The Mediation Project at the Saarbrücken Canadian Studies Centre (CCAC)
Overview
1. Mediation of World Literature: Institutional Aspects
Our research-team at the Universität des Saarlandes has been investigating the influence of literary institutions on the mediation of translations since 1992. We take 'literary institutions' to be organizations and individuals, such as publishing houses, magazines, literary agencies, sponsors, prize-committees, translators, censors, editors, teachers, critics, who all might affect the creation and the dissemination of a given literary text. Ever since authorship and literary publishing have been considered a career, or, whenever literature has had to serve political or ideological ends, institutions have exerted a discernible influence on texts in print. This is particularly true of translated texts, which are subject to repeated mediation, and of literature in the twentieth century, the "century of translation". Although recent developments in literary and cultural studies such as 'Cultural Poetics' or the 'History of the Book' have increasingly attracted scholarly interest to the formerly neglected area of literary mediation, only the smallest part of historical information has been collected so far. This is partly due to the newness of the field, but also to the comparatively difficult access to relevant source material. Accordingly, much of our effort so far has been directed towards field-studies and historical documentation.
Our project was officially recognized as an independent research facility by the Universität des Saarlandes in 1997. As a result of this "institutional" approval our project has been allocated additional resources, most importantly, a spacious office where the foundations for an information-pool (documents, photographs, publications, memorabilia, correspondences, interview-transcripts) are currently being laid. In the foreseeable future, this information-pool is meant to take over the function of a specialized archive, providing visiting scholars with material for their research, and establishing a center of exchange for scholars interested in the field of literary mediation.
2. Institutional Mediation of World Literatures in Translation: The Internationality of Canadian and Anglo-American Cultures
In the context of our research centre "The Institutional Mediation of World Literature in Translation," which has been functional since 1993 and which was officially accredited in 1995 by the then President of the Universität des Saarlandes, Professor Dr. Günther Hönn, we have continuously established and developed research activities in numerous fields of Canadian Studies. Recent developments at this university have led us to further define and clarify our research goals and, through an addition to the title of our centre authorised by the Universität des Saarlandes, to make these goals more visible to the scholarly community at large. Our cultural mediation research centre will henceforth be integrated in our Centre for Canadian and Anglo-American Cultures (CCAC)
We wish to emphasise that in consolidating our research in Canadian Studies we are fortunate in being able to build upon the broad support received from colleagues at the University of Alberta (Edmonton), the University of Prince Edward Island, the University of British Columbia, the University of Northern British Columbia and the Canadian Comparative Literature Association (CCLA) with whom we have enjoyed close contacts for several years. We trust that a Canadian Studies Centre such as ours, which can demonstrate both well established experience in promoting Canadian Studies in Germany and broad international support, will continue to work successfully on a different and broader basis.
Individual Projects
J.C.C. Bruns' Verlag in Minden, Westphalia, and Other Institutional Mediators of International Literature
Transatlantic Cultural Mediation
Literary Periodicals in Post-War Germany: Das Lot, fragmente, Perspektiven
Individual Mediators and Paradigms of Mediation (Amelia von Ende, Max Bruns, Alain Bosquet, Hans Hennecke, Edouard Roditi, Rainer Maria Gerhardt etc.)
Current Project Members
Dr. Jutta Ernst
Prof. Dr. Klaus Martens
Dr. Paul Morris
Dr. Arlette Warken
Two Recent Publications of the Cultural Mediation Project
Pioneering North America. Mediators of European Literature and Culture
Editor Klaus Martens
Editorial Assistant Andreas Hau
"This volume contains papers presented at the University of Saarbrücken´s eponymous international conference (April 24-26, 1998) on international aspects of the mediation of European literature in North America and on some of the authors, institutions, media, and other agents involved in it. The emphasis is on case studies, divided into four different thematic categories. Part One contains different approaches to Felix Paul Greve / Frederick Philip Grove and the crucial role of the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. Part Two concentrates on seven other "Mediators of Culture," from Djuna Barnes to Paul Auster. Part Three, entitled "The Other and the New," presents a broad spectrum, from the impact of Derrida on American literary criticism to an analysis of the transformation of foreign patterns, themes and signs according to the needs of different cultural contexts. Part Four closes the collection with a number of fascinating insights regarding questions of mediation in "Literature and the Other Arts."
"Since much of America's modernist and postmodernist international cultural and literary impact has its origins in the diversity of European literatures and cultures, the conveners of the conference and the editor feel that the time has come to redicsover and reexamine those influences and to see what has happened to some European cultural "goods" in their transatlantic transfer and, often enough, in their return home in different guises." From the Editor's Preface.
Contents
Preface: "Mediating European Literature and Culture in North America (Klaus Martens)
Paul Hjartarson, "Staking a Claim: Settler Culture and the Canonization of 'Frederick Philip Grove' as a 'Canadian Writer'"
Arlette Warken, "How the Ants Pioneered America: F.P. Grove's Consider Her Ways and the Utopian Tradition of H.G. Wells and Jonathan Swift"
Klaus Martens, "Frederick Philip Grove in Kentucky: Spartanic Preparations - An Exploration"
Irene Gammel, "German Extravagance Confronts American Modernism: The Poetics of Baroness Else"
Katharina Bunzmann, "Djuna Barnes' Queer Surrealism: An American Woman in Paris"
Wolfgang Görtschacher, "Translation as Celebration of German Literature: Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton as Mediators of German Literature"
Jutta Ernst, "Transatlantic Simultaneity: John Dos Passos and Blaise Cendrars"
Andrew Eastman, "'Jagged Word': Paul Auster as Poet and Translator"
Stephen Shapiro, "The Moment of the Condom: Saint-Méry and Early American Print Sexuality"
Martin Meyer, "From Armed Services Editions to the Service of Armed Editions?"
Dirk de Geest, "Dealing with Inter-Culturality from a Functionalist Point of View: The Case of America in Belgium during the Second World War (1940-1944)"
Johannes Angermüller, "Derrida, Phenomenology, and Surrealism: Why American Critics Turned Deconstructionists"
Paul Morris, "Susanna Moodie's Roughing It in the Bush as Travel Literature"
Susan Hopkirk, "The Return of the King: King Arthur in Canada"
Walter Göbel, "Constructive Dialogues: European Traditions and African-American Fiction"
Werner Reinhart, "It is but one turn in the road and I would be a cannibal: The Theme of Hansel and Gretel in Contemporary Poems by Women"
Wendell Stone, "Expressing Delsarte: Stelle MacKaye's Contributions to the System of the French 'Master'"
Silvia Carvalho, "The Indifference of Two True Aesthetes: Marcel Duchamp and John Ashbery"
Claire Maniez, " Van Gogh's Room at Arles Revisited: Stanley Elkins's Homage to Van Gogh"
Christoph Ribbat, "The European Eye: Refugee Photographers from Nazi Germany"
ISBN: 3-8260-1756-0
Subject: Literary Criticism / Literary History
Publication date: October 2000
Reviews
"Als eine extensive Studiensammlung gibt der Band ... einen wertvollen Überblick über die große Bandbreite an Phänomenen des literarischen und kulturellen Austauschs und stellt einen geeigneten Ausgangspunkt für weitere Untersuchungen dar. Daher wird besonders eine zielgerichtete Teillektüre oft mit durchdachten Beiträgen belohnt, die sowohl von der Aktualität des Themas zeugen als auch von der zentralen Position der Vermittlerfiguren für jede geführte Debatte über (literarische) Interkulturalität." Ulrich Meurer, Zeitschrift für Kanadastudien 21: 2 (2001).The second volume under review reveals the richness and breadth of the concept of cultural mediation when it is imaginatively and systematically applied. The book contains twenty highly specialized and divergent essays thoughtfully grouped into four sections, and a brief but graceful explanatory preface by editor Klaus Martens, who directs the Saarbrücken project on the mediation of world literature under whose aegis this collection was undertaken . . . (a) remarkable volume. Rosmarin Heidenreich, Canadian Literature 177 (2003).
The Politics of Cultural Mediation
Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Felix Paul Greve
Editors Paul Hjartarson, Tracy Kulba
"The following book is the product of two sessions on the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Felix Paul Greve as cultural mediators organized by Irene Gammel and Klaus Martens for the Canadian Comparative Literature Association annual conference held at Edmonton, Alberta in May 2000."
"Translators mediate between cultures; they negotiate the transfer of meaning from one word and world to another. Writers who migrate, uprooting themselves from one world and settling in another, also mediate between cultures and are mediated by them. This collection of essays explores the contact zones produced by the migrations of two German-born cultural figures: New York Dada poet and artist Else Ploetz (1874–1927), better known as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven or simply "the Baroness"; and writer and translator Felix Paul Greve (1879–1948), aka the Canadian author Frederick Philip Grove. Both figures negotiated languages beyond their mother tongue (German); both moved between geographic and cultural worlds; both produced cultural works in their adopted countries (the United States and Canada); and both "translated" themselves into new contexts." From the Editors's Preface.
Contents
Foreword (Jonathan Hart)
Preface (Paul Hjartarson, Tracy Kulba)
Irene Gammel, Limbswishing Dada in New York. Baroness Elsa´s Gender Performance
Richard Cavell, Baroness Elsa and the Aesthetics of Empathy. A Mystery and a Speculation
Klaus Martens, Two Glimpses of the Baroness
Jutta Ernst, "Il me faut forger une arme de la littérature." Felix Paul Greve among the Magazines
Paul Morris, Of Life and Art. FPG and the Writing of Oscar Wilde into Settler of the Marsh
Paul Hjartarson, "Out of the Wastage of All Other Nations." "Enemy Aliens" and the "Canadianization" of Felix Paul Greve
Felix Paul Greve, Randarabesken zu Oscar Wilde / Oscar Wilde: Marginalia (Translated by Paul Morris)
ISBN: 0-88864-412-4
Price: CND$ 29.95, USD$ 29.95, € 16.5
Subject: Literary Criticism/Art
Publication Date: May 2003
Reviews
"Documents, such as photographs, facsimiles of correspondence, newspapers, and copies of artwork, enrich the text and round out this distinguished collection.”
Anne Burke, The Prairie Journal."Baroness Elsa and Felix Paul Greve were given to gender play, disguise, and challenges to identity that mark them as inevitably avant-garde. Wherever these sometime lovers moved, something hovered in the landscape with them, so that nothing was and will be wholly clear. Is this not, however, their true legacy, to be always slipping away from our and their desiring grasp?”
E.D. Blodgett
(Most of the above text was taken verbatim from the University of Alberta Press website, announcing the book)
