ABSTRACT
Looking at the paradigmatic shifts that enabled the conceptual rise of agency – in Translation studies and the Humanities at large – this chapter examines the complexities involved as they relate to the larger ‘Crisis of Representation’. Permeating the Humanities cross the last two decades of the twentieth century, this phenomenon has played a central in cultural, philosophical, and semiotic theory. In Translation Studies, crisis shifted the focus from ‘accurate representations’ to re-enactment, from representations to performances. This practical reframing has integrated the field, allowing translation scholars to navigate the world’s intertextuality as a nexus of cultures, languages, and emotions without fetishizing or erasing difference. Hinging on Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, this chapter explores the notion of emotional communities and language in and through translation. While sociolinguistics understands language as an entry point to apprehend the social world, language is also considered a central means of constructing, performing, and renegotiating conceptions of society or community (Schneider 2018). Surely then it also has the means of constructing, performing, and renegotiating emotions. Theories of conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner 2010), of emotions as practice (Scheer 2012), and of emotional communities (Rosenwein 2006, 2010) complement theoretical approaches from Translation Studies, namely the notions of habitus, power, and representation, providing the framework for an examination of socially, culturally, and often emotionally complex texts, of the effects of translation on these texts, and involvement of many agents in the process. Plurilingual literary works provide a good case study for the amalgamation of these theories. Using theatre works by Marco Micone in translation, this chapter examines the sources, symptoms, challenges, and consequences of literary plurilingualism engaging the translator in a creation of meaning and identity politics through the articulation of affect.
