The Afterlife of Texts in Translation: Understanding the Messianic in Literature [Hardcover]

The Afterlife of Texts in Translation: Understanding the Messianic in Literature reads Walter Benjamins and Jacques Derridas writings on translation as suggesting that texts exist within a process of continual translation. Understanding Benjamins and Derridas concept of afterlife as overliving, this book proposes that reading Benjamins and Derridas writings on translation in terms of their wider thought on language and history suggests that textuality itself possesses a messianic quality. Developing this idea in relation to the many rewritings and translations of Don Quijote, particularly the multiple rewritings by Jorge Luis Borges, Edmund Chapman asserts that texts consist of a structure of potential for endless translation that continually promises the overcoming of language, history and textuality itself.

Chapter One: Introduction.- Chapter Two: Afterlife.- Chapter Three: The Overtext.- Chapter Four: Language, Judgment, Colonialism.- Chapter Five: The Messianic.- Chapter Six: Pierre Menard, Messianic Translator.- Chapter Seven: Conclusion: Overliving and the Encounter with the Other.

Edmund Chapman has taught English Literature and French at the University of Manchester, UK. He is a co-editor of New Voices in Translation Studies.

The Afterlife of Texts in Translation: Understanding the Messianic in Literature reads Walter Benjamins and Jacques Derridas writings on translation as suggesting that texts exist within a process of continual translation. Understanding Benjamins and Derridas concept of afterlife as overliving, this book proposes that reading Benjamins and Derridas writings on translation in terms of their wider thought on language and history suggests that textuality itself possessel#!