My project, Tracing Shumi: Politics and Aesthetics in Modern Japanese Literary Discourse and Fiction, traces the concept of shumi (趣味) in late 19th and early 20th century Japanese literary... Show moreMy project, Tracing Shumi: Politics and Aesthetics in Modern Japanese Literary Discourse and Fiction, traces the concept of shumi (趣味) in late 19th and early 20th century Japanese literary discourse and fiction. The word shumi was introduced in the 1880s as a translation word for the notion of 'taste'. However, my project aims to show how the word operated beyond a mere translation of an idea. Instead, I demonstrate how shumi was used to rhetorically frame the ways in which people were supposed to behave, sense, and consume and which actors and institutions benefited from such discursive frameworks. Yet at the same time, this dissertation argues that the language of shumi also undermined the very ideological structures it sought to engender. Ultimately, Tracing Shumi, sheds light on how modernity unfolds in the intersection of politics and aesthetics, beyond a limited imagination of politics entirely in terms of power and of aesthetics solely in terms of beauty, at a specific juncture in Japanese history. Show less
Phraseological units notoriously pose challenges for both translators and language learners. However, the presence and nature of phraseological units in lower language proficiency levels have... Show morePhraseological units notoriously pose challenges for both translators and language learners. However, the presence and nature of phraseological units in lower language proficiency levels have received very little attention. Could Children’s Literature contribute to identifying a core phraseological inventory? Both authors and translators of children’s books base their linguistic choices, and their phraseological choices specifically, on the assumptions they have of the still limited linguistic, phraseological, and cultural knowledge of their young receivers.This dissertation investigates Dutch and Italian phraseology in Children’s Literature. In the first part, theoretical aspects concerning Phraseology, (Contrastive) Linguistics, Translation Studies and Children’s Literature are addressed, as well as methodological issues regarding the empirical studies presented in the second part of this work. The detailed contrastive, bidirectional analysis of phraseological units and their translatants (original Dutch ↔ translated Italian), including the mapping of similarities and differences between phraseological inventories, and the examination of the translational equivalence between phraseological units and their translatants, have offered numerous intra- and interlinguistic insights. Show less