| | Name | Surname | Institutional Affiliation | Email | Title of Paper / Poster Presentation | Abstract (about 50 words) | Session | | Adriana | Neagu | Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj | adrianacecilianeagu@gmail.com | Empowered Women – the Last Man: Global Cinema and Gendered Apocalypticism | Abstract:
The presentation is part of an enquiry into dystopian representations of women in current, global cinematic production. It seeks to address the ‘cultural logic’ and the new dynamics of gender roles constitutive of the condition of globality with particular emphasis on post-apocalyptic renditions. Pitted against the horizon of expectation of what is increasingly profiling itself as the ‘posthumanist age’, it sets out to explore the new poetics of female sensibility within the structures of the global imagination. Positing that apocalypticism is the prevalent mode of globality, I argue for the relevance of the congeniality between global cultural production and the so-called ‘global order’, the ‘cultures of apocalypse’ and ‘apocalyptic culture’. I observe ‘global malaise’ and the dominants of the dystopian global imagination in the mainstream productions The Hunger Games (2012) and Divergent (2014).
Key words: apocalypticism; dystopia; globality; global cinema; gender roles; female sensibility; the global imagination; The Hunger Games: Divergent.
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| Claudia | Novosivschei | Babes Bolyai University | claudia.novosivschei@gmail.com | Grandmother’s Country and Grandfather’s Country | In settler colonies, such as Australia, mapping the territory is an essential part in the construction of ethnic and gendered identities. The process is conducted in act, but also in science and mythology: the old and the new are established, values are assigned, and images are created, all which fall in the hands of Fiction.
This paper aims to explore how this process becomes gendered in David Malouf’s short fiction. What is a grandmother’s country? How does it relate to the grandfather’s settlement?
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| Michaela | Mudure | Babes-Bolyai University | mmudurester@yahoo.com | Ivy Litvinov: Identity and Writing | Ivy Litvinov (1889-1977) was an English-Russian writer and translator. This essay analyzes the unpublished stories by Ivy Litvinov which exist in the Hoover Archive at Stanford University. These fictions render the atmosphere of Stalinist Russia a seen by an apparently innocent narrator who gradually realizes the atrocious surveillance that characterizes the Communist system and discovers the lies deftly covered by an extremely efficient propaganda. | S1 |
| Georgeta Loredana | Voicilă | Muzeul Național al Literaturii Române (National Museum of Romanian Literature) | voicilaloredana@yahoo.com | Robe and Gendered Identities in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography. Causality, Contradiction, Ambiguity | Our paper is a case study dealing with the role clothes play in the shaping of gendered identities in Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Orlando: A Biography. It is well known that identity is one of the leading themes of the Woolfian narrative, interwoven within the textual binding and placed at the very core of the novelist’s creation. As for the matter of gender, Woolf’s prose is probably one of the most discussed by a variety of directions of the academic spectrum, including women's and queer studies. The matter of dress however, hasn’t been as fashionable, and has only known a true blooming in recent years. A profusion of works ranging from articles and studies to PhD dissertations and books emerged as to promote the links between Woolf’s fiction, her biography and sartorial practice as an intriguing subject of outmost interest.
In our paper we come to put together three of Virginia Woolf’s main obsessions, investigating the links between identity and gender, and clothing. We approach this subject through the close reading of one of her most popular novels, following three directions, as stated in the title. Causality refers to the way clothes determine the gender identity of a character, shaping thus their entire persona (from manners and way of acting to status and their role in society), as well as to the fantasy of self-fashioning one’s identity. Robes can reveal a character’s personality, and they can also dissociate between male and female genders, though more often than not, they have the exact opposite effect, creating ambiguity. This perspective implies aspects concerning cross-dressing, costuming, disguise, self representation and the other’s perception, etc. Finally, the contradiction referred to in this paper deals both with the contradictory role of clothes (hiding / revealing, constraining / liberating), as well as with Virginia Woolf’s own contradictory approach, hovering between satire, self-indulgent mockery, and addressing crucial issues and the professing of profound believes through symbolism and allegory.
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| Raluca-Daniela | Răduț | Babeș-Bolyai University | raluca_daniela_radut@yahoo.com | Norwegian Experimental Literature: Jan Erik Vold and the Concept of Concretism | This paper aims at presenting the idea of Norwegian concrete poetry as it is reflected in Jan Erik Vold’s literary work. In this sense, I make reference to three concrete volumes of poetry, namely: mellom speil og speil (Between Mirror and Mirror, 1965), blikket (The Gaze,1966) and kykelipi (1969). With respect to the concept of concretism, it is important to note that when dealing with Jan Erik Vold’s concrete poetry, his poems can be classified as follows: grammatical poems, ready-mades and nursery rhymes. Thus, through these categories attributed to concrete poetry, the Norwegian poet gives a note of novelty to the whole concept of concretism, and a variety of meanings attributed to this concept. | S2 |
| Nicolae | Alexandru | "Iorgu Iordan - Al. Rosetti" Institute of Linguistics / University of Bucharest | nicolae_bibi@yahoo.com | The Romanian non-finite modal configurations. Arguments for a uniform syntactic analysis | The goal of the paper is to show that:
(i) the non-finite modal configurations are uniformly monoclausal (as shown by clitic climbing and negation raising, among other diagnostics);
(ii) in spite of the different morphosyntactic realization of the complements of the modal verb (bare short infinitive, participle, supine), they are structurally isomorphic, in the sense that the non-finite complement projects the same “amount” of syntactic structure, i.e. v-VoiceP;
(iii) the [modal verb + non finite complement] is a restructuring configuration, characterized by a series of adjacency effects; our analysis suggests that these restructuring effects actually fall out of minimality considerations (locality effects on verb movement). | S3 |
| Elisabetta | Marino | University of Rome "Tor Vergata" | marino@lettere.uniroma2.it | Gender Roles and the Sexual Double Standard in A Superfluous Woman (1894), by Emma Frances Brooke | This paper will focus on a popular and controversial “New Woman Novel”, A Superfluous Woman, by Emma Frances Brooke, a socialist, a journalist, and an active member of the Fabian Society. As it will be shown, her novel forcefully contributed to challenging traditional male and female prerogatives, besides highlighting the ever-widening gap between gender expectations and reality in an era of profound transformations. | S2 |
| Éva | FORINTOS | University of Pannonia | forintos@almos.uni-pannon.hu | Expressing Third Space Identity | Expressing third space identity
Language is one of the resources available by which people can ‘present’ and ‘represent’ themselves, language has been offered as the most significant aspect of individual identity, it is a more typical representative of ethnicity and identity than ancestry, religion or residence. By mixing codes intentionally in their printed media, i.e. their community newspapers, bilinguals can construct and reconstruct a separate third space identity which relies upon the dissimilar cultural environment. For the study of language alternation in written discourse, Sebba (2014: 14) proposes the application of the methods and analyses of linguistic landscape researchers, and he names two techniques which can be a sign of “the degrees of integration or separation of languages a multilingual mixed-language text can include”. Moriarty (2014: 461) is of the opinion that “linguistic communities that are peripheral in nature or in some way marginalized offer a rich source for LL data”, since diasporic communities can express their sense of national and ethnic identity this way. Written discourse found in space can indicate special localities, for instance identity claims, which can comprise “the categorization of social actors into ingroup and outgroup members, into Self and Other” (Jaworski and Thurlow 2011: 9). The aim of this paper is to show that linguistic landscape research can provide valuable insight into some aspects of the linguistic situation of the Hungarian communities in countries where English is the dominant language by analyzing the semiotic landscapes via language contact manifestations found in the newspapers of these communities.
Jaworski, A and C. Thurlow. “Introducing Semiotic Landscapes”. Semiotic Landscapes – Language, Image, Space. Eds. Jaworski, A and C. Thurlow. Continuum International Publishing Group: London, New York. 2011. 1-40.
Moriarty, Máiréad. “Languages in motion: Multilingualism and mobility in the linguistic landscape.” International Journal of Bilingualism. 18.5 (2014): 457-463.
Sebba, Mark. “Researching and Theorising Multilingual Texts.” Language Mixing and Code-Switching in Writing. Approaches to Mixed-Language Written Discourse. Eds. Mark Sebba, Shahrzad Mahootian and Carla Jonsson. New York: Routledge. 2014. 1-27.
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