CP – Number 17 (2012)

Issue:

CP, Number 17

Section:

No. 17 (2012)  Editorial

Abstract:

Food is a leitmotiv in Dickens’s novels, and in Great Expectations it appears to be the objective correlative of the social rank and the moral stance of the characters. This is especially evident in the verbal and visual representation of Miss Havisham’s decaying banquet: by letting food putrefy, Miss Havisham reduces her own body as mere flesh to feast upon, and it is only by nourishing herself on other bodies that she can satiate her appetites. After exploring how Dickens relates the verbal and visual representation of food to the depiction of his characters’ emotionality, this essay focuses on Miss Havisham’s banquet and its literary ‘afterlife’ in James Joyce’s “The Dead”.

Keywords:

cultural representations, Dickens, Food Studies, intertextuality, Joyce, Victorian literature.

Code [ID]:

CP201217V00S01A0001 [0003768]

Issue:

CP, Number 17

Section:

No. 17 (2012)  Editorial

Abstract:

In the past decades a new interest in “thingness” has emerged, and a new field of studies in the humanities has opened up. Thing Theory and Object Studies have proliferated in different disciplinary areas (philosophy, history, anthropology, literature and visual arts), relevant theoretical work has been produced from a Cultural Studies approach, and some literary critics have read texts in their connection with material culture and the established concepts of commodity and fetish. Dickens constitutes a very special case among Victorian writers as regards the use of things in novels; on the one hand, his obsession with the naming of things is apparent in the stylistic devices he adopts in his fiction – lists, catalogues and inventories; on the other, objects often assume a life of their own, with the exchange between animate and inanimate beings (“pathetic fallacy”), and goods occupy the uncertain territory between things and commodities, owing to the wide range of meanings they carry in Victorian society. A critical debate has developed, and some critics argue against a binary thinking that opposes use-value to exchange-value, and recognize, instead, “both the heterogeneity of things in the world […] and the fluidity of the relations between these categories” (Frow 2001: 285).

The aim of my article is to present a survey of theoretical studies on this topic – a sort of description of the state of the art -, and discuss them in relation to current Dickens criticism.

Keywords:

Dickens, things, inventories, commodities, material culture, Thing Theory, Object Studies.

Code [ID]:

CP201217V00S01A0002 [0003769]

Note:

Issue:

CP, Number 17

Section:

No. 17 (2012)  Editorial

Abstract:

Political reversing mirror websites have become a sign of online democracy since citizens can create their own content having politicians as their ”raw” material. Since 2007 this type of active online participation has prevailed in Romania especially during negative campaigns. The ads which undermine the opponent politicians focus on intertexts where the blocker-objects transfer new meanings upon the politicians. The outcome of this meaning exchange is the shaping of some stereotypes the politicians are associated with. The main aim of our paper is to provide a comparative content analysis of the reversing mirror websites of the three main political candidates in the 2009 Romanian elections (Traian Băsescu – the Liberal Democratic Party, Mircea Geoană – the Social Democratic Party and Crin Antonescu – the Liberal National Party).

Keywords:

intertextuality, stereotypes, blocker-objects.

Code [ID]:

CP201217V00S01A0003 [0003770]

Issue:

CP, Number 17

Section:

No. 17 (2012)  Editorial

Abstract:

This study focuses on the central role of the circus and of the figure of the clown in Charles Dickens’s and Federico Fellini’s visions of life. During their lives, both the novelist and the film director were personally involved with this form of entertainment. For both, the circus represents the possibility to escape an uncomfortable reality in favour of imagination and its redeeming role. Hard Times (1854) contrasts Mr. Sleary’s positive values against Mr. Gradgrind’s “philosophy of facts” and Mr. Bounderby’s capitalist greed, while Fellini insists on the necessity to screen existence through the eyes of the clown figures, traditionally named Whiteface and Augusto. My purpose is to explore this connection, through the analysis of Dickens’s novel Hard Times and Fellini’s movies La strada (The Road, 1954), 8 ½ (Eight and a Half, 1963), and I clowns (The Clowns, 1970), in order to suggest that the novelist and the film director meet each other across time and within the circus ring.

Keywords:

fiction, cinema, circus, clown, carnivalesque.

Code [ID]:

CP201217V00S01A0004 [0003771]

Issue:

CP, Number 17

Section:

No. 17 (2012)  Editorial

Abstract:

Movies represent an important means of transmitting information, ideas and values from culture to culture (becoming means of cross-cultural communication) and a multisemiotic channel (verbal, visual, aural) through which a certain culture creates its own identity.

Movie titles act like a code for deciphering the content of the movie plot. Besides their invaluable guidance of the audience into the reception and interpretation of the movie, they represent a key of success for box-offices. Therefore, we can say they “sell” the movie.

The paper investigates some techniques in the translation of movie titles from English into Romanian. We have chosen a pragmatic perspective, as it is known that any translation is pragmatically oriented towards a recipient. Laying the stress on either the target language element or the source language one, the theory of domestication (term coined by the American translation theorist Lawrence Venuti, qtd.in Cui 2011:353) and foreignization (idem) helped us analyse our corpus of movie titles.

Keywords:

title, translation, culture, domestication, foreignization.

Code [ID]:

CP201217V00S01A0005 [0003772]

Issue:

CP, Number 17

Section:

No. 17 (2012)  Editorial

Abstract:

Considering that linguistic identity is one of the essential components of individual and collective identity, enhanced or subverted by specific cultural practices, our paper brings to attention the urban promotional fashion of pushing Romanian linguistic items to the periphery, under the influence of globalization. Once emblematic for the verbal identity of local firms and stored for generations in the collective memory, most Romanian-based advertising names suffer nowadays from this marginal positioning.

The survey of advertising names from the centre of Bacău county town confirms that most local trademarks have predominantly foreign names as a guarantee of quality and a sign of modernity. Not only do such linguistic fashions of advertising names (Kryukova, 2008: 409) remind of Titu Maiorescu’s theory (1868), but they also foreground a deep cultural crisis created by the new global realities which lead to ‘empty forms’ of local cultural patterns.

Keywords:

linguistic fashion, advertising name, trademark identity, Bacău town.

Code [ID]:

CP201217V00S01A0006 [0003773]

Issue:

CP, Number 17

Section:

No. 17 (2012)  Editorial

Abstract:

The multidisciplinary literature of intercultural communication increasingly addresses the importance of communication competence as impacting both the work and lived experience of scholars. This paper explores the uncertain and ill-defined spaces of the author’s intercultural interactions during a semester-long Fulbright exchange in Romania. Incorporating a broad theory base, the exchange experience is examined through Moran’s Cultural Knowings as the author reflects on personal and professional learning.

Keywords:

intercultural communication, communication competence, communic-ative space, cultural knowings framework, academic exchange, citizen diplomacy.

Code [ID]:

CP201217V00S01A0007 [0003774]

Issue:

CP, Number 17

Section:

No. 17 (2012)  Editorial

Abstract:

Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day registers the changes brought about by the postmodern spirit (experiment, parody or caricature, individual’s self/self-asserting, return to the historical past in an attempt to retrieve its lost values, the play with memory) projected against the background of a traditional context.

Keywords:

tradition, postmodernism, cultural changes, narrative construction.

Code [ID]:

CP201217V00S01A0008 [0003775]

Issue:

CP, Number 17

Section:

No. 17 (2012)  Editorial

Abstract:

Referring to the Shoah, Paul Ricoeur once spoke of the “ruinous dichotomy between a history that would dissolve the event in explanation and a purely emotional retort that would dispense us from thinking the unthinkable.” Whereas traditional historiography’s explanatory power runs the risk of occluding precisely the ways in which memory of the past is constructed and represented, thereby unwittingly contributing to the forgetting of the past, art in both Grossman and Adorno guards against this danger by reflecting incessantly upon the aporetic processes of memory. Art’s hermeneutic of memory, its capacity for remembrance, is relevant to Grossman and Adorno because it attempts to break the silence imposed on the Shoah both by certain (past) national-political discourses and a certain “obsessive focus on the unspeakable and unrepresentable”; moreover, it also articulates the utopia of non-identical individuality.

Keywords:

Grossman, Adorno, (historical genesis of) Auschwitz, anti-theodicy, memory, remembrance, literature, (ex)change.

Code [ID]:

CP201217V00S01A0009 [0003776]