Uncertain Environments

Chair: Isabel Galleymore

'The Big Sleep and the artificial spaces of Los Angeles' by Alick Levick

The development of Southern California is defined by its struggle against the hostile wilderness. Los Angeles in particular, as articulated by Raymond Chandler, is an example of a kind of subverted Eden. The critic David Wyatt notes that Chandler was “a failed pastoralist, and his work can be read as an elegy for the ‘Good Green Place’ he had known and lost”. Chandler’s version of the pastoral can be found in novels such as The Big Sleep (1939), in which “the longing for a garden poises itself against the determination to confront the world of the machine”.

This paper discusses the boundary between the real and the artificial in Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. This theme is illustrated in particular by the unhomely, labyrinthine Sternwood house, full of empty spaces and hidden compartments. Within this house the wilderness is controlled and replicated in the form of a domesticated synthetic wonderland, with the bizarre nature of the Sternwood family, from the cadaverous General Sternwood to his ghastly daughters (and the performativity and duplicity they personify) further expressing the sense of the uncanny which pervades the house, and, by extension, the whole of Los Angeles. The central narrative is the repressed history which is buried in the wilderness, hidden within the false mythology spun by the city.

“The Representation of English Landscape in Russian Translations of Childrens Literature Written in English” by Elena Goodwin

In this paper I will look at images of English landscape, as a manifestation of Englishness, created in children’s literature written in English and translated into Russian. I will explore how Russian translators interpret the English rural landscape in the translations of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1908), Rudyard Kipling’s Rewards and Fairies (1910) and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911). I suggest that cultural knowledge of the source country that Russian translators need for creating their translations might have been affected by existing stereotypes of England and Russia, as well as insufficient information about English culture. Although the translators do not seek to situate their texts within the Russian cultural context, they still tend to use strategies of generalisation, simplification and partly domestication while conveying images of English landscape in the receiving culture. Consequently, the created images might remind Russian child readers of their own homeland but at the same time tell them about the foreign land. By attempting to show how Russian and English cultures interact, I conclude that Russian translators of children’s literature written in English introduce significant features that point to a mythologisation of Englishness in the translated texts.

“On the Road to Nowhere: environmental destruction and literary texts” by Sophia David

This paper will consider the symbiotic relationship between the loss of biodiversity and language in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. It will argue that consequences of environmental destruction removes terms, expressions, inspirations, colours, textures and descriptions from our vocabulary. Without speech we cannot think (Maurice Merleau-Ponty), therefore this loss of names incapacitates us of thought. It also consequently withdraws meaning from our understanding of selfhood as defined through place and the other. Our way of knowing and being becomes dismantled without that around us to provide comparison. With less diversity in nature and language, we have less ways of understanding and producing meaning. Environmental destruction destroys our symbolic order and how we know and exist within the world. Through a close reading of The Road, we can examine the relationship between language, thought and the environment, and how these things are interconnected and what is means for the human and nonhuman when this relationship is destroyed.