Year: 2010

Le metteur en scène en tant que traducteur

On a l’impression en France qu’en lisant un bouquin de Tolstoï ou Dickens, on lit Tolstoï ou Dickens : mais c’est stupide ! Pour lire Dickens il faut lire l’anglais ! Si vous écoutez une œuvre musicale ou si vous allez au théâtre voir Hamlet, ce que vous regardez ce n’est pas Hamlet, vous le savez bien ! Vous regardez Hamlet vu par un metteur en scène.

Aussi le traducteur en tant que sujet situe (ou “met en scene”)  le texte original dans une autre langue:

Tout ce que je dis, c’est que par nature, la traduction est une interprétation. Il ne peut pas y avoir de traduction objective, parce que c’est quelqu’un qui fait une traduction. Quand je dis “par nature” ça veut dire que ce n’est ni bien ni mal, c’est un fait de l’ordre de l’existant. Alors que faut-il demander à une traduction ? Ce n’est pas qu’elle soit fidèle, mais qu’elle soit cohérente, c’est-à-dire qu’elle soit une lecture, et une lecture appliquée. Une lecture pratique.

via L’Oeil électrique.

Film and philosophy

First and practically speaking, film as a medium is an exceptionally rich pedagogic tool which can encourage students brought up in a visual culture to engage with philosophy.

Beyond that, it reinvigorates a number of philosophical debates in aesthetics and philosophy of art.

It also contributes to contemporary debates in epistemology, metaphysics and ethics.

And finally it can serve to push philosophy to confront its residual iconoclasm that makes some of its practitioners fearful of images and the imaginary.

However uncanny the view of Plato’s cave as a metaphor for cinema seems, it is clear that the movies offer far more than illusion.

via TPM.

Blogs are not conversations

I know some people think that blogs are conversations, but I don’t.  I think they’re publications.

And I think the role of comments is to add value to the posts.  If you want to rebut a post, then you can create your own blog and post your rebuttal there.

I’ve always felt this way about what blogs are, and in a similar way I feel Twitter is not a conversational medium.

via Scripting News.

Conversation is a dance

in which

the speaker’s activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener’s activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener’s brain activity mirrors the speaker’s activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses.

via  PNAS.

First-year seminar: the land of giants and their shoulders

For some, it is designed to “help students prepare for the transition from high school to college”.

For others, it provides an  opportunity to “ponder the relationship between private and public narratives and forms of representation in a range of texts and cultural traditions”.

In the latter case, students are required to read books:

Fall semester:

  • Genesis
  • Plato, Symposium
  • Virgil, The Aeneid
  • Virgil, The Aeneid
  • St. Augustine, Confessions
  • Dante, Inferno
  • William Shakespeare, Othello
  • Galileo Galilei, Discoveries and Opinions

Spring semester:

  • Pascal, Pensées
  • W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
  • Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
  • Karl Marx and F. Engels, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
  • Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Second Discourse on Inequality
  • Mary Shelley,  Frankenstein
  • Levi, Periodic Table
  • Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Let’s get rid of the performance review

Samuel Colbert says that

a one-side-accountable, boss-administered review is little more than a dysfunctional pretense. It’s a negative to corporate performance, an obstacle to straight-talk relationships, and a prime cause of low morale at work. Even the mere knowledge that such an event will take place damages daily communications and teamwork.

His solution? Performance previews:

reciprocally accountable discussions about how boss and employee are going to work together even more effectively than they did in the past. Previews weld fates together. The boss’s skin is now in the game.

In my experience,  the workplace is not that dialogical. I side with Lucy Kellaway at the FT: few managers talk or think like that. Yet. Among other things because they have to take part in the same process themselves.