“There are no limits to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination”, Elizabeth Costello addresses her audience in J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. With this statement, Costello seems to agree with Albert Einstein’s famous quote regarding the superiority of imagination over knowledge, making the latter responsible for our limited and short-sighted human knowledge and understanding.
Literature and other artistic discourses feed on the imagination whenever authors/artists render to their public any experience other than their own, even those of individuals belonging to their own species. Thus, when it comes to imagining and rendering the fictional experience of a member of a different species, the role of the narrator/poet/filmmaker/artist resembles that of a translator who moves between the source language (that of the other-than-human being whose experience is being rendered) and the target language (that of the human audience). In so doing, the translator may choose, or inadvertently fall into, the “compensatory humanism” Rosi Braidotti warns against, which could lead to instances of anthropomorphisation that might eventually deny the specificity of the other-than-human being. Alternatively, s/he may devise particular narrative, poetic, artistic strategies in an effort to focus on the message, while acknowledging proximity to the source language, even in the awareness that the recreation of that experience will always be mediated by the fact that the translator belongs to a different species, speaking a different language. Borrowing the concept of “transcreation” from the field of translation studies, which is closely connected to skopos theory, Margarita Carretero-González refers to those cultural artefacts as “interspecies transcreations”.
The aim of this conference is to explore the way in which creaturely encounters have been textually rendered in order to transfer the experience of the nonhuman species to a human audience. As in all EASLCE conferences we welcome contributions from literary and cultural studies, philosophy, art history, translation studies, education, music, anthropology, and other fields of environmental humanities. Proposed papers/workshops may focus on, but are not restricted to topics such as:
- Affective ecologies
- Allegorical functions of other-than-human nature
- Biosemiotics and the language of more-than-human/other-than-human nature.
- Empathetic imagination and education
- Ethical implications of textual representations of other-than-human experiences
- Interspecies transcreation
- Pathetic fallacy and anthropomorphisation
- Posthuman subjectivities
- Textual representations of animal and plant communications in literature and other artistic discourses.
- Translation studies and foreign-language learning: changes in appreciation of other-than-human nature in translation and foreign-language acquisition.