• Cross-Cultural Studies
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• v.33
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• pp.309-330
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• 2013

This paper explores the concept of pure language introduced in Walter Benjamin's "The Task of the Translator" and looks at various perspectives on this concept represented in theories of Paul De Man and Gilles Deleuze and a short story of Jorge Luis Borges. According to "The Task of the Translator," pure language is defined as a vessel of which fragments are the original and the translation. Just as fragments are part of a vessel, so the original and the translation are fragments of a greater language, which is pure language. On the other hand, De Man, from a deconstructive criticism, says that pure language does not exist except as a permanent disjunction, which inhabits all languages as such, and that any work is totally fragmented in relation to this pure language and every translation is totally fragmented in relation to the original. While De Man consider pure language incorporeal, Deleuzian interpretation regards it as a virtual object or differenciator in relation to which the two series of the original and the translation coexist and resonate. Finally in Borges's "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" Menard attempt to translate Cervantes's Don Quixote identically in every detail. By showing a case in which the original and the translation are the same, Borges raises a question what would take place in relation to pure language if the original and the translation were identical. In Deleuze, identity and resemblance are the result of a differenciator, but in Borges, identity is a differenciator which produces differences. If we apply this logic to the last paragraph of "The Task of the Translator," we can say the interlinear version of Scriptures, as the prototype or ideal of all translation, in the form of which the original and the translation must be one, is a differenciator, an endless difference-making machine.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.60 no.2
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• pp.339-363
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• 2014

This essay reconsiders the subject of Romantic self-consciousness in a post-de Manian perspective. Self-consciousness is an attribute of Romantic lyricism whereby the poetic speaker I remains conscious of how (s)he feels or lives here and now. This self-reflective feature of Romantic poetry has been controversially interpreted either as self-centered solipsism or as self-expressive objectivism. The question is stirring more disputes among Romantic critics after the advent of New Historicism and Feminism. These two historicistic approaches reprove Romantic poetry for a lack of the sense of history and ascribes it to Romantic self-consciousness. They argue that Romantic poets in general displace historical materiality into an object of internal consciousness, so negating absurd social realities "merely to gain their own immortal soul." This essay targets to overcome this negative stance on Romantic self-consciousness with a "subversive" return to Paul de Man's criticism of Romantic internality.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.58 no.4
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• pp.783-807
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• 2012

This study compares and contrasts Freud's "work of mourning" which mostly appears in his memorable essay "Mourning and Melancholia" and Derrida's theory of mourning which appears in various works such as MEMOIRES for Paul de Man, The Work of Mourning, and others. Freud maintains that the mourner begins to sever emotional ties to the lost object through a labor of memory and eventually completes the work of mourning. It is a "testing of reality" that motivates the mourner to begin to relinquish emotional attachment to the lost object. Derrida, however, challenges Freudian work of mourning by saying that true mourning lies in "respecting the Otherness of the Other." Derrida suggests that Freud's "normal work of mourning" is "unjust betrayal" of the lost object because it "kills" and "devours" the other and thereby makes it part of the self. So he proposes that work of mourning has "to fail in order to succeed": "success fails" and "failure succeeds." There is an enormous, even epistemological, chasm between Freud who states that mourning, "however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end" and Derrida who states that "mourning is interminable. Inconsolable. Irreconcilable." and "I mourn Therefore I am." The former is the voice of "testing of reality" and common sense whereas the latter is that of utopian ethical vision. Yet neither seems to get the upper hand and they are kind of forced to maintain an ongoing dialogue with each other, for true mourning seems to lie somewhere in between.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
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• v.57 no.2
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• pp.217-235
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• 2011

On recognizing the significance of Walter Benjamin's "The Task of a Translator" in recent discourses of postcolonial cultural translation, this essay examines the creative postcolonialist appropriations of Benjamin's theory of translation and their political implications. In an effort to dismantle the imperialist political hierarchy between the West and the non-West, modernity and its "primitive" others, which has been the operative premise of the traditional translation studies and anthropology, newly emergent discourses of cultural translation actively adopts Benjamin's notion of translation that does not prioritize the original text's claim on authenticity. Benjamin theorizes each text-translation as well as the original-as an incomplete representation of the pure language. Eschewing formalistic views propounded by deconstructionist critics like Paul de Man, who tend to regard Benjamin's notion of the untranslatable purely in terms of the failure inherent in the language system per se, such postcolonialist critics as Tejaswini Niranjana, Rey Chow, and Homi Bhabha, each in his/her unique way, recuperate the significatory potential of historicity embedded in Benjamin's text. Their further appropriation of the concept of the "untranslatable" depends on a radically political turn that, instead of focusing on the failure of translation, salvages historical as well as cultural potentiality that lies between disparate cultural entities, signifying differences, or disjunctures, that do not easily render themselves to existing systems of representation. It may therefore be concluded that postcolonial discourses on cultural translation of Niranhana, Chow, and Bhabha, inspired by Benjamin, each translate the latter's theory into highly politicized understandings of translation, and this leads to an extensive rethinking of the act of translation itself to include all forms of cultural exchange and communicative activities between cultures. The disjunctures between these discourses and Benjamin's text, in that sense, enable them to form a sort of theoretical constellation, which aspires to an impossible yet necessary utopian ideal of critical thinking.