Translation Studies

Since translation studies is a specialty program designed for English majors at the MPhil and PhD levels, instructors conduct a rigorous review of the student’s portfolio. Based on their creative projects and upcoming publications, the instructors select texts to be assigned for translation. Students who wish to participate in this program are expected to be familiar with the following core texts:

Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi. Postcolonial Translation:Theory and Practice. London & New York:

Routledge, 1999.

Derrida, Jacques. What Is a “Relevant” Translation? Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27(2), 1 January 2001,

pp.174-200

Paz, Octavio. ‘Literature and Literalness,’ in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Helen

Lane (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), pp. 184-200.

Venuti, Lawrence. ‘Invisibility,’ in The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London:

Routledge, 1996, pp. 1-42.

Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator,’ in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings Vol. 1, 1913-

1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Harvard University Press, 1996), 253-263.

For the complete reading list, please contact us.

Creative Writing

Our creative writing program combines intensive writing workshops with seminars that study literature from a writer’s perspective. While students develop, hone, and practice their literary technique in a series of workshops, the creative writing seminars are designed to expose students to the various ways that language has historically been used to make art.

The writing workshop is the core element in the creative writing program, and it is therefore a selective and highly rigorous course. Under diligent supervision of the professor, students will discuss the historically agreed-upon fundamentals of writing fiction, poetry, essays, and various hybrid forms, and familiarize themselves with historical and contemporary aberrations from these rules. The program will facilitate students in developing their own styles, voices, rules, and logics, and learn to constructively discuss each other’s work not according to how a story, poem, or essay is “supposed” to look, but by how coherently it unfurls from its own premises. In an effort to introduce students to the rich literary world outside the canon, this course will take an international, experimental approach, reading much literature and criticism from writers in translation alongside Americans and the British. Our aim is that students thus leave this course with an understanding of themselves as young artists in dialogue not merely with their country but with the world.

Students in the workshop produce original works of fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and submit them to their classmates and professor for a close critical analysis during a combination of live and asynchronous peer reviews. Workshop critiques include a detailed written report, as well as thorough line-edits. They assess the mechanics and merits of the piece of writing, while individual conferences with the professor distill the various critiques into a direct plan of action to improve the work. Students will give short presentations, and at the end of the course will write a piece of fiction, or a piece of literary criticism, of at least five pages. By the end of the course, each student will emerge with a developed understanding of their personal creative process.

The reading list is long and diverse in the hope of encouraging sympathy for a broad range of literary sensibilities regardless of what our own natural inclinations may be. The course will be punctuated by secondary readings of literary criticism and philosophy.

Students are advised to make themselves familiar with the following texts for this program:

Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Orwell, George. Politics and the English Language. Sahara Publishers, 1946.

Smith, Zadie. Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

For the complete reading list, please contact us.

English as a Second Language (ESL)

Language learning is changing every day. We ensure our teachers and learners have access to relevant digital tools, which enhance the classroom, without increasing teacher or student workload. Our teachers work with international tools and resource materials used in leading ESL classrooms to help learners achieve the results they need.

ESL students at Adabistan will study the following key texts in addition to supplementary and secondary readings provided by their professors:

Murphy, Raymond and William R. Smalzer. Grammar in Use: Intermediate. Fourth Edition. Cambridge

UP, 2018.

Redston, Chris and Gillie Cunningham. face2face. Second Edition. Cambridge UP, 2012.

Leslie Anne Hendra, Mark Ibbotson, Ben Goldstein, Kathryn O’Dell, Lindsay Clandfield, Ceri

Jones, and Philip Kerr. Evolve Series. Cambridge UP, 2019.

For the complete reading list, please contact us.

MyStudio

The curriculum and reading list for MyStudio is designed after the course advisor meets the student to discuss and design a personalized lesson plan based on the student’s academic goals. To book a consultation, please contact us.