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According to Rita Felski, context is overrated. Even in the sophisticated variants of contextualization typical of the New Historicism, she explains, scholars' obsession with historical context as the ultimate source of textual meaning disregards the capacity of literature to resonate across time and space. "Why is it," she writes, "that we can feel solicited, button-holed, stirred up, by words that were drafted eons ago?" (576). Felski is not the first to raise such objections. In an essay from 2001, Russell Berman takes a similar approach to the politics of periodization, pointing out how periodizing a work can serve to discipline it, that is to say, to deny its claim on the reader's present. For Berman, "A literary-critical culture that values historical frames over 'artistic pleasure,' . . . tends to dismiss the diachronic moment in any reading, and with it the potential of tradition, the capacity precisely to transcend the constraints of the isolated historical moment." Both Felski and Berman present powerful arguments against the fetishization of contemporaneity as the source of the truth of a work. In their focus on affect, however, they neglect a crucial facet of the transtemporal resonance they seek to underscore. To limit oneself to the question of how and why literature can "solicit," "button-hole," and "stir us up" is to understate its role as both an instrument of cognition and a means of fostering particular cognitive capacities, or at least to sidestep the constitutive role of cognition in the experience of aesthetic pleasure.

Readers are never merely passive recipients of textual messages. One of the most powerful insights of reader-response theory in the 1970s and 1980s is that the meaning of a text never resides entirely within the artifact itself. Commentators from Carlo Ginzberg ("aggressive originality"), to Jauss ("horizon of expectations"), to Fish ("interpretive communities"), and Radway ("Reading is not Eating") have long-since established that readers are creators of meaning. To quote Tony Bennett, meaning "is not a thing that texts can have, but is something that can only be produced, and always differently, within the reading formations that regulate the encounters between texts and readers." Yet even as it challenges the very idea that texts exist independently of readers and their institutional and social contexts, Bennett's concept of a "reading formation" also reminds us that there are socio-historically determined limits to creative appropriation. For Bennett, text, context, and reader constitute an inseparable unity; every reading situation is shaped by "discursive and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading. . . ." A rich and nuanced account of the complex balance between social determination and autonomy therefore requires a combination of methods, both a consideration of textual features and investigation of book-historical, ideological, institutional, and social pressures.

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Using English and Spanish translations of Franz Kafka’s Die Verwandlung ‘The metamorphosis’ as a case study, this article contributes to current discussions of retranslation, and of cross-linguistic approaches to retranslation in particular. Building on the work of such scholars as Matthew Reynolds and Tom Cheesman, the analysis uses computational methods to evaluate variance among translators across a range of English and Spanish translations. The aim is twofold: first, to evaluate whether we can link translator variation to specific linguistic and rhetorical features in the original; and second, to determine whether those features are stable across languages.

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