Work-in-Progress 10/28 with Emek Ergun and Kevin Wisniewski
Join us for lunch and discussion of interdisciplinary work
The Dresher Center is pleased to sponsor lunchtime discussions with faculty and graduate students who present their work-in-progress to colleagues. These interdisciplinary discussions are a wonderful way to meet colleagues across the campus and join discussions of multidisciplinary frameworks and methodological approaches.
Monday, October 28, 12-1:00 (Lunch served at 11:45, so please rsvp to mwelsh@umbc.edu)
Emek Ergun, LLC student (Carol McCann, advisor) and Kevin Wisniewski, LLC student (Craig Saper, advisor)
Emek Ergun: Doing Feminist Translation as Local and Transnational Activism: The Turkish Translation and Reception of Virgin: The Untouched History
My dissertation, “Doing Feminist Translation as Local and Transnational Activism: The Turkish Translation and Reception of Virgin: The Untouched History” explores the ways in which the feminist virginity knowledges of an American book, Virgin, traveled through my politically engaged translation. At the Brownbag, I take up the question: How did the feminist readers in Turkey relate to a feminist book that was “originally” written for and about Western women and western virginities? That is, how did they manage to build bridges between the virginity stories of the west and their own geopolitically grounded virginity realities? My reader-reception analysis suggests that readers partly achieved this bridging through a universalizing gesture that allowed them to imagine a common ground of virginity oppression and resistance across histories and cultures. At the same time, they recognized the differences among women and their gender realities. It is my (tentative) contention that such a complex bridging gesture of “differential universalization” offers both promising trajectories and cautionary tales of transnational feminist politics.
K. A. Wisniewski: Improving the Art of Paper War: The Literary Gambols of Francis Hopkinson
Poet, author and satirist. Signer of the Declaration of Independence. First American composer. Co-editor of Pennsylvania Magazine. Scientist and inventor. Federal Judge. And designer of the American flag, the Great Seal of the United States, the U.S. Treasury Seal, and colonial currency. These activities represent only a few of Francis Hopkinson’s accomplishments. But Hopkinson (1737-1791) has somehow escaped recognition from the public as well as in-depth scholarly inquiry from historians and literary critics. This paper seeks to explain his absence in these spheres and to re-position him historically by investigating a few of his “literary gambols” and experiments, including his satire of newspaper quarrels, “A Plan for the Improvement of the Art of Paper War” (1786). Targeted questions include the following: How does Hopkinson’s work correspond or clash with genres of humor and satire and political writings and propaganda of his age? What was the eighteenth-century dialogue or scrutiny surrounding the role and visuality and textuality of the printed word and the process of reading? Lastly, anonymous authorship and the use of pseudonyms were common in the eighteenth century, but how do we read Hopkinson’s abundant use of pseudonyms, especially those that “attack” his own work and published in politically-opposed newspapers?