Eva C. Karpinski | York University (original) (raw)
Books by Eva C. Karpinski
"Borrowed Tongues uses the theoretical framework of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial... more "Borrowed Tongues uses the theoretical framework of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial translation studies to map out migrant subjectivities as they are performed in life writing by diverse twentieth-century American and Canadian women writers (including Mary Antin, Laura Goodman Salverson, Eva Hoffman, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Jamaica Kincaid). Gathering texts by canonical authors and amateurs, poets and ethnographers, professional memoirists and subjects of oral history, the study democratizes the space of self-representation and showcases the generic richness of life writing ranging from the conversion narrative to Künstlerroman, confessions, autoethnography, allegorical metafiction, and the long poem. Through thickly contextualized close readings and discourse analysis, the author examines the vertical and horizontal flows of cross-cultural translation and the usefulness of such concepts as supplementarity, linguistic hospitality, transparency, foreignizing, and domesticating strategies, especially in discussing issues of assimilation, trauma, and genealogy, that is, attitudes to otherness and the passing of a mother tongue between mothers and daughters.
A nuanced interpretation of intersectional differences of gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and culture in writings by women from transnational, diasporic, and immigrant communities reveals linguistic and ethico-philosophical dimensions of translation in the critique of the politics of monolanguage. Ultimately, the distinction between “mother tongues” and “borrowed tongues” functions within the regime of standardization that serves to reinforce the law of the proper (in the sense of property rights, purity, and correctness). It undergirds fantasies of belonging and obsessions with classification, hierarchy, and exclusion, constantly confronted by migrant subjects."
Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara ... more Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard’s work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard’s innovative scholarship, situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and public memory. In pursuit of unexpected linkages and connections, the essays venture beyond generic and disciplinary borders, zeroing in on Godard’s transdisciplinary practice which has been extremely influential in the way it framed questions and modelled interventions for the study of Canadian, Québécois, and Acadian literatures and cultures. The authors work with the materials ranging from Canadian government policies and documents to publications concerning white-supremacist organizations in Southern Ontario, online materials from a Toronto-based transgender arts festival, a photographic mural installation commemorating the Montreal Massacre, and the works of such writers and artists as Marie Clements, Nicole Brossard, France Daigle, Nancy Huston, Yvette Nolan, Gail Scott, Denise Desautels, Louise Warren, Rebecca Belmore, Vera Frenkel, Robert Lepage, and Janet Cardiff.
Papers by Eva C. Karpinski
TTR, 2019
Hélène Cixous’s question “Who are I?” sets up the scene of this inquiry into the Turkish-Canadian... more Hélène Cixous’s question “Who are I?” sets up the scene of this inquiry into the Turkish-Canadian writer Üstün Bilgen-Reinart’s plural self-translations at the crossroads of different cultures she has traversed during her life trajectory from Turkey to Canada and back to Turkey. I read her hybrid translingual family memoir-travel narrative for evidence of productive potentialities of multilingualism in cross-cultural encounters. Woven into the text are complex multilingual entanglements of her many languages, histories, and geographies, as she passes from Turkish to English and French while immersing herself in the stories told in Dene, the language of the Sayisi Dene in northern Manitoba, and collects Kurdish stories from southeastern Anatolia, translated into Turkish. In 1997, with Ila Bussidor, Üstün Bilgen-Reinart co-authored Night Spirits, an oral history of the forcible relocation and subsequent rebuilding of the Sayisi Dene community. Bilgen-Reinart’s perception of the presen...
In various parts of Eastern Europe during the final months of the Second World War and immediatel... more In various parts of Eastern Europe during the final months of the Second World War and immediately thereafter, millions of people were forcibly displaced in one of the largest mass migrations in modern European history. This collaborative chapter focuses on the events called ‘die Flucht und Vertreibung’ (flight and expulsion) in Germany and ‘repatriacja’ (repatriation—in fact, a forced resettlement) in Poland. Karpinski and Warley, two women whose own family histories have been impacted by these experiences, undertook a joint field trip to places of memory in order to explore the processes of accessing, translating, and interpreting personal narratives of flight, expulsion, and forced resettlement. They do so in dialogue, writing in two voices, while theorizing the ways these events have shaped the fates and identities not only of their ancestors but also of themselves.
Eva C. Karpinski interprets the meaning of Barbara Godard's influence on her academic life an... more Eva C. Karpinski interprets the meaning of Barbara Godard's influence on her academic life and writing, drawing especially on the concepts of translation elaborated at different stages of Barbara's ongoing involvement in translation studies.
Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, 2016
The article demonstrates the usefulness of textual genetics in corroborating the dynamic, process... more The article demonstrates the usefulness of textual genetics in corroborating the dynamic, process-oriented concepts of translation developed by feminist translation theorists. Focusing on the Canadian scholar and translator Barbara Godard, the paper examines her translation manuscripts of Nicole Brossard’s L’Amèr: ou le chapitre effrité (1977) and Amantes (1980), published in English as These Our Mothers (1983) and Lovhers (1986). The author argues that genetic analysis has the potential to challenge conventional understandings of translation as a linear transfer of meaning in the exchange of equivalences and that genetics can supply evidence that translation is a multidirectional, recursive and dialogical process of thought and transformation, a creative combination rather than a transparent substitution of meaning. The graphic markings, layerings, and inscriptions on the archival drafts reveal complex intersubjective and interdiscursive foldings at the heart of translation and exp...
Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 2013
Suzanne Desrochers' novel Bride of New France (2011) constructs interesting historical transn... more Suzanne Desrochers' novel Bride of New France (2011) constructs interesting historical transnationalities linking the French biopolitics of population implemented by Louis XIV, with the story of filles du roi and encounters with indegeneity in colonial New France. Although her narrative explores the possibility of illicit transversal alliances between the oppressed, in this case involving a poor white French woman and an indigenous man, I argue that its potential to reconfigure gendered and racialized spaces of the Empire is thwarted by its generic indebtedness to the genre of the colonial gothic, preoccupied with the "hauntings" of colonialism and imperialism. Moreover, Desrochers' hybrid text, a product of "miscegenation" between history and literature, relies on Eurocentric stereotypes of the Noble Savage and the bad Indian, which suggests that perhaps even her ostensibly feminist attempt to re-read the imperial moment through the stock repertoire of g...
Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature
ABSTRACT
European Journal of Life Writing, 2013
The article explores Dubravka Ugrešić's ongoing project of interrogating and challenging differen... more The article explores Dubravka Ugrešić's ongoing project of interrogating and challenging different constructions of Europe from the perspective of "minor transnationalism", focusing on the relationship between European minority cultures and the West. She has developed a hybrid form of political life writing that I call the autobiographical fragment, which mixes autobiography, personal essay, cultural criticism, travel writing, autoethnography, epistolarity, and diary. I argue that the autobiographical fragment is uniquely suited to address the discontinuities and ruptures of history, experience, and memory that have accompanied Europe's post-communist transformations. In the texts that I examine, including Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream, The Culture of Lies, Thank You For Not Reading, and Nobody's Home, she confronts the trauma of ethnic and gendered violence and integrates the personal and the "glocal", linking the former Yugoslavia, present-day Croatia, the European Union, the United States, and the globalized cultural marketplace.
Canadian Woman Studies, 1997
The "oral song" also brings into focus the final words of her essay: "Most of all there is the ce... more The "oral song" also brings into focus the final words of her essay: "Most of all there is the centrality of poetry" that is indeed "layered like amber" throughout this book. This centrality, this searing focus that only poetry can achieve (even when the form is prose) makes this collection compelling. In much of the writing here, we have language that is "controlledn-controlled so completely that it makes chaos clear, lays bare to the very bone truths too difficult to think of; and it does so with an ease that includes the reader.
Tusaaji: A Translation Review
Inspired by Jan Blommaert’s approaches to linguistic landscaping and his studies of linguistic mo... more Inspired by Jan Blommaert’s approaches to linguistic landscaping and his studies of linguistic mobility, this article traces the changing meanings of multilingualism and monolingualism in a world fractured by uneven vectors of globalization and super-diversity. Drawing on such examples as Polish anti-racist billboards, the commercial, transnational space of the mall, or translation policies in the European Union, it is possible to see the paradoxical effects of neoliberal transformations on linguistic diversity, with the hegemony of English on the one hand, and the revival of ethno-linguistic particularity on the other. Alison Phipp’s theories of multilingualism from above and from below, as well as Yaseem Noorani’s concept of “soft” multilingualism are used to make further differentiations between assertive nationalist monolingualism from below and aggressive global monolingualism from above. These different kinds of multilingualism and monolingualism, produced at intersections of ...
Anglica Wratislaviensia
This article examines Hélène Cixous’s biographical monograph The Exile of James Joyce as a limit ... more This article examines Hélène Cixous’s biographical monograph The Exile of James Joyce as a limit case of biographical praxis. Joyce’s biography is read in the context of Cixous’s own evolving personal motif of exile, revealing her autobiographical investment in becoming a writer through reading Joyce. She pushes the boundaries of the biographical genre at the intersections of autobiography, literary criticism, and biography, defying simple generic classifications and exposing the limits of conventional demarcations between the artist, the work, the biographer, and the critic. As a result, the text becomes a creative-interpretive hybrid project, where the biographical code has been displaced by focus on epistemological, psychological, and textual problems implicit in the relationship between the biographer and the biographical subject. Her approach invites us to consider the following questions: How does she rewrite Joyce through her own multiple experiences of exile that she also s...
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
Journal of Canadian Studies
"Borrowed Tongues uses the theoretical framework of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial... more "Borrowed Tongues uses the theoretical framework of feminist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial translation studies to map out migrant subjectivities as they are performed in life writing by diverse twentieth-century American and Canadian women writers (including Mary Antin, Laura Goodman Salverson, Eva Hoffman, Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and Jamaica Kincaid). Gathering texts by canonical authors and amateurs, poets and ethnographers, professional memoirists and subjects of oral history, the study democratizes the space of self-representation and showcases the generic richness of life writing ranging from the conversion narrative to Künstlerroman, confessions, autoethnography, allegorical metafiction, and the long poem. Through thickly contextualized close readings and discourse analysis, the author examines the vertical and horizontal flows of cross-cultural translation and the usefulness of such concepts as supplementarity, linguistic hospitality, transparency, foreignizing, and domesticating strategies, especially in discussing issues of assimilation, trauma, and genealogy, that is, attitudes to otherness and the passing of a mother tongue between mothers and daughters.
A nuanced interpretation of intersectional differences of gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and culture in writings by women from transnational, diasporic, and immigrant communities reveals linguistic and ethico-philosophical dimensions of translation in the critique of the politics of monolanguage. Ultimately, the distinction between “mother tongues” and “borrowed tongues” functions within the regime of standardization that serves to reinforce the law of the proper (in the sense of property rights, purity, and correctness). It undergirds fantasies of belonging and obsessions with classification, hierarchy, and exclusion, constantly confronted by migrant subjects."
Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara ... more Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory is a collection of essays written in honour of Barbara Godard, one of the most original and wide-ranging literary critics, theorists, teachers, translators, and public intellectuals Canada has ever produced. The contributors, both established and emerging scholars, extend Godard’s work through engagements with her published texts in the spirit of creative interchange and intergenerational relay of ideas. Their essays resonate with Godard’s innovative scholarship, situated at the intersection of such fields as literary studies, cultural studies, translation studies, feminist theory, arts criticism, social activism, institutional analysis, and public memory. In pursuit of unexpected linkages and connections, the essays venture beyond generic and disciplinary borders, zeroing in on Godard’s transdisciplinary practice which has been extremely influential in the way it framed questions and modelled interventions for the study of Canadian, Québécois, and Acadian literatures and cultures. The authors work with the materials ranging from Canadian government policies and documents to publications concerning white-supremacist organizations in Southern Ontario, online materials from a Toronto-based transgender arts festival, a photographic mural installation commemorating the Montreal Massacre, and the works of such writers and artists as Marie Clements, Nicole Brossard, France Daigle, Nancy Huston, Yvette Nolan, Gail Scott, Denise Desautels, Louise Warren, Rebecca Belmore, Vera Frenkel, Robert Lepage, and Janet Cardiff.
TTR, 2019
Hélène Cixous’s question “Who are I?” sets up the scene of this inquiry into the Turkish-Canadian... more Hélène Cixous’s question “Who are I?” sets up the scene of this inquiry into the Turkish-Canadian writer Üstün Bilgen-Reinart’s plural self-translations at the crossroads of different cultures she has traversed during her life trajectory from Turkey to Canada and back to Turkey. I read her hybrid translingual family memoir-travel narrative for evidence of productive potentialities of multilingualism in cross-cultural encounters. Woven into the text are complex multilingual entanglements of her many languages, histories, and geographies, as she passes from Turkish to English and French while immersing herself in the stories told in Dene, the language of the Sayisi Dene in northern Manitoba, and collects Kurdish stories from southeastern Anatolia, translated into Turkish. In 1997, with Ila Bussidor, Üstün Bilgen-Reinart co-authored Night Spirits, an oral history of the forcible relocation and subsequent rebuilding of the Sayisi Dene community. Bilgen-Reinart’s perception of the presen...
In various parts of Eastern Europe during the final months of the Second World War and immediatel... more In various parts of Eastern Europe during the final months of the Second World War and immediately thereafter, millions of people were forcibly displaced in one of the largest mass migrations in modern European history. This collaborative chapter focuses on the events called ‘die Flucht und Vertreibung’ (flight and expulsion) in Germany and ‘repatriacja’ (repatriation—in fact, a forced resettlement) in Poland. Karpinski and Warley, two women whose own family histories have been impacted by these experiences, undertook a joint field trip to places of memory in order to explore the processes of accessing, translating, and interpreting personal narratives of flight, expulsion, and forced resettlement. They do so in dialogue, writing in two voices, while theorizing the ways these events have shaped the fates and identities not only of their ancestors but also of themselves.
Eva C. Karpinski interprets the meaning of Barbara Godard's influence on her academic life an... more Eva C. Karpinski interprets the meaning of Barbara Godard's influence on her academic life and writing, drawing especially on the concepts of translation elaborated at different stages of Barbara's ongoing involvement in translation studies.
Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies, 2016
The article demonstrates the usefulness of textual genetics in corroborating the dynamic, process... more The article demonstrates the usefulness of textual genetics in corroborating the dynamic, process-oriented concepts of translation developed by feminist translation theorists. Focusing on the Canadian scholar and translator Barbara Godard, the paper examines her translation manuscripts of Nicole Brossard’s L’Amèr: ou le chapitre effrité (1977) and Amantes (1980), published in English as These Our Mothers (1983) and Lovhers (1986). The author argues that genetic analysis has the potential to challenge conventional understandings of translation as a linear transfer of meaning in the exchange of equivalences and that genetics can supply evidence that translation is a multidirectional, recursive and dialogical process of thought and transformation, a creative combination rather than a transparent substitution of meaning. The graphic markings, layerings, and inscriptions on the archival drafts reveal complex intersubjective and interdiscursive foldings at the heart of translation and exp...
Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 2013
Suzanne Desrochers' novel Bride of New France (2011) constructs interesting historical transn... more Suzanne Desrochers' novel Bride of New France (2011) constructs interesting historical transnationalities linking the French biopolitics of population implemented by Louis XIV, with the story of filles du roi and encounters with indegeneity in colonial New France. Although her narrative explores the possibility of illicit transversal alliances between the oppressed, in this case involving a poor white French woman and an indigenous man, I argue that its potential to reconfigure gendered and racialized spaces of the Empire is thwarted by its generic indebtedness to the genre of the colonial gothic, preoccupied with the "hauntings" of colonialism and imperialism. Moreover, Desrochers' hybrid text, a product of "miscegenation" between history and literature, relies on Eurocentric stereotypes of the Noble Savage and the bad Indian, which suggests that perhaps even her ostensibly feminist attempt to re-read the imperial moment through the stock repertoire of g...
Tulsa Studies in Womens Literature
ABSTRACT
European Journal of Life Writing, 2013
The article explores Dubravka Ugrešić's ongoing project of interrogating and challenging differen... more The article explores Dubravka Ugrešić's ongoing project of interrogating and challenging different constructions of Europe from the perspective of "minor transnationalism", focusing on the relationship between European minority cultures and the West. She has developed a hybrid form of political life writing that I call the autobiographical fragment, which mixes autobiography, personal essay, cultural criticism, travel writing, autoethnography, epistolarity, and diary. I argue that the autobiographical fragment is uniquely suited to address the discontinuities and ruptures of history, experience, and memory that have accompanied Europe's post-communist transformations. In the texts that I examine, including Have a Nice Day: From the Balkan War to the American Dream, The Culture of Lies, Thank You For Not Reading, and Nobody's Home, she confronts the trauma of ethnic and gendered violence and integrates the personal and the "glocal", linking the former Yugoslavia, present-day Croatia, the European Union, the United States, and the globalized cultural marketplace.
Canadian Woman Studies, 1997
The "oral song" also brings into focus the final words of her essay: "Most of all there is the ce... more The "oral song" also brings into focus the final words of her essay: "Most of all there is the centrality of poetry" that is indeed "layered like amber" throughout this book. This centrality, this searing focus that only poetry can achieve (even when the form is prose) makes this collection compelling. In much of the writing here, we have language that is "controlledn-controlled so completely that it makes chaos clear, lays bare to the very bone truths too difficult to think of; and it does so with an ease that includes the reader.
Tusaaji: A Translation Review
Inspired by Jan Blommaert’s approaches to linguistic landscaping and his studies of linguistic mo... more Inspired by Jan Blommaert’s approaches to linguistic landscaping and his studies of linguistic mobility, this article traces the changing meanings of multilingualism and monolingualism in a world fractured by uneven vectors of globalization and super-diversity. Drawing on such examples as Polish anti-racist billboards, the commercial, transnational space of the mall, or translation policies in the European Union, it is possible to see the paradoxical effects of neoliberal transformations on linguistic diversity, with the hegemony of English on the one hand, and the revival of ethno-linguistic particularity on the other. Alison Phipp’s theories of multilingualism from above and from below, as well as Yaseem Noorani’s concept of “soft” multilingualism are used to make further differentiations between assertive nationalist monolingualism from below and aggressive global monolingualism from above. These different kinds of multilingualism and monolingualism, produced at intersections of ...
Anglica Wratislaviensia
This article examines Hélène Cixous’s biographical monograph The Exile of James Joyce as a limit ... more This article examines Hélène Cixous’s biographical monograph The Exile of James Joyce as a limit case of biographical praxis. Joyce’s biography is read in the context of Cixous’s own evolving personal motif of exile, revealing her autobiographical investment in becoming a writer through reading Joyce. She pushes the boundaries of the biographical genre at the intersections of autobiography, literary criticism, and biography, defying simple generic classifications and exposing the limits of conventional demarcations between the artist, the work, the biographer, and the critic. As a result, the text becomes a creative-interpretive hybrid project, where the biographical code has been displaced by focus on epistemological, psychological, and textual problems implicit in the relationship between the biographer and the biographical subject. Her approach invites us to consider the following questions: How does she rewrite Joyce through her own multiple experiences of exile that she also s...
Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies
Journal of Canadian Studies
Resources For Feminist Research, Jul 1, 2007
Literature Compass, Dec 1, 2011
Nicole Brossard's 'fiction theory', that is, her language-focused, exp... more Nicole Brossard's 'fiction theory', that is, her language-focused, experimental prose and poetry, has influenced feminist writing in Quebec and English Canada. This article examines Brossard's inscriptions of radical lesbian subjectivity at the interface of theory and ...
Canadian Woman Studies, Jan 1, 2010
Biography, Jan 1, 2009
Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2007. 2... more Can These Bones Live? Translation, Survival, and Cultural Memory. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 2007. 250 pp. ISBN 978-0-804-75542-9, $21.95. In this pioneering study, translation is a matter of life and death. Bella Brodzki engages Walter Benjamin's metaphysical and materialist model of translation, and its elaboration by Jacques Derrida, focusing on the survival of bodies, texts, narratives, images, and memories through cross-cultural and inter generational transmission that is both transcending death and life-giving, linked to an "afterlife" and to "living on." She offers a compelling examination of the combined genealogical and generative-or commemorative and animating-functions of translation viewed as instrumental to all processes of continuity and change in literature, culture, and history.
Atlantis: A Women's Studies Journal/Revue d'etudes …, Jan 1, 2008
University of Toronto Quarterly, Jan 1, 2007
Canadian Woman Studies, Jan 1, 1998
Canadian Woman Studies, Jan 1, 1997
Canadian Woman Studies, Jan 1, 2002
Canadian Woman Studies, Jan 1, 1997
Canadian Woman Studies, Jan 1, 1995
Gayatri Spivak attempts to bridge a gap between theory and practice by bringing philosophy into t... more Gayatri Spivak attempts to bridge a gap between theory and practice by bringing philosophy into the classroom and applying it to pedagogy. Several