Over the past two years, I’ve been writing a book called A Tactical Guide to Cultural Translation, which builds on work I’ve been doing for the past decade (e.g., here and here).
The book is part of a class I regularly teach, CMN3109: Advanced Theories in Communication. Each chapter comes from a lecture. As I am in the process of revising the book for submission to publishers, I want to make the slides available. As I write in the preface:
This book is part of an answer to a question: how might a class, taken as a unit of which a book is merely part, serve as a vehicle for ideas? I was thinking about how different types of writing express ideas differently. A song, a novel, and a comic book can all recount the same events, but they won’t tell the same story. Likewise, a monograph, an article, and a conference paper can all report the same results, but they won’t convey the same ideas. So how might a class — with its books, its syllabus, its assignments, its regularly scheduled meetings, its questions and answers — become a collective, collaborative text? Who could read it? What would they learn?
The manuscript is a work-in-progress, as are the slides. These are the lectures as I delivered them when I taught the course in the Spring 2018 semester. They will evolve, but because the book focuses on the processes of working through ideas, I’m posting them as is. I’m also posting a description of the pedagogical rationale shaping the course and the book.
Here goes:
Introduction: People’s Minds Are Hard to Change
Lecture 1: Communication Is Translation, So Please Mind the Gap
Lecture 2: Newspeak as a Manual for Translation
Lecture 3: Translational Invention, Inventive Translation
Lecture 4: Fake News and Perspective Unmoored (not yet written)
Conclusion: Jumping In
And here is my note on pedagogy.
Kyle Conway 