Drawing on an expanded concept of translation as process and practice, this contribution to the "Translation, Migration, Narrative" forum explores how migrants, as described by scholars such as Paul F. Bandia, embody "translated beings" who are marked both by agency and by constraint. We argue that translation serves as a literal and metaphorical framework for analyzing archives of migration by illuminating the interplay between migrants' identities, their larger social networks, and the legal, cultural, and linguistic translations they enact and endure. The piece begins by developing theoretical insights from two works of literature: Valeria Luiselli's writings about her experiences as a volunteer interpreter for child migrants and Yuri Herrera's novels reflecting on migrancy as a form of evolving self-translation between languages and cultures. These literary perspectives on translation as an essential component of migrant experience emphasize the hybrid, translational experiences of migrants and the paradoxical, but also resilient, nature of their identities and agency. We then bring these theories to bear as methodology and analyze a 1954 document from the archives of South Africa's Witwatersrand Native Labour Association (WNLA) that translated and transcribed Malawians' messages to their mineworker family members in South Africa. We consider how the lived experience of "being in translation" was both common and differentiated between migrants and their "left-behind" family members. Ultimately, our intervention offers an interdisciplinary approach to migration studies that bridges literature, history, and cultural analysis. This perspective not only underscores how translation practices are essential to the experience of migration but also helps to (re)constitute migration histories, in turn contributing to the archives and narratives that navigate the complex terrain of mobility, identity, and cultural mediation.

The essay investigates the intricate relationship between legal and cultural concepts of property and ownership in 19th-century American historical novels, specifically in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823) and Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie (1827). By examining the various meanings of the term ‘property’ – ranging from tangible ownership to the intrinsic qualities of objects but also texts and even ideas – the author argues that discourses on land and literature as property in 19th-century U.S.-America embody competing claims that reflect broader societal tensions and cultural struggles. Cooper’s narrative emphasizes a legalistic framework, presenting property rights as rooted in colonial appropriation and entitlement and genealogical continuity. In contrast, Sedgwick’s work questions these established notions by foregrounding themes of disruption and dispossession, illustrating how cultural narratives challenge patriarchal norms surrounding ownership and cultural superiority. Her portrayal of characters navigating conflicting legal landscapes reveals a more complex understanding of possession and self-possession, one that prioritizes individual autonomy and ethical considerations over mere legal entitlement. By weaving together these legal and cultural strands, the essay asserts that Sedgwick’s literary approach proposes a redefinition of property that values diverse perspectives and multiplicity in narrating history. Ultimately, the study underscores the interplay between legal frameworks and cultural narratives, illustrating how both land and literature serve as sites of contested ownership and identity in the struggle for representation and understanding in 19th-century U.S.-American culture.

Despite the intense reception and critical discussion which Wolfgang Iser's work on the reading process and the esthetics of reception (Rezeptionsasthetik) received throughout the 1970s and 80s in Anglo-American literary criticism, his later ambitious attempt to sketch out a "literary anthropology" with the help of a general theory of fiction was almost completely ignored outside of his immediate German context. This is especially lamentable from the perspective of law and literature approaches to legal and literary fiction since Iser's argument for the anthropological "grounding" of fictions as acts of motivated and strategic "feigning" (fingieren) develops out of a careful analysis and assessment of Jeremy Bentham's Theory of Fiction. Iser's discussion of Bentham does not only present a rare case of acknowledgement of Benthamian notions about fictions from the perspective of continental literary theory, it also illustrates the way in which the discussion of fiction in general may serve to foster a more robust interdisciplinary perspective in regard to legal and literary practices of storytelling and narration.1 Since Iser's theory of (literary) fiction has been perceived from rather different angles and with a diverging range of comprehension by Anglo-American and European audiences, respectively, the essay will first attempt to introduce and place Iser's discussion of fiction and the imaginary within the larger disciplinary context and his overarching interest and investment in a literary anthropology. After a more general presentation of the various elements in his larger work, the paper will briefly look at the "anthropological" prospects which Iser had pursued from early on throughout his critical work, culminating in The Fictive and the Imaginary. The second half of the essay will then take a closer look at Iser's particular interest in and detailed discussion of Jeremy Bentham's Theory of Fiction, to reveal how Iser's own anthropological project could derive a central impulse and trajectory from his intense reading of Bentham. In particular, I am interested in how Iser interprets Bentham's use of legal fictions to project a general theory of fiction, and how Iser then uses the concept of necessity or "need" to gradually translate and transfer Bentham's theoretical premises to match and support his own conceptualization of the fictive, the real and the imaginary. Iser's particular understanding of "doing fiction," I will conclude, might be of considerable value for the interdisciplinary engagement with legal and literary fictions.

Property rights are central to the concept of citizenship in the liberal state, but in relation to the obvious reality of unequal distribution of resources and material injustice, they also present its most central contradiction. Property rights, as guaranteed by the liberal state, always entail both a right to exclude and to control (the right of dominion), which makes the individual the “sovereign,” and a right to alienate, transfer, and contract property (including certain rights connected to possession, distribution, and further contracts). Of course, these latter social or communal aspects (or potentials) of property rights are dependent on the prior right of dominion, without which full control of the communal dimension of property would be impossible. Yet without the social—contractual—dimension, the right to property would be quite useless in a capitalist system of production, and it is in this regard that property as a legal institution, and not just as a right, attains a crucial status for the critical understanding of the relation between the legal and the cultural formation of the figure of the migrant and the figure of the citizen.

Wie kaum ein anderer Schriftsteller verlieh John Barth ab den 1950er Jahren der Literatur der US-amerikanischen Postmoderne eine überaus prägnante Form und Stimme und setzte seine eigenen literaturtheoretischen Überzeugungen in zahlreichen Romanen und Erzählungen konsequent um. Die explizite poetologische Fundierung seines Werkes mag der Grund sein, warum es in den USA oft als allzu akademisch angesehen wurde und warum sein internationaler Bekanntheitsgrad gegenüber anderen postmodernen Autoren des Landes (Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo oder Paul Auster) eher als gering einzuschätzen ist. Ohne Barths Anstrengungen jedoch, die Erneuerung der US-amerikanischen Erzählliteratur nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg voranzutreiben, wäre die kritische Wahrnehmung und Würdigung der Eigenheiten postmoderner Literatur inner- und außerhalb der USA kaum möglich geworden. So eng lassen sich zentrale Begriffe des kritischen Vokabulars postmoderner Fiktion – wie Metafiktion, Ironie und Selbstreflexivität – mit Barths Werk identifizieren, dass dessen Romane und Erzählungen bisweilen unzulässig verkürzt als reine Illustrationen theoretischer Konzepte gelesenen und aufgefasst werden.

Mit seinem dritten, 2001 erschienenen Roman gelang Franzen ein großer, für Autor und Leser gleichermaßen überraschender nationaler und internationaler Erfolg. Von Teilen der Kritik (auch außerhalb der USA) wurde The Corrections sogar als Wiedergeburt des sozial engagierten, realistischen Erzählens in der US-amerikanischen Literatur gefeiert. Andere dagegen fanden die ambitionierte Mischung aus realistischer Erzählung, Sozialkritik und milder postmoderner Ironie formal konservativ und stilistisch regressiv. Franzen selbst nutzte die positive Resonanz auf seinen Familienroman, um eine Neubestimmung der US-amerikanischen Literatur als kritisch, aber auch lesbar zu postulieren; eine Forderung, die er bereits 1996 in einem viel beachteten Essay in Harper's Magazine aufgestellt hatte. Im gleichen Essay hatte er sich selbst die Aufgabe gestellt, einen ‚großen Sozialroman‘ zu schreiben, der als kritischer Kommentar zur amerikanischen Gegenwart gelesen werden sollte. In diesem Sinne ist The Corrections, wie der Titel bereits andeutet, auch programmatisch zu lesen.

Der 2000 erschienene dritte Roman des schon früh als großes Talent der US-amerikanischen Gegenwartsliteratur gefeierten Autors erzählt die phantastische Geschichte zweier jüdischer Cousins, die im New York der 1940er Jahre mit Comicgeschichten voller Superhelden immensen Erfolg haben. Samuel (Sammy) Clay (eigentlich Clayman) und Josef (Joe) Kavalier, der in spektakulärer Weise vor den Nazis aus Prag fliehen konnte, bilden ein unschlagbares Team: Der umtriebige Sammy ist ein fanatischer Geschichtenerzähler, Ploterfinder und Charakterschöpfer, während der eher introvertierte Joe nicht nur begnadet zeichnen kann, sondern auch als Bewunderer und Imitator des legendären Entfesselungskünstlers Harry Houdini mit jeder Technik und jedem Trick des Verschwindens und der Flucht vertraut ist.

Als der zweite Roman des Autors 1996 erschien, war der gerade 33-Jährige nur einem relativ kleinen Kreis von Lesern bekannt, die sich für die höchst risikofreudigen und stilistisch äußerst variablen literarischen Experimente in seinem ersten Roman, The Broom of the System, 1987 (Der Besen im System, 2004), sowie den Erzählungen aus Girl With Curious Hair, 1987 (Kleines Mädchen mit komischen Haaren, 2001), begeistern konnten. Mit Infinite Jest änderten sich Wallace' nationaler Bekanntheitsgrad und seine Verbreitung schlagartig, obwohl der Autor in dieser grandiosen, über 1000 Seiten fassenden erzählerischen Tour de Force seine Leser an den Rand der Erschöpfung trieb, wenn nicht darüber hinaus. Nicht nur wegen des schieren Umfangs und der wahrhaft enzyklopädischen Anstrengung – allein der Anmerkungsapparat umfasst knapp 100 Seiten – wurde der Roman mit den Werken Thomas Pynchons oder William Gaddis' verglichen. Schon seine früheren Texte freilich verweisen deutlich auf diese und andere Repräsentanten einer älteren Generation postmoderner US-amerikanischer Schriftsteller.

Any definition of creativity is a 'machine' which produces exactly those instances of creativity that follow the rules of the respective definition - so how does one escape the conundrum of defining individual creativity without turning it into a mere act of reproduction? One of the central tenets of the present volume is that Construction Grammar is particularly suited to bridge the gap between everyday linguistic creativity and highly professionalized and conventionalized forms of cultural reproduction, especially creative literature. While it appears to merely follow a trend in cognitive linguistics, which emerged and firmly established itself over the last three decades, and which emphasizes the creative potential of linguistic practices over and against the definition of language and speech as a rule-based system of engendering constraints, Construction Grammar insists on its ability to provide a most profitable interdisciplinary approach for the study of creativity and language - one that would also be able to embrace and empower the study of literary creativity.

This discussion of James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Pioneers (1823) places it within the context of Cooper's other writings, as well as within the historical and cultural contexts of his times and of nineteenth-century literary criticism. The historical contextualization provides the basis for a close reading of the novel, concentrating on major issues and themes, like property, progress and civilization, as well as native and settler conflicts, but also on the major structural, compositional and narrative strategies, like landscape description, plot structure, and compositional order. The essay concludes with a brief assessment of the novel's critical reception, focusing on some of its most consequential studies that informed major critical debates on Cooper's work, but also U. S. literary and cultural criticism at large. The discussion will focus on the relationship between the literary aesthetics and politics of Cooper's historical romance, the underlying concepts of history and narrative authority and, finally, on the problematic relationship between law, property and legitimacy.

The following essay attempts to discuss the convergence of legal and poetical discourse and concepts by looking closely at an early modern lyrical text, Christopher Brooke’s A Poem on the Late Massacre in Virginia (1622). While the poem has achieved a certain notoriety due to its excessively racist imagery, its author has been virtually forgotten, and the text has rarely, if ever, been discussed in regard to its particular poetic strategies. A discussion of these strategies might help us understand the specifi c ways in which, in the context of colonial expansion, early modern English poetry about sovereignty, civility, and indigenous culture(s) helped to develop a discursive ‘fi eld’ which blends aesthetic concerns for proper forms (i. e., the specifi c ‘properties’ of poetry as normative speech) with legal-political and philosophical ideas about rightful conquest, dominion, and colonial property. In Brooke’s poem the convergence between these spheres fi nds its most explicit expression in the deconstruction and reconstruction of ‘civil bodies’—meaning both the bodies of specifi c victims of the massacre and the civil body politic of the colonial commonwealth which the Virginia Company tried to establish. In conclusion, the analysis and the contextual interpretation of Brooke’s text are meant to project a comparative perspective on law and poetry as acts of normative codifi cation. Sir, the law is as I say it is, and so it has been laid down ever since the law began; and we have several set forms which are held as law, and so held and used for good reason, though we cannot at present remember that reason. Sir John Fortescue (1458)1 1. Law and / or Poetry? At the very outset of their joint attempt to come to a better understanding of the “curious but intriguing relationship” between poetry and law, two legal scholars, one from Germany, another from the United States, offer a strong, if somewhat tautological caveat in regard to the fundamental difference between the legal and the poetical: Law is not poetry [...] and poetry is not law. The domain of law is more the domain of abstract reason, offering structure and rules to the members of a society. The domain of poetry is more the domain of imagination, offering inspiration and insight into life. We might say that law partakes more of science, poetry more of art. (Eberle/Grossfeld 353) 1 Qtd. in Mellinkoff, n. p. title page. 1 2 3