Lily Robert-Foley | Université Paul Valéry - Montpellier (original) (raw)

Papers by Lily Robert-Foley

Trans - revue de littérature générale et comparée, 2018

Cet article vise à cartographier un ensemble de convergences qui existent entre les deux champs d... more Cet article vise à cartographier un ensemble de convergences qui existent entre les deux champs de recherche que sont la Traductologie et la pensée Queer. Il commence en se situant dans le contexte culturel de sa langue ; le français, et considère ensuite l’histoire de la réception du mot « queer » en France (écrit ici avec l’accord au féminin : traduction queere). Il poursuit avec l’analyse des points d’intersection, notamment en ce qui les critiques qui tournent autour de certaines notions clés telles que : l’origine, la performance et la performativité, le détournement et les binaires régénératifs. Il conclut enfin en proposant une piste de recherche pour l’avenir qui s’écarterait de la théorie pour chercher une pratique de la traduction queere.

Eu-topias, 2016

Using the theoretical tools of reflections on self-translation and the heritage of Deconstruction... more Using the theoretical tools of reflections on self-translation and the heritage of Deconstruction and Postcolonial thinking, this article strives to deform discourse surrounding a canonical author. It constructs a third text in-between the self-translation of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable and L’Innommable. The third text is a performative space, where reading takes immediate form in its rewriting, its transformation. It creates new syntagms, figures, stories and themes in the transport routes shared by translation and metaphor. After a brief look at work on self-translation, specifically in Beckett, the article attempts to deconstruct theory with practice, reading (and thus rewriting) translations of the same, instances of self-allegory, and figures of displacement in time and space.

Essay Press.org http://www.essaypress.org/ep-78/#6jUevt2vq0ZRJH7x.99, 2016

The metaphor of mathematical equivalence in thinking on translation is an easy source of malenten... more The metaphor of mathematical equivalence in thinking on translation is an easy source of malentendues. That equivalence ≅ equivalence after the metamorphosis of metaphor is quickly exemplified in a simple reading of 1=1, read across two languages, French and English. For one = two (at least); one =/≠ un + une. In spite of this, arithmetic, algebraic, geometric, as well as marketplace metaphors of currency exchange and value measurements, are frequently deployed in translation theory. In this paper I make a “literal wager” (Craig Dworkin’s term) of Money, Math, & Measure metaphors in translation, using them performatively to reread Samuel Beckett’s self translation of L’Innommable/The Unnamable. These metaphors are used as reading filters, producing new figures of bad math, miscalculations, impossible numbers, fiscal fraud, and incalculable gifts in a Third Texte of translation.

This paper is a long adaptation of one initially given at the 2015 Lectures Féministes at Paris ... more This paper is a long adaptation of one initially given at the 2015 Lectures Féministes at Paris 8. The English was printed while the French read aloud. It proposes a Slash fiction of Joanna Russ's "Female Man", called [xxx] — an alternative, potential universe erupting between the choices made during translation.

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, 2017

This article deploys a cut-up technique borrowed from the haunted, fictocritical writing of Anna ... more This article deploys a cut-up technique borrowed from the haunted, fictocritical writing of Anna Gibbs. Taking descriptions from parts of different haunted houses found in short stories of the female gothic, it reconstitutes a new house, that is both an architectural assemblage and a reading of the figure of the haunted house as it relates to both gothic studies and feminism. The article has been divided according to passages describing different rooms as they appear in stories by thirteen women writers of the Gothic era: Charlotte Riddell, Mary Wilkins-Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Elizabeth Gaskell, Edith Nesbit, Emma Frances Dawson, Madeline Wynne, Florence Marryat, Mrs Oliphant, Amelia Edwards, Elizabeth Bowen, Ellen Glasgow and Edith Wharton. The original paper, delivered at the 2015 Conference Haunting in Short Fiction and Its Adaptations at the University of Angers, was accompanied by a hypertext, choose-your-own-adventure-style Powerpoint presentation in which conference participants could select different doors and passageways, each leading to a different route, reading their way through the collaged house in an itinerant fashion. The rooms and architectural features, with their accompanying passages and readings, are here presented in a linear fashion.

S. Hibbs, A. Şerbanet N. Vincent-Arnaud (dir.), Corps et Traduction, corps en traduction, 2017

In the introduction to his Poétique du traduire, Henri Meschonnic lays out what he calls four for... more In the introduction to his Poétique du traduire, Henri Meschonnic lays out what he calls four forms of “teratology”: “suppression”, “ajouts,” “déplacements” of units or groups of units, and the last, “non-concordance” (one unit translated with many) and “anti-concordance” (many units translated with one). His parodic classification of monsters (“teratology”) is a purposefully reductive account of what have been known in translation pedagogy and linguistics as procedures (Vinay-Darbelnet), shifts (Catford, Van Leuven-Zwart) and solutions (Pym). He likens “teratologies” to “calque”, both of which are the “alibi of fidelity” (26), in service to the translator’s invisibility. In parentheses, after the word “teratologies”, he writes “the biological metaphor implies a comparison to a whole and healthy (sain et intègre) body, the body in question being the source text.” Monstrosity is for Meschonnic a problem: it is the perversion and corruption of a unified, complete, well-formed and autonomous body.
The term “teratology” in Greek comes from teras, meaning “monster” or “marvel” and it is typically defined as a classification of monsters, or as the study of deformities, in both human and non-human life forms.
The theme of monstrosity was not new to translation studies at the time of publication of Meschonnic’s Poetics, and has not always been in service to notions of fidelity seeking to erase the authorial trace of the translator’s work. Carol Jacob’s 1975 article “The Monstrosity of Translation” comments upon Benjamin’s famous article “the Task of the Translator”, in which monstrosity is used in precisely the opposite manner to Meschonnic, as the disarticulation of the original in a translation through the monstrous intrusion of literality. This, as Jacobs reads, is for Benjamin the “the most perfect of all translations” (762). A certain literality in translation interrupts the hegemony of sameness. In Jacobs’s monstrosity, this very subject can be fractured or fragmented providing fissures through which the work of translation itself may appear.
Monstrosity in this account is a creative poetics of language in translation through which “the foreigness of languages” (to use Benjamin’s terminology, which later becomes a corner stone of Bhabha’s Third Space) may shine through. But before we assimilate this to Venuti’s penchant for foreignizing, I would like to advocate against any absolute methodological dogma for translation, and rather see translation as a site for negotiation and conversation, to borrow Didier Coste’s lexicon (2016)—an invitation to read more deeply the specifics of the cultural power dynamics at play in the interaction between texts, what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called “thick translation” (1993). As such, the opening to the other that a literalizing strategy in Jacobs/Benjamin accomplishes, I believe can also be accomplished as a translator intervenes to adapt a text to a given public. In other words, the familiar dichotomy of foreignizing/naturalizing that we find canonically in Venuti, must be tailored to the cultural specificity of the texts at hand and especially, the relationships of asymmetry that ground and surround them. To take this back to our reading of Meschonnic’s, “biological metaphor” of translation, we might wonder: to whom does this presumably whole and integral body of which Meschonnic speak belong? What does it look like? Does it look like Meschonnic’s body?

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2017

This article seeks to intervene in and disrupt discourse surrounding a canonical author (Samuel B... more This article seeks to intervene in and disrupt discourse surrounding a canonical author (Samuel Beckett), using the tools offered by reflections on (self-)translation and writing in a foreign language. These tools allow for the construction of a new, third text (in echo to Homi Bhabha's “third space”), emerging from the in-between space of Beckett's self-translations of The Unnamable/L'Innommable. This in-between space can be read as an invitation to bracket textual presuppositions relating to translation and to figure them in a creative way. This new, creative reading/writing of the third text springs from a well-known theme of Self-Translation studies to question the relationship between “original” and “translation,” but specifically here in the difficulty of locating the text. This difficulty of location will be treated first in terms of time, and then space.

What lies in between languages in translation? Is that space (if it is a space at all) empty or ... more What lies in between languages in translation? Is that space (if it is a space at all) empty or full, visible or invisible, loud or quiet? Is it a lost space full of unknown truths waiting to be uncovered, or a new space waiting to be created? Two opposing models for conceiving this paradoxical “spacy emptiness” of which Gayatri Spivak writes might be identified as 1) descriptive and 2) generative. A descriptive approach aims to uncover structures inherent to the relationship between languages that translation reveals but which fundamentally precede the work of translation. A generative approach treats the space between translations as creative: a new text or language emerges from translation. Although they may appear as oppositional, these approaches present points of overlap, such that no one thinker of questions of translation falls wholly under one category or the other. This paper hopes to explore what such an overlapping space might look like.

IdeAs: Idées d'Amériques. "Poètes et Editeurs: diffuser la poésie d'avant-garde américaine (depuis 1945)", 2017

This paper examines a cross section of authors in the Xerolage collection, a subsection of the ex... more This paper examines a cross section of authors in the Xerolage collection, a subsection of the experimental poetry publisher Xexoxial Editions. Xerolage prints 25-page chapbooks of visual poetry using a Xerox machine. These chapbooks are printed in an intentional community in Lima, Wisconsin founded in 1991 by mIEKAL aND and Elisabeth Was called Dreamtime Village, that practices alternative living and permaculture farming. The paper asks what kind of link can be made between these practices of experimental writing, small press DIY printing, and alternative, resistant forms of social organization. The link between experimental writing and social/political resistance is a well-established one, particularly with regards to the avant-garde tradition. In this instance, however, readings of visual poets will be interwoven not just with political resistance but with logistical ones related to the practical matters of community building: housing, eating, living. We see that in both instances, the work challenges principles of order, as they pertain to both reading and civilization, and uses paragrammatic strategies of détournement, subverting this order by recycling, cutting, pasting and rearticulating how resistance can be drawn newly from forgotten pasts. The article examines the work of John M Bennet, David-Baptiste Chirot, Scott Helmes, Geof Huth, Andrew Topel, Elizabeth Was and mIEKAL aND.

FR Dans une démarche critique interventionniste, l’enjeu central est d’attirer l’attention des le... more FR Dans une démarche critique interventionniste, l’enjeu central est d’attirer l’attention des lecteurs et lectrices aux normes qui articulent, codent et produisent nos lectures. Le postnormâle intervient, chaque fois de manière contextuelle, et dans une perspective située. / EN What’s at stake in this practice of critical intervention is to draw readers’ attention to norms that articulate, code and produce our readings. The postnormale intervenes each time in a contextual manner, from a situated perspective.

What happens in a viewer’s experience when not only speech and writing are jumbled but also langu... more What happens in a viewer’s experience when not only speech and writing are jumbled but also languages, as is the case of bilingual viewers of subtitled film and television ? This article presents a playful approach to the question and proposes a teratology of supplementary bodies created in the stereoscopes of speech and writing and French and English in the first season of the X-Files. The teratology is grown out of Donna Haraway and Beatriz Preciado feminisms/queer theories, in which inhabiting the in-between space between technology, animal and human can be an occasion for resistance. Using the monstrous (Niranjana, Jacobs, Meschonnic) practice of translation, I invent subcategories of « monsters » in reception : clones, queers, dismembered and rearranged bodies, humanimals and cyborgs.

IF Verso

This short article contains a summary overview and brief reflection on the life and work of Ameri... more This short article contains a summary overview and brief reflection on the life and work of American poet Stacy Doris (1962-2012). Stacy Doris was poet, translator, performer and "passeuse", nourishing and enlivening Franco-American poetic relations for three decades. Her original work was highly influenced by her translations, and often branched out into experimental forms of appropriation and rewriting. She once said, "All I ever do is translate". The article examines her singular approach to translation, intertextuality and multilingualism.

IF Verso

As many have suggested, translation may serve as an interpretive gesture, or as a privileged read... more As many have suggested, translation may serve as an interpretive gesture, or as a privileged reading of a text. In addition, many have interrogated the locating of the hazy line separating translation and rewriting. In 2011, Krupskaya press released a new translation of Gaius Valerius Catullus by San Francisco poet, Brandon Brown, which troubles the distinction between these and other traditional notions of translation. This short examples takes an in-depth look into Brown's unique way of rewriting, translating and rewriting translation.

This is the text of a talk given at the 2012 Feminist Spaces Conference in Tampere, Finland, in w... more This is the text of a talk given at the 2012 Feminist Spaces Conference in Tampere, Finland, in which I explored the possibility of interpretations of excerpts from canonical texts from Queer and Translation studies in which the word "queer" and the word "translation" had been swapped out for each other. The talk was performed using a recording of the text made by a person of the opposite gender. I gave the talk mouthing along to the recording as though I were speaking in a man’s voice.

In this article I read the contents of my purse according to Peirce's semiotics typology.

Call for Reader-Performers: Fictocriticism, creative critique, and other possible letters An a... more Call for Reader-Performers:
Fictocriticism, creative critique, and other possible letters

An approach that combines creation and critique, such as fictocritcism, or les textes possibles, implies a letting go. As others and elsewheres given through words resist our attempts to stack, seize, count and order, the body of language moves with and through, a fungible body contaminating/contaminated with other bodies. As this ordering process is let go, or escapes, the bodies of language are set free to create, to sculpt new mobile objects that erupt in the writing process itself. Texts inspire more texts. The speaking subject is a cacophonous chorus. Discourses are not closed unities but porous potentialities. This is what we call doing research through the writing process.
We are seeking, for two study days at the Université Paris 3 (Sorbonne-Nouvelle), papers, or projects in languages known or unknown that propose to do something rather than to speak about something. In particular we are looking for new strategies of creative critique: of narrative imaginings (Sophie Rabau, Pierre Bayard), or theoretical ones (Avital Ronnell, Anna Gibbs), textual manipulation or appropriation (Anna Gibbs, Kathy Acker), constraints (Craig Dworkin, Clare Hemmings), creative or queer translation (Outranspo), theory that mixes with other discourses, like poetry (Audré Lorde, Cherríe Moraga), mixes languages (Gloria Anzaldúa), or research that combines creation with other domains of the research. That said, a creative approach also means a surprising one, one that is not preordained to fulfill the criteria of success. Please send us something that tries something different.

Deadline to submit proposals: February 14th, 2016
Event dates: June 30 – July 1, 2016
Please send proposals to: lecteursperformeurs@gmail.com
The study day will take place at the Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle
Organizers: Sophie Rabau, Lily Robert-Foley, Marie-Jeanne Zenetti

Appel aux lecteurs-performeurs

Les unes ne peuvent lire sans fourrer leur nez dans les recoins du texte, refont les œuvre comme d’aucun refont le match, lisent en auteure, en prenant sa place et disent ce qu’ils auraient fait, elles si elles avaient écrit le texte, l’écrivent donc sans pour autant cesser de le lire. Les autres sont des lecteurs qui ne restent jamais à leur place ou ne restent pas en place, mettent les mains dans la pâte ou les pieds dans la fiction, s’y glissent comme personnages, interviennent dans l’histoire, y jouant tour à tour les flics de fiction, les écuyers de héros en perdition, voire les premiers rôles après avoir évacué les personnages qui croyaient présomptueusement être au centre de l’histoire. D’autres encore, ailleurs, répètent le texte mais pour mieux le transformer, s’en distancier, le contester, le déplacer, tandis que certains inventent en théorisant des œuvres inconnues, impossibles peut-être, à moins qu’ils n’inventent la théorie en écrivant si bien qu’on ne sait plus trop s’ils théorisent, inventent ou lisent ou tout à la fois. Encore ailleurs on est plus sage en apparence tout au moins et l’on se contente de contempler les infinies manières dont on lu, savamment, les textes jusqu’à présent, mais c’est pour mieux s’en emparer et faire de nos sages commentaires de merveilleux jouets propres à écrire et à inventer.
Les unes sont en Australie, les autres à Paris et leurs environs, à New York ou encore ailleurs où nous ne savons même pas qu’elles existent. Les unes se disent fictocritiques, d’autres lecteurs interventionistes et d’autres noms encore : commentateurs rhétoriques, théoriciens des textse possibles, pluralisatuers de textes, théoriciens spéculateurs. Ils ne se connaissent pas tous, mais quand ils se rencontrent souvent se reconnaissent, devinent comme un air de famille dans cette façon de lire pour faire, pour inventer, pour dire sans pour autant cesser de partager ce je et le corps qui le porte, pour écrire, dans cet espoir d’inventer sinon une méthode du moins une manière partageable avec d’autres de lire en faisant, en disant je, en inventant, en écrivant ou pour écrire. Parce qu’ils ne se connaissent pas mais souvent se reconnaissent, nous voudrions qu’elles se rencontrent, se reconnaissent ou pas tout à fait, et puissent en discuter, puissent parler également parlent de leurs perspectives, de ce futur encore à écrire qui accompagne leur lectures et leur relation aux textes.
Peu importe donc comment se nommeront et se classeront (ou ne se classeront pas ou se déclasseront) ceux qui répondront à cet appel : ils peuvent être traducteurs potentiels, théoriciens des textes possibles, fictocritiques, lecteurs interventionistes, poélecteur, spéculateurs de textes, lecteurs postextuels et d’autres noms encore que nous ne connaissons pas. L’essentiel serait surtout de se retrouver non pas pour lire en lisant, mais pour lire en faisant, de nous regarder faire et de nos actes de lecteurs tirer encore un ou plusieurs futurs où nous ferons encore.
Nous appelons tous les lecteurs performeurs qui se reconnaîtraient, au moins partiellement, dans cette perspective à nous proposer leur lirécriture pour cette journée dont il pourrait même naître quelques textes encore non écrits.

Date limite pour l’envoi des propositions: le 14 Février, 2015
Date des journées d’études: 30 Juin – 1 Juillet
Les propositions sont à envoyer à lecteursperformeurs@gmail.com
Les journées d’études auront lieu à l’Université Paris 3 Sorbonne-Nouvelle
Organisatrices: Organizers: Sophie Rabau, Lily Robert-Foley, Marie-Jeanne Zenetti

Numéro de revue by Lily Robert-Foley

Numéro n°166 de la revue Littérature, co-dirigé par Camille Bloomfield et Marie-Jeanne Zenetti

Book Reviews by Lily Robert-Foley

Book Review of Marie-Jeanne Zenetti's "Factographies" published by Garnier in 2014.

Trans - revue de littérature générale et comparée, 2018

Eu-topias, 2016

Essay Press.org http://www.essaypress.org/ep-78/#6jUevt2vq0ZRJH7x.99, 2016

Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, 2017

S. Hibbs, A. Şerbanet N. Vincent-Arnaud (dir.), Corps et Traduction, corps en traduction, 2017

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies

Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 2017

IdeAs: Idées d'Amériques. "Poètes et Editeurs: diffuser la poésie d'avant-garde américaine (depuis 1945)", 2017

IF Verso

In this article I read the contents of my purse according to Peirce's semiotics typology.

Call for Reader-Performers: Fictocriticism, creative critique, and other possible letters An a... more Call for Reader-Performers:
Fictocriticism, creative critique, and other possible letters

Appel aux lecteurs-performeurs

Numéro n°166 de la revue Littérature, co-dirigé par Camille Bloomfield et Marie-Jeanne Zenetti

Book Review of Marie-Jeanne Zenetti's "Factographies" published by Garnier in 2014.

Experimental Translation, 2024

The history and future of an alternative, oppositional translation practice. The threat of machi... more The history and future of an alternative, oppositional translation practice.

The threat of machine translation has given way to an alternative, experimental practice of translation that reflects upon and hijacks traditional paradigms. In much the same way that photography initiated a break in artistic practices with the threat of an absolute fidelity to the real, machine translation has paradoxically liberated human translators to err, to diverge, to tamper with the original, blurring creation and imitation with cyborg collage and appropriation. Seven chapters reimagine seven classic “procedures” of translation theory and pedagogy: borrowing, calque, literal translation, transposition, modulation, equivalence, and adaptation, updating them for the material political and poetic concerns of the contemporary era. Each chapter combines reflections from translation studies and experimental literature with practical guides, sets of experimental translation “procedures” to try at home or abroad, in the classroom, the laboratory, the garden, the dance hall, the city, the kitchen, the library, the shopping center, the supermarket, the train, the bus, the airplane, the post office, on the radio, on your phone, on your computer, and on the internet.