Translating & Interpreting, English Fiction & Prose Literature - General & Miscellaneous - Literary Criticism, Literary Criticism - General & Miscellaneous, Politics & Literature, Literary Theory - General & Miscellaneous, Literary Criticism - U.S. Fictio
The Poetics of Imperialism redefines the Anglo-American frontier in terms of problems of translation. Exploring questions of language and colonization, the book demonstrates how intracultural problems of translation—rooted in conflicts of race, gender, and class in the Western tradition of property—were projected onto the communal economics of kinship in the New World as the primary process of dispossession. In describing this process of translation, Cheyfitz examines a range of texts from European travel narratives to the work of Frederick Douglass, Frantz Fanon, and Leslie Marmon Silko; from The Tempest to Tarzan. This venture in the conjunction of critical theory and cultural studies cuts across the disciplines of literature, anthropology, and history within the context of critical theory.
Offers both an alternative conception of Anglo-American imperialism and an alternative position from which to view it. This conception and this position move against the theories of American exceptionalism to locate the US as the apotheosis of the European imperial tradition, which Cheyfitz (English, SMU) views, originally, as having its ideological structure in the central figure of classical rhetoric: the figure of the eloquent orator. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
