The idea of resistance and literature as a subject for the 30th Annual Graduate Symposium arose from a graduate seminar on literature in translation. We discussed all through the semester how innately resistance of several types appears once a work of literature is translated – from semantic and syntactic to political and ideological resistances. The act of translation can both be an act of resistance (introducing new ideological ideas or new aesthetic forms that challenge the norms of a given culture), or an attempted bulwark against resistance, an imposition of domestic norms and needs. In this sense, thinking about translation is a way of thinking about reading, as translation tends to emphasize readerly decisions about what, how and why we resist words in new aesthetic or political forms.

The first panel, “Monsters?” needed the question mark. It focused on the destabilizing genre of the Gothic, a form that came into English literature in the guise of a pseudotranslation, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, because the subject matter (transgressive sexuality) and form (it’s popular, “low,” form) seemed too subversive; monstrosity, Walpole initially claimed, was an Italian thing. Both papers engaged with how the popular form belies (deliberately and subversively) the serious political potential of monstrosity in a norm-filled world. Hannah Phillips, in her paper,  “Our House: Gothicized Domesticity in We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” illuminatingly unpicked Shirley Jackson’s questioning of female domestic norms in 1950s and early 1960s America in her novel, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Jackson’s work is currently undergoing a renaissance and Phillip’s essay suggests why; the two sisters, Merricat and Constance, turn their back on the patriarchal world enforced upon them, through (in Merricat’s case) familicide and arson yet remain eminently empathetic because of the “prescribed nature of womanhood” in their time and culture. Domesticity and horror co-exist in their narrative because they challenge the limits between domesticity as a safe place and domestication as an act of repression. Jonas Black in his enlightening paper, “’Get the Golem’: ‘Jewbook,’ the Digital Left, and the Remaking of a Cultural Monster” analyzed how the figure of the Golem, a protective monster for the Jews of Prague, arose in literature and how it has become a figurative trope and symbol of political resistance for Jews – including the Facebook group, “Cool Jews,” – resisting the frightening (and now deadly) rising anti-Semitism in contemporary America.

The second panel, “Kafka and His Successors,” looked at resistance in and to Kafka’s work. Jordana Jampel’s insightful, “The Death of Dasein: Metamorphosis, Auschwitz, and the Anxiety of Verminhood,” posits a reading of Kafka’s iconic story that resists Heidegger’s concept of Dasein, because of the “deconstruction of language and decentralization of Heideggerian truth and meaning” in the postmodern world, seen through the death of communication between Gregor and his family, his descent into what Jampel calls “the anxiety of verminhood” defies, resists Heideggerian attempts to come to terms with the temporality of being. In his incisive paper, “Aspect’s Impact: Beckett and Kafka in Translation’s Infinity Mirror,” Nathan Lee focuses on Beckett’s resistance to admitting any influence of Kafka’s work on his own, alongside repeated but shaky scholarly attempts to definitively show such influence. Turning the question on its head, he shows how one of Kafka’s recent translators, Mark Harman, used Beckett’s work as a way into translating Kafka, thus implicating an affinity. Reading these translations, he suggests, allows readers a way into thinking about Beckett’s and Kafka’s aesthetics in kinship as resistant to similar aesthetic norms.

The third panel, “Moving Across, Moving Forward,” focused on movement and resistance. Melissa Rubbert’s illuminating “The Translator or the Translated? Role-Reversal in Vladimir Sorokin’s ‘The Swim’,” analyzes the dystopian story, (recently translated by our plenary speaker, Professor Brian Baer) of a propaganda brigade who swim with messages for the population as a story about translation in which the protagonist, Ivan, “translocates a signified from one medium to another by means of consciously controlling the signifier” – a letter that he swims with but that burns and kills him, as the agitprop message falls apart and transforms into another message; words, as she notes “have a life of their own” and resist fidelity to an arbitrarily imposed meaning. In her essay, “Gendered Movement Between Reality & Imagination in Anna Karenina,” Marie D’Apice offers a delightful reading of movement in Tolstoy’s novel and the connection between physical movement and the internal movement of consciousness in two of the characters, Levin and Anna, as they both resist rigid societal norms in their sensitive and constant reactions to the shifting world around them. Finally, Eric Berman’s thoughtful, “Eff the Ineffable: Understanding the Flow of Literary Capital,” considers the market and material asymmetry of world literature and posits means (through the translation and linguistic theories of Benjamin and Chomsky) of reconsidering the canon (which appears to resist innovation and change) as a constantly mobile ebb-and-flow – in an optimistic sense, a “renovation at contact points of asymmetry.”

Acts of translation, and acts of reading, can “resist incorporation” into domestic norms but can also be framed by them, as Brian James Baer, our plenary speaker noted in his talk on how the memoir of, Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, a “self-described transvestite” who came out in Weimar Germany, survived the war, and then life in East Germany. Examining the ambivalence of how translation acts in concomitantly framing and resisting “queer lives and transnational history,” Baer’s talk wrapped up a Symposium that showed, in his words, “the ways in which language and other forms of representation resist being relegated to the role of transparent instrument, neutral conduit, or pale copy.”

Resistance, in other words.