Book Reviews by Thomas Beebee
Comparative Literature Studies, 2016
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Papers by Thomas Beebee
Revista chilena de literatura, Nov 1, 2023
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De Gruyter eBooks, Sep 10, 2018
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Boydell & Brewer eBooks, Jun 17, 2019
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Palgrave Macmillan eBooks, Feb 19, 2014
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Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2012
The Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages (1983; Amour bilingue) uses the ve... more The Moroccan writer Abdelkebir Khatibi’s Love in Two Languages (1983; Amour bilingue) uses the vehicular restriction of French to represent a polylingual reality and moment of indecision between French and Arabic languages and cultures as it plays itself out in the mind of the Maghrebine protagonist/narrator of this transmesis. Of the several texts considered in this book, Khatibi’s supplies the most explicit links between the act of translation and the situation of the “postcolonial subject.” I read this transmesis as a companion piece especially to Khatibi’s critical work published in the same year, Maghreb pluriel, but also to his art and literary criticism. In Maghreb pluriel, Khatibi characterizes Orientalism as an immense translation project that seeks to transfer univocality and that therefore cannot tolerate the untranslatable. The untranslatable, in defiance, becomes the hero of Amour bilingue.
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Journal of foreign languages and cultures, Jun 28, 2022
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Anq-a Quarterly Journal of Short Articles Notes and Reviews, Apr 1, 1988
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Palgrave Macmillan US eBooks, 2012
This brief epigraph contains many interrelated themes associated with the writer Jorge Luis Borge... more This brief epigraph contains many interrelated themes associated with the writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986): the cultic and occultic nature of literature, writing as transcription and archive, the message in cipher whose deferred meaning appears only “after the fact,” and in mistranslation. In his critical writings, Borges mentions Aristotle on several occasions, frequently in opposition to Plato. But the most poignant mentioning is through another, through a man who became known as the Commentator to medieval Europe just as Aristotle was known there as the Philosopher: Ibn Rushd, aka Averroes, protagonist of the story “Averroes’s Search” (“La busca de Averroes”; hereinafter AS).1 The story first appeared in the magazine El Sur in 1947 before being collected in El Aleph (1949). AS incorporates the themes of both translation and mimesis and brings them into conjunction and conflict by making translation depend upon the translator’s total conversion to the culture of the original. Failing that conversion, as happens in this story, both translation and mimesis fail, and the incomprehensible “message” is passed on wrapped in a black box.
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Comparative Literature Studies, 2006
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University of Hawaii Press eBooks, Dec 18, 2017
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Choice Reviews Online, Jan 21, 2015
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Goethe Yearbook
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The Encyclopedia of the Novel, 2010
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Transmesis, 2012
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Transmesis
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Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2013
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Transmesis
Were Gayatri Spivak to read Willard van Orman Quine’s Word and Object, or his other relevant writ... more Were Gayatri Spivak to read Willard van Orman Quine’s Word and Object, or his other relevant writings on translation, she might be compelled to add him, on the basis of his famous “gavagai” example and the transmesis he composes in order to explain it, to her list of the excoriated foundational. That is, the notion of unknown language that calls for “radical translation,” as defined in the epigraph, can be taken as analogous to Kant’s extreme of humanity. The speakers of Jungle, as Quine calls the unknown language that produces a single lexical item, join the New Hollanders and Firelanders at the extreme edge of humanity. What they lack, however, is not material culture— they could, as I will show in what follows, just as well be space aliens trying to explain their incredibly advanced technology to us earthlings—but rather cognates with Western languages, which, as noted above, along with shared culture serve to disguise the indeterminacy of all translation. Quine wishes to use his one-word example to demonstrate the following thesis about translation: “[M]anuals for translating one language into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with the totality of speech dispositions, yet incompatible with one another” (Word and Object 27). The term speech disposition is important, for it encapsulates a behaviorist view of language that linguistic utterances are responses to stimuli from a variety of sources.
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Book Reviews by Thomas Beebee
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