Translating Laurence Louppe

In the light of the increasing corporatisation of academic publishing in English, this paper draws on my experience of translating French critic Laurence Louppe's Poétique de la danse contemporaine (Brussels, 1997) into English (Dance Books, forthcoming 2010) to reflect cross-linguistically upon the need to maintain a diversity of linguistic perspectives and resources in dance commentary. Just as the dancer and the choreographer use each other to learn from the “translation” that their respective bodies and moves represent for each other, so the process of textual translation can provoke a more acute awareness of issues regarding the relationship between language and the complexities of dance experiences. Louppe emphasises that one of the insights of contemporary dance has been that “the body” is not simply a support for verbal language but can have its own, different, communicative modalities. In the light of this, Louppe's own literary poetics seeks in return to mine the etymological layers of her language – and to activate its anthropological roots in sensuous existence. My article discusses the conceptual resources upon which Louppe draws, including those drawn from the modern dance heritage, her own philosophical erudition and literary poetics, and the resources specific to the French language (as these emerge through my perspective from within English) in order to articulate issues of change, corporeality and mobility. This discussion is undertaken in relation to specific terminological and metaphorical examples and makes comparisons with the writings of Isadora Duncan.

'Hidden differences : new meanings in adaptations of literature to the screen'

Approaches to screen adaptation which either accept or reject 'fidelity' effectively hide from view the interrelations of difference that can be observed between literary and visual works of art. Further, comparative reading of a literary precursor and its screen adaptation alone hides from view the interrelations of difference between those and other works. By focussing on difference, screen adaptations can be viewed and read together with literary precursors and other intertextual influences to produce new stories that would otherwise remain hidden. This method of textual analysis, 'differential reading', is explained by reference to three screen adaptations, clustered around themes of unrequited love and rejection, which illustrate general insights into theoretical issues. When viewed and read together, differences can be observed between these works which produce new meanings. When one switches between the possibilities such new meanings create, views of the world embedded in the respective works are destabilised.

Concessivity in scholarly prose : an intercultural study

Miscommunication has always intrigued researchers in and outside linguistics. This book takes a different perspective from what has been proposed so far and postulates a case for intercultural miscommunication as a linguistically-based phenomenon in various intercultural milieus. The contributions address cases of intercultural miscommunication in potentially confrontational contexts, like professional communities of practice, intercultural differences in various English-speaking countries, political discourse, classroom discourse, or the discourse of the past. The frameworks employed include cultural scripts, critical discourse analysis, lexicographic analysis, glosses of untranslatable terms, and diachronic pragmatics. The book shows the omnipresence of miscommunication, ranging from everyday exchanges through classroom discourse, professional encounters, to literary contexts and political debates, past and present.

Controlling the philosophical imaginary: reading Pierre Hadot with Luiz Costa Lima

This essay proffers a critical complement to Luiz Costa Lima's claims concerning the nature, history, and control of the imagination in Western culture. Accepting the wide scope of Costa Lima's critical claim about the socio-political control of imaginative literature in Western history, we claim that Pierre Hadot's work on philosophy as a bios in the ancient West cautions us lest we position philosophy in this history as always and necessarily an agency of control. At different times, philosophy has rather stood as an ally in practicing and promoting forms of criticity, and the playful, creative, and transformative envisaging of alternative ways of experiencing the world Costa Lima theoretically celebrates in literary fiction. Any critique of philosophy as always opposed to the critical imagination can only stand, we have argued, relative to philosophy as conceived on what Hadot suggests is but one, albeit the now hegemonic model: namely, as a body of systematic rational discourses, including discourses about the literary, poetics, and imaginary. What this vision of philosophy misses, Hadot shows, is how the ancient conception of philosophy (which survives in figures like Montaigne, Nietzsche, and Goethe) as a way of life promoted distinctly literary, aesthetic, and imaginative practices; first, to assist in the existential internalisation of the schools' ideas; secondly, to envisage in the sage and utopias edifying counterfactuals to help students critically reimagine accepted norms; and thirdly, in the conception of a transformed way of living and perceiving ‘according to nature’, whose parameters of autonomy and pleasurable contemplation of the singularity of the present experiences anticipate the experiences delineated in modern aesthetic theory.

Archipelago: a journey across poetic islands of the self

 Paul Venzo's thesis is a poetic response to the author's relationship with Venice and the Veneto. It comprises a manuscript of poetry in English and Italian and an exegesis exploring aspects of the poet's creative practice, including translation, writing in place and intersections with literary history and form.

Reframing the turn: toward an ethical poetics of eco-elegy & The Counterpart (an excerpted novel)

 This practice-led thesis, comprising of an excerpted literary novel and an extended theoretical essay, explores the relations between ethics, elegy and ecology, and proposes a framework for rethinking an ethical poetics of eco-elegy.

Post: 9/11: hidden pedagogy: the positional forces of pedagogy in Victoria, Australia

This qualitative study charts the lived narratives of twelve participants, six teachers and six students from urban and rural Victoria, Australia. The study examines in detail the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’. 9/11 has become accepted shorthand for September 11th 2001, in which terrorist attacks took place in the United States of America. The attacks heralded a ‘post- 9/11 world, [in which] threats are defined more by the fault lines within societies than by the territorial boundaries between them’ (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks, 2011, p. 361). The study is embedded in the values that have come to the fore in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and the ideological shifts that have occurred globally. These values and ideologies are reflected via issues of culture and consumption. In education this is particularly visible through pedagogy. The research employs a multimethodological (Esteban-Guitart, 2012) form of inquiry through the use of bricolage (Kincheloe & Berry, 2004) which is comprised at the intersectional points of critical pedagogy (Kincheloe, 2008b), public pedagogy (Sandlin, Schultz, & Burdick, 2010b) and cultural studies (Hall, Hobson, Lowe, & Willis, 1992). This study adopts a critical ontological perspective, and is grounded in qualitative research approaches (Lather & St. Pierre, 2013). The methods of photo elicitation, artefact analysis, video observation and semi-structured interviews are used to critically examine the ways in which teacher and student identities are shaped by the pedagogies of contemporary schooling, and how they form common sense understandings of the world and themselves, charting possibilities between accepted common sense beliefs and 21st century neoliberal capitalism. The research is presented through a prototypical form of literary journalism and intertextuality which examines the interrelationship between teaching and social worlds exposing the hidden influence of enculturation and addressing the question ‘How do teachers teach, post 9/11?’

The unhallowed art : literature and literary fakes in Australia

The fiction of Peter Carey is peopled by the unhallowed; by ghosts and the ghostly. In Bliss (1981), Carey presents us with the Dantesque trials of an advertising executive after he has a heart attack on his front lawn. In The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith (1994), phantom nations are inhabited by simulacra. In True History of the Kelly Gang (2001), a dead bushranger talks. Carey's My Life as a Fake (2003), the subject of this essay, gives us an apotheosis of this literary habit of bringing the unliving to life. It presents us with the flesh-and-blood, machete-wielding, gladiatorial figure of Bob McCorkle, a poet created as a literary hoax.