Chance Encounters with Literature, Language and Meaning in John Williams' Stoner and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language

John Williams' Stoner and Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language are discrete texts, but both are accounts of literary lives. These are lives that have been moulded around language and literature, as well as lives that have been moulded into literature. Stoner is a fictional account of an unlikely individual's unexpected encounter with the sphere of literary studies, around which he then shapes the remainder of his life. Lost in Translation is a memoir about the author's struggle with language as an immigrant, a struggle that contributes to her exceptional ability to analyse and devise literary narratives. These fortuitous encounters with literature become a means to structure their respective fictional and non-fictional lives. In addition, Stoner and Hoffman are outsiders to academia, but both discover that their outsider status makes them especially attuned to the close analysis of words and to several questions of identity and the self. A comparative reading of Stoner and Lost in Translation thus draws our attention towards several large questions that reside at the heart of literary studies: What do we seek to translate into another language, into a commentary, into works of literary criticism or theory? What do we strive to render visible in our writing and teaching that revolves around these literary works? By reading John Williams' novel alongside Eva Hoffman's narrative, I aspire to lend these fairly abstract questions a more concrete guise. By way of conclusion, I emphasize how due to the force of chance and circumstance, Stoner and Hoffman stumble into literary studies where they are confronted by questions that underscore the arbitrariness and unknowability of literature, language and life.