Contents

 

Marek Paryz – The Domanin of Discourse: Madness and American Writin in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century

Cristina Cuciureanu - “Who Am I? What Am I?”: Woman’s Identity in Shakespeare’s Time

Sorin Ungureanu – Newspeak and “The Great PC”

Doina Zaharia . Italian Motifs in Shakespeare’s Plays

Mihaela Mudure – Arturo Islas and the Tradition of American Realism

Silvia Florea – On the Translatability of Poetry: Ezra Pound’s Art of Translation

Andreea Dijmarescu – The Treatment of the Religious Problem in Iris Murdoch’s “The Bell”

Ana-Karina Schneider – The Woman in William Faulkner’ Work

Cristina Sandru – Placelessness and Alienation in Post-War American Drama

Alexandra Mitrea – Herzog’s Quest for Identity

Adriana Neagu – Writing Fiction in the Nineties: The Case of Paul Auster Postmodernity

Lucia Stoicescu – Does Distance Education Work?

Anca Iancu -  Teaching ESP (English for Specific Purposes) in a More Communicative Way

Lucia Zaharescu – Le Français Québécois: L’évolution et les composants du lexique

Mariana Deac – Le modèle balzacien réactualisé dans un chef d’œuvre roumain – «La Chronique de famille » de Petre Dumitriu 

 

 

Abstracts

 

“Newspeak and ‘The Great PC’”

Ungureanu, Sorin

 

PART II resumes the discussion with an excursion inside the US – more and more the realm of oddity than the commonsensic “melting pot”, or the “home of the braves / land of the free” that it used to be (“Interlude. Only in America”); the more conservative (be it only on account of their age) members of the American society feel that there is something wrong with their country, and we the bystanders overseas share the feeling.

The sixth chapter (“6. First Amendment”) of the paper delves into the implications of the conflict between the right of free speech, as stated in the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and the requests of those who advocate the importance of using non-offensive, minority-inclusive speech.

The next chapter (“7. Affirmative Action”) tells the story of positive discrimination, a set of social policies meant to render supplementary individual rights and career or education opportunities for the use of groups, communities or minorities that have been victimized in the past; the phenomenon flourished during the two terms when President Clinton was in office (1993-2001). What will happen when the semantics of one will not fit the expectations of another? is one of the questions in the next chapter (“8. What’s in a Word?”), where linguistic conventions of rather different natures, as well as unconventionality, collide; how to appropriately (correctly, i.e. non-offensively) name things in this world that is getting more and more crowded? The ninth chapter (“9. Verbal Hygiene, and More”) further analyzes the propriety of the words that post-modern people use, as seen by specialists – linguists, teachers, lexicographers and so on – in the context of the contemporary re-arrangement of the English language: “Verbal hygiene emerges whenever people reflect upon the language in a critical way.” The next chapter (“10. Newspeak: PC”) aims at concluding the study, by resting once more upon its subject-matter in itself: political correctness, seen as a new Newspeak; samples of politically correct speech can be found here, e.g. ‘aesthetically challenged’, ‘chronologically challenged’, ‘morally challenged’.

The paper ends with an insight (“Postlude. End of History?”) in the future of humanity as seen from the end-of-the-millennium fears: is the perspective of a world devoid of men a realistic one?, and how far is political correctness going to get?

 

Keywords:  political correctness; Newspeak; affirmative action; awareness; First Amendment; bias; verbal hygiene; -challenged; HERstory; discrimination)

 

 

"On the Translatability of Poetry; Ezra Pound's Art of Translation"

Florea, Silvia 

 

Abstract: One of the definitions offered by poetry is that it is untranslatable and what remains after the attempt, intact and uncommunicated, is the original poem; the paper focuses on how Pound's translations alter the definition and ideals of verse translation by having revolutionized the idiom of translation.

 

Keywords: recreation; imitation; appropriation; limitation; paraphrase; adaptation; ideogram; translation; Chinese; representation;

 

 

“Placelessness and Alienation in Postwar American Drama – A Character Study”

Sandru, Cristina

Abstract: The article focuses on a number of post-war American plays (Edward Albee’s Tiny Alice and Zoo Story and Sam Shepard’s Action in particular, as well as Miller’s Death of a Salesman and several Tennessee Williams plays) in order to examine the nature and forms of modern alienation and its effects on the individual’s sense of identity, his relation to the divine order and his involvement in social relationships. In characters such as Willy Loman, Jerry (The Zoo Story), Shannon (The Night of the Iguana) or Shepard’s Shooter, Jeep, Liza and Lupe, the playwrights dramatize the psychological and social schizophrenia characteristic of modern American culture: on the one hand, the loss of vitality and human bonding at the expense of material wealth and social status, and, on the other, the inadequacy of raw energy and impulse to the requirements of modern life-style.

 

 

“Herzog’s Quest for Identity”

Mitrea, Alexandra

 

Abstract: The essay focuses on one of the most representative characters created by Saul Bellow – Herzog, the hero of the eponymous novel. It sheds light on the factors which led to the crisis the hero is going through, pointing to the way in which this crisis reflects on Herzog’s identity. The essay also investigates the mechanisms to which Herzog – and modern man in general – resorts in order to get hold of himself and save himself from the all-engulfing nothingness which threatens one’s sense of self.

 

Keywords: identity, sense of guilt, crisis, schizophrenia, victimization, Jewishness, letters, rationalization.

 

 

“Writing Fiction in the Nineties: The Case of Paul Auster’s Postmodernity”

Neagu, Adriana

 

Abstract: This paper is an attempt at profiling the work of American novelist Paul Auster in the experimentally effervescent context of the 1990s.  Revisiting some of the most established categories of postmodernist poetics, it discusses Auster’s novelistic practice as it comes out of several key narratives, placing particular emphasis on The New York Trilogy, arguably his most demonstratively self-conscious novel. A pivotal element in the application of postmodernist categories to the textual analyses is Auster’s representation of alterity. Examining modes in which these texts challenge postmodernism’s shallow playfulness, I observe the writer’s negotiating of a voice, making a case for the viewing of Auster’s ‘postmodernity’ as a site of recuperative metafictionality. 

 

Keywords: postmodernism, discourse, fiction, poetics, reality, convention, intertextuality, identity, selfhood, consciousness.