The Lyrical Mode of Translating

The translator has a minor part in Woolf’s fiction, but recurs throughout her novels, from Ridley (The Voyage Out) to Dodge (Between the Acts). Similarly, essays, reviews, and letters show her cross-cultural and trans-historic thinking via Greek, French, and Russian translations. She helped define Hogarth Press’s energetic commissions of translations and engaged in translations and co-translations herself. All these translational transactions share a vivid sense of the alluring sounds, cadences, and scripts of words spoken ‘foreignly’, heard across temporal, geographical or atmospheric boundaries. Translating invokes an intensely dialogic, sensuous encounter with the materiality of language-forms experienced as an almost musical performance, lifting words from the page and voicing them. This chapter explores the cultural and political resonances of Woolf’s translator as a ‘Wandering Anon’, ‘a simple singer, lifting a song or a story from other people’s lips, in the uncouth jargon of their native tongue’ (‘Anon’).

Redrawing the boundary of “speech community”: how and why the historicity and materiality of language and the space/place distinction matter to its reconceptualization

This essay contemplates how we adapt existing sociolinguistic theoretical concepts, methodologies, and analytical units to the world we live in today. Regardless of one’s location on the globe, our lives are profoundly affected by increasingly intense global interconnections and, at the same time, equally intense differentiation of space attending late global capitalism and the evolving nation-state system. While sociolinguistics has attended the heterogeneity within the speech community, in the world today as such, the idea of speech community as bounded is no longer tenable. In envisioning the future direction of IJSL and its leadership in the field, this essay suggests that speech community as an analytical concept would be significantly advanced through the theoretical integration of the space/place distinction and the historicity and materiality of language into its architectonics. By drawing on some of the recent works for guiding models, the essay argues that the reconceptualization of speech community would also demand radical openness to interdisciplinary approaches.

O ensaísmo de Ana Hatherly: “na fronteira entre o diálogo e o duelo com tudo”

One of the medullary aspects of Ana Hatherly’s poetics is its interest in the materiality of language, subjected to continuous investigations in the most varied forms. Each work seems to be a piece of the same incessant research and shows an attention to the performativity and physicality of writing, to the search for its most uneasy or suspensive – essayistic? – voltage. If the essayist, eminently experimental, sets up an “infinite game” and textualizes a “tactile tought” (Jean-Christophe Bailly), it is worth speculating on the configuration of an essayism in many of Hatherly’s poetic and visual experiences. Although the author also collects explicitly reflective texts, this essay starts from the hypothesis.

Perceiving the Materiality of Language in Teaching English Language Arts

As language is the medium of an art or a configuration of arts focused on communication, it is indispensable to realize the materiality of language with its potential to interpret the numerous phenomena in the environment. Our individual microcosms filled with messages on various complex situations received through our sensory channels exist in terms of strings of verbal language that help to re-create them for communication in whatever fashion we want. We experience language in meaningful utterances that function in singles or clusters to represent the life world in numerous registers. Our expressions inspired by our experiences of the life world are communicated through words orchestrated in grammatically patterned sentences. Like in other forms of art, in English language arts, teachers and learners can behave with confidence, when they realize the substance they deal with as oral sounds that gradually evolve into syllables, morphemes, signs, symbols, metaphors, and images, which creatively represent the life world. Against this background, I intend to demonstrate here the relevance of perceiving the materiality of language under the framework of a multifaceted unity of several disciplines, namely, phonology, morphology, semiotics, rhetoric, and stylistics that altogether contribute to a holistic approach to language. A concrete perception of language achieved in this manner helps to recover the learning process not only from inhibition and anxiety but also from fossilization and ephemerality.

Patrizia Vicinelli. Ritmo, corpo e parola tra performance e poesia

It was in the fifties and sixties, in the poetic prospective and research of the second post-war period in Italy that the words and images started to work as fragments in a decontextualized way from different linguistic systems in order to put aside in interaction. Such juxtapositions demanded unprecedented linguistic experiments that arose to explore new forms of intertextuality and montage The essay deals with some aspects of Patrizia Vicinelli's work to analyze how writing and words, between poetry, art and performance, were rethought and redefined starting from a deep involvement of the body between orality, poetic writing and rediscovered materiality of language.

„Raps“

The recent controversy about the possibility of defining a new geological era called ‘Anthropocene’ has far-ranging consequences. The new notion forces us to rethink the dichotomy between the entities formerly referred to as men and nature and to conceive of their relation as an interrelation. The relevance of these considerations for literary studies is not limited to the anthropocene as a subject matter of literature, or to the possible use of literature as a means of enhancing the reader’s awareness of climate change. Rather, what is at stake is the relation of language to the new interrelation between man and nature, including the poetical and metalinguistic functions that emphasize the materiality of language. The present article explores the relation between the materiality of language and the materiality of things by way of a close reading of a single poem written by Marcel Beyer. Devoted to the cultivated plant rape, the literary traditions which this poem invokes reach beyond nature lyrics into georgic. An excursus recalls this genre of agriculture poetry and distinguishes it from pastoral, especially with regard to its use of language.

Decomposing Matter: From literary critique to language creation

This article provides a context for the section “Creating Language and Theorizing Literature”. The editors of the section discuss both contemporary and historicalarticulations of the materiality of language from a new materialist perspective. The new materialist project comprises looking for the immanence of language via three realms: its relation, its theorization, and its creation. Therefore, moving away from representationalist practices demands a definition of language as animate, sensory material requiring creative labour for its realisation. The article provides an example of this materialization of language, via the concept of bodywording.