After the Great Theory Wars
Barbara Burns speaks to Susan Bassnett, whose book Tales of Travellers and Translators: Essays on Comparative Literature was published recently in Legenda’s Selected Essays series.
BB. Congratulations on this inspirational volume which gives us an insight into a multifaceted and trailblazing academic career. The scope of your work encompasses English literature, theatre history, Latin American literature, postcolonial studies, comparative literature, travel writing, and of course translation studies in which you are a founding and highly influential figure. Looking back, can you identify an underpinning research interest that motivated you and that unites these diverse strands?
SB. When I look back across my academic and writing career what strikes me is the importance of the various courses that I was asked to teach, both at undergraduate and postgraduate level. When I started at Warwick, I taught Medieval literature, Petrarch and Petrarchism, French Theatre of the Absurd, and the Anti-realist novel, working with three different departments. Later, my research into women’s theatre, Latin American literature, postcolonial studies and more came out of all the reading I had to do in relation to teaching on new degree programmes, which opened up different avenues. I was also lucky enough to be able to read in several languages and also to be in the vanguard of the new directions in literary and cultural studies that were starting to appear in the late 1970s and 1980s, the period someone described as the age of the Great Theory Wars.
My principal interest was always in comparative literature, but that is a rather loose concept that could mean pretty well anything. I had always been fascinated by translation, having grown up with more than one language in my life, so it made sense to try to bring together comparative literature with the newly emerging field that I was helping to develop, Translation Studies. I found it bizarre, to say the least, that there should be so little interest in and awareness of the role played by translation in literary and cultural history, so I suppose you could say that it has been my life’s work to try and raise awareness of that role.
BB. I imagine your pioneering approach to literary studies and curriculum development didn’t always meet with approval from your peers. Did you sometimes feel you had a battle to fight?
SB. I often found myself on the battlefield. Some colleagues were very supportive, but many were resistant to change, and there were huge changes sweeping through the Humanities. I remember the loud resistance to literary theory, to gender studies, to cultural studies, even to film studies, and since I was excited by all those fields, I often found myself in combative mode. Linguists were initially against translation studies too, and accusations of taking language out of translation to replace it with ideology went on for years. I used to describe myself in conferences as ‘messianic’ because of the way I promoted translation studies.
BB. Is there an essay in this collection that you would pick out as having given you the most pleasure or sense of achievement to write?
SB. The essays in this collection on Central Asia and on Westonia gave me the greatest pleasure to write. I thought about writing a travel book about Central Asia, and went so far as to send out a proposal to OUP, but personal events, such as the birth of my son, my fourth child, intervened. I also wanted to write a book, not necessarily an academic study, perhaps a novel, on Westonia and I have not entirely given up on that idea. I discovered Westonia in 1980 and I am still fascinated nearly half a century later.
BB. Do any of the chapters you’ve chosen to include in your book bring back memories of a challenging topic you struggled to get to grips with but felt at the time it was important to examine?
SB. A really challenging topic was that of news translation, for which I was awarded an AHRC grant and worked with Esperanza Bielsa, who was quite brilliant and has gone on to an Associate Professorship at the Autonoma in Barcelona. As we explored the topic, it became increasingly huge, taking us beyond journalism studies, into Globalisation Studies (where translation was ignored) and, thanks to Christina Schaeffner, into political discourse studies. We produced a monograph for Routledge, a special issue of a journal and a co-edited volume, but I always felt that we had barely scratched the surface. I see that news translation studies is now widely recognised as an important field.
BB. Your opening chapter bears the striking title: ‘Is There Hope for the Humanities in the Twenty-First Century?’ How would you sum up your own response to this question?
SB. When I wrote this piece, my concern was with the obvious shifts that were taking place in reading and writing practices. Whereas my generation had read widely, students were starting to have difficulty with the demands we as lecturers were placing on them. I remember how we had to reduce reading lists drastically, also how increasingly anything written before the Enlightenment apart from Shakespeare was vanishing from the syllabus. I had studied Anglo Saxon, Middle English and Old French, but that knowledge seemed to be disappearing. In compensation, as we all know, students have become increasingly computer literate and have developed other skills, but today I am even more concerned about the state of the Humanities in British universities.
Bluntly speaking, universities have become over-managed commercial enterprises, rather than centres of learning. I watched this happen during my time as Pro-Vice-Chancellor, when the number of administrators started to climb and academics were increasingly sidelined, even with regard to decisions about whether to accept postgraduate students. The greediness of many university managers, the marginalisation of academics, the exploitation of debt-ridden students who still imagined that university would be a rewarding experience, has been depressing. So too are the voices that suggest that studying literature or music or history of art is a waste of effort, and that AI will soon replace them all. The collapse of foreign language study in British schools has had a knock-on effect in universities, and the idea that studying a language could teach you about another culture or that studying literature could teach you how to think and how to express yourself seems to be a dying concept.
I honestly do not know if I would choose to enter academia today if I were young. I serve as assessor for several research councils and there is a lot of talent out there, and a lot of enthusiasm, which I also encounter whenever I give lectures. The problem seems to be the weight of managerialism that affects the morale of those teaching students. For example, before I retired from Glasgow last year, I was required to undertake no fewer than nine different training sessions, including one on how to supervise PhD students. For the record, I have supervised well over 150 PhD students and used to run that training session myself! I did not work out how many wasted hours the training sessions involved, but the only one that was of any use related to computers and confidentiality.
BB. Apart from literary studies, you have been active in the fields of both creative writing and journalism. Did these sometimes serve as a therapeutic distraction from academic life, and do you still pursue either of these interests?
SB. Alongside my academic writing I have written poetry, short stories, done translations from Italian, Spanish, Latin, and French, and a lot of journalism. I still write occasional pieces, and I am putting together a collection of short pieces on translation for general readers, which appeared in the ITI Bulletin over many years. This will be a sequel to Reflections on Translation which came out in 2011. My journalist voice tends to be ironic, my poetry brings out the darker side, but I have striven to find a voice as an academic that will be easily accessible, so creative writing and journalism have most certainly helped me here.
BB. You clearly enjoy engaging with students. The dedication of your book, Translation and World Literature (2019) reads: ‘This book is dedicated to all my students, past and present, from whom I have learned so much.’ This statement illustrates your attitude to teaching and supervision as a mutually enriching process.
SB. The greatest pleasure of academic life has always been working with students. I am still in contact with many of the students I supervised at MA or PhD level, also with many whose dissertations I examined. Sometimes I am sent books or articles written by former students, and at Christmas I am sent family photos from around the world. I never understood those colleagues who regarded supervising postgraduates as a chore. I used to read draft after draft in some cases, and made sure I corrected every line, because I heard so many horror stories about supervisors who would return manuscripts without a single correction or suggestion being made. Of course my kind of supervision was time-consuming, but given the high number of international students with whom I worked, my corrections helped them with language as much as with how to express their ideas.
BB. Speaking from the perspective of retirement, what is your advice for the younger generation of scholars today who are trying to navigate the complex challenges of academic life in the Humanities?
SB. What advice might I give to students today? Well, the same advice I was given, which is to read as widely as possible, to try and read the complete works of an author that interests you, and always to think about the context in which writers work. Close reading of texts is essential, because that way you find out how a work is structured, whether prose, poetry or drama, but so also is understanding the context, the historical moment. When working with translation, recognise that there is no such thing as a faithful translation of anything, because every translation is an interpretation. Recognise too that there is no such thing as objectivity, because every interpretation of anything depends on an individual, and all individuals are different and are shaped by a variety of forces. Above all, try not to see the world in binary terms, because that leads to prejudice and intolerance, to an ‘us versus them’ mentality.
Susan Bassnett was one of the MHRA's Centenary Lecturers in 2018, and her lecture Crossing Textual Boundaries: Why Translation Matters can be read on this website.
full news feed • subscribe via RSS