translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

sculpture, music, architecture, poetry, drama and fiction, design and
fashion. After setting the temporal borders, Bradbury identifies two main
moments of crisis (which may have generated at least two important types
of modernism) – the first in between wars, and the second after World War
II which ‘signed the death certificate’ of a great age through the
contradictions, conflicts, self-doubt, progress as cultural and political
collapse, fragmentation, and loss characteristic of the new coming age.
Thus, it can be said that after the conquests of modernism, the last
two centuries of the second millennium have brought with them the
marking effects of war, famine, slavery and death-camps. This is the reason
why people feel the “exile, the pain inside modernity” (2001: 411) and the
great utopian Enlightenment ideal seems to have been lost forever giving
way firstly to a deeper plunging into the inner world of the individual
(modernism) and then to a discarding of all these political and historical
scars behind the curtain of scepticism, irony and parody (postmodernism).
Artists evaded the concepts of truth, justice, ethics, or beauty by seeking
individual growth and affirmation or by parodically reinterpreting them
through the contemporary cultural context which brought with it a heavy
load of scepticism and a bitter dose of syrup labelled “all is relative” that
people had to swallow almost daily after wondering whether to jump off
the brink of threatening worldwide transformation. Nowadays,
intellectuals are no longer legislators, but interpreters.
Malcolm Bradbury strongly amends this loss that occurred in the
shift from the Enlightenment values to the modern ‘computational’ values.
One of his professor-characters in To the Hermitage, Jack-Paul Verso,
professor of Contemporary thinking at Cornell University, delivers a
speech in which he tries to demonstrate that “we no longer live in the Age
of Reason”:
We don’t have reason; we have computation. We don’t have a tree of
knowledge; we have an information superhighway. We don’t have
real intelligence; we have artificial intelligence. We no longer pursue
truth, we pursue data and signals. We no longer have philosophers,
we have thinking pragmatics. We no longer have morals, we have
lifestyles. We no longer have brains that serve as the seat of our
thinking mind; we have neural sites, which remember, sort body
signals, control genes, generate dreams, anxieties and neuroses, quite
independently of whether they think rationally or not. So, starting
from reason, where did we get? We have a godless world in an
imploding cosmos. We have a model of reality based on a glorious
chaos. We have a model of the individual based on biological
determinism. (2001: 193)
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