Department of Modern Languages

Linguistic theory and Translation Studies have a long, if somewhat turbulent, history. Even now, in some institutions Translation Studies is placed in the field of Applied Linguistics, whereas in others it is subsumed under Cultural Studies. This is perhaps a sign of something that now few would doubt: that the phenomenon of translation, in its many forms, is manifold and can (and should) be approached from a range of angles. This paper approaches the problem of analyzing source and target texts, with the aim of identifying the translator's strategy when translating, and always considering translation to be a decision-making process. To do this, it draws critically on a relatively new theory in the study of language: Optimality Theory.

There is a large body of South American films that use the popular road movie format to examine regional culture and attitudes, especially in Argentina and Brazil. These films, made from the 1990s onwards, take into account the neoliberal post-dictatorship context of the Southern Cone as well as the impact of globalization on Latin American cultures. Pinazza performs a careful cultural analysis of the films and investigates how road movies deal with narratives on nationhood whilst simultaneously inserting themselves in a transnational dialogue. Her comparative approach to national cinemas in South America provides insights on the mediation of the economic, sociological, and cultural elements that affect and are reflected in the films produced in the region.

This paper examines oriental landscape scenes of “luxury” and of “the surprising” as described by Sir William Chambers (1726–1796) in his Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772), and analyses them in relation to Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime and the beautiful. I argue that Chambers’ depiction of these landscape scenes was motivated by a commitment to the importance of maintaining martial virtues in commercial and civil societies. The Dissertation puts forward the role of the surprising scenes for maintaining military vigour in coexistence with the landscape of luxury. For Chambers, landscape is a site for shaping citizens’ sensations and virtues. Chambers articulated his sensationalist landscape, which was deeply influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment discourses of physiology, virtue, and commerce theory, through the disguise of a Chinese garden. The Dissertation provides an important example of how discourses on the building of Britain’s identity operated through allegory within the framework of cultural interaction between Asia and Europe during the early modern period.

Este artigo explora o modo pelo qual os documentário argentino Huanacache, tierra Huarpe (Silvina Cuman e Javier Orrade, 2010) e brasileiro Vale dos esquecidos (Maria Raduan, 2012) refletem uma contranarrativa ao denunciar o racismo institucionalizado e a perpetuação da condição colonial de indígenas na Argentina e no Brasil. Considerando  o conceito de nação de Ernest Renan (1882), posteriormente desenvolvido por Homi K. Bhabha (1990, 2007), o artigo investiga até que ponto “esquecer de lembrar” das dificuldades da população indígena relaciona-se à necessidade de suprimir a violência histórica a fim de manter um sentido de harmonia nas formulações sobre unidade nacional.

The idea that we as humanity have evolved in a linear process over time is probably one of the most widely accepted ideas across the human species. There is debate between more religious fundamentalist perspectives and more scientific-rational perspectives about exactly when it all began (eg a few thousand years ago versus 14 billion years ago), but they all agree on the idea that since that beginning we have been evolving through historical time with a past, present and future. Indeed, even our most popular philosophers and spiritual teachers tend to promote an evolutionary perspective (Wilber (1996), Cohen (2011), Laszlo (1996)). In my own book (Merry 2009) I adopted and connected these various evolutionary theories.
However, over the last year or so, I have come to question this perspective, and the cosmometry retreat has strengthened my belief that there is a more adequate perspective on our human reality that better reflects the fundamental dynamics of life. This paper attempts to explore the broader perspective and apply it to our human story.

The thesis is that as we shift our interior experience and patterns, so the world around us changes. On top of that, the reverse is true – as we create change in the information fields of the world around us, so that is reflected in changes in our interior experience and nervous system. This is why I have chosen to connect neuroscience and eco-fields, and why I selected Hermes’ “as within, so without” quote as the subtitle. The two main faculty members of the course also reflect these two aspects – Jim Hickman on neuroscience and Will Taegel on eco-fields. If this thesis proves to be true (and there is a lot more work needed to develop it) then it will give us a way to navigate hypercomplexity grounded ultimately in our own choices about how we relate to ourselves, each other and the world around us.

This paper builds on previous papers (Merry 2011) in exploring an underlying pattern to the life process, which I have called “volution”. I start with a brief recap of the volution
concept, and then go through a third, second and first person perspective on how my experience and reading at around the Chartres Dialectica intensive deepened this understanding and
feeling, in particular in relationship to Anne Baring's talks and book on "The Dream of the Cosmos".

As I contemplate the question and review my notes and memories of the intensive, a theme jumps into my awareness: towards a new synergy of individual and collective. Not only was this a theme during the week and is it embedded in the question above (“leadership and resilient communities”), but it was a dynamic playing out in the team of Wisdom University over the same days. At one moment I felt called to speak in the group about the potentially creative, but also potentially destructive, tension between a leader who ups the ante, setting out a new vision, and the community they lead who are still busy running the current organisation and also want to be part of the new. This paper will explore the theme of the leader-community tension as a collective moves into and through transition.