BiblioVault - Books about Valentino, Russell Scott

At Translation's Edge

Edited by Nataša Durovicová, Patrice Petro, and Lorena Terando

Rutgers University Press, 2019

Since the 1970s, the field of Translation Studies has entered into dialogue with an array of other disciplines, sustaining a close but contentious relationship with literary translation. At Translation’s Edge expands this interdisciplinary dialogue by taking up questions of translation across sub-fields and within disciplines, including film and media studies, comparative literature, history, and education among others. For the contributors to this volume, translation is understood in its most expansive, transdisciplinary sense: translation as exchange, migration, and mobility, including cross-cultural communication and media circulation. Whether exploring the Universal Declaration of Human Rights or silent film intertitles, this volume brings together the work of scholars aiming to address the edges of Translation Studies while engaging with major and minor languages, colonial and post-colonial studies, feminism and disability studies, and theories of globalization and empire.

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Materada

Fulvio Tomizza

Northwestern University Press, 1999

Francesco Koslovic—even his name straddles two cultures. And during the spring of 1955, in the village of Materada on the Istrian Peninsula, his two worlds are coming apart. Materada, the first volume of Fulvio Tomizza's celebrated Istrian Trilogy, depicts the Istrian exodus of the hundreds of thousands who had once thrived in a rich ethnic mixture of Italians and Slavs. Complicating Koslovic's own departure is his attempt to keep the land that he and his brother have worked all their lives.

A picture of a disappearing way of life, a tale of feud and displacement, and imbued with the tastes, tales, and songs of his native Istria, Koslovic's story is a testament to the intertwined ethnic roots of Balkan history.

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The Woman in the Window

Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel

Russell Scott Valentino

The Ohio State University Press, 2014

In The Woman in the Window: Commerce, Consensual Fantasy, and the Quest for Masculine Virtue in the Russian Novel, Russell Scott Valentino offers pioneering new insights into the historical construction of virtue and its relation to the rapidly shifting economic context in modern Russia. This study illustrates how the traditional virtue ethic, grounded in property-based conceptions of masculine heroism, was eventually displaced by a new commercial ethic that rested upon consensual fantasy. The new economic world destabilized traditional Russian notions of virtue and posed a central question that Russian authors have struggled to answer since the early nineteenth century: How could a self-interested commercial man be incorporated into the Russian context as a socially valuable masculine character?

With chapters on Gogol, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky as well as Pasternak and Nabokov, The Woman in the Window argues that Russian authors worked through this question via their depictions of “mixed-up men.” Such characters, according to Valentino, reveal that in a world where social reality and personal identity depend on consensual fantasies, the old masculine figure loses its grounding and can easily drift away. Valentino charts a range of masculine character types thrown off stride by the new commercially inflected world: those who embrace blind confidence, those who are split with doubt or guilt, and those who look for an ideal of steadfastness and purity to keep afloat—a woman in a window.

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