CP – Number 10 (2005)

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

This paper is concerned with the ever-growing tension between two arrogances: the creative writer’s and the knowledgeable reader’s. Why people write, why they read and how they could change places are also questions to be answered by this essay, along with the consequences of studying literature in the classroom.

Keywords:

writer, (implied) reader, critic, arrogance, mystery of cognitive function, authority, terrifying literature.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0001 [0002097]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The present paper approaches V S Naipaul’s novel The Enigma of Arrival by a close analysis of the text with the goal of achieving a reordering of the elements building an individual’s identity. The whole thus created reveals the complexity of a personality confronted with identity disorders. The aim is to identify the working of the inner mechanism – the causes of disorders, their manifestations and development, and the reunderstanding of the self. The analysis highlights the circumstances that give birth to a quest for identity, the way it is explored by the narrator and the attempt undertaken to arrive at self-knowledge. This paper discusses the most important factor that explains the narrator’s imbalance – i.e. history, in charge of an Indian’s birth far from India. The study of the historical aspect entails a close study of the social context, which determines the character’s separation from his family and community, also playing an important part in his losing the sense of stability.

Keywords:

The British Empire, colonisation, historical identity, social identity, cultural identity, identity disorders, migration, self-knowledge, fragmented world, unrootedness, devalued faith, exile.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0002 [0002098]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

This paper deals with the shaping of two colonial identities, as they are portrayed in the words of Olive Schreiner and Rosa Praed. Africa and Australia are the cultural spaces described through their exotic landscapes inhabited by the aborigines.

Keywords:

cultural identity, tradition, intellectual inheritance, colony/ metropolis, home, otherness.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0003 [0002099]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

This is an attempt at establishing the theme of the border as a parameter for a more inclusive project: a typology of contemporary Chicano literature. The three novels (Mendéz, Miguel, El Sueño de Santa Maria de las Piedras, 1986; Islas, Arturo, The Rain God, 1984; Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands: The New Mestiza, 1987) have a common denominator, their main preoccupation is the resolution of the border problematics, be it geographical, political, economic, cultural, psychological. The border can be seen as separation or reunion (“brisure” ou “jointure”), the two cultures may remain alien or end up in fusion according to a more or less optimistic or universalistic bias. Here we are studying three different and even conflicting answers, keeping in mind the difference between the concept of border seen as linear separation or boundary and the other, more specifically American concept of a fluctuating, moving limit forever asking to be pushed further, that of the frontier. The border parameter therefore sheds light on over-identification (when the fusion is refused) or des-identification (when fusion is acknowledged). Another strategy consists in taking refuge in the flamboyant syncretism of the Third Zone, thus assuaging confrontation between Mexico and the United-States.

Keywords:

border, frontier, separation, fusion, passage, transgression, over/dis – identification.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0004 [0002100]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

Self-disclosure and the discovering of the other are part of daily existence. The paper focuses on these processes, having as support for analysis Graham Greene`s short story The Invisible Japanese Gentlemen.

Keywords:

Self (-disclosure), discovering, the Other.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0005 [0002101]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

A phenomenological approach to Plath’s poetry is first of all justified by the ways in which the poet herself understood the process of creation. Her Journals stand proof to her desperate attempts at finding a synthetic vision meant to provide her with a defining attitude and poetics. Our effort here is to analyze some phenomenological aspects inherent in the construction of Sylvia Plath’s poems. This, we think, might help us identify a possible motivation of the mysterious mechanism enacted so passionately in some of her poems, a mechanism taking the poetic self through repeated deaths and rebirths, toward a final transformation affecting not only the self but also the Other.

Keywords:

phenomenology, life, death, rebirth, imagination.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0006 [0002102]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The paper deals with concepts such as: the house as semiotic object, position and role, cultural space, cultural paradigms, in an attempt to trace the process of the house signification and the way it is communicated to the reader by the three 19th century women writers. Novels such as Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and The Tenant of the Wildfell Hall conatin a ‘discourse of the house’ which foregrounds the semiotic object as binary oppositions (manor house vs hearth; surface calmness vs inner tumult; captive (imprisoned) vs free beings/ minds/ soulas etc.), as positions and roles in terms of strict hierarchical dependency (possessor/ master vs shelterless beings/ objects etc.), as cultural space in terms of identity, alterity and otherness, closely associated with the ‘where’ and a particular place. As for specific Victorian paradigms, such a discourse sends to presence and/or absence of money (as a sign of stability, respectability and wealth), of the house as a space of imprisonment and of the body as commodity, all of them revealing the mentality of the age.

Keywords:

semiotic object, position, actantial role, space, cultural paradigm.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0007 [0002103]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The eighteenth-century novelists’ quest for verisimilitude, which is indissolubly connected with their attempts at having the novel acknowledged as a canonical genre, may also account for their different attitudes towards description as a means of representation. Thus, throughout the century, in the context of the transition from “outer” to “inner” verisimilitude, the novel has witnessed the gradual shift from the radical rejection of description, causing scarcity/absence of visual detail and supported by the writers’ confidence in the power of the word, to its rehabilitation and reinvestment with symbolical functions. The paper aims at tracing the change in the treatment of this site of focalization in some of the most representative novels of the eighteenth century, with special reference to two of its peculiar manifestations, i.e. character drawing and setting descriptions.

Keywords:

realism, verisimilitude, nature, description, visualization, portrait, setting, caricature, picturesque, sublime, journey, picaresque, sentimental.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0008 [0002104]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

English identity appears to be a deeply rooted concept with tradition and resonance. Fiction, films, humour are all the projection of a stereotype that the English themselves are eager to transmit. A foreigner, vaguely familiar with England, would probably declare that Englishness is above all connected to temperance, solemnity, dignity, perfect manners and perhaps rigid outlooks. Reality, however, seems to contradict such prejudiced definitions. Although Englishness truly embodies a complex set of values, British national identity should be analysed in more objective terms. Between the Victorian model of ‘the knight in shiny armour’ and the different approach proposed by the English writers of Asian and African origin, Englishness has more than one facet to show to the world.

Keywords:

Englishness, Britishness, identity, cliché, sports, arts, multicultural (ism), globalization, K, Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0009 [0002105]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

Starting with the premise that Saul Bellow’s belongingness to Judaism manifests itself as a cultural heritage of a set of values, this paper ventures to define a pattern according to which the American and the Jewish cultural horizons articulate within the author’s work. After establishing the impacts of each of the two cultural spheres on the bellovian writing, this analysis shows the disruptive relationship they entertain. The American influence is identified as having an incidence on the novelistic “form”, while the Jewish aspect is proved to have a bear on the narratives’ “content”. The synchronism of the two cultures, given by the fact that Bellow’s hero belongs simultaneously to both, is undermined by the conflicting principles defining them. Thus, the values inherited from Jewish tradition will appear anachronous with the prevailing models of the American present. This dialectics is understood as a subtle mechanism of the bellovian literary creation.

Keywords:

American culture, social alienation, politics, materialism, nihilism, Jewish American literature, Jewish culture, ethics, secularized religion, humanism, universal values, anachronism of Jewish principles.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0010 [0002106]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

This article examines how Josiah Wedgwood’s Frog Service, manufactured for Catherine II, Empress of Russia, at the end of the 18th century, shaped and displayed a new image of Britain. A collection of more than 1,200 illustrations, this service was indeed definitely not a neutral, somewhat random gathering of views, but the consciously built image of a newly unified country. By emphasizing Britons’ common roots, it represented Britain’s new identity and, as such, was exhibited in London before being shipped to Russia. This exhibition, in turn, managed to modify the identity of the service and of its viewers.

Keywords:

British culture, identity, image, exhibition.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0011 [0002107]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The problem of identity is frequently in focus in Salman Rushdie’s works, each time from a different perspective and in connection to other values and issues. In the case of Fury, the relation between self and other is taken under scrutiny from a psychological point of view, on a background of fiction-fact overlapping.

Keywords:

identity, otherness, neurosis, fury, puppet.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0012 [0002108]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

Starting from the working hypothesis that personal identity is central to any discussion of narrative identity, the first part of our study deals with the relationship between names seen as cultural universals and personal identity. In the second part, we shall restrain our area of interest to some naming practices in literature (more precisely, in George Eliot’s Silas Marner) and we shall finally focus upon three major trends in naming – pronominal reference, proper names and definite descriptions – with the definite purpose of indicating how names may contribute to defining personal identity in the narrative.

Keywords:

personal identity, naming practices, real and fictional personal names, cultural universals, identifiers and/or social classifiers.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0013 [0002109]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

This paper deals with the geopolitical theories of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) concerning Britain’s imperial needs in the early 1900’s. Through the analysis of Mahan’s geopolitics – based on the idea that sea power, or “control of the seas”, is supreme in international relationships –, the issues linked to Britain’s geostrategic safety in and around Suez in the early 20th century will be tackled. This paper will also highlight the tenuous bonds existing between the concepts of “naval strategy”, “racial” imperialism, and Western “living space”.

Keywords:

British Empire, Christianity, Geopolitics, Geostrategy, Imperialism (Britain), Imperialism (Germany), Levant, Living space theory, Mahan, Alfred Thayer, Middle East, Ottoman Empire, Racial theories, Ratzel, Friedrich, Strategy, Turkey.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0014 [0002110]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The paper deals with the two most important female characters from In the Land of Cockaigne by Heinrich Mann: Adelheid Türkheimer and Bienaimé Matzke. We will try to establish the differences between the two women in terms of their public and private life in order to see the reasons why space can be considered a defining aspect of a woman’s personality.

Keywords:

home, house, room, city, privacy/ intimacy, opulence, luxury.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0015 [0002111]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The paper attempts to show the features of the artist as a cultural type of 18th century British life. This cultural type defines itself in relation to other key-concepts, such as the space he/she inhabits, the public, London society, publishers and printers, the politicians, other fellow artists and, what constitutes the most important aspect, in relation to himself, to his private expectations and system of values; all this with emphasis on Tobias Smollett’s novel The Adventures of Roderick Random and on Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield.

Keywords:

art(ist), (urban) space, publisher, market, taste cultural type, prison, (artistic) value.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0016 [0002112]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

My paper has as its main aim to show the way in which a character/person comes to life and can be defined as a human being by his interacting with certain people within certain spaces. The introductory chapter is meant to define such concepts as place, space, private and public spaces and places. The second part of the paper demonstrates and shows the continuous process of a being’s becoming by permanently folding himself within a new inner and outer “curtain of experience”. The choice of Pip as an example is meant to define the character caught within the game of the old “curtains’ unfolding” and of the new curtains being woven and folded around the character. Thus, the analysis of spaces in Great Expectations shows Pip between past and present, between “was” and “is”, “there” and ”here”, these terms being characteristic of any human being. The conclusions sum up the reasons for which a human being can be defined, at least partially if not completely, by the places and spaces he goes to, by the way in which he/she reacts to certain situations in certain spaces.

Keywords:

public space, private space, identity, house, London, The Marshes.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0017 [0002113]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The geography of any literary period has included in one way or another the space of the city. On the one hand, our paper aims at analysing the way in which a wide range of urban nuclei, crossing the continents, have been described by Malcolm Bradbury in his critical works as concentrating all the artistic phenomena, the growth of the individual consciousness and the general conflicts as well. On the other hand, our analysis continues by presenting the way in which Bradbury’s fiction parodies the existence of these “culture-cities”1.

Keywords:

transfer of values, urbanisation, loss, the local, “culture-capitals”, to circumscribe/ to map, metaphorisation, new culture, New Man.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0018 [0002114]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The paper deals with the negotiation of identities, with being a victim or victimizer and with aspects such as “otherness” or being (an)other in William Shakespeare`s The Merchant of Venice.

Keywords:

negotiation, identities, religion, Christian, Jew, an(other), otherness.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0019 [0002115]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The most recent Polish parliamentary elections took place on September 25, 2005. When one ponders on its record-breaking poor turnout (ca. 38,3%) one is thinking about the causes of such a situation which took place in an allegedly free and democratic country. The author of the paper makes an attempt at answering the question analyzing media slogans used immediately after the elections. The research methodology derives from philosophically-oriented text-linguistics and the rhetorically-oriented communicational grammar of discourses (for the entire discussion see, for example, Cap 2003, Chruszczewski 2002, 2003).

Keywords:

slogan, political discourse.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0020 [0002116]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

Having as theoretical framework Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory on chronotopes, necessary for any kind of artistic visualization, and Judith Williamson’s model of decoding advertisements, we will embark on a semiotic travel through space and time about feminity and not feminism, trying to depict the modern Eve(s) within the figurative dimensions of two print advertisements (All about Eve versus Le premier parfum de Lolita Lempicka – Annex) for a cultural product, namely perfumes.

Keywords:

chronotope (axis of time & space), referent and product system, glocal time, global time, actantial model, figurative space of sensoriality and of sensitivity, .

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0021 [0002117]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

In this paper, we intend to examine concepts such as time and space as categories of the mind and the way they are “woven” in the textual fabric of John Fowles’s novels and short stories. Coming out of a “sense of loss”, of “insufferable incompleteness”, the act of writing becomes with John Fowles a tool for “reversing” and conquering time and for “correcting” and “supplementing” the real world, which is, as Fowles himself claims, “so wrong, so inadequate and unimaginative”.

Keywords:

time, space, mind, culture, the ‘ebony tower’ vs, the ‘ivory tower’, ‘umbilical cord’.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0022 [0002118]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

This paper is meant to signal the presence Polish metaphysical poetry within the present age of postmodernism. Trying not to be dominated by the consumption-oriented views on culture, the Silesian poets, such as Andreas Gryphius, Jerzy Wojciechowski or Mi³osz Kamiñski, create a lyrical world full of spiritual meanings.

Keywords:

metaphysical current versus postmodernism.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0023 [0002119]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

This paper offers a useful context for a discussion of the Eveline story as it situates itself within the dynamic of the metaphoric and the metonymic. It is possible to read “Eveline” as an expression of the binary oppositions of symbolist poetry and realist prose, since the story focuses on both a scrupulous effort in representing the details of everyday Dublin life and the transformative power of metaphor with which Joyce associated epiphany. It is also possible to focus on the clear gender associations of these binary oppositions in “Eveline”, where the feminine is consistently associated with the constrained, restrained, and repressed position in the bourgeois room, while the masculine is associated with the impulse to travel, to organize desire as a quest for a variously defined possession or goal.

Keywords:

metaphor, epiphany, metonymy, domesticity, gender.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0024 [0002120]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The paper is an attempt to foreground the role of translated literature in transmitting culture within a country and in transferring it internationally. Using Even-Zohar’s polysystem theory as a framework – as a specific application to the study of translated literature – we want to show the position of translated literature within the literary polysystem, and the way translated texts function collectively, as a sub-system within the target literary system.

Keywords:

central position in the polysystem, cultural diversity, culture, peripheral position in the polysystem, polysystem theory, source literature, target literature, translated literature, translation.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0025 [0002121]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

This paper is meant to be a study on the translations of interjections. We consider that interjections are important conveyors of meanings as far as theatre texts are concerned, they prove to be significant constituents of the perception of plays. Our analysis is based on the problems that appear when providing the Polish translation of the English interjection “Ay”.

Keywords:

interjections, “Hamlet”, communicational grammar, contextual embeddings (situational, social, cultural).

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0026 [0002122]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The paper is the first attempt to apply the hexadic model of communication to the process of translation.

Keywords:

translation studies, source-language (SL), target-language (TL), enunciation, signifying, reference, connotation, reception, codification.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0027 [0002123]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

An impressive amount of the terminology in chemistry has its origin in personal names or in geographical denominations. Some of the terms have become part of the internationally accepted terminology and they raise no difficulty in translation. Nevertheless, some other terms do create difficulties in the translation process. The approach devises a possible classification of the translation difficulties and reveals a highly practical character.

Keywords:

eponymy, lexical categories, translation strategies, literal translation, transposition.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0028 [0002124]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The domain of linguistic functions is still open to debate. It unveils a complex network of stylistic functions that pleat in order to achieve the overall impact of the text on the reader. The analysis of the ways in which these functions pleat proves to be very rewarding.

Keywords:

linguistic stylistics, pleating of stylistic functions, stylistic effects, stylistic devices.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0029 [0002125]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

This paper shows that pidgin and creole linguistics is not a uniform, homogenous discipline with clearly marked boundaries between it and other branches of linguistic investigation. Pidgin and creole studies exhibit a great deal of overlap with many realms of linguistics. However, in this paper the scope of considerations is narrowed and the attention is directed to sociolinguistics, language acquisition studies and historical linguistics, in which the studies of tongues in question are firmly embedded.

Keywords:

contact languages, sociolinguistics, cultural space, code-switching.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0030 [0002126]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The paper is a study on disponability, also known by the name of “extermination”, “enslavement”, “final solution”. The semiotic context foregrounds notions such as worth, collectivity, freedom, while the signifiers deployed in freeflow ethics send towards capital, human bodies, restraints on human action and conflict.

Keywords:

nature, culture, collectivity, disponability, dirt(iness), freedom, freeflow, ethics, speed.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0031 [0002127]

Issue:

CP, Number 10

Section:

No. 10 (2005)   Editorial

Abstract:

The paper attempts to signal the urgent modern necessity to build relationships, to exchange experience and knowledge, to celebrate the rich diversity of cultural identities or to embrace other races and faiths within the European context. This necessity emerges from an actual endeavour to bridge the segregation between different nations and cultures, and it finds its manifestation in the various programmes, projects and grants offered to teachers and students by the European Union.

Keywords:

European Union, cultural identity, cultural values, multi-cultural societies, integration, assimilation, education, xenophobia, educational programmes, educational projects, the Comenius programme.

Code [ID]:

CP200510V00S01A0032 [0002128]