Wallace’s Ghosts and Capote’s Voices:|An interdisciplinary approach to style-aware reading in literary translation

Abstract

In this thesis, I draw upon the theoretical insights from ‘contextualized’ Stylistics and the methods of Literary Stylistics, as adapted to Translation Studies by Jean Boase Beier’s stylistic approach to literary translation and Kirsten Malmkjær’s ‘translational stylistics’, and investigate the implications of a ‘style-aware approach’ to reading in literary translation. Within the frameworks provided by Boase-Beier and Malmkjær, I present a two-part, process-oriented study, revolving around the concept of ‘mind style’, which I understand as the textual choices of the writer giving access to a mental state embedded within the text. In the first part, I discuss how the style-aware approach affects the reading phase of the process of translation. I conduct a translational stylistic analysis of “Incarnations of Burned Children” by David Foster Wallace, aimed specifically for translation into Turkish. The analysis indicates how Wallace employs a ‘ghost-narrator’ in his story and deals with ‘self centeredness’. In the second part of my study, I focus on how the style-aware approach may affect the way we read translated literature. I explore Ülker İnce’s stylistic strategies in Başka Sesler, Başka Odalar and how she recreates Truman Capote’s style in Other Voices, Other Rooms. I claim that İnce’s translation focuses on recreating Capote’s experimental language while removing the contexts of community and gender. The thesis promotes a ‘contextualized’, reader-inclusive approach to literary style, and argues that it can be a useful tool in strategy building in the process of translation and provide the translator with theoretical and methodological grounding to support her choices.