Riddle and Kim Attend, Participate in Modern Language Association Convention
Elmira, NY (05/01/2019) — Two faculty members from the Academic Writing Program, Dr. Erin Riddle and Dr. Minjeong Kim, attended the annual convention of the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA). The convention was held March 19-23 in Washington, DC. This year's theme was "Transnational Spaces: Intersections of Cultures, Languages, and Peoples."
Dr. Riddle presented two papers. One paper, entitled "Theories, Practices, and Experiences of Translation in Lydia Davis's Varieties of Disturbance," drew upon her academic background and training in translation studies to explore a collection of stories (Varieties of Disturbance) by contemporary translator and author Lydia Davis. Riddle argued that that many of the stories in this collection exemplify common tropes and theories of translation, especially the role of a translator as both reader and writer-a role Davis herself assumes. This paper was presented as part of a panel session organized by Riddle, "Fictional Representations of Translators and Theories on Their Work." She also participated in a roundtable focused on college composition and illustrated the way that multiple translations of a source text can be used as a resource in a college composition classroom. The Academic Writing Program at Elmira College teaches effective strategies for argumentation and how they are informed by the rhetorical situation, especially the target audience, purpose, context, etc. Based on this practical pedagogical approach, Riddle offered an exercise through which students read two translations from very different rhetorical situations (East Germany and Canada) to explore how the context of writing and publishing can result in quite different texts-even when relying upon the same source text.
Dr. Kim participated in an interdisciplinary panel that focused on the interrelationship of music and literature. In her paper, "A Shadow of Nocturnes on Nocturnes: A Musical Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes," she explored Kazuo Ishiguro's 2009 short story collection Nocturnes from a musical perspective informed by Fryderyk Chopin's nocturnes for solo piano. Using a theoretical approach that combines the postcolonial notion of contingency to the musical concept of counterpoint, she showed how Ishiguro's hybrid text can be read contrapuntally, both in form and content.
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