Alexandra Berlina's Books

Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation

By: Alexandra Berlina

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Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation

By: Alexandra Berlina

Winner of the Anna Balakian Prize 2016 Is poetry lost in translation, or is it perhaps the other way around? Is it found? Gained? Won? What happens when a poet decides to give his favorite Russian poems a new life in English? Are the new texts shadows, twins or doppelgangers of their originals-or are they something completely different? Does the poet resurrect himself from the death of the author by reinterpreting his own work in another language, or does he turn into a monster: a bilingual, bicultural centaur? Alexandra Berlina, herself a poetry translator and a 2012 Barnstone Translation Prize laureate, addresses these questions in this new study of Joseph Brodsky, whose Nobel-prize-winning work has never yet been discussed from this perspective.

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233

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Bloomsbury Publishing USA

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ISBN 10

1623566967

ISBN 13

9781623566968

Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

By: Alexandra Berlina

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Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

By: Alexandra Berlina

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,3, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine", course: PS Language Acquisition, language: English, abstract: In his fundamental work, “Biological Foundations of Language”, the biolinguist Eric Lenneberg presents, among other things, his “Critical period” hypothesis. It consists, roughly, in the idea that a certain age is appropriate for learning a language, so that it is impossible to achieve full competence before or after it. In this essay, I will focus on the second borderline, which is usually drawn by later interpreters at the beginning of puberty – the reasonability of this will be discussed in the next chapter of this essay. Lenneberg subdivides the ongoing process of lateralization into five levels: an infant up to 20 months has identical hemispheres without functional differences; a toddler up to 36 months develops a preference for either the right or the left hand, but the responsibility for language still can easily switch an other hemisphere; a child up to 10 years is still able to reactivate language functions in the right hemisphere; in the early puberty – up to 14 years – the equipotentiality rapidly declines, and after that it is lost completely. Lenneberg talks about a “reactivation”, not “creation” of the language function in the right hemisphere. He thereby implies that at the beginning this function is present in both hemispheres and later (partly) disappears from the right one; it does not develop in the left half of the brain only right from the start (with the option to migrate to the other hemisphere in emergency cases during the childhood). According to later studies, he was right in this point; apparently, he even overrated the monopolistic role of the left hemisphere as he wrote that in about 97% of the entire population language is definitely lateralized to the left (p. 181). He wrote the “Biological Foundations...” in 1967, ten years before the Russian scientists Balanov, Deglin and Chernigowskaya proved experimentally that every hemisphere contains certain speech ability: they caused a temporary aphasia of one hemisphere in healthy persons and detected that people with a blocked hemisphere were able to talk – even if it was the left one. In that case the used vocabulary shrunk, the test persons spoke very little, in short simple sentences, and only about concrete, visible objects, whereas persons with the right hemisphere blocked became very talkative, fantasized, used complicated grammatical constructions and a lot of abstract terms.

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GRIN Verlag

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ISBN 10

3638345084

ISBN 13

9783638345088

Precocious and prodigious children and their environment in 20th century American literature

By: Alexandra Berlina

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Precocious and prodigious children and their environment in 20th century American literature

By: Alexandra Berlina

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 1,0, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine", course: Hauptseminar "20th Century American Short Stories", language: English, abstract: Preface: Defining the topic In literature, just like in reality, gifted children may differ from each other in every aspect except for the very existence of a special talent or very high intelligence. Still, both in life and fiction, certain types can be traced. The terms child prodigy or wunderkind evoke a child which has developed outstanding skills in a certain area like chess (cp. the protagonist of Amy Tan′s short story "Rules of the Game" or Luzhin in Nabokov′s "Luzhin′s defence"; in reality, almost every grandmaster demonstrated exceptional skills in early childhood, the most prominent example being probably Capablanca), music (McCullers′ wunderkind in the short story of the same title does not live up to a comparison with Mozart, but is also considered a piano prodigy as a child), or any other art or science. In the study "Child Prodigies and Exceptionally Early Achievers", the psychologist John Radford practically equates the former with the latter, despite the conjunction in the title. The Wikipedia offers a similar definition: "A child prodigy, or simply prodigy, is someone who is a master of one or more skills or arts at an early age. One possible definition of a prodigy is a person who, by the age of 10, displays expert proficiency in a field usually only undertaken by adults"1. As this paper intends to study prodigious children in American literature, the best source for a definitions seems to be the leading American dictionary. However, Webster′s2 is extremely vague: "a person or thing of remarkable qualities or powers: an infant prodigy"is listed as a second possibility after an even more general reference to everything extraordinary. Merriam- Webster OnLine defines a prodigy in point 2b as "a highly talented child or youth"3. Unlike the print version, it also lists the word wunderkind as "a child prodigy; also: one who succeeds in a competitive or highly difficult field or profession at an early age", implying by the also that such success is not a typical trait of an infant prodigy. The Encyclopedia Britannica gives the most elaborate description which (according to a mini-survey of about a dozen subjects effected by the author of this essay) perfectly matches a native speaker′s use: "an extraordinary person, particularly a child, who shows spontaneous early signs of genius or exceptional ability along certain lines"4. It also stresses chess, maths and music as typical fields of prodigious achievement. Mentions of the words prodigy and wunderkind in other articles of the Encyclopedia add up to 150. The adjective prodigious occurs 176 times, but only rarely referring to early achievers. Surely the encyclopedia′s editors did not have to use this particular term every time they considered somebody as showing talent early. Word combinations like at an early age or as a child appear thousands of times, but a random sampling shows that in the overwhelming majority of biographical articles they are used to describe outer circumstances rather than achievements.

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GRIN Verlag

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ISBN 10

3638563081

ISBN 13

9783638563086

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

By: Alexandra Kingston-Reese

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Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

By: Alexandra Kingston-Reese

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life gives us a new way to view contemporary art novels, asking the key question: How do contemporary writers imagine aesthetic experience? Examining the works of some of the most popular names in contemporary fiction and art criticism, including Zadie Smith, Teju Cole, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Lerner, Rachel Kushner, and others, Alexandra Kingston-Reese finds that contemporary art novels are seeking to reconcile the negative feelings of contemporary life through a concerted critical realignment in understanding artistic sensibility, literary form, and the function of the aesthetic. Kingston-Reese reveals how contemporary writers refract and problematize aesthetic experience, illuminating an uneasiness with failure: firstly, about the failure of aesthetic experiences to solve and save; and secondly, the literary inability to articulate the emotional dissonance caused by aesthetic experiences now.

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221

Publisher

University of Iowa Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1609386752

ISBN 13

9781609386757

Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation

By: Alexandra Berlina

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Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation

By: Alexandra Berlina

Is poetry lost in translation, or is it perhaps the other way around? Is it found? Gained? Won? What happens when a poet decides to give his favorite Russian poems a new life in English? Are the new texts shadows, twins or doppelgangers of their originals-or are they something completely different? Does the poet resurrect himself from the death of the author by reinterpreting his own work in another language, or does he turn into a monster: a bilingual, bicultural centaur? Alexandra Berlina, herself a poetry translator and a 2012 Barnstone Translation Prize laureate, addresses these questions in this new study of Joseph Brodsky, whose Nobel-prize-winning work has never yet been discussed from this perspective.

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233

Publisher

Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published Date

ISBN 10

1623561736

ISBN 13

9781623561734

Precocious and Prodigious Children and Their Environment in 20th Century American Literature

By: Alexandra Berlina

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Precocious and Prodigious Children and Their Environment in 20th Century American Literature

By: Alexandra Berlina

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GRIN Verlag

Published Date

ISBN 10

3638831116

ISBN 13

9783638831116

Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

By: Alexandra Berlina

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Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

By: Alexandra Berlina

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GRIN Verlag

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ISBN 10

3638345084

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9783638345088

Poetry in Irish prose - poetic devices in Sean O'Faolain's short stories

By: Alexandra Berlina

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Poetry in Irish prose - poetic devices in Sean O'Faolain's short stories

By: Alexandra Berlina

Essay from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1, University of Dusseldorf "Heinrich Heine" (Anglistics), course: Seminar "Irish Literature and Sean O' Faolain", language: English, abstract: It was simple to define poetry hundred years ago: a poem had to contain a measure, rhythm and rhymes. Nowadays, none of them is indispensable any more. So, what is poetry? In my opinion, poetry is primarily qualified by a concentrated language. I feel certain that there is a relationship between the German words “Dichte” (concentration, denseness) and “Dichter” (poet, writer). In a poem, every single word should be essential, no word random, nothing to delete or to add. There is only one literary genre where this tightness of language is almost as important – the short story. Sean O’Faolain wrote poems in his youth, and then he switched to short stories. It seems to me that he did not consider himself talented enough as a poet to publish his verses (maybe partly because of the experience he describes in his autobiography “Vive moi!” – as a student, he was laughed at for his naïve poem about Mother Ireland’s teeming navel), but still felt a desire to write poetry. Interestingly, the twenty-four years old hero of “How to write a short story” with whom the author seems to identify, had rested from writing poetry and was trying to write short stories. The short story is a genre that has a long tradition in Ireland and many Irish masters, but that is surely not the only reason why O’Faolain wrote mainly short stories. He must have felt the close relationship between them and verses. He wrote prose, but smuggled poetry into it. O’Faolain either placed his own poems into his stories (a few times, for example, in “Hymenial”), or quoted other poets there (far more frequently), or he made whole passages of his prose sound remarkably poetic – and this he did in almost every story. To analyze this phenomenon, I have chosen O’Faolain’s later stories (from 1970 on, the collections “The Talking Trees and Other Stories”, “Foreign Affairs and Other Stories” and the last stories published only after the author’s death). By the time he wrote them, he was not so susceptible for outer influences as in his youth. These works are more mature and original; they contain less romantic (and other) clichés than his early experiments. Therefore, these compositions are more interesting to study and to decompose into single metaphors, similes, alliterations etc – especially if there are many of them at once, as it often occurs in his stories. I did not use any secondary literature, because I wanted to study O’Faolain’s way of writing by myself.

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GRIN Verlag

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ISBN 10

3638282333

ISBN 13

9783638282338

Book's by Alexandra Berlina

Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation

Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation

Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

Precocious and prodigious children and their environment in 20th century American literature

Precocious and prodigious children and their environment in 20th century American literature

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-First Century American Life

Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation

Brodsky Translating Brodsky: Poetry in Self-Translation

Precocious and Prodigious Children and Their Environment in 20th Century American Literature

Precocious and Prodigious Children and Their Environment in 20th Century American Literature

Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

Lenneberg's Critical Period Hypothesis

Poetry in Irish prose - poetic devices in Sean O'Faolain's short stories

Poetry in Irish prose - poetic devices in Sean O'Faolain's short stories

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