1st Edition
Agencies in Feminist Translator Studies Barbara Godard and the Crossroads of Literature in Canada
This book sets out a new framework for a feminist history of translators, drawing on the legacy of Canadian scholar Barbara Godard and her work in establishing the Canadian literary landscape as a means of exploring agency in feminist translation studies and its implications for cross-disciplinary debates.
The volume is organised in three sections, establishing feminist translator studies as its own approach, examining these dynamics at work in a comprehensive portrait of Barbara Godard’s scholarly and literary history, and looking ahead to future directions. In situating the discussion on Godard and Canadian literary history, Elena Castellano calls attention to a geographic context in which translation and its practice has been at the heart of debates around national identity and intersected with the rise of feminism and feminist literary scholarship. The book demonstrates how an in-depth exploration of the agency of an individual stakeholder, whose activities spanned diverse communities and oft conflicting interests, can engage in key questions at the intersection of nation-making, translation, and feminism, paving the way for future research and the further development of feminist translator studies as methodological framework.
This book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies, feminist literature, cultural history, and Canadian literature.
Contents
Part 1: Cross-Disciplinary Feminisms: Towards Feminist Translator Studies
1. Introduction. Feminisms, disciplinary politics, and translation: Defying knowledge
1.1 A Feminist stance on the (re-)production of knowledge
1.2. Feminisms, disciplinary politics and translation
1.3. A feminist, agency-driven view on translation (history)
2. Feminist Translator Studies: A Cross-Disciplinary Hub
2.1. Feminist Translator Studies: Agency, discursiveness
2.2. Towards Feminist Translator Studies
2.3. Critical Discourse Methodologies for Feminist Translator History: Feminist Translation as a Form of FCDA
3. Telling the narrator’s tale: The legacy of Barbara Godard’s agency
3.1. The narrator
3.2. The tale
Part 2: A Feminist Translator's Portrait: Barbara Godard's agency at the crossroads of literature in Canada
4. Arrival at York University: In the chinks of the Canada Council machine
4.1. Establishment? A point of departure
4.2. "English-Canada's New Wild West": Québec's Rebellious Literary Search for Identity
4.3. Intercultural Canada? The Literary Translators Association (LTAC)
4.4. Stagnation?
4.5. Arrival at York University: The Canada Council Years
4.6. Godard's Tale of Don L'Orignal (1978): Channeling Maillet's Roman Acadien
5. Breaking into academia: The golden age of Canadian-feminist translation
5.1. “Roman national or récit féminin?”: The reception of a literary (Feminist) Québécois Identity
5.2. Feminist Criticism as the first truly transnational Canadian dialogue
5.3. The Golden Age of Canadian-Feminist Translators
5.4. L'amèr (1977) and These Our Mothers (1984): Godard's First Approximation to Brossard's Fiction Theory
6. Passing on The Mission: New Questionings
6.1. Self-Criticism: The emergence of Canadian (Literary) Translation Studies
6.2. Collaboration, Polyphony: Translation becomes self-conscious feminist activism
6.3. Loose ends
6.4. Overture: The Last Academic Voices of Canadian-Feminist Translation
6.5. "Je déparle yes I unspeak": A collaborative translation of Lola Lemire Tostevin's bilingual feminist poetry (1989)
Part 3: Future directions
7. Feminisms, Nation, Translation: Barbara Godard's Periplum and the fate of Canadian Feminist Translation Studies
7.1. Decline of the Canadian dream
7.2. Divergence in the CanLit ranks: (Im-)Possibilities of the Woman/Nation Binomial
8. Un-Charting The future of the dialogue between translators and feminisms
8.1. Prospects: Disciplinary politics and (Translative) Feminisms
Index
Biography
Elena Castellano-Ortolà is an associate lecturer in the Department of English and German Studies at the Universitat de València. A former postdoctoral fellow, she also collaborates regularly with the Université Bordeaux-Montaigne.
