Professor%20Matthew%20Reynolds: List of publications

Multilingualism is integral to the human condition. Hinging on the concept of Creative Multilingualism - the idea that language diversity and creativity are mutually enriching - this timely and thought-provoking volume shows how the concept provides a matrix for experimentation with ideas, approaches and methods. The book presents four years of joint research on Creative Multilingualism conducted across disciplines, from the humanities through to the social and natural sciences. It is structured as a manifesto, comprising ten major statements which are unpacked and explored through various case studies across ten chapters. They encompass areas including the rich relationship between language diversity and diversity of identity, thought and expression; the interaction between language diversity and biodiversity; the 'prismatic' unfolding of meaning in translation; the benefits of linguistic creativity in a classroom-setting; and the ingenuity underpinning 'conlangs' ('constructed languages') such as Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin, designed to give imagined peoples a distinctive medium capable of expressing their cultural identity. Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto is a welcome contribution to the field of modern languages, highlighting the intricate relationship between multilingualism and creativity, and, crucially, reaching beyond an Anglo-centric view of the world. Intended to spark further research and discussion, this book appeals to young people interested in languages, language learning and cultural exchange. It will be a valuable resource for academics, educators, policy makers and parents of bilingual or multilingual children. Its accessible style also speaks to general readers interested in the role of language diversity in our everyday lives, and the untapped creative potential of multilingualism.

Website prismaticjaneeyre.org

Babel: Adventures in Translation, a new exhibition at the Bodleian Libraries, explores the power of translation from the ancient myth of the Tower of Babel to the challenges of modern-day multicultural Britain in light of Brexit. Featuring a stunning range of objects from the Libraries' collections, the exhibition shows how ideas and stories have travelled across time and territory, language and medium. Babel explodes the notion that translation is merely about word-for-word rendering into another language, or that it is obsolete in the era of global English and Google Translate. It shows how translation is an act of creation and interpretation, and has been part of our daily lives since time began.

Minyan Sun we saw how an exoticizing gaze can develop the feedback loop of autoexoticism when the self recognizes its investment in the other and subjects itself to its own desiring attention. Daniele Nunziata and Naomi Charlotte Fukuzawa both traced further complexities of identity that cross the self-other boundary in colonial Cyprus and between Britain and Japan. Peter Hill, Katarzyna Szymanska, and Valentina Gosetti all explored the tactical potential of autoexotic elements in a politics of representation, in locations as diverse as Syria, Poland, and Flanders. With Adriana Jacobs we found autoexoticism in recent Hebrew poetry to be a “transcreative and relational” imaginative practice. Finally, Xiaofan Amy Li argued that autoexoticism opens “the boundaries of one’s own subjectivity and culture to change and rupture,” creating “a holistic field of intercultural experience” where “what is considered self and other are transient and plastic,” since they are drawn into an “intercultural practice that consciously selects and recreates elements and aspects from disparate cultures and identities.” As these accounts reveal, there can be much that is attractive in autoexoticist styles of being, of self-representation, and of encounter. They are formally and linguistically mobile. They have a strong affective charge, provoking reactions of amusement, embarrassment, or outrage. They are courageous, since they run the risk of being dismissed as mere exoticism. And they can loosen established identities, opening them to change.

Translation is everywhere, and matters to everybody. Not only does it give us foreign news, dubbed films, and instructions for using the microwave, but without it there would be no world religions, and our literatures, our cultures and our languages would be unrecognizable. In this Very Short Introduction, Matthew Reynolds analyses the use of translation, from ancient Chinese to World English, from St Jerome to Google Translate. He shows how translation determines meaning, how it matters in commerce, empire, and conflict, and why it is fundamental to literature and the arts. Reynolds concludes by revealing how translation is changing radically in our new age of electronic media.

The essays gathered here challenge current notions of the accessibility of culture, whether in overtly ideological and politically repressive contexts, or in seemingly 'neutral'; cultural scenarios.

Translation, illustration and interpretation have at least two things in common. They all begin when sense is made in the act of reading: that is where illustrative images and explanatory words begin to form. And they all ask to be understood in relation to the works from which they have arisen: reading them is a matter of reading readings. Likenesses explores this palimpsestic realm, with examples from Dante to the contemporary sculptor Rachel Whiteread. The complexities that emerge are different from Empsonian ambiguity or de Man’s unknowable infinity of signification: here, meaning dawns and fades as the hologrammic text is filled out and flattened by successive encounters. Since all literature and art is palimpsestic to some degree — Reynolds proposes — this style of interpretation can become a tactic for criticism in general. Critics need both to indulge and to distrust the metamorphic power of their interpreting imaginations. Likenesses follows on from the argument of Reynolds’s The Poetry of Translation (2011), extending it through other translations and beyond them into a wide range of layered texts. Browning emerges as a key figure because his poems laminate languages, places, times and modes of utterance with such compelling energy. There are also substantial, innovative accounts of Dryden, Stubbs, Goya, Turner, Tennyson, Ungaretti and many more.

But early modern English translation often finds its setting within far busier scenes of worldly life - on the London stage, as a bid for patronage, for purposes polemical, political, hortatory, instructional, and as a way of making a ...

The poets of the mid-nineteenth century lived in a time of 'nation-building'. The Realms of Verse brings this political and intellectual context to life. Drawing on a wide range of soources, Matthew Reynolds shows that the Italian Risorgimento raised questions about community and individual liberty which were especially problematic for subjects of the multi-national United Kingdom, and argues that these questions are at the heart of the poetry of Robert and Elizabeth Browning, Tennyson, and Clough. Their long poems characteristically tell stories about marriage, investigating the symbolic and actual interactions between that personal union and national unity. Their verse as a whole exploits correspondences between political government and poetic form, and is alert to its own role in fostering a common culture. Historically detailed, theoretically astute, critically nimble, and stylishly written, The Realms of Verse is the most far-reaching reassessment of Victorian poetry to have been published in recent years.