Perec and Mathews
Perec and Mathews
Translation and Analytic Philosophy in the South Seas
This chapter looks at a pair of related short stories, one by Perec, one by Mathews. Both concern South Seas ethnographers who stumble upon languages with highly limited vocabularies. These stories draw on the analytic philosopher W. V. O. Quine’s example of the gavagai language, by which he illustrates the indeterminacy of translation, and Perec and Mathews use their stories to similar ends. Perec’s story, from his novel Life A User’s Manual, encodes allusions to Wittgenstein’s ‘slab’ language from Philosophical Investigations, as well as to Borges’s famous Chinese encyclopaedia, in order to reflect on how the categories by which we understand the world, and which are so important to translation, are culturally specific. Mathews’s story meanwhile ends with a riposte to Quine: pure translation may not be possible, but we do as well as we can do.
Keywords: Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, W. V. O. Quine, Ludwig Wittgenstein, analytic philosophy, philosophy of language, radical translation
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
