28 Feb

Posted at 11:35h in Calls

Koç University Mustafa V. Koç Maritime Archaeology Research Center (KUDAR) and The Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII) offer a short-term fellowship focusing on connections between the Byzantine and Nordic worlds Applications, including include a cover letter, curriculum vitae with list of publications and other scholarly work, and the names of two referees, should be submitted to sriiapplication@gmail.com by the 15th of March 2023. The expected starting date is in April 2023.

28 Feb

Posted at 11:13h in Calls

The KOINet pleased to announce the workshop The Language of Violence, which will take place from the 10th till the 12th of April 2024 in Visby (Gotland/Sweden). Papers from humanities and sciences that can provide example of expressing, experiencing or witnessing violence are welcome. Send the lecture title, a 250-word abstract in English and additional discussion-relevant reading material of a maximum of 12 pages (primary sources only) with key questions for reading as well as a short CV to koinet@aegyp.fak12.uni-muenchen.de by the 15th of April 2023. 

14 Feb

Posted at 13:16h in Announcements

The members of the Retracing Connections programme express their deepest condolences to everyone who lost their loved ones in the recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, as well as their firmest solidarity with everyone affected by these tragic events. While the rescue efforts continue and the care for the survivors only begins, we feel the responsibility to call upon the academic and international community to give support and show solidarity with all the victims.

The stories that we work on daily have been written, translated or transmitted in the regions that now lie under rubble. We honor this land’s past by keeping its present custodians in mind and by not neglecting their calls for help. We stand with them in mourning the departed and in providing a dignified life to the survivors. We commit to hearing, remembering and diffusing their stories, lest they be muted and forgotten.

We invite the affected friends and colleagues to reach out and ask for our help and support. 

We urge the international community to provide urgent help to those in need!  You can find some organizations to donate to here, here, or here.

14 Feb

Posted at 12:17h in Uncategorized

Our warmest congratulations to our advisory board member Karin Kukkonen (University of Oslo), who has received an ERC Consolidator Grant for the research project JEUX – Literary Games, Poetics and the Early-Modern Novel . The project offers a valuable continuation of Karin’s previous work on the early modern novel by investigating how literary games in the French seventeenth-century salons contributed to establishing the novel as a genre. The project will combine a more traditional literary approach with anthropology and creative writing and, among other things, make students engage in some of these 400 years-old games. Anyone interested in not only the early history of the novel, but also narrative processes at large, are advised to keep an eye on this fascinating project.

We take this opportunity to recommend two of Karin’s recent books: 4E Cognition and Eighteenth-Century Fiction: How the Novel Found its Feet (2019) and (co-authored with Marco Caracciolo) With Bodies: Narrative Theory and Embodied Cognition (2021). Both are must-reads for anyone interested in cognitive narratology and literature.

You can read an interview with Karin Kukkonen and Gry Oftedal here (in Norwegian). 

24 Jan

Posted at 18:56h in Into the Storyworlds

Last spring, our research programme reading group focused on translation theory and translation studies, reading our way through a rather long list of essays, articles and books. One of them was Jacques Derrida’s “Des tours de Babel” (1985), in which Derrida dwells on the problems that translation causes: the confusion of language and its changing meanings. The biblical account of the tower of Babel is used as an example or image of this confusion. Derrida’s essay is difficult to read, marked by irony and in itself rather confusing, but one important point is that God’s destruction of the tower creates the need for language to be translated, while at the same time making it impossible to be translated. And the word Babel is itself a case in point, argues Derrida: it cannot be translated, because we don’t even know if it’s a name or a noun.

When we struggled with Derrida in the spring of 2022, we didn’t know that a novel entitled Babel: An Arcane History would soon appear and become a global bestseller, drawing on similar imagery and turning translation issues into an issue of historical and political concern. Had I known, I would have put R. F. Kuang’s novel on our reading list, because it would have offered a perfect complement to our scholarly readings not only in its sophisticated treatment of language and translation issues, but also in its crafting of an alternate universe – its translation of the historical Oxford we know into a different world where language magic runs the world.

The fact that language runs and creates the world is nothing new, but in Kuang’s novel it takes on epic proportions. The setting is an alternate-reality 1830s England in the wake of the Opium wars, where the empire’s economic and colonial supremacy is driven by magical silver bars. Silver, in this storyworld, has the magic power to capture what is ‘lost in translation’ between languages. Silver bars inscribed with ‘match-pairs’ of words in different languages, with similar but not identical meaning, have a magic effect that help run various aspects of the empire, from trains to medicine. Oxford University hosts “Babel”, the Royal Institute of Translation, where students are trained to find such match-pairs and become scholars in the service of the empire. The full title of the novel –Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators’ Revolution – indicates that this set-up turns out to have serious consequences.

Needless to say, this is necessary reading for anyone who is interested in language, translation or worldmaking. I hope to get back to it in more detail as soon as I have time, but right now I just want to encourage everyone to read and enjoy!

 

Ingela Nilsson