French 590 Special Seminar and Conference

This transdisciplinary and multilingual graduate seminar takes as its task the bridging of the gap between academic-theoretical discourses on translation and the practice of translation as a public good. The seminar aims to foster a community of scholars in the humanities and humanistic social sciences working across modern languages as well as those in other fields who see translation as crucial to their scholarship and future professions and activism. As such, it assumes a two-pronged approach.

First, translation and its publics: we consider the theorists and cultural actors that focus on the “public” dimension of translation—broadly, its vocation to enable a provisional and fragile relation between cultures by making previously inaccessible texts available to new publics. We explore its potential to create expanded and even entirely new conceptions of the public sphere (e.g., queer translation, translation in imperial contexts).

Second, public translation: in dialogue with the readings that address translation as a public good, we will critically develop the public-facing dimensions of the seminar in the form of a “translation collective” that constitutes a collaborative network of translators and those who require/desire translation in which multiple parties co-create the resulting target-language text.
Advanced proficiency in a language other than English (ideally, in all 3 skills, but at least in reading) is required, as is a willingness to operate in a multilingual context in which the “dominant” language is not always the language of reference.

Richard Watts is Associate Professor of French and Director of Canadian Studies. His first book, Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World, considers the ways in which the paratexts of literary works enabled their circulation and a certain kind of reception in the French-speaking world via an engagement with theories of cultural translation. Among other honors, he has received a 2018 Mellon Fellowship for New Graduate Seminars in the Humanities, which supported the development of this course.