Translingual Practices and Alternatives: Literary Studies in the Age of Global Mobility

Abstract

A response to Giulia de Gasperi and Joseph Pivato, eds. Comparative Literature for the New Century (McGill-Queen's UP, 2018). "Caught at the crossroads of my personal experiences as an academic researcher, published author of fiction, and self-translator, in Italy, South Africa, and Australia, I almost perforce vouch for the reinstatement of the author and her life experience in the literary discourse. Obviously, I am not advocating for the trend toward author as celebrity, nor supporting the author’s narcissism and her apotheosis. Rather, I challenge the disposal of the author’s subjectivity and situatedness invoked by an early
Barthes and so often enthusiastically accepted in scholarly quarters ready to overlook the ironic subtleties and “clever word-play” (Pivato 48) inherent in Barthes’s original French text."