Linguaculture, Volume 2, Number 1, 2011
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Sorina Chiper
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania
Abstract & Keywords
The dominant pattern in the Western hermeneutics has been to view autobiography as an occasion for the celebration of the individual. This article tackles the dialectics between identity and entity, between self and other, and between genius and “everybody” in two of Gertrude Stein’s autobiographies: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and Everybody’s Autobiography. Drawing on associations between autobiography and photography, I highlight the performativity of Stein’s autobiographical self, suggest posing as a metaphor for the autobiographical act, and discuss Gertrude Stein’s move from the question of identity to the question of genius as entity.
Keywords: Gertrude Stein, posing, identity, entity, genius
Dana Bădulescu
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania
Abstract & Keywords
This paper looks into the artful way in which James Joyce fictionalizes his autobiography in his Künstlerroman A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Joyce projects his essentially artistic self onto the fictional character Stephen Dedalus, the namesake of the classical ‘cunning’ ‘artificer.’ In his turn, Stephen dreams of becoming Joyce and writing Ulysses. Thus, Joyce’s personal history and Dublin’s geography lose their recognizable ‘reality’ in a blueprint of the artist’s mind that charts a Dublin and a self-reshaped by his imagination.
Keywords: autobiography, fiction, artist, impersonality, patterning, structure
Nicoleta Stanca
Ovidius University of Constanta, Romania
Abstract & Keywords
The reader must not identify Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with James Joyce in every respect. For instance, Stephen is represented at Clongowes as a timid boy, conscious of his smallness and weakness. Conversely, young Joyce was keen on hurdling and cricket, won cups in sports competitions and earned the nickname “Sunny Jim” due to his cheerful disposition. This paper will trace autobiographical elements in the novel with the purpose to prove that they are meant not as mere recordings of particular autobiographical experiences but as instances of universality. Hence, the choice of the novel title, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Keywords: Stephen Dedalus; autobiographical elements; A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Daniela Doboş
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi, Romania
Abstract & Keywords
Bob Dylan is a contemporary icon of popular music and culture, one of the most influential Americans of the 20th century and America’s most important “song poet”. At the same time, there is perhaps no living person of whom so much has been written but whose bibliography remains so elusive. Not only this but, as Christophe Lebold writes, “the fundamental gesture behind Dylan’s oeuvre is indeed the permanent construction and deconstruction of himself”. The paper sets out to identify autobiographical influences in Dylan’s lyrics, which span five decades, down to the current “mix of inscrutability, flashed teeth, existential angst and deep sorrow, deadpan humour and dead-on breakdowns”, as a perfectly satisfactory coda to a remarkable half-century of music making.
Keywords: autobiography, poetry/lyrics, songwriting, identity
Cornelia Vlaicu
University of Bucharest, Romania
Abstract & Keywords
Although some critics do not even accept that Love Medicine is a novel at all, but a collection of short stories with the same characters telling the stories of their lives, it is clearly an identity narrative. This paper will focus on spaces of identity (re)construction in Love Medicine that reflect the tension between the mainstream white American culture and the Native American traditional one. The church, the pub, the car, the road, the bridge, or the reservation itself thus function as heterotopias, while the space of the autobiographical story functions as a utopia. The paper will discuss these spaces and their roles in the characters’ quest for identity.
Keywords: autobiography, Native American, identity, heterotopia
Rubén Jarazo Álvarez, Elena Domínguez Romero
University of the Balearic Islands, Spain; Universidad Complutense of Madrid, Spain
Abstract & Keywords
Translations, adaptations and reception of William Shakespeare and his works in many literary systems have been successfully analysed over the past two decades. However, there are still peripheral communities such as Galicia that refuse to review the role played by the English bard in the reconfiguration of their literary tradition in the twentieth century. In this article, we will examine the role of two Shakespearean adaptations written by Álvaro Cunqueiro (1911-1981) in the twentieth century. In addition, we will try to prove the value of both works as instances of veiled criticism of the dictatorial regime, while also hinting at the Galician writer’s and adaptor’s own biography.
Keywords: Shakespeare, Cunqueiro, Francoism, veiled autobiography and criticism
Irina Ghiorghiasa
Mihai Eminescu Highschool, Botosani, Romania
Abstract & Keywords
The paper focuses on the particularities of an auto biographical work, Norman Manea’s The Hooligan’s Return. In this work, the writer uses elements that are considered as defining for this type of writing and dramatic innovations in the way of organising the narrative material. An original idea Manea develops in a metaphorical way is that the native space is subsumed to the language space. This idea acquires complex meanings in this autobiographical text, built by evocation and intertextualization.
Keywords: autobiography, native space, intertextuality, narrative formulas
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Teodora Ghivirigă
Tereza Niţişor
