Wallace's ghosts and Capote's voices: An interdisciplinary approach to style-aware reading in literary translation

In this thesis, I draw upon the theoretical insights from 'contextualized' Stylistics and the methods of Literary Stylistics, as adapted to Translation Studies by Jean Boase-Beier's stylistic approach to literary translation and Kirsten Malmkjær's 'translational stylistics', and investigate the implications of a 'style-aware approach' to reading in literary translation. Within the frameworks provided by Boase-Beier and Malmkjær, I present a two-part, process-oriented study, revolving around the concept of 'mind style', which I understand as the textual choices of the writer giving access to a mental state embedded within the text. In the first part, I discuss how the style-aware approach affects the reading phase of the process of translation. I conduct a translational stylistic analysis of "Incarnations of Burned Children" by David Foster Wallace, aimed specifically for translation into Turkish. The analysis indicates how Wallace employs a 'ghost-narrator' in his story and deals with 'self-centeredness'. In the second part of my study, I focus on how the style-aware approach may affect the way we read translated literature. I explore Ülker İnce's stylistic strategies in Başka Sesler, Başka Odalar and how she recreates Truman Capote's style in Other Voices, Other Rooms. I claim that İnce's translation focuses on recreating Capote's experimental language while removing the contexts of community and gender. The thesis promotes a 'contextualized', reader-inclusive approach to literary style, and argues that it can be a useful tool in strategy building in the process of translation and provide the translator with theoretical and methodological grounding to support her choices.