Evoking Understanding
Ambulatory Aesthetics of Travel and the Translation of Alterities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alaner Imamoglu
Evoking the most significant ideas of the contemporary world, such as diversity, culture or identity, alterities are associated with the notion of difference which takes manifold forms to get perceptible, visible or disputable in the era of globalization. They indicate the contemporary and communicative human condition which tends to overcome alienating narratives, and create a more inclusive vision of world, a more accurate approach to understand the variation of cultural entities. Such tendency is intimately related to the fact that how the other is translated. The main challenge in this situation becomes the translation of alterities with regards to the use of words which is able to affect the definition of the difference. And as a consequence, translation of the other may become more complex, more worldly as it travels from one cultural landscape to another and thus getting shifted from its previous context to a new one. To unravel the magnitude of the mobility of concepts related to the difference, this paper takes the condition of the traveler as a state of conveyance based on the impressions, comparisons, and creative reinterpretations, and discusses how travel begets an ambulatory pattern of aesthetics to retranslate such concepts from a transnational and transcultural perspective. By referring to the travel writings produced by contemporary Turkish writers, the aim is to show to what extent the translation of alterities contributes to the transferable and extensible outlook regarding the ideas of culture and world after the transitory vision adopted during the travel lifetime.
The Importance of Inter- and Transdisciplinary Studies: Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sheila Spector
For my paper, I use Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) to illustrate the need “to broaden the scope of the humanities and creat[e] a wider critical canvas through cultural studies.” Specifically, the novel evinces a disparate array of inter- and multidisciplinary approaches, that is, “Traveling Concepts,” which require “The Transfer and Translation of Ideas [beyond] the Humanities.” Generally viewed as a bildungsroman, Lehrjahre uses the metaphor of trade guilds to trace the hero’s evolution from idealistic youth to mature adult. Although most critics believe that the novel lacks unity, the fault lies not with Goethe’s execution but readers’ expectations. In this inter- and multidisciplinary text, the basic elements of fiction - theme, structure, and plot - are all associated with Goethe’s non-literary pursuits. The theme derives from his scientific studies, in particular his essay "On the Metamorphosis of Plants," which led to his assumption of an Urphänomen, a comprehensive whole towards which individual instances strive. Next, the structure incorporates elements of Western Esotericism, especially the Neoplatonic concept of emanation, given concrete form by the kabbalistic Sefirot, the divine potencies through which creation was supposedly effected. Finally, the plot of each chapter is designed to fulfill Rasa, the Sanskrit theory that each component of a text should evoke in the audience an intended emotional state. In sum, as completed, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre is a fully conceived text that synthesizes at least three distinct knowledge domains into a dynamic unity that supersedes conventional disciplinary boundaries.
The First African World Novel and Encyclopedic Narrative: Thomas Mofolo's 'Chaka' (1925)
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sonja Loots
This paper interprets Thomas Mofolo's precolonial African novel Chaka as an “encyclopedic narrative”, a genre theorised by Edward Mendelson in his controversial 1976 framework and redefined by various other critics since. My reading considers the ways in which this novel, originally written in Sesotho and published in 1925 by a missionary press of the Paris Evangelical Missionary, rewrites and translates traveling concepts associated with European enlightenment and the encyclopedic tradition. My reading of “the first African novel”, as it has been called, reflects on the ways in which Mofolo disrupts Anglo-American interpretations and reinterpretations of “encyclopedic narrative”. I argue that Mofolo’s literary experimentation with the encyclopedic genre was deliberate and should be read against the backdrop of its embeddedness in the historical context of mission literacy and literary activities that introduced Mofolo and his contemporaries to multiple, global audiences and markets alongside local ones.
