Graduate Students and Faculty are invited to attend the first Brown Bag Lunch of the year:
“Translation, Reductionism, and Iris Murdoch”
Joshua Gang
JHB 719
Wednesday September 24, 12-1pm
Abstract:
Typically we think about translation as a relation between texts in different languages. But can we also think about translation as a way of effecting scientific reductionism—or as a tool for eliminating metaphysics from philosophy? Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net (1954) asks us to think about translation both these ways. This talk uses Murdoch’s novel to excavate theories of translation from early analytic philosophy and logical positivism. At a time when so much critical energy is invested in translatability and interdisciplinarity, these reductionist and anti-metaphysical ideas of translation—however antithetical they might seem to literary study—offer us an expanded notion of translation’s entailments and comprise an important precedent to contemporary critical debate.