I. Prismatic Translation and Jane Eyre as a World Work

Abstract

The chapter starts by giving a history of anglophone responses to Jane Eyre, both critical and creative, and arguing for the similar significance of translations: they too are interpretive acts that change the source text by their interpretation of it. It goes on to explain the pragmatic distinction between translations and other kinds of response that has been adopted in this volume: translations are taken as being published prose fiction texts that present themselves as being Jane Eyre in a different language. It then fleshes out this definition through a close reading of the 1849 French translation by ‘Old Nick’ (Paul Émile Daurand Forgues) and an account of other early translations. It concludes by building on Reynolds’s existing theory of prismatic translation to offer a definition of Jane Eyre as a world work – that is, as a work that is co-constituted by the English texts of Jane Eyre together with all their translations, and so as a work that is always changing while remaining continuous with itself.

Illusions of textuality: The semiotics of literary memes in contemporary media

“…(Malone & Greatley-Hirsch, 2021: n.p.) Following the example of Jane Eyres (Reynolds & others, 2023), it would perhaps be more appropriate instead to speak of digital Shakespeares, where each instantiation of the digital Shakespeare is different as they arise from the specific affordance of the medium in which they are conceived. The plural form of the bard's name is crucial, for it de-emphasizes 'the inscription of the Father' (Barthes, 1977, p. 161) and spotlights simultaneous multiplicity; hence we have Latinx Shakespeares (Gatta, 2023), Chinese Shakespeares (Huang, 2009), and the Springer book series Global Shakespeares which endeavours to explore 'the global afterlife of Shakespearean drama, poetry and motifs in their literary, performative and digital forms of expression in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.'…”

“…In slightly different terms, the two cases above illustrate how canonical writings become Texts by way of a prismatic transposition (see Reynolds, 2020Reynolds, , 2023 of Sun Tzu's ideas on strategy and leadership in traditional war settings (the memes) into modern neoliberal discourses of a wholly different character. This is particularly 12 of 17 -LEE pronounced in the milieu of late capitalism where absolutely everything can be commodified, including of course ancient wisdom, and it is in this light that we can begin to appreciate the crosslingual and transmedia distribution of writing via Internet memes.…”

“…As a corollary, '[t]he study of world literature should embrace translation far more actively than it has usually done to date.' (p. 289) This is a very cogent line of argument, amply demonstrated in the large-scale AHRC project Prismatic Jane Eyre (Reynolds & others, 2023; https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/), which maps hundreds of translations of Charlotte Brontë's novel across spatial and temporal distances using digital humanities tools. The aim here is to appreciate the non-singularity of Jane Eyre, which exists in the plural, namely Jane Eyres, each of which is uniquely value-adding within its own chronotope.…”