Summarising recent developments in postclassical narratology and imagology, the article traces affinities between the two disciplines in order to observe the challenges that await the researchers of image and narrative in what Baudrillard called the simulation culture. Two case studies presented in the article (one devoted to Instagram visual narratives, the other – to a YouTube advertising campaign) illustrate challenges for the study of eventfulness, narrativity, and fictionality, and suggest - in line with the postulates of Mark C. Taylor and Esa Saarinen – that a radical change of educational and communicative practices is needed in contemporary Western societies. A change of this sort, it is postulated, might be instigated by the collaboration of researchers in visual studies and narrative theory.
One of the most spectacular cultural macro-events of the last five years, the rise of high-brow narrative TV series has proven to be indicative of several tendencies in contemporary audio-visual culture, both in Europe and in the US. The presentation of dystopian fictional worlds in Mr Robot, Westworld, Utopia, Legion, and several other series is perhaps the most significant manifestation of both the maturity of the TV series form, and the unfaltering interest of audio-visual culture in the utopian/dystopian subject matter. This paper illustrates the connection of the TV series to both solidarity and dystopia, and explains how contemporary TV series has decidedly manifested its artistic ambitions.
The article discusses Samuel Beckett’s practice of self-translation as 1) a textual strategy that
parodies the use of life/death methaphors in translation studies discourse, 2) a predominantly autobiographical act that aims at the preservation of a certain writerly signature not only in two linguistic
versions of the same text but also in the larger Beckett oeuvre. Issues related to transtextuality and
subjectivity are discussed with reference to a wide array of critical writing on Beckett, self-translation,
and translation studies in general.
The article confronts the problem of diffi culty – one of dominant tropes in the discourse of translation studies – in a subversive way, that is, by attending to diffi culties
that the translator faces in contact with textual material whose dominant artistic feature
is apparent simplicity. The argumentation, taking as the example the short story oeuvre
of a non-canonical writer, Theodore Francis Powys, focuses on such issues as the translation of syntactic and lexical simplicity, of underspecifi cation, lacunae and understatement. The author proposes a commonsensical rule of translational moderation – withdrawal from any addition to the syntactic or phonosemantic structure of the original.
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