(VI) New Perspectives
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TEODOR MATEOC editor Cultural Texts and Contexts in the English Speaking World (VI) New Perspectives Teodor Mateoc editor CULTURAL TEXTS AND CONTEXTS IN THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD (VI) NEW PERSPECTIVES Editura Universității din Oradea 2019 Editor: TEODOR MATEOC Editorial Board: MĂDĂLINA PANTEA GIULIA SUCIU EVA SZEKELY Advisory Board JOSE ANTONIO ALVAREZ AMOROS University of Alicante, Spain ANDREI AVRAM University of Bucharest, Romania ROGER CRAIK University of Ohio, USA SILVIE CRINQUAND University of Bourgogne, France STANISLAV KOLAR University of Ostrava, Czech Republic ANDRZEJ DOROBEK Instytut Neofilologii, Plock, Poland ELISABETTA MARINO TorVergataUniversity, Rome, Italy INGRIDA ZINDZIUVIENE Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania DANIELA FRANCESCA VIRDIS University of Cagliari, Italy PAUL WILSON University of Lodz, Poland MIRCEA MIHAIES Universitatea de Vest, Timisoara VIRGIL STANCIU BabesBolyaiUniversity, Cluj-Napoca Publisher The Department of English Language and Literature Faculty of Letters University of Oradea ISSN 2067-5348 ISBN 978-606-10-2072-0 CONTENTS Introduction Old Wine in New Bottles / 7 BRITISH AND COMMONWEALTH LITERATURE Elisabetta Marino, Exploring Migrant Lives in the Narratives of Monica Ali and Sunjeev Sahota / 12 Éva Székely, Aspects of Liminality in Elizabeth Bowen’s ‘The Heat of the Day’ / 26 Delia-Maria Radu, ‘France Rather than England’ or Reflections on Food in John Lanchester’s ‘The Debt to Pleasure’ / 38 Dan Horațiu Popescu, Layers of the private epitext: Lawrence Durrell and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s correspondence / 46 Soukayna Alami, Madness in the Female Character of Mrs. Audley in ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ by Elizabeth Braddon / 61 AMERICAN LITERATURE Ioana Cistelecan, American Western Hero. Rise & Fall / 72 Sangjun Jeong, Literary Criticism in the “Me” Decade: From Text to Reader / 80 Teodor Mateoc, Raymond Craver: What He Talks about when He Talks about Love / 88 CULTURAL AND GENDER STUDIES Giulia Suciu, The Power of Advertising or the Secret behind Dedeman’s Popularity / 102 Paloma Tejada Caller, On new-borns and babies. The emergence of new lexical age-stereotypes in Early Modern England / 108 Andrada Marinău, On Witchcraft in England during the Middle Ages / 121 Neha Hooda, An Indian Perspective on Localized Content for Children in a Globalized World / 130 Cristina Zimbroianu, The Reception of ‘A Handsful of Dust’in Spain and Romania / 142 Blessing Datiri, A Semiotic Analysis of the ‘BringBackOurGirls’ Campaign in Social Media / 156 Anemona Alb, Feminist Taxonomies in Chick Lit: a Tale of Two Novels / 171 Irina-Ana Drobot, The Culture of Reading Books in ‘Words in Deep Blue’ by Cath Crowley and ‘The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie’Society’ by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows / 175 Daniel Nyikos, Disenchantment and Re-Enchantment in the Graphic Novel ‘Lullaby’ / 184 LANGUAGE AND TRANSLATION STUDIES TEACHING ENGLISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE Csillag Andrea, Fear of Beta Israel and a Kemant Girl in Jane Kurtz’s ‘The Storyteller’s Beads’: A Corpus Based Analysis / 190 Alexandra Liana Martin, Construing Time through Image Schemas: A Cross Linguistic Analysis / 207 Mădălina Pantea, Limited Abilities of Computers as Translation Devices / 228 Laura-Rebeca Stiegelbauer & Ioana-Lucia Patrauta, Practices in Teaching and Assessing the New Literacies of Online Research / 234 Introduction Old Wine in New Bottles The biennial conference organized by the English department of the Faculty of Letters in Oradea has reached its sixth edition. For twelve years, every March academics working in the field of Anglophone studies meet and reconvene here to share their interests in and passion for English and American literature, Cultural Studies, Linguistics and/or Teaching English. In an almost ritualistic manner, we gather around the fire to tell our stories and listen to the stories of others. Stories about other stories already fictionalized in the more or less recent past, stories about real, political events that have marked or that mark our time, stories about words and the way the help us make sense of reality, stories of success and failure, courage and resignation, hope and despair. Behind them, passion and hard work, commitment to the profession and an unwavering belief in the power of the word The five articles grouped under the rubric British and Commonwealth Literature focus on topics that exceed imagination in the sense that they deal with real-life situations which are re-incorporated into fictional narratives whereby they acquire a new, heightened meaning. This is the case of Elisabetta Marino who, in her key-note speech and then in the article, looks at the way in which the present-day issue of the refugee crisis is mirrored in two novels. Starting from the idea that such individual stories ‘are…hardly heard, concealed and sanitized behind the accuracy of figures and statistics’, she looks at ‘what lies beyond’ in an effort to give ‘a clear and powerful voice to the silenced ones. An interesting example of ‘liminality’ is offered by Eva Szekely’s article on the modernist Elizabeth Bowen and her possibly best novel, ‘The Heat of the Day’. Interesting in the sense that the liminality of her own Irish-British identity is somehow translated both into the liminal space that is London during the war and, at the level of characters, into ‘liminal relationships and behaviour’. War and its aftermath are also present in the correspondence between Lawrence Durrel and Patrick Leigh Fermor. Dan H. Popescu lifts 7 Introduction the Iron Curtain and allows us a glimpse into the Romanian scene by evoking an affair of the heart between Fermor and a local princess who‘belonged to an aristocratic family with roots in imperial Byzantium and with branches all over Europe’. In her article, Delia-Maria Radu reflects on food, just like the narrator in Lanchester’s novel while travelling around France. Cuisine is here ‘linked to the idea of art, of artwork’ and what appears to be a ‘cookbook’ turns into a narrative with unexpected revelations. In her article, however, the author focuses primarily on ‘French culture, food and places, and on the narrator’s ‘comparative criticism of British mores’. Last but not least, Saukayna Alami revisits the immensely popular Victorian novel Lady Audley’s Secretand looks at the representation of madness in relation to class and gender. Further, she demonstrates how, in this patriarchal society,‘transgressive acts are translated to insanity and vice versa’. Revisiting the past, reading the present is at stake in two of the articles in the American Literature section. Ioana Cistelecan sees the American West both as a timeless Arcadia and as a surrogate for a usable past, a foundational myth in a country with an excess of geography and a shortage of history. The writers under consideration in her article undermine ‘the traditional paradigm of the Western short story’ by focusing on ‘marginal heroes and thus adding a ‘psychological dimension’ to the ‘ritualistic confrontations between good and evil’. Teodor Mateoc writes about Raymond Carver’s stark, minimalist stories and argues that beyond their blunt realism they do allow for a metaphorical meaning and illuminate human emotions released mostly in limit situations or moments of crisis. In form, these stories illustrate the idea that less is more; in content, love as the arch emotion is here replaced by its contraries: confusion, falsity, betrayal, hatred and violence. Starting from the triad author-text-reader, Sangjun Jeong looks at several critical stances that have considered the issue of ‘textual objectivity’, from the New Criticism to the reader-response school. The variety of critical interpretations and the ‘the multiple responses to the same text on the part of the reader’ leads him to the conclusion that, in the long run, ‘interpretive anarchy cannot be avoided’. As usual, the Cultural and Gender Sudiesis the most substantial section. The topics of the article bear witness to their authors diverse interests: childhood, religion, feminism, advertising, politics or book marketing. Andrada Marinau’s article takes us back, to the Middle Ages, and the dark times of witchcraft. She intends to look at ‘how witchcraft was viewed and dealt with in medieval England’ and, by foregrounding the 8 Introduction figure of the witch, looks at the image of the sorceress from a feminist perspective. Paloma Tejada Caller uses brand new critical tools to look at stereotypical representations of infancy and childhood in Early Modern England, such as Cultural Linguistics and Age Studies. The motivation of her research is that earliest childhood is ‘un under-researched life stage’ which came into focus rather late, in the sixteenth century, when ‘the child was discovered in social practice’. Childhood and teenage is also the age period that interests Neha Hooda, but from a totally different perspective. Her research intends ‘to demonstrate how foreign made localized content finds acceptance in Indian television for children’ and ‘how their…understanding of life is shaped by the content they watch’. She gathered her data by resorting to interviews, questionnaires and content analysis administered to several hundred children ‘from urban middle-class homes of North India’. A somewhat unusual article is that of Blessing Datiri for it shows how a recent violent episode perpetrated by a radical Islamist group occasioned a semiotic approach applied to the texts, slogans, images and hashtags posted on media platforms. These are analyzed by using ‘structural semiotics from narrative, enunciative, figurative and pathemic concepts’ in the idea of highlighting the utility of social media in advancing the objectives of activism’. Cultural studies via literature could well be the description of the approach in other three articles. First, Cristina Zimbroianu looks at the reception of a classical English novel in Franco’s Spain and in communist Romania .taking into account specific ‘historical and social determinants’ but also, as Jauss’ reception theory claims, the ‘horizons of expectations’ of the two readerships. Irina-Ana Drobot’s contribution brings together two novels and two cultural spaces, Australian and American.