Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature
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The Untranslatability of Dreams
Get PDFThis short meditation on dreamwork-narrative wonders why dreams are not easily translated. It takes off from Derrida’s remark in Writing and Difference that “since the materiality of the signifier constitutes the idiom of every dream scene, dreams are untranslatable†(210). Working through a secular, a Hindu and a Buddhist parable respectively, this essay considers 5 possible explanations for the untranslatability of dreams. It proposes that there might be no material to translate, as in the fiction whose “materiality†we assume and which we are used to reading and interpreting in broad daylight. Dreams however continue to be immaterial while the translator works away at his desk. We haven’t yet known it as either material “work†or “text,†so there might yet be no need to trouble ourselves with the death of its author
Sex and the City-State: Cultural Politics and Sexual Cultures in Love and Lust in Singapore
Get PDFIn this article, we explore how the erotic short story collection Love and Lust in Singapore (2010) emblematises the cultural and sexual politics of the nation-state. We argue that the anthology presents a conflicted and contradictory view of Singapore, demonstrating a movement between conservative affirmation and liberal critique of the state's political, cultural and sexual practices. While the nation-state is presented as a participant in a global capitalist culture, the majority of the stories contained in Love and Lust challenge, in one way or another, Singapore's alleged privileging of materialism and consumerism over the domestic, cultural and spiritual needs of citizen, resident and visitor. Acutely aware of the collection's problematic status as predominantly populated by expatriates, we will argue that all of the stories in Love and Lust serve to either affirm or disavow both national state rhetoric and popular ideologies of nationhood
