From Painting to Storytelling in John Updike’s Seek My Face
Florentina ANGHEL
University of Craiova
In Seek My Face John Updike uses the pretext of an interview to weave almost a century of American spirituality. Hope Chafetz, an abstract expressionist painter, and Kathryn, the interviewer, rediscover the post-World War II painters and their works as well as the relationship between the artist and his work. Unexpectedly, the novel turns to itself, as the theoretical fragments naturally embedded in the main story also represent useful directions towards an interdisciplinary approach to the text. Therefore, by analysing the novel as a piece of abstract expressionist writing, one can emphasize the way in which John Updike adjusted the abstract expressionist techniques to literature and how he used words as colours.
Language and Power in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties
Thafer Y. Assaraira
Qatar University
Yonnondio is, on many levels, about the importance and difficulty of finding a voice. Olsen emphasizes the struggle to find a voice by consistently personifying the wind: it cries, moans, laughs and speaks. Making one's self heard is often impossible. Over and over, poignant silences fall, voices falter. Finally, language does not free the characters in Yonnondio from the oppressive poverty that rules their lives.
The Subversive Power of Words in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses
Hédi Ben Abbes
University of Franche-Comté (Besançon)
At the beginning there was the Word! The divine and the artistic, both “fight” for the same territory: the subliminal.
In Rushdie’s case it is fiction and the work of imagination that allow the artist to establish that dialectical relationship between things and being. In The Satanic Verses, Gibreel, half angel, half human finds in words the means to reveal the interregnum as a “presencing”. In that interregnum, he discovers his ambivalence, the relativity of truth and the “burden of meaning”. Setting his words against the words of God, Gibreel brings forth what was hidden and waiting for the accomplishment of the poetic experience to come to the light. Profane, subversive words rendered that revealment possible, when they interact with other divine words and unveil other aspects of his being. The poetical experience is a permanent quest for words and meaning in the liminal territory of what Heidegger calls the place where “sky and earth, divinities and mortals” gather. There, in that interstitial space and through language Gibreel manages to consider “truth” from another angle, to question the authenticity of language and its authority. In doing so, he discovered the new territory of “being”. He confirms what Heidegger means by ‘words as the dwelling place of being.’ Gibreel’s poetic and existential experience is made through and by words to come to the conclusion that “Only the word can reveal and bring forth a thing, as such, the way it is. The word reveals itself to the poet as something that holds and keeps a thing in its being.”
Challenging Language in Murdoch’s The Black Prince
Felicia Burdescu
University of Craiova
I. Murdoch's novel The Black Prince is written in a composite and heterogenious way, in an apparently “inattentive” style. The author believed just like Shakespeare that her style is reality, contingency. To Pearson, the narrator, Hamlet becomes supreme because it has come out of Shakespeare's apprehension of reality which is so rare, and that enables him to invent language. For Hamlet language does not signify, but is.
In the novel we also find a clear Wittgensteinean voice in Murdoch's word philosophy, in her play with visual perspectives which go beyond the obvious metaphorical analogies.
Humour and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England
Sorin Cazacu
University of Craiova
Since the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas introduced the notion “public sphere” during the 1960s in order to describe the symbolic arena of political life and conversation that originated with the cultural institutions of the early eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, the “public sphere” itself has become perhaps one of the most debated concepts at the very heart of modernity. The satires were very successful and popular because in their pure state they leave both the victim and the witness the option of denying that an "attack" has even taken place. Just as Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal may be taken as a prototype of satire, the confusion about it is also typical.
Motifs and the Shakespearean Interest in Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince
Denisa Cerăceanu
University of Craiova
As a philosophical writer, Iris Murdoch goes beyond the simple gestures and ideas trying to unveil the deep implication of things. As a keen observer, she has Pearson deforming the reality and grasping it through the flight of the imagination. The parallelism between Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Iris’ Black Prince is obvious from the characters within the title, Pearson being directly associated with Hamlet and Julian Baffin because of her androgyny and her uncertain role of master-mistress of Pearson’s interest. The kites, the fruits from the market, the color of passion - red, Der Rosenkavalier opera are all symbols which exhibit sexual connotations indicating the sin.
Words of Terror in Edgar Allan Poe’s Short Stories
Mihai Coşoveanu
University of Craiova
Death – a word that persists in Poe’s short stories and not only. His texts are usually overwhelmed with expressions, constructions and sentences that suggest the existence of a totally different world, where fear, horror and grotesque reign. Poe remains a remarkable painter of this macabre landscape, where the reader must face all these words of terror.
Ambiguity and Humor in Proverbs, Sayings and Jokes
Ileana Cristea
“Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu
The paper is focused on the ambiguity of language and we try to exemplify some situations when different interpretations may lead to wrong or funny situations. Nevertheless, our conclusion is that ambiguity is a quality of the language that should not be avoided but, on the contrary, it should be understood and controlled.
Melville’s Great Art of Telling the Truth
Maria Camelia DICU,
University “C. Brâncuşi”, Tg. Jiu
Melville’s recognition did not come from the world of lies where he had to disguise himself behind a mask, the mask of a storyteller, the only relationship being that of an author with his audience, being in touch with them only through his words but “removed from their meaningless masquerade”and, to paraphrase Dryden, Melville’s achievement in Moby Dick is the result of a victory of art, therefore of the word, over life.
Intercultural Communication: on Cultural Liminality and the Loss of Self
Silvia Florea
“Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu
Victor Turner's project of symbolic anthropology continues to thrive as an entry point into American literary studies and the cultural criticism it engenders. In recent decades liminality has reshaped many critical practices that inform contemporary approaches to American literature. What is theoretically innovative and politically crucial is the need to think beyond narratives of originary and initial subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. My paper starts from a model of social drama and discusses the concept of liminality, viewed by Turner as transition between cultures and reflective of cultural shock, and suggests possible reloadings of the term in a larger contemporary context.
Striving for Transcendence in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
Alina Gaspar
University of Craiova
Wuthering Heights is a Victorian novel by the social elements it alludes to, gothic by setting and atmosphere and romantic by the violence of the passions it reveals. Wuthering Heights is a self-reflexive novel, referring to itself as the dialectic movement between two houses, two families and two generations. The Romantic influence is assured by the main protagonist, a kind of Lucifer in his unbridled passion and destructiveness, by the use of folkloric figures, by different allusions to God and devils, damnation and redemption and by the use of the supernatural.
The twentieth-century critics have discovered in Wuthering Heights a book of philosophic vision, a symbolic representation of human existence, based on an excellent narrative design. This article is meant to discuss the theme of transcendence in Wuthering Heights and I refer to religion, metaphysics and mysticism as, according to Oxford Dictionary of English Language for Advanced Learners, ‘to transcend’ means ‘to go beyond the limits of human knowledge, experience or reason, especially in a religious and spiritual way’.
The Temptation of Astonishment in Cortazar’s Work
Andreea ILIESCU
University of Craiova
The fantastic, as a literary genre and despite its stigma of intruder, of artificial creation, doomed to literary failure, has not fallen into decay, it still extracts its vigour out of the deepest spheres of the soul. That is why the literature portrayed by fantasy must reach a superior position of the hierarchy, its place on the threshold of tolerance being just a wearisome prejudice.
Cortázar’s act of creation cannot be limited to a trite mechanical reflex of the realness; instead, it should be put into a new perspective which tends to assign unexpected values and meanings to existence.
Discourse and the Incomprehensible in Henri Michaux’s Poetry
Ioan Lascu
University of Craiova
Henri Michaux’s life, just like his work, is made up of signs and moments of silence. The poet has rarely accepted to talk about himself: he did not approve of his biographies being published; only two times has he written down some biographical references with a parsimonious, rigorous and reserved attitude. The moments of silence persist all his life since in the texts, especially in his poems, he lets almost nothing but the signs speak. In his works, the signs’ function refers to imprecise suggestions, to the vague and incomprehensible. The signs are meant to explore the depths of an obscure, mysterious psyche.
The Representation of Human Failure in Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies
Adriana lăzărescu
University of Craiova
This paper identifies different elements representing failure through the power of words in Samuel Beckett’s novel Malone Dies. The line of the story makes a presentation of a nondescript man who ends up in the care of an institution populated by eccentric characters. He lives in a world of words, preoccupied with creating a personal story that appears never to come to an end; it continually spirals off into sub-narratives in which aspects of character and society are illustrated and criticized and the lines between prose and poetry are blurred. Beckett was once again exploring the limits of narrative form and asks his audience to join him on a surreal journey through the haunted landscape of memory and imagination.
Authorial Re-Creation. Mâtho in Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô
Camelia MANOLESCU
University of Craiova
The Flaubertian text is an attempt “to build” the book and its characters which have their own lives and to reflect the relation between creator and world at the same time. The text becomes a material that moves and has its own soul in which feelings and sensations find their expression. First of all, Flaubert needs to observe the reality and transpose it into the pages of his novel Salammbô, then he has to re-construct both the action and the being using his well-known theme: the coloured light.
Epiphany and Browning: Character Made Manifest
Victor Olaru
University of Craiova
When discussing epiphanies from the writings of Robert Browning(or John Ruskin, or George Eliot), we should bear in mind real differences in perspective between James Joyce and a dissenting English Victorian like Browning. Still, it is worth asking what sort ofepiphany might have meant to a mid-century figure like him. Epiphany is where you find it: and in Browning's poetry you find it everywhere. The presentation is an attempt to account forthe above-mentioned assertionwith examplesfrom “Men and Women”, “My Star”, “Transcendentalism: A Poem in Twelve Books”.
Inside the Sign: Deconstructing Semiosis
Emilia PARPALĂ
University of Craiova
Deconstructing semiosis is a main theme of the semiotic poetry, whose roots can be identified in the modern poetry of Tudor Arghezi. The metalinguistic concept of explicit semiosis (cf. Testament) coexists in Arghezi’s poetics with the baroque predominance of the “signifiant” – consequence of illocutionary acts (cf. Blesteme).
As the sign becomes the central figure in the rhetoric of the 80’s, the play within the semiotic triangle brings forth the controversial issue of referency: the option between “words” and “things”. The poets of the 80’s wrote about the power and the weakness of the word, about the rejection and nostalgia of the referent, about the truth and falsity of language etc.
The theoretic mimetism of the semiotic poetry reveals the poetic latencies of the theoretics, its flexibility and the strong creativity of these poets apparently damned to semiotic captivity.
The Early Works of A Novelist “On the Margin”
Lucia-Marilena Pavelescu,
“Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu
Considering himself to be a novelist “on the margin”, Anthony Burgess shared many things with other contemporary writers, but I consider him to be a unique voice in twentieth century British literature since he resisted any association with one literary trend or another. And, indeed, every time critics tried to associate his novels with modernism, postmodernism or structuralism, he wrote another book which made these assumptions look as if based merely on circumstantial evidence. His changing style, however, does not hinder his oeuvre from standing majestically in British literature.
Postmodern Identity, Nuclear Technology
and Postmodern Messages of Death in Don Delillo’s White Noise 1
Radwan Gabr Elsobky
Al Menoufiya University, Egypt
DeLillo's White Noise takes a look at the loss of postmodern identity. Gladney, the postmodernprotagonist, and his wife are obsessed with death. This fear is because of the siege of nuclear radiation resulted from postmodern technology. Fear of death caused Gladney and his family members (symbolizing Americans in general) to be puzzled and lost. Postmodern identity suffers from fear, worry and loss. So itis a time bomb like nuclear bomb which may explode suddenly at any moment.
The Mythology of the Revolution in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm
Otilia SIMION
”Constantin Brâncuşi” University, Tg. Jiu
If we analyse the themes of the two novels we have proposed to discuss, Homage to Catalonia and Animal Farm, we can notice, from the very beginning that both are based on what we may call the mythology of the revolution – The Civil War in Spain in Homage to Catalonia and The Russian Revolution in Animal Farm. They also have a documentary value, as a result of the confrontation between the reported historical events and the texts, between fact and fiction.
The Late Effects of Early Transportation:
From Dickens to Peter Carey and David Malouf
Emil SÎRBULESCU
University of Craiova
The process of transporting convicted criminals to Australia came about as a result of Britain’s defeat in the American War of Independence. The idea of the transported convict attained a certain mythical status in the Victorian psyche. This was reflected in the literature of the period, and the concept of transportation offered Dickens a perfect plot device. The capital law against returning from transportation sharpens the impact of the later chapters, when Pip sheds his pretensions as well as his wealth. There is a pervasive sense of colonial guilt throughout David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon, an awareness of the suspect morality of the colonial process. Like Great Expectations, Babylon recognises Australia as a potential utopia for the industrious European immigrant – unlike Dickens, however, Malouf asserts that the success of the project rests on reaching a kind of harmony and exchange with the landscape and with the colonised. Viewed from a post-colonial perspective, Remembering Babylon is a pessimistic assessment of the colonial project, a lament for the missed opportunities which a meeting of disparate cultures could provide for humanity. Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs is an example of the post-colonial concept of ‘writing back’. That is, the novel although written over a century apart from Dicken’s Great Expectations, is in fact indirectly interacting with this original text. The novel is of more interest to the reader studying post-colonialism, due to its addressing of issues such as an interest in the way in which Maggs acquires his wealth. He is unable to function as an individual in the Metropolitan occident of London, it is only following his expulsion from his country that he becomes a respectable member of society.
Virginia Woolf’s Worded Voyages
Aloisia Şorop
University of Craiova
The article discusses the way Virginia Woolf draws ‘the portrait of the artist’ in her novel Orlando. A Biography. Orlando is a sort of ‘personnage-fleuve’ who lives 400 years and turns from a man into a woman, crossing different geographical and cultural spaces. The poem, symbolically entitled The Oak Tree, he/she writes throughout this period represents the quintessence of Britishness and Orlando turns into the emblem of the British writer. In Virginia Woolf’s opinion only an androgynous consciousness can ideally achieve the epic of its nation.