Response by Littau to the responses to “Translation and the materialities of communication”

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Note on contributor

Karin Littau is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of Essex, UK. She has published on book and film history, adaptation, translation, and reception studies. Her articles on translation have appeared in journals such as Forum for Modern Language Studies, MLN, Translation Studies, TTR and most recently in IJoC and SubStance. Her next book is a history of the relations between literature and film for Routledge; others include Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania (2006; translated by Manantial into Spanish in 2008), A Companion to Translation Studies (2007, with Piotr Kuhiwczak) and Cinematicity in Media History (2013, with Jeffrey Geiger).

Notes

1. Compare McLuhan’s point that “the medium is the message” (1964, 15–30).

2. Rhodes and Sawday reference in their bibliography, as do Finkelstein and McCleery, the British Library edition of McKenzie's The Panizzi Lectures 1985. Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (1986). The salient passages are the same as in the Cambridge University edition I cite.

3. On the substantial difference between the use of these two terms in McKenzie and Chartier, see Littau (2006, 26, 159–160); on “subtly” changing the meaning of “effect” to “affect”, see Galey (2010, 113–114); on the ease by which effect/affect are misspelt in English, see Van Mierlo (2013, 142).

4. The most sophisticated argument I have come across as to the differences between McLuhan and Williams is offered by Iain Hamilton Grant (2003) in developing an account of technological determinism that is quite different to that which Williams ascribes to McLuhan: deploying the logic of not a mechanical causality but non-linear causality.