Sabine Coelsch-Foisner – författare

This collection of essays is dedicated to the theory and practice of drama translation. The focus is on foreign-language plays translated into English and staged in Anglo-American theatres. In this connection, concepts like acculturation and cultural transfer, Werktreue, adaptation, transformation and rewrites are discussed. Bringing together academia, the stage, and the ‘backstage’, Drama Translation and Theatre Practice involves a wealth of European cultures (Austrian, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Scottish, etc.) and spans more than five centuries. Where the essays concentrating on Molière, Racine, Marivaux, Sheridan, Da Ponte, Ibsen, Brecht, Jelinek and others meet is in questions of theory and questions concerning the target language. How are committed plays emerging in a particular socio-political context put on stage for audiences lacking such experience? How do translations produced for readers differ from stageable versions? How are libretti made singable? How does humour translate from one culture to another culture? Addressing such a variety of issues from both theoretical and practical perspectives, this book makes a weighty contribution to current debates about the role and function, performance and performability of plays in translation.

Mozart in Anglophone Cultures brings together papers given at the 15th Salzburg Annual Conference on English Literature and Culture held in 2006 to commemorate Mozart’s 250th birthday. The volume concentrates in particular on the reception of Mozart and his work in English literature and film, on English translations and adaptations of Mozart’s operas and songs, on the performance history of Mozart’s operas on stages in the English-speaking world, and on relationships and influences between Mozart and English composers. Aspects covered in the volume include: Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus as historiographic metafiction, the reception of Mozart in Australia, Mozart’s works as intertext in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Barbara Trapido’s Temples of Delight, Mozart’s influence on American ballet and W. H. Auden’s re-writing of The Magic Flute. In its focus on the creative reception of Mozart rather than on Mozart’s oeuvre, this book hopes to show the importance of a living myth in various cultural traditions (Victorian, Modernist and Postmodernist) – and, conversely, to reveal Mozart and his own age’s mode of listening as being equally embedded in cultural traditions.

The human body is a recurrent theme in contemporary literatures in English. The aim of this collection of essays is to explore its multiple representations and functions within a wide range of texts drawn together from various Anglophone cultures. For thematic coherence, this volume is divided into four parts: Diseased Bodies, Invented Bodies, Gendered and Transgender Bodies, and Fragmented and Mutilated Bodies. By adopting multi-disciplinary perspectives, each group of essays illustrates the different ways in which these become multiply signifying sites of cultural and political representation, whether the mode is realistic or daringly speculative and fantastic, as in the case of genetically designed bodies, monstrous and machine bodies. This book contributes to understanding the body as a culture-specific construct.

The book presents contributions to the 2012 conference of the Austrian Association of University Teachers of English in which scholars of various fields of English Studies discuss aspects of contact and conflict in Anglophone literatures, critical theory, cultural studies, interdisciplinary and comparative English studies and English linguistics. The papers reflect current research in these areas and show that disciplinary classifications are no longer as rigid as they used to be: Topics are as widely spread as linguistic variation, Māori English, English as a lingua franca, intergenerational conflict, hip hop discourse, literature and the creative arts, science drama, childhood in crime fiction, and the crisis of «high art».

One of the most radical conceptual shifts in postmodern debates about art has been the dismantlement of the very idea of a work of art, its unity and ontological status. The move from work to text has entailed far-reaching questions concerning the status and function of the artist or author, the role of interpretive communities, and the constitution of texts as intertexts. By concentrating on the author as reader, the present volume explores the process of writing in terms of textual visions and revisions undertaken by the author him- or herself. Tracing an author’s foot- or fingerprints along the multiple versions of a text does not only alert us to the fact that a printed text may not be the first version, nor may it be the final, let alone finished, version; more radically, it suggests that works of art are fleeting products within a fluid process of transformations.