Session led by Jordan K. Skinner (Princeton University)

Not only is the essay one that has drawn interdisciplinary attention—from the film criticism of Christian Metz to the narratology of Gérard Genette—but it also presents two problems of translation that would make for an interesting discussion. The first translation problem can be found with the term histoire, a central term of the essay, that can be rendered in English either as “story” or “history”. The second translation problem is identified within the essay itself and follows from the fact that English lacks an equivalent to the narrative use of the French passé composé, making the task of narration a problem proper to the domain linguistics itself.