Teodor Mateoc Editor

TEODOR MATEOC editor ------------------------------------------------ Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World (IV) Teodor Mateoc editor CULTURAL TEXTS AND CONTEXTS IN THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD (IV) Editura Universităţii din Oradea 2015 Editor: TEODOR MATEOC Editorial Board: IOANA CISTELECAN DAN NEGRUT GIULIA SUCIU EVA SZEKELY MĂDĂLINA PANTEA Advisory Board JOSE ANTONIO ALVAREZ AMOROS University of Alicante, Spain ANDREI AVRAM University of Bucharest ROGER CRAIK University of Michigan, Ohio, USA SILVIE CRINQUAND University of Bourgogne, Dijon, France SEAN DARMODY Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland ANDRZEJ DOROBEK Instytut Neofilologii, Plock, Poland STANISLAV KOLAR University of Ostrava, Czech Republic MIRCEA MIHĂIEŞ Universitatea de Vest, Timişoara VIRGIL STANCIU Babeş-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. What’s in a Name? / 9 I. BRITISH AND COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE Carmen-Narcisa Albert, ‘Waterland’ – The History Teacher-The Storyteller – Small Stories, Grand Stories / 19 Monica Busoiu, Aspects of the Ritual of Initiation in Alice Munro’s Short Story A Red Dress / 35 Elisabetta Marino, Rejuvenating the Stage: ‘The Descent of Liberty, a Mask’ (1815) by Leigh Hunt / 45 Titus Pop, Transliterated Coinages in Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Ibis Trilogy’ - A Text- mining Research / 53 Dan H. Popescu, Images of the Jews in Patrick Leigh Fermor’s ‘Between the Woods and the Water’ / 61 Eva Szekely, W. B. Yeats: ‘At the Hawk’s Well’: an Eastern Mythical Play / 71 Ingrida Eglė Žindžiuvienė, Restatement of Traumatic Experience in Victoria Hislop’s Novel ‘The Island’ / 81 II. AMERICAN LITERATURE Ioana Cistelecan, John Green, Simply Narrating Life, Romance and Cancer / 101 Andrzej Dorobek, Beatific or Beaten? Encounters with Nature from Transcendentalists to the Beats and Hippies / 109 Amelia Precup, The Manipulation of World-Building Conventions in Woody Allen’s Short Fiction / 127 III. CULTURAL STUDIES Sorin Ciutacu, Geoffrey Chaucer - the Astrolabe and the Arab Connection / 139 Peter Gaál-Szabó, Black Female Ethics and Subjectivity in the Black Church / 147 Valeria Palut, Gulliver Travels Well in the 21st Century, Thanks to Jack Black / 157 Delia Maria Radu, What’s in a Name? or Defining Others through their Dietary Practices / 165 Giulia Suciu, Miss Representation of Women in Today's Romanian Mainstream Media / 173 Sonia Vass, “An Elegant Suicide is the Ultimate Work of Art”.Symbolic Meanings of the Movie “Stay” / 179 IV. LANGUAGE STUDIES Ioana Alexandrescu, Octavio Cano Silva, ‘Gringo’ Words: On Anglicisms in Mexican Spanish / 187 Andrei A. Avram, Issues in the Identification of Varieties of English / 199 Claudia Leah, To Be Between Conventional and Unconventional / 219 Madalina Pantea, Translator as a Cultural Mediator / 225 Irina Stoica, THAT-omission – the View from Manner of Speaking Verbs / 233 Anca Tomoioaga, On Lexical Blends / 247 Introduction Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World. What’s in a Name? At the end of March, 2015, the English Department of the Faculty of Letters at the University of Oradea held its fourth biennial conference on Anglophone Studies under the same generic title of Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World. More often than not, we tend to take titles for granted and only rarely do we stop to actually ponder on their actual meaning(s). What do we mean by cultural texts? Aren’t all texts, including literary texts, cultural after all? To what extent do they reflect or surpass their temporal and geographical contexts? And how is that done: by subversion, distortion, projection or revisions? All these, more or less legitimate questions are being considered by all those working in the field of humanities whether we approach it from a literary or cultural perspective and their offshoots: gender, area, feminist, postcolonial or ethnic studies. For some time now, it has become clear that Contemporary Cultural Studies must be taken as a particular critical discourse, different from previous discourses both in intention and methodology. First, because it displays a certain suspicion of theory, of general discussions that may be too distant from the actual cultural contexts. Secondly, it borrows from existing critical discourses and uses them for its specific purposes. As a result, it displays a variety of theoretical orientations and its method is inevitably interdisciplinary and eclectic. What has also been noticed is that literariness, the aesthetic or moral dimension of a work of fiction tends to be marginalized and only used as pretext to discuss relations of power, ideological affiliations, ethnic considerations or gender issues. Long gone is the Arnoldian and Leavisite tradition according to which literature was the main form of expression of a given culture which was itself primarily defined in moral and aesthetic terms. The criticism of literature was therefore held to be a vehicle for an ethical critique of contemporary culture, for all genuine literature emerged as the cultural expression of an organic community seen as the repository of the finest human experience of the past, preserved and disseminated by an educated elite. Gradually, such an elitist view came to be challenged by a more social definition of culture, seen by Raymond Williams as the complex set 9 Teodor Mateoc of expressions we all employ to make sense of experience: culture is always a particular way of life containing certain meanings and values best represented by a structure of feeling, i.e., the ways in which the ensemble of the values, beliefs and practices of a culture colours, as it were, the experience of its members. More than anywhere else, the structures of feeling are best embodied in literary texts which, however, are not a simple reflection of an already constituted external model, since they both reflect and build up the structure of feeling of their cultural contexts. In time, Williams’s culturalism was challenged by Stuart Hall and his structuralism. This new paradigm, rather than emphasizing human experience as the source of culture, stressed the ideological component as the ultimate influence of human praxis. Rather than makers of culture, we are its ideological products. Against culturalism’s insistence on the holistic nature of culture based on human agency, structuralism emphasizes the role of differences. As for certain poststructuralist approaches, Hall’s critique was that they exaggerated the notion of difference which led to extreme relativism and radical heterogeneity. Avoiding both extremes, it was Richard Johnson in What Is Cultural Studies Anyway? who argued that the complex nature of culture require that its study remain interdisciplinary and pluralistic. As opposed to earlier culturalism, Johnson argued that Cultural Studies was, in general, concerned with the various forms in which subjectivity is (re) produced in the dynamics of culture. Following from here, he viewed culture as moving through a cycle of production/ textualization/ reception and appropriation. As for the text-based approaches, he considered that the usual practice of close-reading was too focused on texts as such, while neglecting their broader cultural relevance. On the American scene, cultural criticism has always been, in the words of Alfred Kazin, “the great American philosophy”, a kind of “histoire moral that sums up the spirit of the age in which we live and then ask us to transcend it”. Ever since the days of Thoreau and Emerson in the 19th century, the tradition of cultural criticism was carried on by thinkers from various fields of inquiry: cultural and political journalism (Walter Lippman); literary criticism (Alfred Kazin); sociology (David Reisman); cultural history (Richard Hofstadter, Christopher Lasch). As a result, cultural criticism is not just another intellectual discipline, but the basis for the general reevaluation of traditional values which must take place in every generation. Although it cannot be restricted to a single methodological approach, it can still be defined in loosely intellectual terms that also imply an ethical dimension. Lionel Trilling, too, believed that literary situations should be seen as cultural situations and cultural situations as 10 Introduction great elaborate fights about moral issues. But he may well be a minority voice in defense of moral reflection in the analysis of culture. Most critical orientations, from the new Critics to the Poststructuralists, have evaded the moral imperatives of criticism. From Barthes to Derrida and Cioran, all literary and cultural products are marked by a radical skepticism that permeates any epistemological claim of the individual. In the postmodern context that accommodates such assumptions, the genres of thought and discourse have become blurred and, consequently, what is at stake is not the what but the how of what we say. It is what Terry Eagleton meant when he remarked that, nowadays, “literary studies….are a question of the signifier, not of the signified”. Attempts to reconnect literature to values, art to morality were first made, in the modern era, by the new critics and then by a next generation of thinkers and writers (Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Kenneth

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