Flaubert’s Parrot

Abstract

The strict boundaries between disciplines have been seriously challenged by various links established between them through cross-fertilization. Links between literary and translation studies are not new. However, in the (post)-modern world, when interdisciplinarity is starting to give way to transdisciplinarity, a new meeting point has been found in transfiction, enabling translation to become an interpretative paradigm for literature. Attempting to support this rather neglected approach, this paper analyzes Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot in the light of the relationship between source and target texts and the concept of the invariant as a reflection of the postmodern quest for truth, claiming that the novel makes a fictional dethronement of the source text and calls for a shift from instrumentalism to the hermeneutic approach in translation.