Jeroen Vandaele (Univ. Ghent) nous invitera à réfléchir aux conditions dans lesquelles l’humour grinçant peut être reçu et traduit. Sa présentation est intitulée : « Cringe Across Communities. Understanding and Translating The Office with Erving Goffman ».
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Cringe Across Communities. Understanding and Translating The Office with Erving Goffman
Erving Goffman provides a brilliant ‘micro-sociological’ analysis of how individuals manage their image in front of others. In public, individuals intend to promote what they think is a positive self-image and therefore conceal image-incompatible information and supply image-enhancing information. Moreover, image enhancement is most effective when it seems a natural and unconscious expression that individuals give off, not a conscious effort to make an impression on others. When these mechanisms fail, there is face loss, the individual may experience embarrassment, and become the object of comedy. If there is antagonism between the embarrassed and the audience, the felt comedy is usually a form of Schadenfreude. However, the embarrassment may also carry over on the audience, which leads to second-hand embarrassment—cringe— and the mixed emotion called cringe comedy. In this paper, I show that both Schadenfreude and cringe are dominant emotive effects in the sitcom The Office (British and American versions), I investigate how these two distinct emotions come about, and how they fare in translation.
Jeroen Vandaele teaches courses in literary translation and Hispanic literatures at Ghent University. Earlier he was professor of Spanish at the University of Oslo, teaching courses in poetics, translation studies, and discourse analysis. In Fall 2023 he is a Mare Balticum Fellow at the University of Rostock (Germany), for the domain of translation studies. He is the author of Estados de Gracia, which is a monograph on the censorship, translation, and influence of Billy Wilder in Francoist Spain (published by Brill in 2015) and, more recently, of Translation and Big Details, a monograph in press at Routledge New York. Among the volumes he edited or co-edited are Cognitive Poetics (Mouton de Gruyter) and Translating Humour (a special issue of The Translator). In the domain of humor research, one of his biggest efforts is the double essay “Narrative Humor,” published in Poetics Today.