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Thornber, Karen

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Thornber

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Karen

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Thornber, Karen

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2009 - 200912010 - 20111

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Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.08d5fa87-2f8b-43aa-836d-bcc1d03df7e9

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    Literature and environment
    (Annual Reviews, 2011) Buell, Lawrence; Heise, Ursula K.; Thornber, Karen
    Since prehistory, literature and the arts have been drawn to portrayals of physical environments and human-environment interactions. The modern environmentalist movement as it emerged first in the late-nineteenth century and, in its more recent incarnation, in the 1960s, gave rise to a rich array of fictional and nonfictional writings concerned with humans' changing relationship to the natural world. Only since the early 1990s, however, has the long-standing interest of literature studies in these matters generated the initiative most commonly known as “ecocriticism,” an eclectic and loosely coordinated movement whose contributions thus far have been most visible within its home discipline of literature but whose interests and alliances extend across various art forms and media. In such areas as the study of narrative and image, ecocriticism converges with its sister disciplines in the humanities: environmental anthropology, environmental history, and environmental philosophy. In the first two sections, we begin with a brief overview of the nature, significance, and evolution of literature-environment studies. We then summarize in more detail six specific centers of interest: (a) the imagination of place and place-attachment, (b) the enlistment and critique of models of scientific inquiry in the study of literature and the arts, (c) the examination of the significance of gender difference and environmental representation, (d) the cross-pollination of ecocritical and postcolonial scholarship as ecocriticism has extended its horizons beyond its original focus on Anglo-American imagination, (e) ecocriticism's evolving interest in indigenous art and thought, and (f) ecocri-ticism's no less keen and complex attentiveness to artistic representation and the ethics of relations between humans and animals.
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    Translating Betrayals, Betraying Translations
    (Rio de Janeiro : Aeroplano, 2009) Thornber, Karen
    Debates over the boundaries of early twentieth-century Japanese literature often focus on the volumes of Japanese-language literature written by semicolonial Chinese and colonial Koreans and Taiwanese and published throughout the Japanese empire. Part of both modern Japanese literature and the modern literatures of China, Korea, and Taiwan, these texts greatly expand the conventional boundaries of “Japanese literature.” Further undermining conventional boundaries were transnational literary movements, where connections with writers and creative texts from abroad often ran just as deep as with those from closer to home. Although fertile, these and other discussions of what constitutes early twentieth-century Japanese literature have neglected the paradox of translation – translation both into and from the Japanese language. Translations naturally facilitate the cross-pollination of literary worlds. But even more significantly, they defy perhaps more than anything else the division of literature along purely national lines. This presentation will focus on one of the most striking sets of colonial and semicolonial translations of Japanese literature, namely Chinese and Korean translations of heavily censored Japanese proletarian and battlefront texts, where fuseji and missing pages are replaced with Chinese and Korean words, creating literary works that are no more “Japanese” than they are “Chinese” or “Korean.” I also will address the further reworking of Japanese literature in Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese intertextual reconfigurations of censored literature, and the deep yet regularly overlooked intertwining of the early twentieth-century Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Taiwanese literary worlds (particularly the intra-Asian friendships) that allowed this transculturation to flourish.