IAS faculty members Amaranth Borsuk and Sarah Dowling publish chapbook documenting Translational Poetics

chapbook documenting translational poetics

Essay Press has just published Affect and Audience: Translational Poetics, a chapbook curated by Amaranth Borsuk, with an introduction by Sarah Dowling, and with contributions from micha cárdenas. The free digital publication documents a 2016 symposium at the Simpson Center for the Humanities, which Borsuk and Dowling hosted with Gregory Laynor (PIP) and Brian Reed (UW Seattle, English).

The symposium Affect and Audience: Translational Poetics investigated contemporary scholarly, aesthetic, and activist projects that engage the processes and thematics of translation. Rather than considering how literary works move from one language to another, the symposium used the thematics of translation to better understand the affects and effects of digitally-mediated art and literature.

As an extension of the thematics of the symposium, the organizers decided to compose a chapbook that would not reproduce, but carry over and across the key ideas proposed by panelists Jordan Abel, Kara Keeling, Lori Emerson, Rodrigo Toscano, Amy Sara Carroll, and Stephen Voyce. In addition to a transcript of the closing roundtable–a conversation among panelists and audience–the chapbook includes photographs, drawings, media art, and notes by attendees: documenting the event by displaying the transit through which presenters’ propositions were received and transformed by the gathered group.