Description
The madness narrative in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher
Konstantina Kyriakou
M.A. ‘English Language, Linguistics and Translation’, Specialization ‘Translation Studies and Interpreting’
The study attempts to trace diachronic evidence of attitudes towards madness in translated fiction and how they have changed through the years. It explores three Greek translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story The Fall of the House of Usher, spanning from 1995 to 2013. Michel Foucault’s Madness in Civilization (Foucault, 1961), is used as the methodological framework regarding shifting attitudes towards madness from a historical perspective. Attitudes towards madness, in discourse, may be manifested through an im/politeness model testing the following hypothesis: Using the notions of offensiveness, interpersonal distance and explicit references to mental illness, the study hypothesizes that the degree of impoliteness of the first-person narrator towards the mentally ill protagonist, Roderick Usher, will decrease in the latest translation, as a result of the disability movement, suggesting that the Greek society’s attitudes towards mental illness are becoming more tolerant and inclusive. Α questionnaire addressing Greek-English bilinguals, between twenty and thirty years of age, confirms the madness-inclusive attitude in the third translation, suggesting that representations of mental illness in fiction undergoes a major shift, as it does in society. Τhe research shows that translators need to construct identities relevant to societal tensions to regulate the implications they allow from verbal choices they make.
