this volume through a series of case studies offering snapshots of translational activity in different times and places. Overall, the picture that emerges is of a translational practice that is still very flexible, as source texts are creatively appropriated for new purposes, whether pragmatic, pedagogical, or diversional, across a range of genres, from science and philosophy to literature, travel writing and language teaching. This book will be of value to those interested in Early Modern history, linguistics, and translation studies.