In an era of increased mobility and globalization, a fast growing body of writing originates from authors who live in-between languages and cultures. In response to this challenge, transnational perspective offers a new approach to the growing body of cultural texts with an emphasis on experiences of migration, transculturation, bilingualism, and (cultural) translation.
The introductory analysis and the fifteen essays in this collection critically interrogate complex relations between transnational and translation studies, bringing to this dialogue a much needed gender perspective. Divided into three parts (From Transnational to Translational; Reading Across Borders and Transnational in Translation), they address a range of issues relevant for this debate, from theoretical problems to practical questions of literary criticism and translation, understood as an act of cultural interpretation.
The volume mostly deals with contemporary literary and cultural production, but also with classical texts and modernist literature. Its particular quality is a strong (although not exclusive) focus on Central and East European literatures, and more generally on women writers. Its interdisciplinary, transnational, and intercultural perspective makes it relevant across disciplinary boundaries, from literary and translation studies to gender studies, cultural studies, and migration studies.

Jasmina Lukić, Sibelan Forrester and Borbála Faragó: Introduction: Transnational Literatures and Cultures in/and Translation

1. From Transnational to Translational

Susan Stanford Friedman: Translational Migrations: Novel Homelands in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane

Eleonora Federici and Vita Fortunati: Theorizing Women’s Transnational Literatures: Shaping New Female Identities in Europe through Writing and Translation

Azade Seyhan: Crossing Borders in Perilous Zones: Labors of Transport and Translation in Women Writers of Exile

Sonia Fernández Hoyos and Adelina Sánchez Espinosa: Zygmunt Bauman’s Liquidity and Transnational Women’s Literature: Nancy Huston as a Case Study

Jasmina Lukić: Travelling Theory as Theory in Translation: Transnational and Transgenerational Perspectives

2. Reading Across Borders

Grace Ledbetter: Translation into Dance: Adaptation and Transnational Hellenism in Balanchine’s Apollo.

Ágnes Györke: Stories from Elsewhere: The City as a Transnational Space in Doris Lessing's Fiction

Vera Eliasova: The Mobile Imagination in European Women’s Writing of Modernism and its Contemporary Resonances

Madalina Nicolaescu: Romanian Women’s Success Stories as Transnational Migrants

Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru: From Travelling Memoir to Nomadic Narrative in Kapka Kassabova’s Street without a Name and Twelve Minutes of Love: A Tango Story

Dejan Ilić: Through the Looking-glass: About recurring motifs and devices in the prose of Dubravka Ugrešić

3. Transnational in Translation

Michael Kandel: It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Swing

Sibelan Forrester: Translating Folktales: From National to Transnational

Ellen Elias-Bursać: Rivalry and Consecration: Croatian and Serbian Writers In Conflict and Translation

Kathrin Hellerstein: China Comes to Warsaw or Warsaw Comes to China: Melech Ravitch’s Travel Poems and Journals

Index

Knjiženstvo

"Each article of the study discussed is based on its own theoretical grounding. However, there is a specific layer in every single article manifested by an individual analysis and interpretation of the concrete cultural or literary phenomenon. This individual analysis is actually a specific research perspective of each expert (comparative, cultural, thematic, phenomenological and postcolonial, etc.). It is noticeable, however, that Times of Mobility offers a broad spectrum of research perspectives but taking the gender insight as a constant. Each article, at its individual level, lays stress on the feminist layers of the findings, sources and relevant references. Those feminist layers entail either specific women writing or different feminist elements in the very writing. Perhaps the most important aspect of the study lies in the emphasis of the strength and responsibility of language and... more

Slavic Review

"The essays are beautifully crafted, meticulously researched, synergistically connected to one another and together form an important and much needed contribution not only to literary studies but to cultural and feminist studies and to the intellectual history of the last half a century."

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/slavic-review/article/abs/times-of-mobil…