SUBLIME TRANSLATION IN THE NOVELS OF JAMES FENIMORE COOPER AND WALTER SCOTT

2004 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
A. NEWMAN
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
American English ◽  
James Fenimore Cooper ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Walter Scott

In the first four volumes of his Leatherstocking Tales (1823-1840), James Fenimore Cooper employs an arcane motif in which scenes of communication between Anglo-Americans and native Americans are set in sublime locations and, typically, interrupted by animals. Cooper has borrowed this motif of ““sublime translation”” from Walter Scott; the paradigm is the ““Highland Minstrelsy”” chapter of Waverley (1814). ““Sublime translation”” is crucial to the thematics of both sets of romances. In the works of Scott, Cooper finds a use of the sublime that is particularly suitable to his aesthetic agenda of differentiating his usage of English from that of the mother country. The motif figuratively naturalizes American English and links it to the indigenous languages, and it also transfers the quality of sublimity from the dying native tongues to the new American one. Thus the ultimate elevation of Reason over Nature that characterizes the Kantian sublime (Scott was strongly influenced by German Romanticism) takes on a new meaning in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

Savage and Scott-ish Masculinity in The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie: James Fenimore Cooper and the Diasporic Origins of American Identity

2009 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-162 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juliet Shields
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Social Development ◽  
James Fenimore Cooper ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Self Control ◽  
Cultural Appropriation ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Historical Romances ◽  
Walter Scott ◽  
Last Of The Mohicans

This essay reassesses James Fenimore Cooper's literary relationship to Walter Scott by examining the depiction of Scots in The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827). Read as companion texts, these novels represent the imperial migrations of Scots as a cause of Native Americans' unfortunate, but for Cooper seemingly inevitable, eradication. They also trace the development of an American identity that incorporates feudal chivalry and savage fortitude and that is formed through cultural appropriation rather than racial mixing. The Last of the Mohicans' Scottish protagonist, Duncan Heyward, learns to survive in the northeastern wilderness by adopting the Mohicans' savage self-control as a complement to his own feudal chivalry; in turn, The Prairie's Paul Hover equips himself for the challenges of westward expansion by adopting both the remnants of this chivalry and the exilic adaptability and colonial striving that Cooper accords to Scots. I suggest that the cultural appropriation through which Heyward and Hover achieve an American identity that incorporates Scottish chivalry and savage self-command offers a model for the literary relationship between Cooper's and Scott's historical romances. The Leatherstocking Tales borrow selectively from the Waverely Novels, rejecting their valorization of feudal chivalry while incorporating their representation of cultural appropriation as a mechanism of teleological social development.

"Without a Cross": The Cultural Significance of the Sublime and Beautiful in Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans

1997 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Blakemore
Keyword(s):  
James Fenimore Cooper ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Cultural Significance ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
The World ◽  
Indian Tribes ◽  
Last Of The Mohicans ◽  
Historical Moment

This essay demonstrates that James Fenimore Cooper was incorporating the language and values of Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) into the "world" of The Last of the Mohicans (1826). In the Enquiry Burke's distinction between the sublime and beautiful centers on traditional distinctions between men and women-an "eternal distinction" that Burke continually underscores. In Mohicans Cooper initially incorporates the beautiful into the sublime, in an intentionally illusive "mix" that corresponds to the illusory mixing of the white and Indian races. He then reinscribes Burke's distinction between the sublime and beautiful as an eternal distinction between whites and Indians-writing "out" the problem of the "Other" (gendered "femininity" and alien, "red" beauty) in a meditation of the significance of culture and race in America. In retrospect, Mohicans is a novel of ambiguous "crosses" and complicitous combinations-a novel of fatal and fruitful mixes comprising a series of covert traces telling a secret story contradicting Cooper's overt, racial ideology. Yet it is this "pristine" ideology that finally overpowers and double-crosses the novel's "other" message. Written in 1826, at a specific historical moment when the Indian tribes were being removed or destroyed, the novel reaffirms a racial ideology tortured with its own historical ambiguities.

scholarly journals Evaluation of the American-English Quality of Life in Short Stature Youth (QoLISSY) questionnaire in the United States

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Monika Bullinger ◽  
Rachel Sommer ◽  
Andreas Pleil ◽  
Nelly Mauras ◽  
Judith Ross ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Quality Of Life ◽  
United States ◽  
Short Stature ◽  
American English ◽  
The United States

The Bible and Indigenous Language Translations in the Americas

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linford D. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Indigenous Languages ◽  
Indigenous Language ◽  
Translation Process ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Translational Activity ◽  
John Eliot ◽  
Sample Range

Scholarship on Native Americans and the Bible has often focused on the 1663 Indian Bible produced under the direction of John Eliot, the English missionary. This chapter expands the purview of European translational activity in the Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries by focusing on a fuller sample range of translations into indigenous languages. Doing so reveals the astonishing range of Bible related translations undertaken by Catholic missionaries in the Americas. Such a study demonstrates the ways in which alphabetic literacy was only one form of communicating biblical truths, while it also highlights the important roles indigenous people played in the translation process.

THE SMELL OF SOPHOKLES'SALMONEUS: TECHNOLOGY, SCATOLOGY, METATHEATRE

Ramus ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Robert Cowan
Keyword(s):  
The Sublime ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Extreme Probability ◽  
Corporeal Nature

Virtually nothing is known for certain about Sophokles' satyr playSalmoneus. However, a number of extremely probable deductions may be made on the basis of the few surviving fragments and the mythographic testimony about its eponymous villain (the iconographical record is totally unhelpful, or almost so). This article adds some further suggestions about the implications of the three most substantial fragments, which, if they do not quite share that level of extreme probability, it is hoped have a high degree at least of plausibility, and some significance for (meta-)dramatic and thematic aspects of the play as a whole. I shall argue that a reference to the malodorous quality of the thunderbolt draws attention to the gross physicality of the thunder-machine orbronteion(βροντεῖον) which Salmoneus has invented and constructed out of ox-hides. This has both a metatheatrical dimension, since thebronteionwas probably part of the stage-machinery of 5th-century drama, and a thematic one, since it emphasises the low, corporeal nature of Salmoneus' thunder in contrast to the sublime weapon of Zeus which it imperfectly mimics. The established parallelism between thunder and farting adds another level to the debasing of Salmoneus’ invention and concomitant deflation of his pretensions. Finally, I shall suggest that another fragment relating to the sympotic game ofkottabosmay have drawn a similarly deflating parallel between the hurling of the wine-lees and that of the tyrant's ersatz thunderbolts.

Indigenous Metaphors and the Philosophy of History in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Rivett
Keyword(s):  
Native Language ◽  
James Fenimore Cooper ◽  
Indian Languages ◽  
American Continent ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Verse Forms

Chapter 8 explores how a fascination with a “native language” emerged in literary circles through a simultaneous indebtedness to traditional British prose and verse forms, and Anglo-American linguistic affiliation with indigenous-language roots. By 1815, the “Historical and Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society” would declare this “native language” a uniquely “American idiom” to be discovered on the American continent through the “numerous novel forms” of Indian languages. In his early novels, James Fenimore Cooper seized upon the aesthetic value that could be constructed from Indian languages and from the figure of the noble savage. I show how Cooper’s novels build upon beliefs in the prelapsarian quality of indigenous languages. I argue that the regenerative potential that Cooper’s novels portray as arising from Indian words functions as aesthetic compensation for the violence and repeated violation of treaty agreements that characterized US and Indian relations in the early nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Revisiting Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” in Light of His Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism1

2012 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
James St. André
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
Definition Of

Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator,” the most widely cited twentieth century philosophical statement on translation, is commonly seen as one of the most opaque and misunderstood essays in the field. This paper uses a close reading of Benjamin’s doctoral thesis, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” to throw light on his thoughts on translation. I argue that the German Romantics’ definition of art, and art’s relation to criticism, are crucial to understanding why Benjamin conceived of translation as an “afterlife” of the work of art, why he believed that translatability is an innate quality of the work of art, and why he speaks of translation as moving the work of art onto a higher plane. I read Benjamin’s own essay on translation as a sort of “criticism” which seeks to “translate” the philosophical ideals of the Romantics, and thus give them an afterlife, and then reflect upon the implications for translation studies today.

James Fenimore Cooper on the Languages of the Americans: A Note on the Author's Footnotes

2011 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lance Schachterle
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
New World ◽  
American English ◽  
James Fenimore Cooper ◽  
Charles Brockden Brown ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Sufficient Evidence ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Noah Webster

Lance Schachterle, "James Fenimore Cooper on the Languages of the Americans: A Note on the Author's Footnotes" (pp. 37–68) James Fenimore Cooper scattered observations about the formation of a distinctive American language throughout such social analyses as Notions of the Americans (1828), Gleanings from Europe: England (1837) and The American Democrat (1838), arguing the need for Americans to establish mental independence from England in matters of language as well as politics and social structure. And many of the footnotes he added to his novels reinforce this message. "Twenty millions of people not only can make a word, but they can make a language, if it be needed," Cooper wrote in a burst of enthusiasm at the end of a footnote justifying Americanisms in his novel Satanstoe (1845). In this essay I investigate these authorial footnotes for evidence of words that Cooper defended as Americanisms necessary to comprehend the new topography and life-forms that Europeans were finding in the New World. Cooper found such words not only among older usages in English, but also in French, Dutch, and especially Native American adoptions—and even in some neologisms of his own. Unlike Charles Brockden Brown and John Adams, Cooper never advocated for a select elite like an academy to oversee the formation of the American language. The best practices among people like himself, "educated gentlemen of the middle states"—not the nasal tones and artificial rules of New Englanders like Noah Webster—would regulate the amelioration of American english. But he realized in the end that "the twenty millions…can make a language"; as he observed in Notions of the Americans, "when words once get fairly into use, their triumph affords a sufficient evidence of merit to entitle them to patronage."

scholarly journals The Sublime in Don DeLillo’s Mao II

2015 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 137-145
Author(s):  
Niloufar Behrooz ◽  
Hossein Pirnajmuddin
Keyword(s):  
The Sublime ◽  
The World

The world that DeLillo’s characters live in is often portrayed with an inherent complexity beyond our comprehension, which ultimately leads to a quality of woe and wonder which is characteristic of the concept of the sublime. The inexpressibility of the events that emerge in DeLillo’s fiction has reintroduced into it what Lyotard calls “the unpresentable in presentation itself” (PC 81), or to put it in Jameson’s words, the “postmodern sublime” (38). The sublime, however, appears in DeLillo’s fiction in several forms and it is the aim of this study to examine these various forms of sublimity. It is attempted to read DeLillo’s Mao II in the light of theories of the sublime, drawing on figures like Burke, Kant, Lyotard, Jameson and Zizek. In DeLillo’s novel, it is no longer the divine and magnificent in nature that leads to a simultaneous fear and fascination in the viewers, but the power of technology and sublime violence among other things. The sublime in DeLillo takes many different names, ranging from the technological and violent to the hollow and nostalgic, but that does not undermine its essential effect of wonder; it just means that the sublime, like any other phenomenon, has adapted itself to the new conditions of representation. By drawing on the above mentioned theorists, therefore, the present paper attempts to trace the notion of sublimity in DeLillo's Mao II, to explore the transformation of the concept of the sublime under the current conditions of postmodernity as depicted in DeLillo’s fiction.

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