Papers by Fiona Doloughan
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The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translingualism, 2021
This chapter treats literary translingualism in relation to its shaping presence in fiction. Whil... more This chapter treats literary translingualism in relation to its shaping presence in fiction. While acknowledging the longevity and ubiquity of translingualism in literature, the chapter concentrates on translingual writers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, given the intensification of translingualism as a phenomenon in this period. It focusses on some of the stylistic traits and prevalent thematic concerns articulated in novels and short fiction by a sample of translingual writers from different parts of the globe. As well as taking account of translingual writing practices as they are realized in literature, it also considers what engagement with translingual fiction means for reading practices
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One of the many reasons why narrative has emerged since the 1980s as a seemingly ubiquitous mode ... more One of the many reasons why narrative has emerged since the 1980s as a seemingly ubiquitous mode across the human and social sciences can be seen to relate to the “tectonic shifts in our cultural architecture of knowledge following the crisis of the modernist episteme ” (Brockmeier and Harré 2001, 39). Critical
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Hybrid Englishes and the Challenges of/for Translation, 2019
As a documentary film-maker, poet and novelist, Chinese-born writer Xiaolu Guo, now a British cit... more As a documentary film-maker, poet and novelist, Chinese-born writer Xiaolu Guo, now a British citizen, is familiar with ‘movement’ across modes and media, as well as across languages and cultures. Indeed, as I have shown elsewhere (Doloughan, 2016; and 2017), Guo’s work can be characterized as focussing on the dynamics of translation in multiple senses. In her latest work, Once Upon A Time in the East (2017), subtitled ‘A Story of Growing Up’, Guo relates the narrative of her past over a 40-year period up to the birth of her daughter and the death of her mother. Described as having “a fabular quality”, Guo's memoir “sounds like the plot of a novel”, according to one reviewer (Feigel, 2017); another entitles his review “Cinderella in China”, alluding to its fairy-tale-like quality and colourful plot and characterising it as an “occasionally self-indulgent, occasionally unconvincing […] tale of survival” which nevertheless “lingers […] night after night” (Rose, 2017). This chapter will focus on Guo’s ‘translation’ of a life in the light of her earlier fictions, particularly A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), with a view to exploring its performative and intertextual elements. Against the backdrop of an understanding of “the productive tension between figurative and literal in translation” (Godard, 2000: 331) and taking account of Guo’s narrative design and “biliterate performance” (Lee, 2012: 245), I shall seek to relate her memoir not to “representational reproduction” (Godard, 2000: 337) but to a process of creative transposition and a translational performance of self. What Feigel (2017) calls “autobiography as Bildungs-roman or indeed as Kunstlerroman (sic)”is a work of autofiction self-consciously framed by references to successful female writers – there’s a dedication to Marguerite Duras and a quotation from Eva Hoffman’s Lost in Translation – who are themselves the product of ‘translated’ lives and a struggle to achieve artistic success. What I hope to show is that Guo’s oeuvre, including her narrative account of her childhood, adolescence and early adulthood in Once Upon a Time in the East, is realized through a series of translations, both literal and figurative, and that it enacts a performative textual dynamics which has the effect of drawing attention to the translational as a transformative mode of story-telling.
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The term ‘translation’ has come under increased pressure in recent times from a number of differe... more The term ‘translation’ has come under increased pressure in recent times from a number of different disciplinary directions (e.g. Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Comparative and World Literature) including from within Translation Studies itself (Gentzler, 2011, Bassnett, 2012). Its default meaning of linguistic and cultural transfer from language A to language B or from ‘source’ to ‘target’ text has been interrogated in the light of a nexus of arguably related phenomena: the apparent deterritorialization (James, 2008) or relocation of English (Saraceni, 2010) and the rise of English as a lingua franca; an increasingly translingual orientation to language practices (Canagarajah, 2013) and the construction of social and literary identities (Kellman, 2000; Steinitz 2013). Against the backdrop of shifting conceptions of translation,this chapter will focus on the various uses to which translation is put in the work of Chinese-born writer and film-maker, Xiaolu Guo. While referenc...
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The work of Chinese-born British writer and film-maker, Xiaolu Guo, has been characterized to dat... more The work of Chinese-born British writer and film-maker, Xiaolu Guo, has been characterized to date by a focus on translation, broadly construed. Her “breakthrough” novel, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007), drew (retrospectively) on the process of language acquisition to construct the consciousness and experience of a Chinese learner of English as she interacts with her new cultural and social environment, in a hybrid narrative form that combines conceptual and narrative modes. Guo’s 2014 novel I Am China takes further her interest in translation as a mode of storytelling and a means of highlighting the problematics of travelling texts as well as movement of ideas and people across languages and cultures. This paper will reflect on Guo’s narrative modus operandi in relation to her focus on the possibilities and limitations of translation, both fictive and “real”, as a mode of critique and invention. It will situate Guo’s translational impulses within the context ...
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Choice Reviews Online, 2016
This is a book about what it means to produce literature in English today at a time when an incre... more This is a book about what it means to produce literature in English today at a time when an increasing number of writers with access to more than one language and culture are writing in English. For many of these writers translation, whether in a broad or a narrow sense, has become a central concern. This, in turn, poses questions for readers as they engage with writing that is the product of more than one cultural and linguistic tradition, even if it appears on the surface to be written in a language they understand. Taking as my starting point a thoughtful and provocative article by Alastair Pennycook (2008), “English as a Language Always in Translation”, in which he points to the consequences of the fact that English does not in reality operate in isolation in the world today but always in the context of other languages, I suggest that a shift has taken place in our conceptions of translation and that this shift is reflected in writing in English. By looking at a series of case studies from Eva Hoffman’s 1989 memoir Lost in Translation to Xiaolu Guo’s early twenty-first century work including her 2007 novel A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers as well as her recently published novel I Am China (2014) via a number of other works, across a 25-year time-span, that thematize translation and reflect on what it means to move across languages and/or cultures, I suggest that the prototypical notion of language as loss and translation of self and other as a predominantly painful and traumatic experience have given way to a greater sense of what is to be gained, both at the individual and societal levels, through access to different languages and cultures.
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Contemporary Narrative : Textual production, multimodality and multiliteracies, 2011
Contemporary Narrative introduces key issues and trends in contemporary narrative studies. Taking... more Contemporary Narrative introduces key issues and trends in contemporary narrative studies. Taking a case study approach, it traces key narrative developments in the context of a range of theoretical approaches, including multimodality, multilingualism and transliteracy. It offers students of contemporary narrative an overview of the way in which twenty-first century narratives are constructed and the extent to which their construction depends on a range of social, cultural, linguistic and technological factors as well as on individual creativity and expressivity. The book brings together insights from narratology, semiotics, linguistics and translation studies and applies them to the issues raised by contemporary literary and cultural texts, particularly in relation to processes of adaptation, translation and transformation across modes and media. Highlighting the key features of contemporary narrative from a critical and analytic perspective, it also explores the close relationships between reading and writing and the critical and creative dimensions of text to reveal the creativity at work in a range of innovative contemporary narratives.
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This chapter explores the extent to which Eva Hoffman and Ariel Dorfman translate themselves in t... more This chapter explores the extent to which Eva Hoffman and Ariel Dorfman translate themselves in the process of translating for others the new cultures which they adopt or adapt to in the process of migration. Through examination of their memoirs, it charts their bilingual journey and represents the translational process by which they come to accept their doubleness and bilinguality as something to be celebrated rather than something to resist or to mourn. In reviewing their memoirs through the lens of changing contexts for, and new understandings of, bilingualism, the chapter indicates the extent to which the bilingual condition itself has undergone transformation in literary and academic discourse.
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Creativity in Exile, 2000
... woman in pain, banished from her country"(Kundera 2002: 24) is far from her vision of se... more ... woman in pain, banished from her country"(Kundera 2002: 24) is far from her vision of self. As she chats with Milada in Prague, she realizes that her life in France after her husband Martin's death was, in fact, a happy time, a time when she was in control of her own destiny. ...
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Journal of Narrative Theory, 2015
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... a relationship between “individual psychic geography” and “cultural geography”, (Bruner 2001,... more ... a relationship between “individual psychic geography” and “cultural geography”, (Bruner 2001, 33 ... of De Maistre's injunction to look carefully at one's immediate environment and ... the visual representations chosen to give another, complementary, mediated cultural perspective on ...
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In Other Words the Journal For Literary Translators, 2005
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The paper that follows is part of a larger project aiming to examine the textual production of wr... more The paper that follows is part of a larger project aiming to examine the textual production of writers having access to more than one set of representational resources. It is premised on the notion that access to such dual or multiple resource-bases permits the production of texts that are ‘marked’ in salient and systematic ways.
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Design Issues, 2002
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Translation and Interpreting Studies, 2009
... growing up in England come up against cultural difference and are torn, particu-larly in the ... more ... growing up in England come up against cultural difference and are torn, particu-larly in the case of Shahana, between respect for their parents ... of her fiction, Per-fect points to Ali's use of a study of Bangladeshi garment workers in London and Dhaka by Naila Kabeer, which she ...
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Papers by Fiona Doloughan