Reflections and Representations
Street View of a Story: Immersing Students in the Study of World Literature Using My Google Maps
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rachel Smydra
This paper shares the student experience from a research study that employed an active learning approach in a World Literature course. While reading a short story, students used My Google Maps to create their own original maps based on their experiences with a story’s historical, cultural, and political underpinnings. Employing the Google platform’s tools, which includes images, links, and text boxes for example, students simulated walking the streets to construct a visual element that facilitated a deeper understanding of the story’s setting and theme. The immersive experience not only expanded students’ knowledge and understanding about the interconnections humans share across time and space, but they also exited the course with an enhanced global and cultural awareness and stronger critical thinking skills.
Translating Unruly Weathers: Two Artworks in the World Weather Network
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Janine Randerson
Many creative practitioners seek new ways to articulate and collectively cope with rising weather turbulence. Sound-orientated artworks enable intimate listening with the cyclonic winds and heated atmosphere across Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, the Southern Pacific Ocean. This paper focuses on two artworks from Aotearoa New Zealand as active translators of unruly Twenty-First Century weather. The collaborative artwork Koea ō Tāwhirimatea - Weather Choir (Breath of Weather collective, 2022-2023), and MĀKŪ, te hā o Haupapa: Moisture, the breath of Haupapa (Bull, Randerson, Shearer et al. 2022-2024) are catalysts for eco-poetic activism, pulling in ancient cosmologies of wind and weather. They attune and amplify our perceptions of meteorological forces. Indigenous (Moana, Polynesian) names for the winds, harmonic and aharmonic sound recordings offer alternative modalities of representation to scientific quantification or televised spectacle. This paper builds on my experience as curator and artist in the World Weather Network (WWN), a distributed online network for artists, performers and writers to share their many weathers. The WWN web and mobile platform convenes artists’ ‘Weather Reports’ (including the aforementioned artworks), enabling concepts to travel amongst a network of 28 small arts organisations from disparate continents and archipelagos. The research draws on Anthropologist Tim Ingold's sense of co-mingling with the environment (2007), echoing Michel Serres (1985) philosophy of mingled bodies. I suggest that this sense of embodied being with the weather resonates with Māori concepts of environmental ancestry (Marsden 2003). Artists' cultural instruments sensorially voice the wind, letting it be, unsettling the primacy of human phenomenological experience.
My Chief Business Therefore as a Translator…: Striving for the English Anatomical and Surgical Body in the Early XVIII and XIX Centuries
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cosimo Calabrò
In this paper, I focus on two translators’ prefaces introducing two seminal anatomical and surgical works published in Britain in 1733 and 1814, respectively. The first one is written by the physician George Douglas, (?-1737), whose translation of Jacques-Bénigne Winsløw’s (1669-1760) Exposition anatomique de la structure du corps humain, (1732), was published as Anatomical exposition of the structure of the human body in 1733. The second is written by the surgeon John Henry Wishart (1781 – 1834), whose translation of Antonio Scarpa’s (1752–1832) Sull'ernie. Memorie anatomico chirurgiche, (1809), was published as A Treatise on Hernia in 1814. By comparing both prefaces and a selection of their original and translated excerpts, I interrogate the extent to which anatomical and surgical lexica was uniform between two languages and if uniformity was possible or even desired. I also analyze when and how different translator strategies were implemented to accurately transfer knowledge to specific readers with very different pedagogical and procedural needs. Ultimately, the resulting translations were the product of a complex linguistic and scientific reflection that began with the highlighting of the perceived strengths and limitations of both source and targeted languages and included a comparative analysis of Classical rhetoric, notions of textual organization and a novel nomenclature only partially displayed. It was in this linguistic topological space that the quest for the most accurate English anatomical and surgical body continued to be written.
