Linguaculture, Volume 11, Number 2, 2020
Abstract & Keywords
The present article is based on the material of a keynote presentation that was delivered at the International Conference From Runes to the New Media and Digital Books, which took place at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi on 30-31 May, 2019. In order to make that material more coherent, the author of that presentation will add supplementary clues and comments, all meant to sustain the idea that the Old Germanic runes – although commonly considered to be just alphabetic signs – have peculiar features that resemble the ones of much earlier historical scripts, and even of prehistoric ones, such as the now much discussed Danube Script. The issues and illustrations of this paper may be of interest not only for linguistic and cultural studies, but also for the domain of European history.Abstract & Keywords
William Morris is extremely famous for his career as a designer and one of the founders of the whole movement of the Arts and Crafts in Late Victorian England. But the other side of his career, as a man of letters, is far less abundantly documented. While his Socialist utopia News from Nowhere (1890) is still read and commented upon today, far less attention has been given to his early poems, as well as his late romances written in a mock- mediaeval style which was to inspire the whole twentieth-century movement of “Fantasy” literature.The article focuses on Morris’s partly neglected love of letters, both in the sense of literature as a whole, and of individual letters. Morris loved the letter as a writer, but also as a visual artist: from an early stage of his career, he practiced calligraphy as leisure, before turning to book-printing as a professional activity in the last years of his life. This love of letters is studied on the basis of a particular case-study: his production of a calligraphic and illustrated version of the mediaeval Persian poems of Omar Khayyam, the Rubbayiat, in their English translation by Edward FitzGerald (1859). Aside from his passion for letters, in both their graphic and poetic dimension, Morris’s work on the Rubbayiat shows how deeply intercultural and intermedial his inspiration was. He recreated for the English readers of the Persian poet a visual world which borrowed from his other creations in the field of textiles, carpets, wall-papers, etc., and brought together East and West in a completely hybrid visual creation. It is those eminently cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary sources of inspiration that the article unravels.Abstract & Keywords
If the history of the English language is the story of its written texts, the same holds true for the history of the Romanian language, and in both cases the first grammars played a major part in the shaping up of the respective vernaculars. The paper proposes a comparative approach to the beginnings of codified grammars in English and Romanian, with a focus on those that are deemed to be the first major works– Robert Lowth’s A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) and Samuil Micu and Gheorghe Şincai’s Elementa linguae daco-romanae sive valachicae (1780). This approach considers topics such as why grammars might have been desirable in the eighteenth century (the political factor), and the functions of ‘grammars’, which are relevant in both cases; what language was actually codified, as well as the role of Latin in this enterprise, since it is worth noting that while English and Romanian belong in different language families, Latin was a formative element in both, ever since the territories of the two respective countries marked the North-Western and South-Eastern borders of the Roman Empire.Abstract & Keywords
As tattoos are both drawing and text that imprint the epidermis in inky arabesques of Delphic symbolism, Punch or The London Charivari acted, for more than one-hundred and sixty-one years (1841-2002) as the sharply witty, bitterly satirical chronicle of its own time. With a weekly circulation of approximately 50,000 – 60,000 issues in the mid-Victorian period, Punch became one of the most influential journalistic witnesses in mid-Victorian Britain, renowned for its unique sense of humour, audacious approach to current social and political matters and, most of all, for an unprecedented mastery of caustic illustrations, in a fresh approach to capture and caricaturise the spirit of the epoch, equally unprecedented in its dynamism and expansion. Although throughout the 1840s the magazine built its popularity more on political analysis than on satirical drawing, ”Punch's Pencillings” would turn the magazine into a vivid fresco, whose inimitable touch and magnetism have come to be osmotically associated with
John Leech (1817-1864). With his undeniably remarkable artistic touch he managed not only to define the overall architecture of the magazine, but also to create a new understanding of humorous drawings, introducing the world to the concept of 'cartoon' as we all know it today. This article examines a selection of his three-thousand drawings published in Punch, in an attempt to recompose, through curved charcoal lines, the jigsaw of what Henry James coined as “newspaperized world,” at times when, as Lucy Brown argues, Britain was forging the modern concept of news. It is not only the social, cultural and political milieu that interests us, but also the extratextual implications of a visual appearance and narrative that pervaded the literary scene, as nineteenth-century journalism shared its boundaries with the realm of literary fiction.
Abstract & Keywords
The Jewish diaspora quickly became one of the most notable immigrant groups in the American context. Faced with an arduous process of assimilation and acculturation, as exiles, Jews in America felt the pressure of the difficult choice between preserving their tradition and adapting to the new pragmatism and materialism that their new circumstances required. The issue of accelerated assimilation and loss of Jewishness became a real concern. As such, initiatives such as the one proposed by the YIVO Institute of a contest for autobiographical writing belonging to Jewish immigrants, dedicated to protecting Jewishness, offered a forum for personal written histories, submitted in different languages, but united through their English translations. Autobiography, as an essentially American genre, constituted an auspicious venue of expression, thus aiding the communal efforts of (re-)shaping and (re-)defining what it meant to be a Jew and what it meant to be a Jewish-American.
Abstract & Keywords
The paper intends to explore Elizabeth Bowen’s stylistic choices in her wartime short story, The Demon Lover (1945), wherein the experience of war is rendered in gothic form as a supernatural occurrence. Bowen’s predilection for framing aspects of war in an inverted manner is well-documented in such novels as The Heat of the Day (1949), and her appeal to the fantastic is part of an Irish tradition, ranging from Bram Stoker to John Banville. The paper attempts to analyze the way in which the gothic mode, particularly at the level of language, contributes to a deconstruction of the war experience and a re-examination of the psychological horror of the Other. To this end, the paper employs theoretical concepts pertaining to the sphere of the “war gothic”, while also placing emphasis on modernist theories of style, specifically as they relate to Bowen’s “willfully tortuous syntax” (Teekell 61) which has an almost physical, claustrophobic effect on the reader.Abstract & Keywords
One of the most subtle and complex oral literatures, Australian Aboriginal literature, still keeps meaning covert to Western readers, despite its ever-growing popularity and prolificity. As an introduction to an ongoing research into orality in Australian Aboriginal Literature, this paper aims to focus on a number of reasons which, while make Aboriginal stories more palatable for Western culture, distil original meaning of concepts, beliefs and traditions. In other words, what are some of the elements which hinder source – reader communication when it comes to Australian Aboriginal literature? The focus of this paper is meaning transformation through layers of interpretation, starting from an original performance of a story, with its syncretism of art forms. It is well worth it to explore such development of meaning, from performance to oral translation into English, with its later written form, to ultimately broken-down fragments covert within poems or novels. It is of no wonder Western readership comes up against difficulty in grasping meaning from Australian Aboriginal literature, as our own understanding of universal concepts, such as time, space, spirituality is so fundamentally different. There are, however, valuable lessons to be learnt and any effort will yield reward.Abstract & Keywords
This paper follows the way in which the filmography of the movie director John Ford presents cultural icons. We discuss the symbolism of these images and their cultural significance in the larger context of the West as a cultural area and American culture in general. Ford’s sensibility had one foot in 19th century American thought and feeling, and the other in the 20th century. We argue in favor of the idea that John Ford is a myth-builder and a visual image-maker whose contribution provided the foundation of a romantic, heroic America and the forging of American national character.
Abstract & Keywords
Pete Seeger would have turned one hundred and one on May 3 of this year. To commemorate these ten decades plus one year, I would like to look at eleven of the most remarkable aspects of Pete Seeger’s life, work and legacy. This paper will examine the cultural impact and oral tradition of the music, songs and books of Pete Seeger. This legendary folk musician's career spanned eight decades and touched on many of the key historical developments of the day. He is responsible for some of the iconic songs which have not only helped define American culture, but even beyond. Seeger was also a pioneer in a number of fields, using his music to propagate political convictions, ecological themes, civil rights, world music, education, etc. The folk singer also had his finger on the pulse of a number of developments in American history and culture. He was friends with a number of prominent musicians and artists and influenced an entire range of younger musicians and activists.
Abstract & Keywords
This paper outlines reading strategies to help map Hart Crane’s book-length poem, The Bridge, as a repository of American runes and writing. Contextualizing the poem in the philosophical, historical, and popular culture that influenced its creation, we can examine Hart Crane’s linguistic condensation, puns, and etymological play as techniques for balancing the clash between eternity and secular history upon which America was founded, rehearsed in The Bridge in the clash between secular a-temporality and the historical moment.
Abstract & Keywords
I intend to explore Philip Roth’s strategy of affirming youth as core value among his major themes revealing the experience of aging, illness and loss by revealing its particular framing in the novels of his later work. I shall analyze the contexts that connect youth to vitality and survival, revisiting some key moments in the long imaginary biographies of his notorious characters David Kepesh and Nathan Zuckerman. Although central in Roth’s work, youth has been commonly investigated in connection to allegories that anchor the writer’s oeuvre in a territory marked by nostalgia, loss, and a sense of impending vital exhaustion. My aim is to isolate this issue more clearly and focus on its specificity rather than its connectivity.
Abstract & Keywords
In this paper I aim at looking at some of the themes that Gloria Anzaldúa approaches in her poetry. As all the authors representing and writing on behalf of the American ethnic minorities, she is especially concerned with defining the cultural identity of her people; thus, she focuses on the cultural profile of the American Chicanos and, at the same time, on the relationship of her people with the whites. The poetess is not only interested in exploring her ethnic identity, she is also preoccupied with feminism; actually, she aims at articulating the figure of the New Mestiza, the Chicana woman that fights for liberation from both the whites’ oppression and that of men. One of the recurrent concepts in Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetry is that of the border, which is explored from a(n) (inter)cultural perspective and which is used for defining the identity of the American Chicanos.
Abstract & Keywords
As an object, the book has a material condition. On the surface, it is a collection of printed leaves held between two covers. The graphics, colours and design are aspects partaking of its aesthetic dimension. However, beyond this materiality, with all its aesthetic qualities, the book has an intrinsic capacity of undergoing changes in its status. Gabriel Liiceanu, a Romanian philosopher, argues that the book is an imploring object. It begs to be opened, read, and thus brought to life. Therefore, the book is an object with a special fate, which necessarily depends on the whims and moods of the Reader who, by merely opening and reading it, changes its ontological status, breathes life onto it and saves it from an improper state of being, as Liiceanu argues. The book’s status as an object is exceptional in this situation. As an object, the book is a treasure trove. The big drama of any book is that of being sentenced to a life in prison between its covers, while its big fortune is to become a spiritual and cultural presence in the mind and soul of the Reader.
BOOK REVIEW