Pawelski, Melissa (2022) Languages of punishment : translating Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir into English and German. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

Translating one of the most important works in the humanities and social sciences, Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison (1975), is a challenging enterprise. This thesis explores the way in which the English translation by Alan Sheridan, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (1977), and the German translation by Walter Seitter, Überwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefängnisses (1977), significantly differ from the original French and from one another. The differences, especially regarding the key concepts in the book, arguably enable interpretations that Foucault did not intend or that rest upon words with multiple meanings in other languages. To this end, I have identified a number of central concepts, which I analyse alongside the different semantic fields in which they are situated. I argue that the translation choices made by Sheridan and Seitter must be critiqued on the basis of the historical differences between criminal procedures and punishment (the concept of supplice), intellectual influences denoting specific theories of the body that get lost in translation (the concept of the body following Nietzsche), a theoretical misdirection of the Foucauldian relationship between power and violence (the concept of pouvoir), and finally the cultural particularities of the concept of la surveillance, which problematise the power of the gaze and the production of behaviour beyond questions of technological automatization. Through the critical analysis of translation, this thesis offers a comprehensive study of the central ideas in one of Foucault’s most renowned books. Unlike all previous studies, this thesis combines Foucauldian thought with the fields of modern languages, translation studies and theory, and philosophy in order to visualise their multilingual connections in philosophical writings. I suggest that reading foreign authors only in translation is insufficient to understand their intellectual development and their contribution to scholarship.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN0080 Criticism P Language and Literature > PQ Romance literatures
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. Surveiller et punir. -- Translations into English -- History and criticism, Foucault, Michel, 1926-1984. Surveiller et punir. -- Translations into German -- History and criticism, French literature -- Translations into English, French literature -- Translations into German
Official Date:	April 2022
Dates:	Date Event April 2022 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	School of Modern Languages and Cultures
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Davis, Oliver, 1977- ; Elden, Stuart, 1971-
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	231 leaves : illustrations
Language:	eng

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