2012 Publications
Ad Maiora Selected papers from the Victoria University of Wellington Postgraduate Symposium edited by Sarah Leggott and Marco Sonzogni.
This volume comprises a selection of papers presented at the inaugural School of Languages and Cultures (SLC) Postgraduate Symposium, held in October 2011 at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. The Symposium showcased the research work of Honours, MA and PhD students from the different language and culture programmes in the School: Asian Studies, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish. Interaction and exchange between postgraduate students and academic staff are at the heart of SLC’s research culture. Consequently, the supervision and mentoring of future academics play a central role in the life of the School. The inaugural SLC Postgraduate Symposium was both a reflection and a product of such dialogue. This was a very important and highly successful event for our School, and we are proud of the excellent work produced by our postgraduate students who are clearly very promising scholars.
The essays included in this book are testament to the quality and the diversity of research work that is undertaken by the postgraduate community in SLC. Engaging with contemporary critical debates in different areas of literary, language and cultural studies, the papers serve to highlight the interdisciplinary nature of the research produced in the School. The essays in this book are arranged in four sections, mirroring the four sessions of the symposium, each focusing on a key thematic area: Issues of Representation, Issues of Translation, Issues of Language, and Issues of Reception and Cross-Cultural Representation. These sections, and the essays that comprise them, signal not only the breadth of scholarship in SLC, but also particular strengths in areas such as translation studies, contemporary literary criticism, and history and memory studies.
Re-Covered Rose. A Case Study in Book Cover Design as Intersemiotic Translation by Dr Marco Sonzogni, Senior Lecturer in Italian. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2011.
When a reader picks up a book, the essence of the text has been translated into the visual space of the cover. Using Umberto Eco’s bestseller The Name of the Rose as a case study, this is the first study of book cover design as a form of intersemiotic translation based on the purposeful selection of visual signs to represent verbal signs. As an act of translation the cover of a book ought to be an ‘equivalent representation’ of the text. But in the absence of any established interpretive criteria, how can equivalence between the visual and the verbal be determined and interpreted? Re-covered Rose tackles this question in an original and creative way, laying the foundation for a new research trend in Translation Studies.
Snow from Broken Eyes: Cocaine in the Lives and Works of Three Expressionist Poets by Dr Richard Millington, Lecturer in German. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2011.
Snow from Broken Eyes: Cocaine in the Lives and Works of Three Expressionist Poets, Bern: Peter Lang, 2012. 341pp. For more information, click here
The highpoint of German Expressionism in the second decade of the 20th century coincided with a rapid increase in the availability of cocaine as the drug was stockpiled for medical purposes by armies fighting the First World War. This study investigates the implications of this historical intersection for the lives and works of three poets associated with Expressionism: Gottfried Benn, Walter Rheiner and Georg Trakl. All three are known to have used the drug during the War, although under very different circumstances, and the cocaine references contained in their works are equally diverse. In this study, the findings arising from close readings of key works by Benn, Rheiner and Trakl are contextualized in relation both to the longstanding historical association between psychoactive substances and imaginative literature, and to the radical innovations in literary style that characterized the early 20th century.
2011 Publications
One Artist on Five Continents: The Life of Elisabet Delbrück by Dr Margaret Sutherland, Senior Lecturer in German. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2011.
Elisabet Delbrük (1876-1967) was one of a number of Germans who came to New Zealand in the late 1930s. Unlike most, she had not intended to emigrate but was touring the country when World War II broke out. She was at first forbidden to leave and then chose to remain in Wellington. Her thirty years in Mahina Bay on Wellington harbour had a profound effect on all who knew her. This study aims to discover why she was so remarkable. It explores her early life, her marriage into a prominent German family and her qualification as an artist. She turned this into a profession, teaching and exhibiting on five continents in the 1920s and 1930s. She always travelled alone, observing the customs and beliefs of the people she met. In Australia and New Zealand in 1938 and 1939 she was wrongly suspected of spreading Nazi propaganda. Her story is also the story of a heroic group of Wellingtonians who helped her in the 1940s and valued her friendship till her death.
The Last of the Human Freedoms - The French civilians who chose to help Kiwis during the Second World War by Dr Keren Chiaroni - Senior Lecturer in French.
The Last of the Human Freedoms - The French civilians who chose to help Kiwis during the Second World War by Keren M. Chiaroni.With forewords by Michel Legras, Ambassador of France to New Zealand, and Rosemary Banks, Ambassador of New Zealand to France. RRP $39.99 HarperCollins Publishers NZ.
When Kiwi airman John Sanderson was shot down over Laines-aux-Bois in 1944, a French family chose to shelter him. A local doctor called in to treat his wounds made a different choice and betrayed them all to the Gestapo. The mother was eventually released, but her husband was transported and died en route to Dachau concentration camp. The airman survived the war and began a correspondence with the family, the legacy of which continues today.
Based on letters, journals, military records and personal accounts, The Last of the Human Freedoms tells of a number of dramatic escapes by downed airmen made with the help of French citizens―some were members of the Resistance and others just ordinary citizens from many walks of life―all of whom were aware of the dangers involved. The helpers associated with two of the pilots whose stories are told in this book were sent to concentrations camps. One died en route, one died in the camps, the others returned with nightmares that remained with them for the rest of their days.
'Their decision to assist others at great cost to themselves,' says Chiaroni, 'provides a counterpoint to the shameful policies of the Vichy regime, while offering a demonstration of the role of choice in our lives even, and especially, in circumstances where our freedom has been curtailed.'
Chiaroni's extensive research during the course of five years, took her to many locations in France and New Zealand, where she interviewed surviving members of the families whose stories are told in this book, and was able to access archival resources in both public and private collections.
While primarily about individual lives and personal choices, The Last of the Human Freedoms also presents a poignant and compelling view of humanity. As Auschwitz survivor and philosopher Viktor Frankl wrote: 'Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms' to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.'
Keren Chiaroni teaches French at Victoria University. She is committed to exploring links between different media and cultures, and between France and New Zealand.
About the Author: Read more about Dr Keren Chiaroni on her staff page.
Book by Dr Myreille Pawliez - Senior Lecturer in French.
Une étude sémantico-narratologique de Dis-moi que je vis (1964) et du Portique(1967) de Michèle Mailhot. Colimaçon et oscillation dans les soliloques de Josée. Myreille Pawliez, Lewiston-Queenston-Lampeter, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2010, 356 pages, ISBN-13: 978-0-7734-1322-1 / ISBN-10: 0-7734-1322-7.
This study is an in-depth narratological analysis of the first two books by the Quebec writer, Michèle Mailhot, who was first published in the 1960s, at a time when a truly Quebec literature emerged and the number of published novels in the province soared. Each of the novels, Dis-moi que je vis (1964) and Le Portique (1967), is narrated in the first person and portrays a female protagonist named Josée who lives in Montreal.
The research departs from the existing sociological and psychological works, essentially feminist, which have focussed on the personal struggle of Mailhot's protagonists who live in a patriarchal Quebec. Based on Gérard Genette's internationally recognised narratological theory, it looks closely and systematically at the narrative features of both works in order to pinpoint their network of narrative characteristics and interpret the effects from textual clues such as verbal tenses, spatial and temporal deictics, personal and modal markers, typological and discourse indicators that are presented in the two long tables of the appendices. It also examines how characters are constructed within the text, combining the notion of semantic traits with some aspects of narrative theory, using a model specifically developed to supplement the theoritical gap in the study of characters within the boundaries of narratology. As a result of this examination, despite a noted similarity in many narrative elements relating to time, focalisation, narration and characterisation, a different, and meaningful, overarching narrative structure, as well as a meaningful network of characters, are uncovered for each of the novels, thus showing for the first time how the narrative underpins the semantic in Mailhot's first two novels. New elements and effects, sometimes paradoxical and often relating to the protagonist, emerge, confirming, or refuting, previous findings. In particular, it is revealed if Josée is the one and same protagonist, and if the humour, which ranges from derision to sarcasm, stems from Josée-the protagonist or Josée-the narrator.
The detailed comparative semantico-narratological analysis, accompanied by an exhaustive bibliography and preceded by a presentation of the author's writings and a commentary of the associated media reviews and academic studies, leads to the contextualisation of both works within the broad classification of traditional vs modern novels, as well as within the ideological and literary context of Quebec. The work concludes on the paradoxical aspects of Dis-moi que je vis and Le Portique as well as the paradoxes surrounding Michèle Mailhot's writings. In the end, this study unveils the extent of her talent and to a certain degree, explains why her writing has somehow been overlooked.
This publication would appeal to readers interested in Michèle Mailhot's novels, Quebec literature, characterization and narratological analysis.
About the Author: Read more about Dr Myreille Pawliez on her staff page.
So Far the World (Si Loin du Monde)
Tahitian fisherman Tava'e Raioaoa was cast adrift in the currents and winds of the Pacific Ocean. He travelled over 1,200 kilometres in his small open vessel for more than 100 days until landing on Aitutaki in the Cook Islands. Tava'e Raioaoa told his story to French journalist Lionel Duroy.
The French language book was first published in 2003 by Oh Publishing and went on to win the Document category of the Prix des Maisons de la Presse Award in 2003.
So Far the World has been translated into English by Dr Jean Anderson, Senior Lecturer, School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Victoria and Director of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation / Te Tumu Whakawhiti Tuhinga o o Aotearoa.
Read more about Dr Jean Anderson