Lingnan University

Faculty Member, English

Tong Tin Sun Chair Professor of English and head of the English department

Faculty of Arts

About

Doug Robinson is broadly interested in human communication as grounded in human social interaction, and specifically in the ways in which the circulation of shared evaluative affect through the collective body-becoming-mind of a group constitutes a living and constantly self-adjusting and self-regulating organism. The study of this homeostatic interaction, which he calls the somatic exchange, is the basis of his somatic theory.

If somaticity is about feeling as our primary channel of social regulation, its "public" aspect, what Kenneth Burke calls "dramatistic" interaction in groups, would be performativity--based especially on J. L. Austin and his followers, including Grice, Felman, Butler, and others.

This broad theoretical orientation tends to get focused in specific books and articles into specific disciplinary niches: literary theory, translation theory, language theory, cultural theory, rhetorical theory, gender theory, and so on. Doug's books on American literature and culture--American Apocalypses (1985), Ring Lardner and the Other (1992), and No Less a Man (1994)--are also, and in some sense primarily, literary and cultural theory, and the latter two are both gender theory as well. The Translator's Turn (1991) first introduced the somatics of language and translation; in the books on translation from the late 1990s--Translation and Taboo (1996), What Is Translation? (1997), Becoming a Translator (1997), Translation and Empire (1997), Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (1997), and Who Translates? (2001)--somaticity and performativity tended to get buried rhetorically, but are at work subtextually.

Doug's books of the 2000s return to somaticity and performativity in overt ways: Performative Linguistics (2003) and Introducing Performative Pragmatics (2006) carry the latter in their titles, and PL has two chapters on somatics; Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (2008) carries the former in its title. The Estrangement book is one volume in a series that remains mostly unpublished; the other volumes are on the somatics of language, postcolonial culture, first-year writing, and rhetoric. The book ms that he just finished, and uploaded in the Books category--Translation and the Problem of Sway--is in most ways another volume in that series as well, though it does not have somatics in its title.

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