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The novel The Omen is set within a time journey having as a starting point the eighth century BC and proves itself a captivating mythical drama. The main character is inspired by the biblical prophet Iona from the Old Testament. The biblical texts directly referring to this apparently insignificant prophet are scarce. What gives substance to the novel is the author’s effort to offer the reader the background and spirit of the epoch. The particularity of the novel is given by the sequencing of the events narrated by the story-tellers followers of the prophet, starting with his daughter Esther, and continuing with his granddaughter Hulda followed by other descendants for several centuries. The author’s ingenuity is proved by the use of those voices, vaguely sketched entities, by means of which the thread of the story is conveyed over ages. An artifice in the narrative strategy is the outlet from the time of the story and the time of the story-telling: some discretely mentioned details draw the reader’s attention to the fact that he left behind the ancient events and finds himself in the Middle Ages, then in the interwar period, and later even in the present technological era of internet and mobile cell phones. Dominated by the biblical myth with spiritual, philosophical, esthetic stakes, this novel can be considered a warning for the ever more desacralized society, often facing the struggle for survival, a fact illustrated even by the time of the publishing of the literary work, whose title gets an anticipatory value.
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The purpose of this enquiry is to illustrate the way in which numerous poetic works were dedicated to the man and the creator Constantin Brâncuși by some writers from Gorj, whose admiration the artist enjoyed directly through their inserting of various brâncușian concepts in the sphere of literary creations. (Re)reading the aforementioned poems that have in the foreground both the creator's philosophy of life and the unmistakable artistic style of his works is always an occasion for joy. Moreover, it is proof that the artist was and still is esteemed by his fellow Gorj dwellers, and that his oeuvrestands the test of time and lives on, through literary creations, beyond the opinions, comments, ideas or malicious assumptions sometimes made against him, Brâncuși being the one who managed to revolutionize the sculpture of the 20th century. If the universal dimensions that render the archetypal images of Brâncuși's works of art are based on the communion of the individual self with the universe at large, then we can say that the village, as an exponent of values and traditions, represents, in the conception of Gorj poets, a symbiosis between the material and the spiritual worlds. Gorj poets still see the artist today as a representative of a rural universe that in time proved to be the key to understanding the Brâncuși universe. A testament to that is the fact that all the lyrical creations in which the image of the village appears have an enchanting force. Therefore, those lyrical creations will be analysed in which Constantin Brâncuși becomes the exponent of the entire Gorj cultural and literary scene. Moreover, we reiterated the idea that the artist did not fade into forgetting and that he has transcended the irreversible passage of time. Equal in importance, but different in terms of complexity, we consider that the lyrics of Gorj writers tend to suggest a closeness to Brâncuși-the man and Brâncuși-the artist. The existence of the monumental Ensemble in Târgu-Jiu can be an additional reason to strengthen the idea that the artist's spiritual will was "signed" years ago, and some literary personalities - whom we may consider Brâncuși’s literary "heirs" - are the ones who dedicate numerous creations to him, as a sign of high appreciation for his works and for the one who was and still is the emblematic figure of the county, of which every Gorj citizen should be proud.
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The three volumes of Romulus Rusan’s masterpiece A Journey to the Inner Sea describe the journey to the Mediterranean Sea the author and his wife undertook under the auspices of the Herder Prize awarded to his travelling companion Ana Blandiana in 1982. The trilogy presents a geographical survey of the great cities they visited and which is depicted on the cover map of the 1986 first edition. The first volume starts in Vienna, Austria and follows with descriptions of Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Turkey. The second volume picks up from Turkey and ends up in Greece and it is followed by a third volume continuing with Greece and ending up in Egypt. The travelling writers’ intent is in discovering the culture and the daily life of the places they visit. The chosen route has been documented with maps and atlases six month in advance of the trip, and researching history books, art albums and other travelers’ journals (i.e. NicolaeFilimon and Gustave Flaubert). Explorers’ interest is in visiting as many museums, palaces, churches, monasteries, temples and artefacts that speak about and confirm the knowledge the explorers found in other history books and art compositions. The trip unveils ancient civilizations of which the authors seems to have ample cultural and historical knowledge. Greece and Turkey in particular provide genuine opportunities for travelling back in time and for encountering numerous mythological, legendary and literary references. The trip appears as an alert 13,000 km journey over a three-month period that involves more than six countries and their cities and metropoles, and which stimulates the readers’ curiosity to see all those intriguing places, but also somehow leaving the feeling of longing for ever seeing them again. In fact, it is a cultural and spiritual journey with a strong literary character that pleads convincingly for art as a form of survival in the face of time.
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This piece of writing focuses on the theme of ‘Otherness’ in Amy Tan’s novel ‘The Valley of Amazement’ but from an opposing view now, that of a genuine woman and mother who skillfully struggles to mingle and adapt to the Chinese way of life proposing a cultural theme now, that of the Courtesan Houses in China. The balance switches for the time being. We are dealing in the reversed In-group (the genuine Chinese) and Out-group (Lucia Minturn, born American and who came to China in the hope to marry the father of her daughter, Violet). The article brings the following themes to the center of attention: assimilation, ethnicity, family, prostitution, Chinese and American worlds. The article underlines the alterity between the In-group and the Out-group. The connection is made by Violet, who, as a regular half-Chinese, is hesitant to learn about her Chinese origins. We focus on the constant gap between Lucia's life and Violet's. What is spectacular about this novel is Lucia's return to America and Violet's staying in China.
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The purpose of this article is to debate upon the term "foreshadowing" in regards to screenplays and to emphasize its importance in the construct of the script. The article takes into account: the definition of the term; the various types of foreshadowing with exemplifications – Chekhov’s Gun, Prophecy, Flashback, Symbolic Foreshadowing, Red Herring; the different ways of foreshadowing by means of resorting to different clues – visual clues as a means to achieve the specific type of foreshadowing called Chekhov’s Gun, or the special type of foreshadowing called The Red Herring, innocent verbal clues; explicit verbal cues that stand out and musical cues; prominent exemplifications of foreshadowing in different screenplays; a somewhat detailed but not exhaustive exemplification of foreshadowing in the German science-fiction thriller TV series Dark; foreshadowing vs. reincorporation and it concludes by stressing the importance of foreshadowing in the screenwriting landscape.
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The stories about the "Wassertal" in the northern Romanian Forest Carpathians have not only fascinated the inhabitants of the region, but also famous writers who have always tried to collect the stories and tales from the "Wassertal". The most famous writer of this area, who made this project his goal in life, is the German-speaking ethnologist, theologian and writer, Anton-Joseph Ilk. His book "Die mythische Welt des Wassertales" includes a remarkable collection of legends and stories from the region, presented in their orally transmitted stories. The main themes of the stories naturally include customs and traditions, whereby certain values, principles and charity were passed on not only to the children and grandchildren.
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“A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” envisages James Joyce’s attempt to transfer his life experiences into language. The author is well known for his breakthrough in resuscitating language and making it reflect features of mental activity, inner turmoil, and perception. Written in the form of an autobiography, the creation contours the profile of a young Catholic Irishman and his intellectual evolution from boyhood to adulthood. The outcome work, considered as a landmark of modernism, puts language front and centre as the pervasive power in constructing the rebellious youth, Stephen Dedalus. The metaphoric language creates, throughout the novel, various instances of symbolic forms of feelings and attitudes. This study highlights the most prevalent similes as linguistic ornamental devices and essential tools for conceptualizing reality. Further on, we intend to examine the strategies used by two Romanian translators, Frida Papadache, in 1969, and Antoaneta Ralian, in 2012, to render how the character's uneven linguistic expression fully develops in body and mind. The retranslation hypothesis states that subsequent translations manage to be closer to the intentions and form of the original text. Our primary purpose is to use contrasting instances of the same source text paragraphs in gathering sufficient evidence for proving the question.
More...Hindi Dalit Autobiographies and Their Engagements with India’s Past and Present
Life writings had time and again been used as source material for historical research both in the West and the various literary cultures of South Asia. Considering the absence and a deliberate, socially conditioned erasure of Dalit history from the mainstream narratives of Indian historiography, some scholars have introduced the notion of viewing Dalit life writings as exercises in history writing. This article explores several Dalit autobiographies as instances of engagement with the process of constructing history of Dalit communities in India. Starting from this premise, it undertakes a preliminary analysis of various narrative strategies employed in Hindi autobiographies by Dalit authors in the hope of revealing the nature of their engagements with India’s past and present. The study presented in this paper is based on four relevant examples of prose in Hindi—by Kausalya Baisantri, Sushila Takbhaure, Omprakash Valmiki, and Sheoraj Singh Bechain.
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Mo Yan’s work has been widely considered a Chinese type of magic realism, this label also alluding to the total reshaping that took place in the 1980s in China’sncontemporary literature, due to an unprecedented opening to western culture, especially in the humanities. Nevertheless, labeling always does more harm than good, so the critics, especially in China, are divided into two opposing groups, with views often dismissive of each other, concerning Yan’s style. One group tends to regard the author as living proof of the huge influence of the West, while the other one emphasizes that receiving western influences was just a short spell of madness at the author’s beginnings, and that as he matured, he returned to the Chinese tradition in composition and style. Both positions are exaggerated, and this paper tries to set a few guiding lines concerning the influence of magic realism on Mo Yan’s work and conciliate some of these rather groundless controversies.
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This study analyses Matéi Visniec’s volume Caragiale is to blame (2019),a reverence to his first literary Master. Visniec confesses that he had the impulse of becoming a writer while reading and rereading Caragiale’s short prose masterpieces. This postmodern literary project is built on the incessant intertextual interplay with Caragiale’s texts and characters, and involves a metatextual dimension, as words themselves become the main protagonists, playing the drama of the language crisis. Totally disinterested in the message and narcissistically turned to his own generative mechanisms, the idiolect of political discourse commits suicide live. Visniec’s project radicalizes Caragiale’s reforms regarding the forms of expression in literature.
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In the history of universal theatre, Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author stands out as one of the best known and most translated plays of the early 20th century. Despite its current popularity, the play did not have are sounding success on its debut. With what the critics called a succès de scandale, the play initially conflicted with the audience’s expectations, taking into account the dramatic story of the characters, but also the unusual prospect of staging a conflict between the characters and the actors. This has probably led the Italian playwright to modify the initial text several times between 1921 and 1925. Today, 100 years after its debut, Six Characters in Search of an Author is the play that proposes Luigi Pirandello in the gallery of the great European playwrights, together with Samuel Beckett or Eugène Ionesco. In addition to the drama of the characters, long subjected to interpretation by literary critics, I consider that the play is worthy of discussion in the current context due to the innovative dramatic techniques that combine the avantgarde and the absurd. Therefore, the present paper aims to examine those peculiarities of a type of theatre that intuits the Theatre of the Absurd of the mid-20thcentury: the elements of the metatheatre, the self-reflective discourse, the actant model, the absurd relation between fiction and reality.
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This paper demonstrates that T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land is a magic incantation to restorethe lost values of the Western culture on realistic foundations. The poem’s intertextuality,together with its versification are analyzed in order to show Eliot’s view on Western man’shistory: one of sin, fall and increasing decay. The main argument is that, through his poem, Eliotis attempting to restore humanity and its destiny away from the sad history in which it was castfrom the beginning.
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The article studies the main characteristics of A. Averchenko as a writer in the pre-revolutionary, post-revolutionary and emigration periods of his creativity, which was initially divided into journalistic feuilletons and two groups of humorous stories – every day with common life situations and works with grotesque and paradoxical plots. In later works during his emigration, the writer became a master of satire and humour at the European level. It is established that many of his works created in exile reached the level of world classics or were innovative in genre and style. The article defines A. Averchenko’s creative activity – organizational (as an editor and administrator of «Satyricon» and «New Satyricon»), literary (as a prolific author of humorous/satirical stories) and theatrical (as a director, screenwriter and actor of theatres «The House of Artist» and «The Nest of Migratory Birds»). It was found that the writer had a humorous attitude to life, including ridicule of his shortcomings. He is best characterized through public communication – his interviews, speeches, and private correspondence. It is concluded that the artist’s activity satisfied his vital need not only to be at the forefront of creative development of Russian and European literature but also to create a team of like-minded, talented authors, provide a fruitful atmosphere of creative work, fight censors, arrange financial success of print or theatre, as well as to conduct journalistic activities, to be a master of the feuilleton, who keeps his hand on the pulse of political events in the country and abroad, has observation and analytical skills.
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