Kundera Archives

Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation engages with translation, in both theory and practice, as part of an interrogation of ethical as well as political thought in the work of three bilingual European authors: Bernardo Atxaga, Milan Kundera and Jorge Semprún. In approaching the work of these authors, the book draws upon the approaches to translation offered by Benjamin, Derrida, Ricœur and Deleuze to highlight a broad set of ethical questions, focused upon the limitations of the monolingual and the democratic possibilities of linguistic plurality; upon our innate desire to translate difference into similarity; and upon the ways in which translation responds to the challenges of individual and collective remembrance.

Each chapter explores these interlingual but also intercultural, interrelational and interdisciplinary issues, mapping a journey of translation that begins in the impact of translation upon the work of each author, continues into moments of linguistic translation, untranslatability and mistranslation within their texts and ultimately becomes an exploration of social, political and affective (un)translatability. In these journeys, the creative and critical potential of translation emerges as a potent, often violent, but always illuminating, vision of the possibilities of differentiation and connection, generation and memory, in temporal, linguistic, cultural and political terms.

Heterosexual Masculinities and the Self-Reflexive Novel examines how the narratives of four world-renowned authors, namely J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, Philip Roth and Mario Vargas Llosa, offer a standpoint through which to address the inscription of heterosexual masculinity into Western literary legacy and the ways in which masculinity is re-fashioned in contemporary self-reflexive novels.

Considering the interconnectedness of their narratives for the first time, the book explores unexamined patterns of dialogue among Coetzee, Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa while also contextualising their writing in the light of the European literary tradition inaugurated by Cervantes’s Don Quixote and continued by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Rather than building on conventional theoretical approaches to literary studies, Stefano Rossoni develops a fresh and engaging approach by looking at these two works not only as narrative texts but most importantly as theories of literature. In dialogue with critical contributions that examined men’s emotional illiteracy and struggle to develop a language for self-reflection, the book argues that the narratives of Coetzee, Kundera, Roth and Vargas Llosa engage with the tradition of the self-reflexive novel and its ramifications to reflect on masculinity as a socio-cultural construction. Ultimately, their writing reveals men’s novelistic self-reflexivity as a site of unintelligibility.