Discussion Group - Modernist Afterlives: Living Forth a Century Later - Dr. Ian Ellison (Kent)
This year marks the centenary of Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on ‘The Task of the Translator’, which introduced the influential concept of the ‘afterlife’ of a literary text in translation. Yet closer reading reveals ‘afterlife’ as a productive mistranslation of what Benjamin calls ‘Fortleben’ (literally ‘living forth’), a term lacking any sense of the mortality or decay suggested by the English ‘afterlife’. Returning to and departing from the original essay, Ian Ellison asks what the language of translation (and translation studies) can tell us about other things. In this talk, he examines this decade’s ongoing obsession with modernist centenaries to consider what forms of modernism precede a modernist ‘afterlife’, and what theories of ‘afterlife’ enable a finer description of the ongoing legacy of modernism in the twenty-first century. Carol Jacobs has rightly noted that ‘it is an error to search Benjamin’s work for stability in terminology’, but this is precisely why Benjamin’s consistent use of the term ‘Fortleben’ is so significant. This talk interrogates what implications it might have for thinking about the posterity of modernist authors, particularly those like Proust and Kafka whose later work is itself preoccupied with questions of posterity, in the present age of global literary circulation and translation.
Date: 1 May 2023, 12:45 (Monday, 2nd week, Trinity 2023)
Venue: St Anne's College, Woodstock Road OX2 6HS
Venue Details: Seminar Room 10
Speaker: Dr. Ian Ellison (Kent)
Part of: Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Katy Terry, Hope Lukonyomoi-Otunnu