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Accented Criticism: Translation and Global Humanities

2013; Duke University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/01903659-2367080

1527-2141

Anita Starosta,

Translation Studies and Practices

This essay asks how translation—considered not merely as an interlinguistic procedure but as a practice inherent in every encounter—might come to inform the emergent paradigm of “global humanities.” Even as post-Eurocentric criticism presumes Europe to have been provincialized, it is all the same haunted by the formal residues of Eurocentrism because the “global” inherits its unresolved binaries and its spatial imagination that tends toward identity, intelligibility, and recognition. What I am calling accented criticism marks the desire to dismantle this post-Eurocentric form from within. Accented criticism is a principle of reading globally that shifts focus toward dialogism and toward the “double-accented” word, to help examine existing ways of ordering the world and to ask what effective decentering might look like. Reading fragments from Derek Walcott’s Omeros, Joseph Conrad’s A Personal Record, Mikhail Bakhtin’s late writings on method, and Zbigniew Herbert’s Still Life with a Bridle, the essay argues for the need to restore the enunciative dimension to the critic’s otherwise subjectless speech.