Books in the Transcript series

Transgressive by nature, erotic literature engages the reader in a dialogue informed by the social and aesthetic conventions that it playfully disregards or happily reproduces. But once this intimate, arousing and, often, disturbing dialogue transitions into another language, culture or medium, it must reposition itself within new conventions. How does this happen in practice?Examining erotic literature from multiple angles, this volume starts off with an ethical evaluation of the most recent rendering of Marquis de Sade into English. Other inquiries into European letters include the works of Goethe, Georges Bataille, Pierre Guyotat and E. L. James, and the films of Michael Haneke and Patrice Chéreau. Studies of Chinese and Japanese erotic traditions complement the picture by addressing the different functions of the erotic in discrete cultural settings.Johannes D. Kaminski is Marie Sk¿odowska-Curie Fellow at University of Vienna.

Both comparative criticism and translation cross borders, yet borders that have been crossed still exist. Even a border that has been dismantled is likely to reappear in a different place, or as a less obvious set of limiting practices: migrant texts and migrant ideas, like migrant people, may not achieve full citizenship in their new locations. Of course, there is a creative aspect to borders too, as postcolonial theory in particular has emphasized. Borders are contact zones, generators of hybridity, spaces of exchange, cross-fertilization, and enrichment. For all these reasons, borders require minding - thinking about, managing, even in a sense policing.Rather than celebrating the crossing of borders, or dreaming of their abolition, Minding Borders traces their troubling and yet generative resilience. It explores how borders define as well as exclude, protect as well as violate, and nurture some identities while negating others. The contributors range comparatively across geography, politics, cultural circulation, creativity, and the structuration of academic disciplines, hoping that the analysis of borders in one domain may illuminate their workings in another. Whatever other form a border takes it is always also a border in the mind.

Petrarch is arguably the most influential poet in Western culture. Throughout the centuries, other poets have imitated him or drawn inspiration from what they know of his work: his poetry has been discussed, set to music, illustrated, fictionalized, parodied, cannibalized. Furthermore, through translations of Petrarch, the sonnet has soared across Europe, remodelling its poetic landscape - so much so that even the most avant-garde poetry still finds itself in debt to the author of the Canzoniere.Ranging through five centuries of translations, adaptations and imitations of the father of Humanism, this transcultural, transdisciplinary study considers the echoes of a major figure, whose reach goes beyond borders and eras to resonate singularly into our times.Carole Birkan-Berz is Senior Lecturer in Translation and Literature at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, Guillaume Coatalen Senior Lecturer in Early Modern English Literature at the University of Cergy-Pontoise and Thomas Vuong holds a doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University Paris-13 (Sorbonne-Paris-Cité).