Year VI Volume 9/2019 Cultural Intertexts
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Cultural Intertexts Year VI Volume 9/2019 Cultural Intertexts Journal of Literature, Cultural Studies and Linguistics published under the aegis of: ∇ The Department of English – Faculty of Letters, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania ∇ The Centre for Interface Research of the Original and Translated Text. Cognitive and Communicational Dimensions of the Message Editing Team Editor-in-Chief: Michaela PRAISLER ([email protected]) Editorial Board Isabela MERILĂ ([email protected]) Lidia-Mihaela NECULA ([email protected]) ISSN-L 2393-0624 ISSN 2393-0624 E-ISSN 2393-1078 Full content available at www.cultural-intertexts.com Abstracting & indexing: ERIH+, CEEOL, DOAJ, EbscoHost, Index Copernicus, ProQuest © 2019 Casa Cărții de Ştiință Cluj-Napoca, B-dul Eroilor 6-8 www.casacartii.ro [email protected] SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE Ioana MOHOR-IVAN – Professor, “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi Vladislava GORDIC PETKOVIC – Professor, University of Novi Sad, Serbia Anca DOBRINESCU – Professor, “Petrol şi Gaze” University of Ploieşti Steluţa STAN – Associate Professor, “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi Gabriela Iuliana COLIPCĂ-CIOBANU – Associate Professor, “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi Cătălina NECULAI – Senior Lecturer, Coventry University, UK Nicoleta CINPOEŞ – Senior Lecturer, University of Worcester, UK * The contributors are solely responsible for the scientific accuracy of their articles. Contents EDITOR’S NOTE 7 ARTICLES 9 SHAHD ALSHAMMARI (Kuwait) 9 “But They’re Nothing Like Us!” A Pedagogic Approach to Shakespearean Drama in Kuwait GABRIELA-IULIANA COLIPCĂ-CIOBANU (Romania) 17 Clowns, Guns and a Writer’s Block: Romanian-American Encounters in Her Alibi (1989) LILIANA COLODEEVA (Moldova) 38 Consciousness on Stream in The Ambassadors by Henry James GABRIELA DEBITA (Romania) 46 The Otherworlds of the Mind: Loci of Resistance in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest and Voices (Book II of the Annals of the Western Shore) ALINA GANEA (Romania) 68 Constructing Identity in Higher Education Prospectuses. Approach to the Rhetoric of Excellence KETEVAN GIGASHVILI (Georgia) 87 Essential Textual and Editorial Markers of the Editions of the Bible’s Georgian Translations in the Pre-Soviet, Soviet and Post-Soviet Eras GEORGE GOTSIRIDZE and 100 KETEVAN GIGASHVILI (Georgia) Private Letters as Visual Evidence for Disclosure of the Totalitarian Regime 4 MARA IVAN-MOHOR and 113 IOANA IVAN-MOHOR (UK and Romania) “… the price we pay for peace”: Luba Lukova’s Poster Art IRAKLI KHVEDELIDZE (Georgia) 119 Narrative Strategies of the Representation of Consciousness in the Modern Georgian Novel: Post-Soviet Experience (Based on Obole by Aka Morchiladze) BOHDAN KORNELIUK (Ukraine) 125 The Complete Works of Shakespeare in Ukrainian: A Breakthrough or a Slowdown? DARIA MOSKVITINA (Ukraine) 134 The Mock-Shakespeare by Les Podervianskyi: Overcoming Soviet Experience LUCIA OPREANU (Romania) 143 Intertextual Ever Afters: Fictionalised Biography and Compensatory Adaptation in Shakespeare in Love and Becoming Jane ALINA PINTILII (Moldova) 157 The Main Father-Daughter Relationship in Julia Kavanagh’s Rachel Gray between Reality and Fictionality MICHAELA PRAISLER and 171 OANA-CELIA GHEORGHIU (Romania) The Art and Politics of Rewriting. Margaret Atwood’s Historical Notes on The Handmaid’s Tale KATHERINE RUPRECHT (USA) 182 The Azerbaijan Carpet Museum: A Symbol of National Identity and Heritage in a Post-Soviet Era GABRIELA SCRIPNIC (Romania) 186 (De)Constructing Leadership through Ritualised Discourse 5 STELUŢA STAN (Romania) 201 On Book to Movie Adaptations FLORIAN ANDREI VLAD (Romania) 209 The Rhetoric of Geopolitical Fiction in Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech BOOK REVIEWS 220 PETRU IAMANDI (Romania) 220 Ioana Mohor-Ivan (ed.; coord.) 2019. Cinematic Journeys: Myths, Hero(in)es, Gothic Frames. Cluj-Napoca: Casa Cărții de Știinţă DELIA OPREA (Romania) 222 Oana-Celia Gheorghiu 2018. British and American Representations of 9/11. Literature, Politics and the Media. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan 6 Editor’s Note The current issue of Cultural Intertexts – a Journal of Literature, Cultural Studies and Linguistics – comprises eighteen articles and two book reviews signed by scholars and researchers from seven countries. The articles focus on various cultural manifestations and representations, as well as on their subtle but relevant interrelatedness. Literary texts and contexts, public/media discourses, private correspondence, visual art, museography, film and geopolitics are all tackled in view of highlighting the real versus the imaginary, identity (re)constructions, strategies of (re)writing, power structures, post- totalitarianism, manipulation and rhetoric, fictional cartographies, narrative techniques, translation and editing issues, linguistic contamination and multimodal communication. The corpus selected by the authors covers a wide range of traditional and modern cultural texts: the Bible and its translated versions; Shakespearean plays and recent translations/adaptations; Victorian women’s writing; early modernist fiction in English; contemporary American, Canadian and Georgian novels; films foregrounding self and other; speeches by famous international leaders or by local politicians; prospectuses for educational marketing; private letters of political victims and victimisers; the conceptual poster at the crossroads of fine and applied arts; the museum as a vehicle for national identity and shared heritage. As for the book reviews, they advertise the outcome and findings of undergraduate and post-graduate research at the Faculty of Letters in Galati, Romania, with reference to a collection of essays in the field of Film Studies written by master’s students, and a volume based on a doctoral dissertation in Literary Studies. The editors thank the members of the scientific committee for their invaluable suggestions and corrections, which have made the publication of this volume possible. Michaela Praisler 7 “But They’re Nothing Like Us!” A Pedagogic Approach to Shakespearean Drama in Kuwait Shahd ALSHAMMARI∗ Abstract This paper considers teaching British canonical texts such as William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, the Moor of Venice in multicultural settings. The author discusses her experiences with teaching Shakespearean drama to a group of undergraduate students who are not essentially interested in Western texts. Making connections to the students’ immediate lives proves to be essential in drawing the students into a more active learning environment that brings Shakespearean texts closer to home. By localizing Shakespeare’s text, the students were able to find literary value that resonates with their own lived experiences. The classroom thus becomes a place of safety and finding one’s voice both inside and outside the classroom. Key words: Shakespeare, Arab, personal narrative, pedagogy, cultural studies When teaching literature to undergraduates, it is crucial to be aware of the cultural implications involved in addressing students with different backgrounds. We cannot simply transfer William Shakespeare’s work to a group of Kuwaiti and Arab students and expect them to feel as interested as students in a Western classroom. Literature breaks through boundaries and crosses national frontiers, but how transferable is British literature to a contemporary Kuwaiti classroom? Renaissance drama has always been part of the canon of English literature and the presence of a name like Shakespeare’s in the undergraduate syllabus is almost unquestionable. We cannot deny the prevalence of British literature in the construction of the English canon, although it is contested by postcolonial critics, and there tends to be a pedagogical move away from ‘English Literature’ and towards ‘literatures written in English’ or ‘World Literature.’ Yet we cannot have graduates of English literature without exposing them to the literary ∗ Associate Professor, Gulf University for Science and Technology, [email protected] 9 Cultural Intertexts Year VI Volume 9 (2019) genius of Shakespeare and the provocativeness of his work. Kuwait can boast about Sulayman Al-Bassam, playwright and theatre director, founder of the Zaoum theatre company as well as of the Sulayman Al-Bassam Theatre of Kuwait. Al-Bassam is famous for re-workings of Shakespeare (i.e. The Al-Hamlet Summit, Richard III: An Arab Tragedy). Although his works are well known internationally, not many students are aware of his adaptations. Scholars are interested in Al-Bassam’s work while students remain distant and disconnected from the arts in general, and theatre in particular. To teach them a Shakespearean text and illustrate its importance is crucial to draw their attention to the universality of the work and its timelessness. But how is this done in a very practical sense? This paper draws on personal and pedagogical experiences in teaching Shakespeare. I used to teach at an undergraduate institution in Kuwait that caters to students from different socioeconomic backgrounds, those that are less privileged socioeconomically. I do not wish to categorize or homogenize their experiences, but, for the sake of qualitative data, many of my students come from tribal backgrounds. The majority of the students were Bidoon. The Bidoon Rights Organization defines this category as Kuwait-born individuals who do not possess citizenship, and are also referred to as ‘stateless’ or, more recently, ‘illegal immigrants.’ According to Rania Al- Nakib in her Education and Democratic