“WPI Professor David Dollenmayer Wins Austrian Cultural Forum New York's 2010 Translation Prize - WPI News” plus 1 more |
| Posted: 18 Nov 2010 01:38 PM PST Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) Professor of German David Dollenmayer is the winner of the Austrian Cultural Forum New York's (ACFNY) 2010 Translation Prize for his translation-in-progress of Michael Köhlmeier's Idyll With Drowning Dog (Idylle mit ertrinkendem Hund), first published in 2008. Renowned critic Daniela Strigl from Vienna will present Dollenmayer with the award at a Dec. 6 ACFNY ceremony in New York City. Köhlmeier is a major Austrian writer whose works have never been translated into English. This is Professor Dollenmayer's second translation award in two years. In 2008, he was honored by the German cultural organization Goethe-Institut with the prestigious annual Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for his German-to-English translation of the poet Moses Rosenkranz' Childhood: An Autobiographical Fragment (Kindheit. Fragment einer Autobiographie). He has also translated works as varied as Dearest Georg by Elias Canetti (2010), Crossing the Hudson by Peter Stephan Jungk (2009), and House of Childhood by Anna Mitgutsch (2006). In collaboration with the Dietrich W. Botstiber Foundation and Words Without Borders, the ACFNY Translation Prize supports translations of contemporary Austrian fiction, poetry, and drama which have not previously appeared in English, with a € 3,000 grant. The award will be disbursed upon the formal acceptance of the manuscript by a publishing house, which must occur within a three years. The trophy for the winner is sponsored by SWAROVSKI GEMS™. A Hopkinton, Mass., resident, Dollenmayer's primary research interests are the translation of contemporary German authors' works; and 18th, 19th, and 20th century German literature and culture. "I think my work is typical of the kinds of things being done by my other colleagues in WPI's Humanities and Arts Department," he says. "My experience has always been that WPI students approach the humanities and arts with the same openness, curiosity, and enthusiasm they display in their science and engineering courses and in their research projects." Dollenmayer is the author of The Berlin Novels of Alfred Döblin (University of California Press, 1988) and co-author with Thomas Hansen of Neue Horizonte: A First Course in German Language and Culture (Houghton Mifflin, 7th edition, 2008). He has also published translations of works by Bertolt Brecht (Flüchtlingsgespräche), Perikles Monioudis (Im Äther), and Michael Kleeberg (Der König von Korsika). Dollenmayer earned his B.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University, and began teaching at WPI in 1988. November 18, 2010 Contact: Lorraine U. Martinelle, Public Relations Specialist, +1-508-831-6425, lurbans@wpi.edu Eileen Brangan Mell, Director of Public Relations, +1-508-831-6785, ebmell@wpi.edu This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| The Cultural Roots of Disunion - New York Times Blogs Posted: 01 Dec 2010 06:38 PM PST
The traditional take on how the Union came apart after Abraham Lincoln's election rests on the irreconcilable political and economic differences between North and South over slavery. Yet the secession crisis didn't emerge overnight, and the long build-up to it also involved concerted efforts on both sides to construct self-serving pseudo-ethnic and civic identities. These identities consciously exaggerated the cultural antipathy between the two sections — and contributed greatly to their eventual split. These differences had roots going back before the founding of the Republic. And while it's become commonplace to see corrosive sectional pride as a strictly Southern thing, recent historians have argued that it was in fact the North that struck the first blow for regional chauvinism. Often shrouding their sectionalism in the soaring rhetoric of early American nationalism, Northern partisans like geographer Jedediah Morse and lexicographer Noah Webster shamelessly touted New England as the model for American identity and character, pointedly contrasting its Yankee "industry … frugality [and] piety" with the Southern slaveholding culture of "luxury, dissipation and extravagance." "O, New England!" Webster concluded. "How superior are thy inhabitants in morals, literature, civility and industry." Employing similar juxtapositions of New England virtues and Southern vices, later writers, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, helped to inspire and nurture a broader vision in which the Northern states were synonymous with America — with the South standing as the antithesis. By 1823 New Yorker Gerrit Smith could already remark on the almost "national difference of character between the people of the Northern and the people of the Southern states." It is hard, today, to comprehend how thoroughly sectional divisions defined antebellum politics. At the 1814 Hartford Convention, which sought to resolve regional tensions resulting from the War of 1812, New England Federalists demanded constitutional protection of their region's interests and even threatened to secede. Underlying the Federalists' national agenda was a sectional one, which pushed for a central government powerful enough to protect and advance New England's trade and shipping activities at home and abroad. Indeed, in the years to follow, New England's most eloquent champion, Daniel Webster, consistently cloaked his support for sectional policies like protective tariffs and internal improvements in the language of national interest. Eventually Webster removed the cloak: by the end of the 1840s, he was making no secret of his hope for a politically cohesive "North," rooted in a coalition of Northeastern and Western free states (settled in part by New England émigrés), that would dominate the country. Webster's wishes were realized in the late 1850s with the meteoric ascent of the Republican Party, whose strikingly concentrated Northern base made it, as historian David Potter observed, "totally sectional in its constituency." By then, however, the North and Midwest's demographic and economic strengths were such that, although the Republicans had almost no support elsewhere, it appeared they would soon dominate national politics while the South, with its demographic and economic clout on the wane, would be powerless to prevent it. RelatedCivil War TimelineAn unfolding history of the Civil War with photos and articles from the Times archive and ongoing commentary from Disunion contributors. Perhaps because their region's lines of communications were less advanced than the North's, Southerners were relative Johnny-Rebs-come-lately to the sectional-branding business. But when they began to craft a distinctive regional identity, they did so with determination and verve, realizing that they desperately needed a legitimate, unifying antecedent and symbol for their increasingly particularized and embattled region. Some, like George Fitzhugh and Thomas R. Dew, invoked the slave society of ancient Greece as a laudable analog. But, as cultural icons went, an Athenian in toga and sandals was no match for a dashing English cavalier. The legend of the cavalier, which gained currency amid mounting criticism of the South in the 1830s, held that white Southerners were descended from the Norman barons who conquered England in the 11th century and populated the upper classes of English society. According to the story, they had emigrated to the Southern colonies after losing out in the English Civil War to the plebeian Puritan "Roundheads" or "Saxons," whose kinsmen had later settled the North. As one Virginian asserted in 1863, "the Saxonized maw-worms creeping from the Mayflower" could claim no "kinship" whatsoever with "the whole-souled Norman British planters of a gallant race." Zeal for the cavalier legend had also been stoked by the enormously popular writings of Sir Walter Scott, whose tales of Scotland's struggles against English oppression seemed to evoke the South's struggles against the North. Scott was so beloved in the South that Mark Twain would later blame the Civil War primarily on Southerners' affliction with "the Sir Walter disease." Outside Virginia, few Southerners could show evidence of familial ties to English cavaliers (and it's likely that even fewer cavaliers had Norman ancestors). But that didn't keep the legend from quickly taking firm root, so much so that even Europeans saw it as potentially a nail in the coffin of the American Union. In 1835 France's Louis Phillipe warned that the cultural divide between the Puritan North and Cavalier South meant that Americans, "as a people, have conflicting interests and ambitions and unappeasable jealousies." There were, however, limits to the legend's influence. The cavalier story may have become what historian James McPherson called "the central myth of Southern ethnic nationalism" among more affluent or literate Southerners by the 1850s, but efforts to promulgate it more widely ran into problems. In the rural South, with its poor communications networks and relatively high illiteracy rates, new ideas didn't travel far or quickly, and local traditions held tight. Nor did the myth hold much water with yeoman farmers, who made up a significant portion of the Southern population and who, with the rising price of slaves in the 1850s, saw their dreams of joining the planter class dashed. Indeed, a rather clueless proposal to feature the figure of a "cavalier" on the official seal of the Confederacy was derailed by concerns that it would remind the slaveless two-thirds of the South's free population that they were fighting for an institution they could not enter. These regional cultural differences not only contributed to the growing sectional crisis, but also may have helped tip the balance during the war. After all, Northern troops consistently spoke of an affinity with, and an obligation to, the Union, which they readily conflated with their Midwestern and Northern homes. Conversely, the failure of the South to create what Alabama fire-eater William Lowndes Yancey described as a shared "southern heart" led many soldiers to echo the sentiment of the Georgia private who declared, "If I can't fight in the name of my own state, then I don't want to fight at all." It would take a fierce four-year conflict, ending in a bitter and ignominious defeat, to forge anything approaching the sense of kinship and common cause that the white South's leaders had tried to instill before its ill-fated struggle for independence began — an identity that we still recognize today. James C. Cobb is Spalding Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Georgia. His latest book is "The South and America since World War II." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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