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Conclusion

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In conclusion, my project addresses the issues of translation in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Honoré de Blazac's La Peau de chagrin and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's The Tale of the 672nd night as one is in English, one in French and the other in German. The subject of translation is tackled through the loss of meaning, the subversion of description and their relationship within a cultural apparatus and the exploration of the limitations of language through the complexity of the champ lexical. What is gained from this analysis is although something is necessarily lost in translation, translators are very much authors in their own right as they must make the arduous decisions on whether to focus on form or meaning. Throughout this close reading, however, one realizes that much of these wordy descriptions serve another purpose. These all inscribe themselves as part of the literary movement of the uncanny or fantastique. This literary genre was arguably started with Balzac and La Peau de chagrin but was taken up by many other authors such as Wilde and Hofmannsthal. The uncanny, as explored in the second part of my project, is a coping mechanism to reconcile the lived experience of the coming of modernity and radical shifts in the social order mixed with the oppressive nature of the bourgeois interior. The uncanny or fantastique where the object is the master of the main character allows for catharsis (it mimics the trope of the Aristotelian tragic hero but where the fatal flaw is the commodity) attempting to relieve, but for a moment the societal angst whilst at the same time commenting on their époque. I believe it would be interesting to analyze more texts from this époque to see if other themes and devices like this occur as well. 

I believe my project does a good job in reconciling all these different approaches languages and mediums. In fact, the nature of my project is multiple. In order to be able to create such a project,I first used the paper texts which I read over an uncountable amount of times, annotating them, highlighting them and jotting down ideas and important information. I then had my first encounter with the digital as I researched my project and did almost 3/4 of my readings online while the other fourth was analogue. I then preceded to jot down and structure my project in a notebook, with a pen and paper, while at the same time exploring the different possibilities the digital realm offered me, eventually beginning the creation process where I believe I was successful in bridging, to a certain degree, the chasm which exists between the digital and the analogue. As Hayles describes in her essay How We Read: Close, Hyper Machine, close reading is the traditional scholarly literary way of analyzing and reading over a text by searching for clues and a deeper meaning within every word in sentence. I accomplished this type of analysis both in my argument and as I was building my arguments. She then moves on  to discuss the shift toward the digital and hyper-reading, where one now has access to a great amount of texts and information so you must be able to skim quickly and utilize search words to get to the points which interest you."He is not talking here about digital reading but about archival research that requires a scholar to move through a great deal of material quickly to find the relevant texts or passages. he identifies two techniques in particular, scanning (looking for a particular keyword, image, or other textual feature) and skimming (trying to get the gist quickly). " (Hayles. How We Read: Close, Hyper Machine. p. 66) I, in fact, utilized this very technique of searching for keywords amidst a sea of information when creating a visualization for Dorian Gray. To create an accurate word cloud for the main character, I searched the text for "Dorian Gray" when those words were found I then did a close reading of the paragraphs using only the parts that were pertinent to the context. Finally, Hayles gets to the synergy or interdisciplinarity between all these types of readings and the digital medium, which is one of the main components of my project with example such as Literature + where "the approach is threefold: it offers students traditional literary training; it expands their sense of how they can use digital media to analyze literary texts; and it encourages them to connect literary methodologies with those of other fields they may be entering." (Hayles. How We Read: Close, Hyper Machine.p.75) I attempt to do exactly this in my project. As mentioned earlier, I attempt to bridge the gap by using the Scalar, Voyant and Weebly tools to display my project and highten it through hyperlinks, videos and experience. For example, I recreated the stuffiness of the bourgeois interior with a visualization and annotations of an image in Scalar and with the Dorian Gray hyper-reading visualization. However, this whole project would not have been possible had I not bridged the gap and done an incredible amount of close reading and literary analysis to then be able to "feed my findings into the machine". In fact, I probably did more close reading in this digital project than I would have done for a literary analysis as the information I had to gather was no longer solely quotes. As Hayles concludes:
"What transformed disciplinary coherence might literary studies embrace? here is a suggestion: literary studies teaches literacies across a range of media forms, including print and digital, and focuses on interpretation and analysis of patterns, meaning, and context through close, hyper-, and machine reading practices. Reading has always been consti tuted through complex and diverse practices. Now it is time to rethink what reading is and how it works in the rich mixtures of words and images, sounds and animations, graphics and letters that constitute the environments of twenty-first-century literacies." (Hayles. How We Read: Close, Hyper Machine. p.78) 


Finally, as mentioned in our weekly meetings and synthesized in my oral, I have worked tremendously hard on this final thesis and have learned a lot. I expected to learn a lot about the first hand texts, the époque in which they were written, translation which I knew very little about and how to use Scalar.  I have most definitely attained those goals but I also learned a lot about the effort and structure one must have in order to create an interdisciplinary digital project. I had the chance to experience my own personal claustrophobic interior as I was creating a project on the oppressive bourgeois interior. In fact, as opposed to the literary essay, the digital one is all about defying linearity and juggling these different pieces of the project your don't know how to come together. Furthermore, the digital medium creates this space where all your files are jumbled and each piece of information or picture has it's own file generating the same sensation of being overwhelmed that the bourgeois interior does. I also learned and experienced a lot of the invisible labour that goes into creation one of these projects. In fact, it is quite easy to get lost down a rabbit hole that isn't actually useful to your project. Also, contrary to the literary essay where all you do for it will be useful in a certain sense and nothing you do can be useless. In the digital project, spending hours on something that will soon be rendered useless is the norm. In fact, much of this is caused by the limitations of technology and the tools. For example, I spent hours creating a library of images I wanted to use only to realize that Scalar would only allow you to input the URL. I had a similar experience with StoryMap where I spent weeks learning about it and then trying all the different tools to create my vision for the bourgeois interior until I realized that I could have easily used Scalar which already had all the tools for me to be able to create what I wanted. Lastly, I have learned an incredible amount whilst creating this project. Particularly about the amount of work which goes into creating one of them, especially unseen work. And to conclude, after taking three digital humanities classes at McGill and doing most of my essay on Weebly,  I believed I was in the digital humanities camp in the debate between the digital and the analogue. However, doing this project I learned that they aren't mutually exclusive in fact, it is quite the opposite.They are in fact intrinsically dependant upon one another as both are made exponentially better when joined with the other. 

 

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  1. Characteristics of the Bourgeois Interior Sandrine Servant