Annals of the University of Craiova ANALELE UNIVERSITĂŢII DIN CRAIOVA ANNALES DE L’UNIVERSITÉ DE CRAIOVA ANNALS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CRAIOVA SERIES: PHILOLOGY -ENGLISH- * YEAR XVIII, NO. 1-2, 2017 1 Annals of the University of Craiova ANNALS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CRAIOVA 13, Al. I. Cuza ROMANIA We make exchanges with similar institutions in Romania and abroad ANALELE UNIVERSITĂŢII DIN CRAIOVA Str. Al. I. Cuza, nr. 13 ROMÂNIA Efectuăm schimburi cu instituţii similare din ţară şi din străinătate ANNALES DE L’UNIVERSITÉ DE CRAIOVA 13, Rue Al. I. Cuza ROUMANIE On fait des échanges des publications avec les institutions similaires du pays et de l’étranger EDITORS General editor: Aloisia Sorop, University of Craiova, Romania Assistant editor: Ana-Maria Trantescu, University of Craiova, Romania Editorial secretary: Diana Otat, University of Craiova, Romania Reviewers: Professor Sylvie Crinquand, University of Bourgogne, Dijon, France Associate Professor Patrick Murphy, Nord University, Norway Professor Mariana Neagu, “Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati, Romania Associate Professor Rick St. Peter, Northwestern State University, USA Associate Professor Melanie Shoffner, James Madison University, USA Dieter Wessels, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany Associate Professor Anne-Lise Wie, Nord University, Norway The authors are fully responsible for the originality of their papers and for the accuracy of their notes. 2 Issue coordinators: Associate Professor Florentina Anghel, PhD Associate Professor Madalina Cerban, PhD Senior Lecturer Claudia Pisoschi, PhD Senior Lecturer Mihai Cosoveanu, PhD CONTENTS FLORENTINA ANGHEL Past and Present in T.S.Eliot’s Avant-Garde Poetry ………………… 7 ARDA ARIKAN Characters as Animals in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie ....................... 16 SORIN CAZACU Culture Clash in Toni Morrison's Tar Baby .............................. 21 STEFANIA ALINA CHERATA Christmas Trees, Pigs and Catwalks: A Brief Look at Oil and Gas Metaphors .................................... 29 ALICE BAILEY CHEYLAN Old Possum’s Poetics ............................................................... 44 ESTELLA ANTOANETA CIOBANU Forever Eating the Past in the Present? Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and Tom Forsythe’s Food Chain Barbie …………………………….. 52 PATRICK COLEMAN Past and Present in Irish-Romanian Relations ......................... 69 MIHAI COȘOVEANU Hamlet: Can One Death Justify Several Others? …………….. 74 ANDA DIMITRIU Remnants of the Past in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road ........... 80 CRISTINA-ALEXANDRA DRĂGOI The Impossibility of Doing Away with the Plot: Narrative Identity in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway ............... 93 ANCA FLORINA LIPAN Grammatical Synonymy with Adverbs and Adverbials in English and Romanian ......................................... 103 BRIAN MOTT The Syllable: A Conclusively Defined Phonological Unit? ............ 122 NAUM PANOVSKI Hamlet and Protestantism or What Martin Luther Had To Do With It ................................... 133 MIHAELA ROIBU Life, Death and Identity as a Matter of Chronology in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button ................................... 146 RICHARD ST. PETER The Ten-Dollar Founding Father: Alexander Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and the Continuing Revolution of America ............................... 157 JARED STRANGE Timeless and Terrible Desire: Confronting the Eternal, the Malevolent, and the Political in Adaptations of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi ....... 165 SORIN GHEORGHE SUCIU A Shakespearian Sonnet and its Imaginary Translation ............ 177 VLAD PREDA Aspects of the Lexicographic Registration of Certain English Collocations in Romanian Dictionaries .......... 190 __________________Annals of the University of Craiova_____________ Past and Present in T.S. Eliot’s Avant-Garde Poetry Florentina Anghel1 University of Craiova, Romania Abstract Avant-gardism brings together the ideas of newness, originality and change, making art consumers get a glimpse of the potential future. Although T.S. Eliot’s poetry perfectly and admittedly folds on the avant-garde principles, aspects of the past and present tendencies intertwine on the way to newness. In both his theory and practice, Eliot showed the coexistence of past and present. Departing from reasons that may determine the concern with the presence of past elements in one’s work, the paper encompasses ways through which the poet used these elements to refresh the form and meaning of poetry. Keywords: British poetry, past, present, avant-garde, change Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past. (T.S.Eliot, 2004 – “Burnt Norton” of Four Quartets) Various relations between the precursors and the successors have been established since the latter started caring for the originality of their products. Harold Bloom investigated and synthesized them in The Anxiety of Influence and he admitted: Shelley speculated that poets of all ages contributed to one Great Poem perpetually in progress. Borges remarks that poets create their precursors. If the dead poets, as Eliot insisted, constituted their successors' particular advance in knowledge, that knowledge is still their successors' creation, made by the living for the needs of the living. (Bloom, 1997, p. 19) Criticism and analyses of the literary texts, targeting their particularities and valuing them for their contribution to the uniqueness of the poem, have gradually built poets’ awareness of the originality of their creations. A wider interest in the past-present interrelatedness can be assigned to the twentieth century writers due to several steps taken at the end of the 19th century. The legal frame for the protection of the authors’ rights was initiated in the 17th century in England but it was legalized through The Berne Convention in 1 [email protected] 7 __________________Annals of the University of Craiova_____________ 1886. Sigmund Freud coined the concept of “Oedipus/Oedipal Complex” in his Interpretation of Dreams published in 1899 and opened the possibility of a metaphorical reading of the father-son rivalry which was also seen as the rivalry between masters and disciples or between forerunners and their successors. At the turn of the centuries, Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, published his works on duration, matter and memory, perception and intuition, and offered a new perspective upon time, image and representation which contributed to the writers’ focus on the way in which they individually and differently perceived and represented the world. It is also at the beginning of the twentieth century that Einstein launched his theory of special and general relativity according to which an observer’s moment/acceleration affects his/her perception of time-space and that the time-space around Earth is twisted due to the planet’s rotation. The assault of scientific and cultural events required a change of paradigm in literature achieved with the avant-garde movement. To explore the relation between the avant-garde art and the past, where the former is perceived as a daring, legitimate and revelatory spring of newness and originality meant to shape the future of art, it is necessary to establish the meaning of ‘avant-garde’ and the ‘pastness of the past’ (Eliot, 1986: 2014). The much debated past-present tension in modernist poetry was strongly outlined by the modernists themselves, and their road-opening theories were further developed in revelatory studies and critical theories. Modernist writers of the avant-garde, though admittedly concerned about the past influence, revealed their awareness of the presence of the past in their works and even turned the past-present interlacing into a technical device. It is widely recognized the fact that the avant-garde artists, and implicitly poets, contributed with new artistic representations that supposed “radical changes in style and technique” which is seen as artistic avant-garde, and also “demanded that art transform the way in which people experience the world” and not only represent it, which is called “aesthetic avant-garde”. (Erjavec, 2015, pp. 2-3) It would be somehow disappointing to discover that the concept of ‘avant-garde’ was not quite new, despite its forceful resonance, as David Cottington (2005) demonstrates in his tracing the history of the term almost one hundred years back, to the beginning of the 19th century (p. 5). It was the quest of the French for a society more respectful of the individual and able to replace the monarchical regime that caused the first use of the term: One of the most influential groups of this political spectrum was gathered around Count Henri de Saint-Simon who, shortly before his death 8 __________________Annals of the University of Craiova_____________ in 1825, elaborated a model of a state-technocratic socialism in which society would be led by a triumvirate of professions: the artist, the scientist, and the industrialist. Of these, the artist would be the ‘avant-garde’ (…) (Cottington, 2005, p. 5) Cottington upholds his theory with a quotation from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto of 1848 according to which the past with “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions” is “swept away” (p. 5). By tracing the history of the concept of avant-garde, including its military meaning, Cottington shows that the present of the avant-garde, with its revolutionary impetuous aimed at conquering the future, is deeply rooted in the past, that we deal with a hundred-year