Contents

 

 

Silvia Florea – Notes on the Romanian Translations of Ezra Pound’s Poetry

Clementina Mihăilescu – The Saint – Artist Relationship in Iris Murdoch’s “The Black Prince”

Alexandra Mitrea – The Dramatic Works of Thomas Stearns Eliot

Adriana Neagu – Author versus ‘Scriptor:’ Poststructuralist Doctrines Revisited

Daria Răhăian – A Parallel Approach to Tennessee Williams’ “The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore” and “Man Bring This up Road”

Nicoleta Răileanu – Huxley the Poet: French References and Influences

Ana-Karina Schneider – A Typological Study of the Problem of Gender in Jane Austen’s Novels

Cristina Şandru – “Crime and Punishment” – A Study of the Significance of Transgression in the American Drama of Mid-Twentieth Century

Andreea Teodorescu – Passive Constructions in English and Romanian: A Contrastive Approach

Lucia Ţăţulescu – Does Distance Education Work?

Sorin Ungureanu – Newspeak and the ‘Great PC’

Doina Zaharia – Italian Influences in the English Literature of the Renaissance

Adriana Neagu – Images of America in Scandinavia

 

 

Abstracts

 

"Notes on the Romanian Translations of Ezra Pound's Poetry"

 Florea, Silvia

Abstract: The significance of this comparative approach to verse translation tends to get lost unless the noble purpose these translations into Romanian serve is taken into consideration. Whenever we consider the translations offered to us, we are inevitably to engage in act of discrimination, ultimately leading to some conclusions.The critique is aesthetic, the conclusion subjective and the process is sometimes only an act of instinctive discernment. A Pound poem sounds excessively triangular because, for all their polish, Pound's poems are unfinished; the parts are highly finished, but they require the reader to compose and complete them, the poem is static and may be blank until it is understood when it becomes dynamic and delivers its charge.

 

Keywords: untranslatability: excellency; tonality; "direct treatment of the thing"; colloquialisms; exigency; uninspired; transposition; polish; improvisations.

 

 

“The Dramatic Works of Thomas Stearns Eliot”

Mitrea, Alexandra

 

Abstract: The paper explores T. S. Eliot’s dramatic works from the point of view of the playwright’s own theory of poetic drama as well as from the perspective of the pattern and the underpattern noticeable in his plays. With regard to Eliot’s theoretical views on poetic drama, the paper investigates Eliot’s essays on the dramatic works of various playwrights, mainly Elizabethan, as well as on his theoretical studies focusing on the nature of drama. In its final section, the paper investigates Eliot’s dramatic works which were meant to embody his theory about drama according to which, what characterizes poetic drama is “a doubleness of action, as if it took place on two planes at once”. The paper sheds light on this doubleness of action which translates into a dual structure manifest in all Eliot’s plays.

 

Keywords: poetic drama, objective correlative, doubleness, pattern, underpattern.

 

 

“Author versus ‘Scriptor’: Poststructuralist Doctrines Revisited”

Neagu, Adriana

 

Abstract: Reading Roland Barthes’s iconic essay ‘The Death of the Author’ against American novelist Paul Auster’s prose, The Invention of Solitude,the article contrasts the critic’s discoursal approach to writing to Auster’s constructive vision of self-referentiality, based in the transcendental and the contingent. It implicitly addresses the limitations and excesses of postructuralist linguisticity, its doctrinal and reductive aspects.  Considering alternatively the refinements to textuality contributed by the Derridean ‘mark’, I argue that discourse in Auster’s piece articulates itself as the ethical space responsible for the fullness of the writing process.

 

Keywords: discourse, subject, authority, authorship, meaning, presence, style, design, voice, identity

 

 

“Crime and Punishment: A Study of the Significance of Transgression in the American drama of Mid-Twentieth Century.”

Sandru, Cristina

 

Abstract: The article proposes to investigate the significance of guilt and transgression as it is embodied in a number of representative post-war American plays. Starting from a discussion of ‘crime and punishment’ as they emerge in modern Western consciousness (from Paul Claudel’s and T. S. Elliot’s Christian drama to the absurd of Beckett, Ionesco or Genet), the article then explores the theme of metaphysical culpability in a number of representative plays by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee and Sam Shepard.  This dialectics of ‘crime and punishment’ assumes different forms in the plays discussed, and the article engages these under several sub-headings: the struggle to evade a just but destructive punishment; guilt and punishment as redemptive; sin and punishment as symbolic of an absurd universe. 

 

 

“Newspeak and ‘The Great PC’”

Ungureanu, Sorin

 

 

PART I begins by introducing the readers into the cultural and political context in which political correctness emerges and develops; deconstructivism is associated with the diverse instances in which -isms become known and identified as the source of discrimination exerted throughout history by the DWEM against “the various minorities [...] whose members have been the victims of...” – ableism to. . . weightism (“Prelude. Postmodernism and Civil Society”).

The first chapter (“1. The Quakes of the Century”) analyzes the historical shift (westward) of the global centers of power (South Asia – the Middle East – the Mediterranean – Western Europe – America...) and the American performance as a superpower in the 20^th century, within the more general phenomenon of globalization.

The next chapter (“2. Democracy: Win Some, Lose Some”) puts on display the history of American democracy, beginning with the Constitution and further amendments, till the time of the two World Wars and the subsequent Cold War, and the social movements of the 1960s; although “the gradual historic success of liberal democracy against its rivals proves the power of democratic ideas and the exhaustion of alternative ideologies”, it becomes apparent that political correctness is, hopelessly, the adversary of the American democratic system itself.

The third chapter (“3. Correctness and Its Evolution”) probes inside the concept of correctness and its manifestations after WW2: around the time of the 50^th anniversary of the Allies’ victory – a time that coincides with the apex of the political correctness movement – heads of state and government openly and publicly express their excuses for past atrocities committed by their predecessors.

There are three concepts that are essential to the proper functioning of a democratic society (“4. Tolerance – Respect – Freedom”); unfortunately, the advantage of one will eventually bring about the disadvantage of another – and that appears to be the greatest challenge of them all that today’s governments have to cope with.

The last chapter included (“5. To Supply Rights”) tackles the issue of how to provide the sine qua non citizens’ rights, without upsetting the social balance: “The passion to regulate down to the finest detail of people’s lives can lead to infringements of personal liberty. And infringements of personal liberty are easy to begin, but hard to stop”.

 

Keywords: political correctness; DWEM; discrimination; minorities; -ISMs; globalization; democracy; tolerance; freedom; rights)

 

 

“Italian Influences in the English Literature of the Renaissance”

Zaharia, Doina

 

Abstract: At a time when Italian culture was harshly criticised by the English Puritans on moral grounds, Italian poetry and prose were greedily assimilated into the emerging English literature. The adoption by Wyatt and Surrey of the Petrarchan sonnet and of blank verse into the mainstream of court poetry inaugurated an age of imitation, translation and plagiarism that generated what is now generally acclaimed as the English literature of the Renaissance. The present article is a comparative study of the Italian and English verse, prose and drama of the sixteenth century that foregrounds both the obvious influences and filiations, and the subtle poetic conventions that enabled even the minor Elizabethan writers to achieve the effect of freshness and sincerity. Genres as diverse as the sonnet and love lyrics, the pastoral, madrigal, satire, religious and political pamphlet, literary criticism, the chronicle, travel book, novella, drama and commedia dell’arte were made available by extensive translation from the Italian (and, occasionally, French), as well as in the original. As a result, echoes of the poetic Italian and French voices sounded uninhibited in the occasional plagiaristic transcriptions of the Elizabethan lyrical enthusiasts. Moreover, Italian prose generously nourished the English drama of the Renaissance with subjects and plots, motifs, situations and characters, repartees and funny allusions, witty or sarcastic remarks, which the magnificent Elizabethan plagiarist unscrupulously feasted upon. The Elizabethans’ works are full of reminiscences of Italy in plots, places and customs. The continuous descriptions of theatrical performances or the phrases evoking a glimpse of gardens, palaces, cities, rivers or of actors, musicians and dancers revealed to the Englishman of the period the Italy which he learned to know in spirit and love. What this intensive exchange and the consequent reinvigoration of poetic form amounted to was nothing short of the genesis of modern English literature.

 

Keywords: Italy, Renaissance, sonnet, pastoral, criticism, disputes, satire, pamphlet, novella, comedy.