A Conversation on Translation and Reading
left: Zaia Alexander & Antje Ravic Strubel
right: Strubel

“A CONVERSATION ON TRANSLATION,” which took place on October 13, featured German novelist Antje Ravic Strubel, who is also the German translator for Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and Stories We Tell Ourselves in Order to Live. Strubel came to UCI along with her English translator, Zaia Alexander of UCLA. Strubel and Alexander each spoke about the difficulties of rendering culture-specific communication in a new language and for a different culture and entertained questions and comments from the audience. Later in the afternoon, Strubel gave a literary reading in German from her new novel Kältere Schichten der Luft which is currently being translated by Alexander as Colder Layers of Air.
--Gail Hart, Department of German

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Author Readings with David Mura and Wendy Lee
Photos courtesy of the Department of Asian American Studies

THE DEPARTMENT OF ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES hosted two readings in early October with writers David Mura and Wendy Lee. Mura, an acclaimed memoirist, poet, and playwright spoke about his new book, "Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire" (Coffee House Press, 2008).  A novel about mysteries, a father's suicide, a missing brilliant astrophysicist brother and a mother whose secrets died with her. The protagonist of this story finds his personal history entwined with WW II Japanese-American internment camps, the "No-No Boys", who refused to sign government loyalty oaths, draft resisters, and decorated veterans. First time novelist Lee, spoke about her premiere novel, Happy Family (Grove Press/Black Cat, 2008), a story about a young Chinese immigrant nanny's entry into what appears to be a "happy" family, international adoption, love, and loss. 

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Korean Literature Bilingual Reading
left: Professor Bruce Fulton, Kim Aeran, Yi Hyegyŏng
right: reading audience

THE DEPARTMENT OF EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES hosted a bilingual reading of Korean literature at UC Irvine on October 17. The event was part of the 2008 annual Korean author tour of North America, organized by Professor Bruce Fulton at University of British Columbia, to introduce the reading public to contemporary South Korean literature. This year featured the two leading authors in South Korea, Kim Aeran and Yi Hyegyŏng. Kim Aeran began publishing fiction in 2003 and has since been awarded a number of literary prizes, including the Hanguk Ilbo Prize.  Her first collection of stories, Run, Dad! (Talryŏra, Aebi) appeared in 2005 and was followed in 2007 by Saliva (Ch’im yi Koinda).  With these two story collections she has become a central figure among the new generation of writers in 21st-century Korea.  She is represented in English translation in Azalea. Yi Hyegŏng made her literary debut in 1982 and has flourished since the mid-1990s, with the novel A House on the Road (Kil uiŭi Chip, 1995) and the story collections House Front (Kŭjibap, 1998) and In the Shadow of Flowers (KKotgŭnŭl Arae, 2002).  She has received the prestigious Tong’in Literature Prize and several other awards for her fiction. For two years she served in Indonesia as part of a Korean overseas volunteer program. In 2007 she became the first Korean author to participate in the Ubud International Literary Festival, in Bali.  She appears in English translation in the journals Azalea and Koreana.
-- Serk Bae Suh, Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures

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Future of Writing Conference
Photos courtesy of HumaniTech®

THE FUTURE OF WRITING MINI-CONFERENCE, held at UCI on November 6-7, 2008, brought together scholars, artists, pedagogues, and the curious to discuss the impact of the new communications technologies on changing conceptions and practices of writing.  The event was the brainchild of the Campus Writing Coordinator, Dr. Jonathan Alexander (English) and HumaniTech® Director Dr. Barbara Cohen, and it attracted scholars from across the Southern California region, including UC San Diego, UC Davis, UCLA, Pitzer College, as well as sprinkling of participants from as far way as the University of Illinois and Michigan State University.  Together, panelists and participants considered topics as diverse as the use of YouTube in the teaching of writing, the machine scoring of student work, and the enhanced visual possibilities for the representation of text offered by communications technologies.  Questions at the heart of discussions included the following: How are new communications technologies changing the way people "compose," "write," and "author"? How do collaborative writing spaces and social networking challenge the concepts of “text” and “author”? And how are emerging emphases on visual literacies shifting what we think of as writing?  Some panelists were very “high-tech” indeed; Alexandra Juhasz of Pitzer College delivered her exploration of a writing course focused on studying and authoring multimedia texts as a series of YouTube videos.

David Theo Goldberg, Director of the UC Humanities Research Institute, offered opening remarks that resonated throughout the conference.  He turned participants’ attention to the complexities of reading digital and multimedia texts and commented that the study of how we write such texts needs further examination.  Part of the challenge of studying the composition of such technologically-rich texts is a methodological one, as such composing often borrows energy and insight from literature, the arts, design, visual studies, informatics, and computer science in general.  “Writing” becomes, then, not only a consideration of “text” but also of layout, format, mode of dissemination, and potential for feedback and collaboration.  Keynote speaker Dr. Lester Faigley of the University of Texas at Austin addressed the increasing complexity of what “writing” actually means in a “digital age.”  In a lively exchange with Jonathan Alexander, he considered how “writing” is now not only the content one uploads to the Internet (through templates such as Facebook, Myspace, or any comparable venue) but also the coding that enables the template and which can be manipulated to “scoop up” information for other use and redistribution (in marketing campaigns, for instance). 

The conference was sponsored in large part through generous support from the UC Irvine Humanities Center and the International Center for Writing and Translation.  The conference website, http://www.humanities.uci.edu/humanitech/writing/ includes podcasts of almost every session.
Contributed by Jonathan Alexander, Campus Writing Coordinator, Department of English