“Medieval Translatio(n), Modern Rhetoric”

Michelle Bolduc, Professor in Translation Studies at Exeter, is an internationally recognized scholar of Translation Studies and Comparative Medieval Literature (French, Occitan, and Italian), and has published extensively on medieval literature (translatio) as well as on modern rhetoric--the New Rhetoric Project--and its translation. Under the direction of Barbara K. Altmann and F. Regina Psaki, she took a PhD in Comparative Literature with a specialization in Medieval Literatures from the University of Oregon; she has held positions at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Arizona. In this inaugural lecture, Professor Bolduc will explore the influential role played by translation, and in particular, the medieval topos of translatio, in the development of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca’s modern New Rhetoric Project. In this diachronic examination, she proposes the concept of translatio(n) as a key to understanding how rhetoric—as the art of reasoning—becomes for Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca a resource for an ethics of civic discourse essential for a cosmopolitan and multilingual Europe.