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theses

In nineteenth-century Europe, the nation emerged as the dominant organizing structure for cultural community. Languages became national languages and prominent intellectuals began to understand translation as a nationalist enterprise. But novelists increasingly used translation in another way: as a means to reposition the reader as a site of potential group affiliation beyond national borders. The legacy of this challenge to national identification is the structural transformation of the novel’s address to its audience. My dissertation locates this transformation in the works of four major novelists who begin their careers as critics and translators but turn to narrative as the mode best suited to their examination of political and ethical sociality. I move from Thomas Carlyle’s fictional translation and Germaine de Staël’s Romatic-era theories of national character to George Eliot’s narratives of cosmopolitan sympathy and Virginia Woolf's interrogation of the communicative potential of private or, as she calls them, “little” languages. In each case, I reveal how translation is central to the writer's specifically narrative intervention in their readers’ conception of community, and I demonstrate that the novel’s turn to translation radically reorients the genre. Finally, I show that the novel’s investment in a newly sensitive reader anticipates the concerns of later translation theory, which also hinges on the capacity of its audience to be changed through encounters with unfamiliar words and stories.

ETD_4746

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Jennifer R. Raterman

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.1/rucore10001600001.ETD.000068944

doi:10.7282/T31R6P4B

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.