CP – Number 28 (2023)

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023)

Abstract:

This paper examines three poems by three American poets – W. D. Snodgrass, J. Berryman and A. Ginsberg who subscribe to the confessionalism of the 1950s and 60s being largely spared the complication of clinical depression which plagued the other three major confessionalists – Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. Not having a severe form of it – Snodgrass – has resulted in generally more light-hearted texts by them containing irony and yearning which differ in mood from the rather mostly bleak verses of the other three mentioned American poets. These three, however, were also perfectly capable of their own personal darkness represented in verse and in turn did not fail to scandalize with the content of some of their verses. The paper also discusses the power of sincerity in these autofictional poems vs what could have been mere authenticity of dissimulated lived experience. As such, it aims to dispel possible attacks of self-display or glorification, as well as of possible victimization that autofictive poets, including some of the ones under scrutiny, have come under.

Keywords:

autofiction, 1950s, confessional, irony, sincerity, authenticity.

Code [ID]:

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29081/cp.2023.28.01

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023)

Abstract:

This paper examines three poems by three American poets – W. D. Snodgrass, J. Berryman and A. Ginsberg who subscribe to the confessionalism of the 1950s and 60s being largely spared the complication of clinical depression which plagued the other three major confessionalists – Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. Not having a severe form of it – Snodgrass – has resulted in generally more light-hearted texts by them containing irony and yearning which differ in mood from the rather mostly bleak verses of the other three mentioned American poets. These three, however, were also perfectly capable of their own personal darkness represented in verse and in turn did not fail to scandalize with the content of some of their verses. The paper also discusses the power of sincerity in these autofictional poems vs what could have been mere authenticity of dissimulated lived experience. As such, it aims to dispel possible attacks of self-display or glorification, as well as of possible victimization that autofictive poets, including some of the ones under scrutiny, have come under.

Keywords:

autofiction, 1950s, confessional, irony, sincerity, authenticity.

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023)

Abstract:

The focus of the paper is upon a comparison of the language media in Bulgaria and the UK when talking about ethnic minorities, and more specifically on Roma in Bulgaria and Gypsies and Travellers in the UK. Applying the sociocognitivist approach within the Critical discourse studies (van Dijk 2016), I revisit one of the most frequent metaphors, i.e. the one related to War, used by the media at the beginning of the century (2001-2005) and in 2020-2022. The reason to select that particular device is the fact that metaphors reflect thinking patterns and emotions that people share and are conducive to the establishment of a generalized image of various phenomena, and, in this particular case, of an ethnic group. At the same time, I hypothesize that the pandemic would probably take media attention away from ethnic minorities and thus coverage of the groups would be scantier and the language, in case there are articles on Roma and Gypsies and Travellers, more neutral and void of metaphors. The corpus for the analysis at hand comprises some of the most popular dailies circulated online in Bulgaria and the UK. The analysis has shown that despite the time difference and the pandemic, the attitude and the language the Bulgarian and the British media use in their presentations of this ethnic group in particular has not changed significantly and has not been affected significantly by Covid-19.

Keywords:

media discourse, CDS, ethnic Other, Roma, Gypsies & Travellers, metaphors.

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023)

Abstract:

This paper provides an empirical analysis of the novel Autumn by Scottish author Ali Smith, published in 2016. Our study seeks to contribute to the understanding of the way the author has chosen to represent the cultural and generational gaps on the background of Brexit in the UK in her novel, by providing an in-depth stylistic analysis dwelling on the author’s linguistic choices. The applicative part of our study will provide a stylistic investigation of the selected literary text, bringing to the fore the main linguistic features and the symbols the author has chosen in order to depict the general state of the nation and to underline the divisions and the fractions born as a consequence of the 2016 referendum in the UK.

This study addresses several issues related to the cultural and generational gaps already existing in the pre-Brexit period in the UK, which are reflected in Ali Smith’s novel. Smith, who considers that all Brexit did was to reveal these gaps, underlines the fact that these misuderstandings and differences had already been there before the UK’s decision to withdraw from the European bloc.

The main objective of this paper is to provide a stylistic analysis with special focus on the symbols and symbolism identified in the selected literary text, be they people, marks, locations, or material objects, representing something beyond the literal meaning. Our analysis fosters a more in-depth understanding of the selected literary text, uncovering the hidden yet essential aspects of the novel.

Keywords:

Brexit, Brexlit, national identity, Stylistics, stylistic analysis, symbol, Autumn/autumn.

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023)

Abstract:

Within the hierarchy of the wider translational professions, it is commonly accepted that literary translators enjoy a privileged position. However, it is only comparatively recently that this recognition – in the form of international awards and prizes for translated literary works – has come to broader public attention. In the British context, two of the most prestigious literary translation awards are the Booker International Prize (relaunched in 2015) and the EBRD Literature Prize (first awarded in 2018). In recognising growing scholarly interest in literary translators themselves and their biographies, this contribution aims to contextualise the history and development of these awards, before focusing attention on the pre-award career trajectories of the prize-winning translators. Using information from a variety of sources, this contribution aims to see if there are any factors – such as age, gender, or educational background – that this high-performing set have in common. As such, it is planned to provide useful exploratory information on the composition of this select and talented group of literary translators.

Keywords:

cultural heritage, food, identity, cultural semiotics, resistance, cultural communication.

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023)

Abstract:

The article presents and discusses a mixed-method study whose aim is to find out how Harrods and Liberty, two luxury department stores in London (the United Kingdom) that are referred to as British cultural icons (visitbritain.com 2023), use modality that is expressed by modal verbs (e.g., can) in their discourse on sustainability. Methodologically, the study is based upon the literature (Aiezza 2015; Bu et al. 2020; Garzone & Catenaccio 2022; Kranich & Bicsar 2012), which argues that modal verbs play a number of important pragmatic roles in corporate discourse. Following the literature, it is hypothesised in the study that modal verbs in sustainability discourses by Harrods and Liberty are employed in a pragmatically similar manner. In order to verify the hypothesis, a corpus of Harrods’ and Liberty’s sustainability discourses is collected and analysed quantitatively in the computer program AntConc (Anthony 2022) to compute the frequency of the occurrence of modal verbs. Thereafter, the most frequent modal verbs in the corpus are examined qualitatively to establish their pragmatic roles in Harrods’ and Liberty’s sustainability discourses. The findings indicate that these discourses make use of the modal verbs will and can as boosters that contribute to a positive corporate image-building.

Keywords:

cultural icons, discourse, environmental sustainability, modal verbs

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023)

Abstract:

 The article is devoted to the consideration of some issues of an interdisciplinary field of knowledge that has emerged relatively recently at the junction of theology and linguistics – theolinguistics. The relevance of the research is determined by the demand for new interdisciplinary scientific developments explaining the mechanisms of explication of religious concepts in linguoculture, representing a comparative picture of the integration of linguistic conceptual and theocentric aspects of the description of different structured languages. The main purpose of the article is to present the experience of reconstructing the religious (Islamic) concept as a value-cognitive and ideological constant on the example of the concept of Haram/ХIарам in Russian and Avar linguistic cultures. At the same time, structural and substantive similarities and differences in the reflection and consolidation of certain religious content in languages are established, which makes it possible to build an adequate invariant model of the concept under study in the context of comparative theolinguistics. Similarities and differences may depend, first of all, on the specifics of a person's religious-linguistic consciousness, his perception of the world; secondly, they may be due to the discourse in which the concept is explicated, and therefore objectification takes place in different pictures of the world (religious, everyday (naive), etc.), cognitive-semantic, communicative-pragmatic and sociolinguistic mechanisms of realization of theological thought and modeling of religious communication in Russian-speaking Islamic discourse. Based on the assertion that common basic religious concepts are found in the national languages of different ethnic groups professing the same confession, it can be suggested that representatives of different ethnic groups find unity in spiritual terms, common in mentality, worldview and world perception; they are united by a single religious language, a single faith and love for a single God. The similarities in the compared linguistic cultures are represented by the conceptual component of the concept of Haram, the differences are determined by the value component and the scale of the semantics of the representative lexemes. The concept frame Haram is a concept with a multilevel structure, which creates, firstly, difficulties in reconstructing the concept, calculating the model of the concept under study, and secondly, difficulties in adequately translating it from Arabic into Russian and Avar languages. The interpretation of religious concepts seems to be a complex and ambiguous process, involving the complex application of linguosemiotic, linguoculturological and theoconceptual approaches in the study of linguistic phenomena.

Keywords:

theolinguistics, islamic discourse, language and religion, religious concept, concept modeling, verbal operator

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023)

Abstract:

As well as being an academic, Chicago-born Tony Ardizzone is one of the most prominent American writers of Sicilian origin. In 1985 he travelled to Morocco and settled in Rabat, where he taught at Mohammed V University. As he has elucidated in more than one interview, he had no intention of writing about Morocco, even though, during his stay, he kept a diary. He travelled to Morocco a second time, in 1988, and, when he came back, he decided to weave some of the stories he had already started to draft into one collection of fourteen interlaced pieces, entitled Larabi’s Ox: Stories of Morocco, re-issued in 2018 as The Arab’s Ox to mark the 25^th anniversary of the book publication.

As this essay sets out to demonstrate, by setting the collection in a foreign territory at the crossroads (between Europe, Africa, and the Arab world), by choosing American characters (not just Italian Americans) who are struggling to balance their identity in a country whose mores they do not fully understand, Ardizzone aims at casting light on the difficulties and the negotiations each person of ethnic origin has to grapple with, in his/her path of recognition in America.

Keywords:

Bridging Cultures, Italian Americans, Larabi’s Ox, Otherness, Stereotypes, Tony Ardizzone

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023) 

Abstract:

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the paradigm of neomedievalism in historical popular romance novels as the process of recreating the medieval past through a combination of character types and medievalist tropes accepted by the readership as iconic.

Considering that the typical readers of popular romance novels set in the Middle Ages are less preoccupied with historical accuracy, and neomedievalism does not prescribe specific gender tropes (Ford 2015), we shall explore the ways in which knights are developed as male characters, and whether the cultural assumption about the medieval past as “a time of unrelieved misogyny” (Ford 2015: 31) is subverted in heteronormative popular romance contexts. While popular romance novels are usually heroine-centric, the selected novels by author Alice Coldbreath feature the knight archetype repeatedly and prominently, with slight variations related to background, thus suggesting that the readers are particularly interested in a certain type of rugged, military manliness associated with a warrior physique, prowess in battle and honour.

Unlike other novels typical of the popular romance genre, Coldbreath’s novels do not take interest in war but in tournaments attended by the knights, predominantly war veterans with romantic interests, frequently as part of the audience, and sometimes as knowledgeable and invested supporters. Throughout this paper, our focus will be on the representation of the knight and its two ideals – chivalry and prowess –on display during tournaments, as well as on the dichotomy knight/lady (and implicitly, man/woman), and their manifestations in the medieval popular romance genre.

Keywords:

neomedievalism, knight, tournament, popular culture, historical romance

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023) 

Abstract:

This study focuses on some word-formative strategies used in the 21^st century newly coined English vocabulary and English borrowings in Bulgarian. The fast development of new technological products necessitated the coinage of new lexical units to name them. Following the definition, the term ‘neologisms’ is appropriately associated with new words or groups of words. The corpus of this study, however, consists of vocabulary which has already been included in the dictionaries of Standard English, and Bulgarian. This research tries to determine the processes of adaptation which the English borrowings undergo when they are adopted in the target language, as well as the whole word families created around the new word. Some loan words when they enter a foreign language begin to give rise to derived units. We claim that this technique helps the progress of the new vocabulary into the target language and its assimilation.

Keywords:

new words/ neologisms, zero derivatives, compounds, English, Bulgarian

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023) 

Abstract:

Used for centuries as means of clarifying certain phenomena and occurrences or the causes for unexplained events, myths have adorned  human reasoning with metaphors and allegories that kindle  imagination and hope.  Throughout historical eras, myths have been continuously adapted to the public, starting with ancient myths up to the modern ones that include urban myths, and they have served various purposes such as justifying the origin of words, rituals or even actions. 

Most of the myths with which we are familiar incorporate surrealistic creatures, among which one can discover vampires or werewolves, whose existence proves difficult to demonstrate since they inhabit the deserted realms of the Americas or the isolated European communities. Even though there is little evidence that Krampus haunted the houses of misbehaving children or that a reminiscent dinosaur swam in the Loch Ness, these mythical occurrences were reinterpreted within amusing approaches to taboo topics that might elicit wonder or cynicism. Such comic interpretations of one of the latest modern myths, the extra-terrestrials abducting cattle for experiments and the famous marks left by their UFOs, or the so-called “crop circles”, together with other Ancient or Medieval myths, can be identified in some of the episodes belonging to Murdoch Mysteries television series.

Keywords:

myths, humour, reinterpretation, Murdoch Mysteries TV series

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper:

Issue:

CP, Number 28

Section:

No. 28 (2023) 

Abstract:

The relation between culture and language can offer important information to the language learner. In fact, one way to understand a culture is through its language. Teachers of English as a foreign language (ought to) provide knowledge of the culture along with the mandatory curriculum items as a means to support students in bridging any cultural gaps. This paper aims to analyze English water and fire idiomatic expressions by describing their meanings and origins and identifying their Romanian equivalents. The research starts with a theoretical overview of the definitions and classifications of idiomatic expressions in the specialized literature, followed by the contrastive analysis of twenty English idioms functioning as verbs. More specifically, the description of their meanings and origins is provided, as well as the Romanian counterparts, and where possible, the origins of the translated items. The last part of the paper draws some conclusions on the significance and practical teaching implications of this analysis.

Keywords:

culture, teaching English, idiomatic expressions, water, fire, contrastive analysis

Code [ID]:

Note:

Full paper: