I’m working on a asian studies question and need a sample draft to help me understand better.
The length of the essay should be eight to ten pages (Times New Roman 12, double-spaced).
The title of the work you are referencing and the corresponding page number should be given in parentheses in the main text [example: (The Gotha Programme, 16)].
You are expected to write a carefully reasoned, clearly argued essay that reflects a firm grasp of the reading materials. In the introduction of your essay, you should clearly state what your main argument is. We have read about various ideas of translation and related issues over the quarter.
We started with Roman Jakobson’s treatise, which examines the issue of translation from the perspective of linguistics and George Steiner’s essay, which discusses the four modes of the hermeneutic motion involved in the course of translation. In contrast to Jakobson’s linguistic and Steiner’s hermeneutic approaches, Lydia Liu calls attention to the intervention of political forces in the process of translation in the context of colonialism. By drawing on the Marxian ideas of exchange value and use value, she examines the ways in which unequal power dynamics between the West and the non-West conditioned the establishment of equivalence between languages in the course of translation. On the other hand, Naoki Sakai takes up the issue of translation by discussing two different attitudes toward one’s relationship with the other; homolingual address and heterolingual address. Ultimately, he criticizes the conventional idea of translation, which in his view reifies the boundaries of nation states, and offers his theory of translation as a venue for destabilizing the subjectivity, which is inseparably coupled with the nation state. From the political approaches of Liu and Sakai, we moved on to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics. By criticizing the tradition of Western thought, which views discourse as conversation between two interlocutors sharing common ground for understanding, Levinas looks at discourse as the site of ethics in which “the I” (the self) reaches out to “the thou” (the other), who does not share anything in common with the self and thus can challenge the self’s understanding of him or her. As discussed in class, such a view of discourse as the site of ethics demands that the self should hold the other higher than itself. In other words, Levinas’s ethics requires an unequal relationship between the self and the other, and thus implicitly problematizes the idea of equality (symmetrical reciprocity), which fails to take account of the self’s indefinite obligation to the other’s need. Karl Marx’s criticism of Bourgeois equality helps clarify Levinas’s critique of symmetrical reciprocity. For Marx, genuine justice can be achieved when Bourgeois equality is liquidated in favor of the Communist society in which one receives as much as one needs rather than as much as he works for. Such an ideal society can be premised only on the basis of an ethical principle akin to Levinas’s. In that sense, it is crucial to remember that Levinas warns us that we cannot but fail to uphold the other. Unlike Marx’s vision of the communist society, which will be achieved in the future, Levinas’s ethics constantly reminds us that we will ultimately fail to be completely ethical no matter how much we try. Ironically, the unavoidable failure of being ethical drives us to constantly try to be ethical in Levinas’s thought. Finally, we read Fredric Jameson’s theory of third-world literature as national allegory and Aijaz Ahmad’s rebuttal of it. Attempting to grapple with the radical difference of third world culture, Jameson in the end advocates it. In his view, unlike in Western culture and literature, there is no split between the private and the public, between poetics and politics, and the libidinal and the social in third world culture and literature because of its historical experience of capitalism different from that of the West. Thus, third world texts manifest social totality whereas first world texts primarily reveal fragmentations of society. In response, Ahmad finds fault with Jameson’s argument that third-world literature is inevitably national allegory. His criticism especially focuses on Jameson’s limited access to third world literature through translation. Keeping in mind the issues highlighted in the above overview of the course materials, discuss in your essay which ideas of translation and the related issues presented in the course materials above Suh’s chapters advocate and criticize, and why the chapters champion certain ideas and denounce others. You are expected to demonstrate your full understanding of the course materials as well as Suh’s chapters.
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