Language Links
The Androcentrism of Gender Neutrality: Attempted Introduction of Pronominal Gender ne/she in Armenian View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rafik Santrosyan
Most Indo-European (IE) languages are gendered with a different degree of grammaticalisation of gender. Modern English grammaticalises gender for the pronoun in the form of he, she, and it. On the other end of the gender spectrum, Armenian, a separate branch of the IE family, is epicene. That is, it does not grammaticalise gender even for the pronoun, embedding an indeterminate antecedent in a single pronoun նա [na]. While most gendered IE languages are pressured to adopt strategies of neutralizing grammatical gender and introducing epicene pronouns, Armenian has historically attempted the opposite by introducing a feminitive pronoun. By examining primary historical Armenian texts with feminizing pronouns as well as current scholarship on gender neutral or inclusive language, the paper argues that both attempts of gender neutralization and gendering of the language are predicated upon the same premise, that is, the male-centered use of language.
Translating the Victorians: An Interdisciplinary Pedagogical Approach to Time, Space, Narrative, and Disease View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Darby Wood Walters
What might the Victorians have to say that would be of use to current pre-health students from America? And why would such a conversation necessarily be couched in terms of narrative? This project attempts to answer such questions in the context of a newly designed, six-week study abroad program from the University of Florida that brings undergraduates to London and Edinburgh. Entitled “Health Disparities and Health Charities,” the program serves students who are interested in the relationship between past health inequities and current health policy. I use this program as a case study to explore pedagogical techniques for building connections between the catastrophic epidemics, pervasive endemics, and changing etiologies of disease in the nineteenth century and current views towards health policy in the wake of COVID-19. Students create narratives about the changing time and space of disease over the last several centuries, but also analyze how the Victorians created their own narratives of disease and how these compare to current narratives. They design multimodal “Thick Maps” that examine current health practices as a continuation of the geographical spaces and demographics of the past. Beyond the context of study abroad programs, I suggest that current students, even in pre-professional programs that often minimize the study of the humanities, can benefit from examining their disciplines through historical contexts and specifically through the analysis and creation of narrative, which as Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope informs us, must necessarily involve the study of time and space.
The Original versus Translations over the Years: Faithful Copies or Translators' Interpretations?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Dybiec
The paper is devoted to the issue of changes in translations of emotive language on the basis of Charles Dickens’s two Christmas books: The Chimes (1844) and The Cricket on the Hearth (1845) and all their Polish renditions. This study is a comparative analysis of the selected emotive phrases and lexemes naming and expressing feelings which were observed in retranslations. It emphasises stylistic and linguistic differences which can be observed in a detailed comparative analysis of emotive linguistic markers in the Polish translation series. The oldest translations differ from the contemporary translations in terms of emotional expressions. In particular, the presenter focuses on the history of Dickens's selected Christmas books' translations, emotional load and various stylistic devices (hypocoristics, archaisms) used to depict emotions in different times by translators. The author tries to answer the question if expression of emotions in translation changes over time and in what way.
“Gazing Unflinchingly” into Black Waters: Anamorphosis and Afropessimism in J.M.W. Turner’s Slave Ship View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Emily Beckler
After the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, Afropessimist theories have gained academic and cultural traction. Afropessimism pushes back against Humanist universalism to contend that the Black person is denied access to full status of “human” subjectivity; instead, Afropessimism offers a conception of the social reality of the world as structured upon Black social death. In this paper, I take up what Frank B. Wilderson III, a prominent Afropessimist theorist, describes as “burn[ing] the ship … from the inside out,” exploring how an anamorphic experience for a Black subject could lead to a dissolution of this social death and a radical restructuring of the world. I apply Wilderson’s conception of Afropessimism, as outlined in his memoir of the same name, to J.M.W. Turner’s 1840 painting Slave Ship, examining this painting as an example of Lacanian anamorphosis. I outline how the undercurrent of racist violence within the painting, revealed only as a viewer steps in closer to examine the murky waters of the painting’s depths, functions as “the abyss” for both nonblack and Black viewers. Although Wilderson claims that his theory offers no solutions or concrete praxis, I bear down on the hopeful thread of “burning” which weaves through the second half of his memoir, arguing that for the Black viewer of Slave Ship, an encounter with this “abyss” of Black suffering can lead to a transformative shattering of subjectivity—interrogating what it means to be “human” altogether.
