This thesis examines theories of translation which are explicit in the themes and implicit in the rhetorical uses of form in the work of Joyce, with a focus on the French translations of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake produced with his collaboration between 1921 and 1931. Philosophies of translation from Jerome through Benjamin plus work in translation theory by Even-Zohar and Toury inform this study of the ethics both of translating and of being translated in the modernist idiom. In identifying a translation ethic arising out of the modernist aesthetic, the thesis postulates a rhetoric of translation by analogy with Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction. To this end, key issues in translation studies are addressed: the critical status of the authorized collaborative translation; accounting in translation for persuasive (versus purely expressive) functions of literary works as text types; translation strategy as a contribution to the debate between essentialism or universal grammar and cultural relativism; the translation imagined as a frame narrative, and the translator as an implied frame narrator of varying invisibility and reliability; and translation as a model of cognitive processes such as reading, understanding, memory, and the growth of consciousness. Via a combination of descriptive, historical, and textual study, this set of topics in translation is shown to explain many thematic and technical preoccupations of Joyce - just as Joyce proves to be an ideal case for descriptive translation studies, not in spite but by virtue of his notional untranslatability. The thesis also seeks to contribute to Joyce studies proper: to an understanding of how Joyce's fiction both does and does not depart from conventions of western narrative; to a portrait of the implied author and undramatized narrator in Ulysses; to an appreciation of translation both broadly and narrowly defined as a recurrent theme in his work; and to a recognition of the influence of Joyce's many contemporary translators and their languages, cultures, and personalities upon his own innovating uses of language and narrative.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:395227 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | McMurren, Blair R. |
| Contributors | Paulin, Tom |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:41fd0bc5-acc9-406f-b5e3-e21021470f92 |
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