Second Language Learning and Identity: Cracking Metaphors in Ideological and Poetic Discourse in the Third Space
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The sense also that the more one looks into one’s own culture, the more one sees there is no such thing as a place that one can just return to safely…It’s a reality that cannot be contained, that always escapes, but that one cannot escape. (p. 22)

During the process of writing this book, I have been forced to realize that my translations are not innocent (Bassnett & Trivedi, 1999). This work of writing is a creation that has come to be as a result of a very subjective, interpretive, and generative space that acknowledges Aoki’s (2000) notion of the impossibility of “absolute translation” (p. 8).

I feel that I was changed and transformed through the process of writing, being both writer and written, not knowing my destination in this third space. I found the drive to seek out this destination in the heart of a woman who lived for 50 years in Japan in realizing how, emotionally, body and mind have come together in a postmodern stance. I am overwhelmed by the avalanche of meanings caused by my question: What does it mean for a Japanese woman to study English? My third space is laden with ambiguity, metaphors, and scattered hints; thus, this book is more readerresponsible than writerresponsible. In this way, I disrupt Western, colonial, objective, logical, explicit, and unemotional academic style. To this end, I have taken the Japanese Ki-shou-ten-ketsu (beginning, develop, change, conclude) writing style to heart and made it a part of this text, because my thinking is deeply rooted in this style. Ten (changing focus) will be Ivanic’s academic frame that I required in order to stretch out in my unfamiliar place, distancing myself, being critical about my familiar space. Ivanic stated that through writing, “possibilities of selfhood” emerge. Pinar (2005) explained Aoki’s conception about selfhood:

In this passage Aoki seems to have moved past the phenomenology of the early papers: the conception of “selfhood” as “authentic being” who is “grounded” in “lived experience” has become movements of selfconstitution within spaces of difference. Who we are, this view suggests, is not some anterior or essential “soul.” Rather, who we are is produced by the effects of our movements among layers of differences. (p. 24)