Guest Editor: Russell Scott Valentino, Indiana University

Rhetorical theorists since Aristotle have known that rhetoric is a temporally and spatially situated form of communication that forges (or fails to forge) a bond between a speaker and an audience through the use of commonplaces (topoi): canned formulas that can be varied to generate appropriate action and novel insights. The form of communication called translation offers fertile ground for rhetorical exploration. A good translator skillfully manipulates a receiving culture’s language and expressive modes, soliciting readers’ participation in worlds beyond their own.

Recognizing how infrequently the resources of rhetorical reflection have been brought to bear on the act and products of translation, POROI: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Analysis and Invention, is calling for papers for a Special Issue on rhetoric and translation.

Guest Editor Russell Scott Valentino, Chair of the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University and President of the American Literary Translators Association, will be joined by associate guest editors Jacob Emery, Assistant Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Indiana University; Sibelan Forrester, Professor of Russian at Swarthmore College; and Tomislav Kuzmanović, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Zadar, Croatia.

Anticipated publication date of the Special Issue is Summer 2016.

Topics and approaches are open. Papers might concentrate on issues about translators, audiences, or texts. For example, translator introductions situate both works and their translators vis-à-vis the receiving culture, using appeals to authority, language expertise, and sometimes, empathic connection; re-translations require justification, often on the basis of timeliness (language gets old, politics change; rights become available); the construction of gender, race, and ethnicity in translated works is rife with questions that are rarely articulated in any explicit form; the reception of texts requires that audiences respond on the basis of translators’ work, but reception is also affected by powerful historical, political, cultural, and institutional forces; within the field of translation practice proper, familiar topics circulate with abandon—from invisibility to “theory,” the marking of dialogue, and the comma splice. The editors hope to receive submissions from a wide variety of scholars and artists. The length and style of submissions is open.

POROI is a peer-reviewed e-journal that appears twice a year under the auspices of the University of Iowa Project on Rhetoric of Inquiry. Its platform encourages papers of varying lengths and is friendly to incorporating visual and graphic materials.

Submissions may be made through the POROI journal portal at http://poroi.grad.uiowa.edu

The final date for submission is November 1, 2015.

Papers will be reviewed as received.

For further information contact: russellv@indiana.edu