Confluențe 2014

CONFLUENŢE Texts & Contexts Reloaded T.C.R. Analele Universitǎţii din Oradea Fascicula Limbi și literaturi moderne Oradea, 2014 Editura Universitǎţii din Oradea 2014 Editor-in Chief: Ioana Cistelecan Secretary: Éva Székely Executive Editors: Anemona Alb (English) Veronica Buciuman (German) Florica Mateoc (French) Dan Negruţ (English) Advisory Board: José Antonio Álvarez (University of Alicante, Spain) Tamás Bényei (University of Debrecen, Hungary) Liviu Cotrǎu (Partium Christian University, Oradea) Roger Craik (Kent State University, U.S.A.) Sylvie Crinquand (University of Dijon, France) Magda Danciu (University of Oradea) Sean Darmody (Trinity College, Dublin) Claire Despierres (University of Borgogne, France) Erika Hammer (University of Pécs) Stanislav Kolář (University of Ostrava, Czech Republic) Teodor Mateoc (University of Oradea) Mircea Morariu (University of Oradea) Michaela Mudure (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca) Petru Popescu (writer, U.S.A.) Irena Ragaišiene (Vytauas Magnus University, Lithuania) Nóra Séllei (University of Debrecen, Hungary) Angeles Sirvent Ramos (University of Alicante) Marta Teixeira Anacleto (University of Coimbra) Maria Trappen (“Lucian Blaga” University, Sibiu) Elena Viorel (Partium Christian University, Oradea) In 2012 the Ministry of Education and Research (Romania) ranked our journal category C. e-ISSN 2344 – 6072 ISSN - L 1842 - 662x Adresa redacţiei: Facultatea de Litere Universitatea din Oradea Str. Universitǎţii, nr.1, Oradea, Bihor Tel. 0259-408178 www.ephor.ro/confluente Contents Inhaltsverzeichnis Tables des matieres INTRO. Roger Craik: From Literary Criticism to Creative Writing: A Personal Perspective 5 Eva Szekely: Students’ Poetry Contest: FIRST WORLD WAR CENTENARY. Winning Poems 14 Issue’s Topic: GENDER, RACE AND ETHNICITY LITERARY-ISMS: LITERATURWISSENSCHAFTLICHE STUDIEN ÉTUDES LITTÉRAIRE Gender Issues and Stereotypes In Neo- Victorian Fiction: “The Crimson Petal And The White” by Michel Faber Diana Cordea 20 Language and Metamorphosis in A. S. Byatt’s Possession Ágnes Molnár 34 The Priest of the Normal and His Victims In Peter Shaffer' s Equus Antonia Pâncotan 49 Feminist and Feminine Issues in the Theatre of Pam Gems and Marsha Norman Diana Presadă 58 Feminine Identitary Discourses In Christa Wolf’s and Elfriede Jelinek’s Novels Liliana Truţă 66 L’expérience de la «surconscience linguistique» chez Julien Green et Emil Cioran Eva-Ildiko Palyi Delce 76 CULTURAL-ISMS / KULTURWISSENSCHAFTLICHE STUDIEN/ ÉTUDES CULTURELLES Kate Atkinson’s Gendered Spaces Magda Danciu 88 Negotiating Tradition and Innovation, Originality and Creolization– Food Creolization In The Romanian Menu Lavinia Veronica Pavel 96 Perceptions of Gender Roles in the Romanian Society – a case study Giulia Suciu 105 Revisiting the Argentine Tango: From the “Paris of South America” to the Interwar Bucharest Sonia Vass 111 Comment Bouddha a découvert la Révolution russe Aurora Băgiag 119 Imaginaire des lieux, imaginaire des mots. « Russie », « Norvège », Andalousie » ou la magie des toponymes étrangers Andreea Bugiac 139 BOOK REVIEWS/ BUCHBESPRECHUNGEN/ REVUE DU LIVRE Dissipation, Death and Ethics in Markus Zusak’s The Book Thief Markus Zusak, Hoţul de cărţi Anemona Alb 152 Roger Craik. A Book on Solitude and Instant Down Stranger Roads Ioana Cistelecan 155 Alain Berenboom: Monsieur Optimiste Floarea Mateoc 157 Teresa Gomez Reus & Terry Gifford, eds.: Women in Transit through Literary Liminal Spaces Teodor Mateoc 161 Adriana Babeţi, Amazoanele. O poveste (The Amazons. A Story) Marius Miheţ 164 Daniela Francesca Virdis, Serialised Gender. A Linguistic Analysis of Femininities in Contemporary TV Series and Media Dana Sala 166 A Useful Aid for the Teacher of Canadian Studies: Scott W. See: The History of Canada (Second Edition) Eva Szekely 170 4 INTRO From Literary Criticism to Creative Writing: A Personal Perspective Roger Craik1 The title of this effort, delivered as a keynote lecture and deliberately unrevised so as to retain the spoken and perhaps idiosyncratic, voice behind it, is “From Literary Criticism to Creative Writing: A Personal Perspective,” with the now apparently obligatory colon. Actually it’s a little more complicated than this—a better title would have been, albeit more cumbersome, “from creative writing to literary criticism, and back to creative writing, with some literary criticism still, but in diminishing amounts,” but such a title would cause the departmental printer, poor thing, no small discomfort. And although this is supposed to be, and is, a personal perspective, I want to stock the paper with instances, quotations and examples, rather than with details of my own life. It’s these subjects, literary criticism and creative writing, that are my focus, and how they complement each other, if they do, and how they react against each other, again if they do, or even have nothing at all to do with each other, if this happens to be the case. The first half will concern itself with studying, reading, and literary criticism, and will be more or less chronological—the second half will have hardly any chronology in it at all, and will concern itself with attempts (I stress “attempts”) to write poetry, and aspects of those attempts. When I was a schoolboy in the north of Scotland, from the ages of twelve to fourteen, there was a compulsory class, and it was called English, and it was a glory and a delight. One part of it was called “interpretation,” which involved our having hurled at us all manner of unseen material in fragments (Francis Bacon (the philosopher, not the artist), Somerset Maugham, Thackeray, Dickens, W. H. Hudson, Marco Polo, and even W. H. Davies’s 1 Associate Professor of English, Kent State University, Ohio 5 account of how to beg for food, the gloriously-titled “Autobiography of a Super Tramp,” from which a pop group of the 1970s would later take its name. Although all this was called “interpretation,” it wasn’t interpretation in the sense we know it today: just twenty factual questions so that we could prove ourselves capable of understanding, on a good day. The second part was creative writing—I remember writing stories borrowing heavily from D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner,” and poems of my own invention and subject. The English teacher (meaning the teacher of English in the Aberdeen school) even made a small book of them. When we reached fifteen, all that changed. Out went interpretation, never to return, and out went creative writing, never to return either. Also, incidentally (or perhaps not incidentally) out went art, so that was the end of making things. And the new course, which was called English, involved writing about other people’s books. It was never explained why, which struck my fifteen-year-old self as, somehow, a betrayal as well as a loss. French remained French and Latin remained Latin, but English was changed forever, and changed into joylessness. The staple was King Lear, Julius Caesar, Lord of the Flies, and some faux Scottish stuff (a great irony was that Aberdeen was the city of that most extraordinary of Scottish writers, Burns Singer, although it was not until I was working in America that I heard his name). After school came English at university, less joyless. The answers required of us were large and sweeping—Love in John Donne, the characteristics of Metaphysical Poetry, Fate in Hardy. There was no creative writing. I never heard the word “manuscript.” I don’t think it ever occurred seriously to me that the words that we were reading on the page had been written, or perhaps typed, by cigarette-smoking men and women. I began to feel—not in any sense that I was right, just that I began to feel—that what I valued in literature was not covered by the lectures, or by the books of criticism that we read (and, healthily, we read little of those). It was a loneliness. Does anyone tell a graduating class that one it has graduated, there are no more essays to write, on prescribed books, and that you can graze on literature’s hillside like a good sheep? “Never judge a book by its cover,” one is told, but I did, munching my way indiscriminately through Livy, Alain-Fournier, Gide, Kerouac, Thomas Wolfe, Cicero, Blaise Cendrars, Lermontov and 6 Pliny the Elder. It was then, for what it’s worth, that I began to realize what came to matter most: individuality, detail, eccentricity. Let me give you some examples, without telling you the books (“books,” not “texts”) they come from. 1) “The usual English, who are so hopeless abroad.” 2) “The clock began to strike. ‘It’s an old clock,’ I said, idiotically.” 3) “’Is that you, Frank? ‘Why are you calling me at work, Helen?’ ‘Do I have to have a reason to phone you, Frank?’ asked Helen, tenderly.” 4) “Philosophically the jar gave no advice.” 5) “’Finally, Charles,’ said Cordelia, ‘the fathers took poor Sebastian in at a small monastery by a river. There had to be a river.’” 6) “Thomas Edison. Or maybe it was B. F. Goodrich. One of them was deaf.” 7) “She is all states, and all princes I. / Nothing else is.” Well, the first is D. H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as I’m sure, (forgive me), you don’t remember. Second is from The Great Gatsby. The indeterminate Jewish Lower East Side in the 1950s is the scene of the third, from Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant. That’s Ray Bradbury in the fourth, in “The Jar.” Evelyn Waugh is fifth: Brideshead Revisited . The sixth:Death of a Salesman. The seventh is John Donne. Now, I could say much about why these resonate with me, but I withhold comment, other than to say that in the words “there had to be a river” there is a whole world, a whole lifetime of the girl who knew her older brother, who held to his simple, childhood loves to the end: the words draw the reader back to the years before the novel began.

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