Translation as/and Mediation: Teaching Life Writing the Foreign Literature Classroom

Abstract

Monolingual speakers of English are sometimes confused when I tell them that although I teach English literature, I did so in a Foreign Languages and Literature Department in my former university in the South of Brazil. In the four-year undergraduate degree system, all students in English, Spanish, French, German, and Italian are expected to complete a common core of classes in linguistics, translation studies, and literature for two years before progressing to the language-specific second half of their education. This division also impacts the language of instruction: until they become third-years, with the exception of language proficiency courses, everything is taught in Portuguese to students of all five languages as it is generally their first language and the country’s only official national language.1 The common-core course which I discuss in this contribution is a first-year Introduction to Narrative course; docents are expected to design syllabi which consider various narrative forms in translation from primarily but not exclusively the five languages the university offers as degrees. Before teaching the course for the first time, my informal survey of previous syllabi on the teachers’ resource page revealed that, historically, most choices, regardless of medium, could be classified as fiction; and so, I decided to introduce a new module to the course in which to explore my interest in life writing. Although specific to my context of teaching, my practice of having the students analyse the paratext of translated editions of life writing can be extrapolated to other processes and agents that shape students’ (and other readers’) reception of life writing and which I hope can be relevant to other contexts of teaching about life writing and mediation. In designing the activities in the module, I anchored my approach on the materiality of the books I chose to include in the syllabi. By centring my students’ reception on the printed books, I can combine insights https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2154446