Browsing by Author "Seyhan, Azade"

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    Blurred Identities: Investigating Language and Memory as Locations of Identity and Culture in Amara Lakhous' Scontro di civiltà per un ascensore a Piazza Vittorio and Richard Rodriguez's Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez
    (2013) Allen, Anaka; Higginson, Pim; Ricci, Roberta; Seyhan, Azade
    While varied forms of migration have always existed, the last few decades have witnessed vast displacements and resettlements of many populations. World and ethnic wars, the dissolution of nations, environmental fluctuations, and the increasing wealth disparities between nations have all contributed to the growing number of exilic populations. In addition, the world has also contracted in its perceived expanse as a consequence of improved technologies, which have provided a facility of communication and mobility across borders. Thus exile, a term that has often been perceived as a unifying condition suffered by populations of ‘immigrants,’ ‘emigrants,’ ‘emigres,’and ‘refugees,’ has become an increasingly universal experience. Amara Lakhous and Richard Rodriguez, two authors who have encountered the liberties and constraints pertaining to the modern exile, have demonstrated their precarious condition of “in-betweenness” in their respective works. As modern exilic authors, they are concerned with the preservation of identity and cultural history in the face of a destination country that does not resemble their own and misunderstands the ‘other’. As they attempt to balance two opposing cultures, language and memory become crucial modes for both accessing the past and assimilating within the host culture. Lakhous and Rodriguez demonstrate that the exilic author is a classification under construction, which complicates the limited boundaries of nation and national literature, and the experience of migration.
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    [Im]pure : Investigating the Relationship between Language and Nation in Amin Maalouf's Les Identites meurtrieres and Milan Kundera's Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli
    (2010) Miller, Becky; Seyhan, Azade; Miller, Jerry
    Transnational writers have moved far beyond conventional notions of bilingual writing and have come to occupy a different status with regard to the role of the nation in determining personal identity. We must examine this significance of choosing a non-native language — in this essay French — in the face of a progressively more interconnected world. While the globalized and industrialized nature of the contemporary age, political and commercial concerns undoubtedly factor into an author's choice of writing language. This paper examines language as a mode of both representing an experience and commenting on the method of conveying that narrative. Amin Maalouf's Les Identites meurtrieres and Milan Kundera's Le Livre du rire et de l'oubli elucidate the essential multiplicity of perspectives and allegiances exemplified by the hybridized texts of transnational writers.
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    One and Three Texts: Writing and Re-writing the Politics of Al-Khubz al-Hafi in Translation
    (2015) Fries, Daniel; Seyhan, Azade; Higginson, Pim
    In 1973, a British publisher asked American novelist Paul Bowles, then in Tangier, to ask Moroccan Amazigh writer Mohamed Choukri for an autobiography. Bowles had some experience translating oral narratives, but since he was unable to read Arabic, Choukri’s text was unintelligible to him. The two men translated through Spanish, French, and colloquial Arabic, while their disagreements led to them sitting on opposite sides of the same room, trying to work independently. After a few edits, the book was translated into French in 1980 by native Arabic speaker Tahar Ben Jelloun, and was finally published in Arabic in 1982. In this thesis, I examine the Bowles translation, titled For Bread Alone, and the 1980 French translation, Le Pain nu, and compare them to the 1982 version of the Arabic text. I argue that Choukri’s original text is politically motivated, written to criticize the French and Spanish colonial influence on Morocco and the Moroccan economy. Choukri’s violent memoir describes abject poverty, as well as a complicated relationship between food, sex, and money, that Bowles, with his experience of Tangier as a foreign city, rewrites, either deliberately or because of his inability to understand Arabic. I make use of Lawrence Venuti’s work on translation, and in an analysis that takes the form of word-to-word comparison, as well as original translation of some sections of the Arabic, I evaluate the effects of the “remainder”— what the translator brings unconsciously to a text already inscribed with its own values, traditions, and structures—on Mohamed Choukri’s political goals in writing a “collective autobiography” of the Rifian Amazigh people in Morocco.
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