TEODOR MATEOC editor ------------------------------------------------ Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World (V) Teodor Mateoc editor CULTURAL TEXTS AND CONTEXTS IN THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD (V) Editura Universităţii din Oradea 2017 Editor: TEODOR MATEOC Editorial Board: IOANA CISTELECAN MADALINA PANTEA GIULIA SUCIU EVA SZEKELY Advisory Board JOSE ANTONIO ALVAREZ AMOROS University of Alicante, Spaian ANDREI AVRAM University of Bucharest, Romania ROGER CRAIK University of Ohio, USA SILVIE CRINQUAND University of Bourgogne, France SEAN DARMODY Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland ANDRZEJ DOROBEK Instytut Neofilologii, Plock, Poland STANISLAV KOLAR University of Ostrava, Czech Republic ELISABETTA MARINO University Tor Vergata, Rome MIRCEA MIHAES Universitatea de Vest, Timisoara VIRGIL STANCIU Babes Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca PAUL WILSON University of Lodz, Poland DANIELA FRANCESCA VIRDIS University of Cagliari, Italy INGRIDA ZINDZIUVIENE Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania Publisher The Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Letters University of Oradea ISSN 2067-5348 CONTENTS Introduction Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World: The Fifth Edition ............................................................................. 9 I. BRITISH AND COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE Adela Dumitrescu, Physiognomy of Fashion in Fiction: Jane Austen ..... 17 Elisabetta Marino, “Unmaidenly” Maidens: Rhoda Broughton’s Controversial Heroines ................................................ 23 Alexandru Muica, Introduction to Elizabeth Bibesco’s Literary Works .. 34 Rudolf Nyari, Problematic Domesticity in Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit ..... 41 Dan Horatiu Popescu, More than a Literary Friendship: the Romanian Ties of Patrick Leigh Fermor and Sacheverell Sitwell .. 51 Eva Szekely, Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat as Derive: A Psychogeographic Reading .......................................... 61 Adela Daniela Tigan (Serb), Displacement and Its Effects in Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of the Suburbia and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss ................................... 69 II. AMERICAN LITERATURE Bokos Borbala, Rewriting an American Myth: On Paul Auster’s The Music of Chance .......................................................... 79 Cristina Chifane & Liviu-Augustin Chifane, Spatial and Temporal Nostalgia in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth (2008) ............ 85 5 Ioana Cistelecan, 9/11 Turned into Trauma Fiction. J. S. Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close .......................... 98 Eniko Maior, American or Immigrant? Caught between Two Cultures ...............................................................109 Mihaela Ogasanu, Revisiting the Unfinished Memoir-A Cautionary Tale of Early Success ................................................. 120 III. CULTURAL AND GENDER STUDIES Iuliana Borbely, The Humane in Twentieth-Century Sci-Fi Films: Technological Development against the Backdrop of Emotions ................................................................ 127 Jillian Curr, Headscarves and Hijabi Fashionistas: A Way Forward ..... 138 Andrzej Dorobek, Psychedelia- Alcoholica? Mind-Expanding Aspects of Alcoholic Intoxication in Socio-Cultural and Political Reference as Highlighted in Selected European Cultures ...................................................... 154 Andrada Ramona Marinau, Women’s Victorian fashions in a Nutshell ..... 165 Delia Maria Radu, Between Two Worlds: Migrant Issues in Mario Puzo’s ‘The Fortunate Pilgrim’ .................................. 172 Nora Sellei, Quilting as Collective Self-Narrative by Women ............... 182 Giulia Suciu, Investigating the Gender Dimension in the City of Oradea .. 199 IV. LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION STUDIES David Finbar Brett, Quantitative Methods for the Analysis of Characters in Drama .................................................. 207 Claudia Leah, On Relative Words and Relative Clauses ....................... 224 Madalina Pantea, Culture-Bound Issues in translating Sitcoms ........... 231 Titus Pop, Reading with a Soundtrack-The Augmented E- Book .......... 245 Adina Pruteanu, From Conceptuat to Thematic Meaning ..................... 251 Dana Sala, Escher’s Hands in Translating Orbitor (Blinding) by Mircea Cartarescu ...................................................... 260 Laura-Rebeca Stiegelbauer, CELTA Teaching Methods - A Doable Approach in Romanian Universities? ........................ 271 Introduction Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World: The Fifth Edition In a comprehensive university like ours, the field of humanities is rather narrow and often frowned upon, if not straightforwardly dismissed as elitist, financially inefficient, self-centered and tribal. Having said that, I very much doubt whether my distinguished colleagues working in the field of hard sciences, like mathematics, physics, economics or engineering have read a Shakespeare play, although I admit the possibility that some of them saw one performed on stage. Nor am I more optimistic when it comes about my own colleagues-myself included- and their knowledge of the second law of themodynamics! The dichotomy was enunciated by C. P. Snow in his famous lecture The Two Cultures, in 1959. Snow was an English novelist but also a scientist in the field of physical chemistry and his lecture describes a state of affairs that has not changed much ever since: the gap between a humanistic culture and a scientific kind of education. And, implicitly, a somewhat idealistic belief that the gap could be bridged, by some kind of mutual transfer of knowledge, so as to have a finely balanced intellectual profile. In an effort to recall what I had long ago learnt in my Physics lessons in high school, I did look up the aforementioned physical law, stopping short at its baffling numerical expression, but comforted to see that not even scientific theories can dispense with words! I was hoping to see whether there is some sort of connection, be it metaphorical, between what is stated as a scientific truth and our field of literary, cultural or linguistic studies. For a layperson and a humanist, the Second Law of Thermodynamics comes down to the assertion that all kinds of energy in the material world tend towards disorder if they are not prevented from doing so. This constant increase of entropy is posited as the basic law of the universe, the fundamental law of life, ultimately. Disorder is natural, stopping it requires deliberate counteraction 9 Teodor Mateoc The sense of the world going astray has long haunted the mind and imagination of so many writers if one thinks of Yeats’s The Second Coming, the literature of the absurd or Pynchon’s postmodernist cyberpunk fictions, but examples are in the hundreds. Is this true at the reception end as well? For aren’t the exegetic efforts to arrive at some meaning, be it provisional or personal, an attempt to freeze the chaotic flux of impressions, sensations, experiences and daily occurrences into some coherent vision, so as to make some sense of lived experience? The constraints of interpretation, the imposition of a mental grid on a particular literary text, cultural or linguistic phenomenon are, one may say, efforts to stop the dissipation of meaning, to recapture the initial creative energy and its significance. Generally speaking, this is what happens whenever academics in the field of humanities gather together to make public their own scholarly endeavors and research. In the sphere of limitless possibilities, to make a personal statement on a text, cultural context or a linguistic phenomenon is to reverse the flow of entropy. If such a statement can only be temporary or subjective, the effort is always commendable. The fifth edition of our international conference hosted by the Department of English at the Faculty of Letters between 24-25 of March, 2017 brought together the hermeneutic energies of the participants working in the now established areas of scholarly research: Out of the seven articles in the British and Commonwealth Literature Section, four are concerned with Victorian issues. A. Dumitrescu focuses on the connection between social standing and fashion in Jane Austen’s ’Pride and Prejudice’ where clothing is an identity marker which “attests the belonging to a social class” and helps building “:social identities”. Elisabetta Marino chose two of Rhoda Broughton’s ‘sensation novels’ as illustrative for the way late Victorian certainties regarding gender roles, sexuality and the ‘doctrine of the separate spheres” were undermined by alternative stories of “unmaidenly maiden” heroines. Such characters subvert ‘traditional models of womanhood’ and suggest “the ultimate possibility to be released from the shackles of social conventions”. Family relations, especially those between biological fathers, father figures and their daughters are central in Rudolph Nyari’s reading of Dickens’ ‘Little Dorrit’. Such: separate dyads” perform their ”separate symbolic roles in Victorian society” within the confining context of “family spheres”, seen by the author as ‘an ever changing theater of power relations”. 10 Introduction In her article, Eva Szekely suggests a psychogeographic reading of the once extremely popular but now quasi-forgotten (an unjustly so, she believes) comic travelogue, which is Jerome K. Jerome’s “Three Men in a Boat”. Such a perspective insists on the protagonists ’reaction to the geographical environment”, complimented here with instances of “social critique