New books on the shelf

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chu Pok

China's Quest for Sporting Mega-Events: The Politics of International Bids
Author: Chu Pok, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Publisher: Routledge

 

Chinese cities have pursued sporting mega-events since the 1980s. The President, Premier and Central Government usually provide all-out support, boosting their odds of success, yet their attitudes vary from case to case. This book reviews 20 bids to explain the reasons behind the final decisions.

 

Aleksandar Stevic

Falling short: the bildungsroman and the crisis of self-fashioning
Author: Aleksandar Stević, Assistant Professor, Department of English
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

 

From the inception of literary realism in the 1830s to the height of modernism a century later, the bildungsroman presents itself as a key symptom of modern Europe's inability to envision either coherent subjectivity or successful socialisation. In this book, Prof Stević argues that the bildungsroman tends to condemn its heroes to failure because our modern understanding of both individual subjectivity and social success remains riddled with contradictions. It offers a revisionist history of the realist and modernist bildungsroman, unearthing the neglected role of defeat in the history of the genre.

 

Darry Sterk

Indigenous Cultural Translation: A Thick Description of Seediq Bale
Author: Darryl Sterk, Assistant Professor, Department of Translation
Publisher: Routledge

 

This book is an account of translation in the textual history of the Mandarin language screenplay of the Taiwanese blockbuster Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale, tracing how it was adapted into Mandarin from Japanese written and Seediq oral sources and then back-translated into Japanese and Seediq. The indigenous cultural translations demonstrate how translation may be part of language and culture revitalisation projects that articulate alternative indigenous modernities in settler states like Taiwan.