Call for Papers für Beiträge zu einem Seminar beim Jahrestreffen der American Comparative Literature Association vom 26.-29. März 2015 an der Universität Washington in Seattle. Frist zum Einreichen von Vortragsvorschlägen: 15. Oktober 2014.

“Double frames: authors, texts, audiences in original translation”

Writing a text as if it were a translation creates a specific kind of fiction: it overlays the act of authorship with an invented author, and the original text with an invented original in a different language, aimed at a different audience. Original translation does not (only) invite readers to imagine a fictional world, but to imagine a fictional original version of the very text they read.

Examples of such “translations without an original” (Apter), “pseudotranslations” (Toury), “fictitious translations” (Bassnett) or “original translations” span centuries and literatures: among them Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, a 12th century history of the Kings of Britain, purportedly translated from an ancient book, Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605/1615), mostly a supposed translation from an Arabic manuscript, Macpherson’s hotly discussed Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760), Merimée’s Guzla (1827), a collection of “authentic” folk songs from the Balkan, and Makine’s La fille d’un héros de l’Union soviétique (1990).

This seminar will explore some of the conceptual and historical implications of this wide-spread phenomenon specifically for Comparative Literature, focusing on three main areas:

(1) How does writing such a text allow authors to position themselves differently, and challenge concepts of authorship; (2) how does imagining a preceding original that only exists in the author’s and reader’s act of imagination question the authority of original texts; (3) and how does the other culture in which the original texts are supposedly situated offer a foil to contemporary political and social conditions?

We invite case studies and systematic or conceptual approaches.

This seminar is part of the ACLA annual meeting at the University of Washington in Seattle, March 26-29, 2015. More about the ACLA and its annual meeting here: http://acla.org/annual-meeting

To submit a propsal (up to 250 words), please register at http://acla.org/user and then choose “Double frames: authors, texts, audiences in original translation” in the drop-down seminar menu. Deadline: October 15, 2014.
Please contact both Brigitte Rath (brigitte.rath@uibk.ac.at) and Beatrijs Vanacker (beatrijs.vanacker@arts.kuleuven.be) with any questions regarding this seminar.
CfP online: http://acla.org/double-frames-authors-texts-audiences-original-translation-0