In September, Penny Yeung defended her dissertation entitled “Double Voicing: Postmonolingual
Multilingualism in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée, Dung Kai-Cheung’s Atlas: The Archaeology of an Imaginary City, and Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear,” a project which brings together narratology and translation studies in the analysis of the three contemporary multilingual texts.
In her wonderful work, Penny explains how the distinction structuralist narratology makes between “story” and “discourse” is undermined in various ways in the three works, and demonstrates that the texts couch their acts of translation in and as the form of this structural “divergence.” This process, which she terms “double voicing” and defines narratologically as marking a convergence of two or more narrative voices, challenges conventional definitions of what translation is. Her approach illuminates postmonolingual conceptions of language and translation in the works, and enables an analysis not otherwise possible through existing national, linguistic, or regionally circumscribed frameworks of literary study.
Meanwhile, Penny thanks her committee members, Professors Andrew Parker, Janet Walker, and Xiaojue Wang, her external reader, Professor Rey Chow, and the Comp Lit community for their support throughout the years.
Please join us in extending sincere congratulations to Dr. Yeung on her remarkable achievement. May all the best be with her for her future endeavors.