Meridian Critic

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Call for Papers

Sumar

B. Literatura, Tomul XVIII, Nr. 2, 2013

CONTENTS

 

I. CRITICISM. Body as/and Text	11
Onoriu COLĂCEL, The Body (Language) of “The Saboteur”: Obstructionism and Banditry  in the Digital Media Entertainment	13
Paromita DEB, Transgressive Sexuality and the Politics of Female Body in Early Modernity: A Study on the Subversive Body of the Duchess in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi .................................	22
Diana PRESADĂ, Modalităţi de reprezentare a corporalităţii în creaţia lui Beckett şi Antonioni .......................................................................	40
Sarat Kumar DOLEY, Writing on the Shame of the Flat Nose, Short Height and “Black” Skin .................................................................	51
Mihaela-Cristina LAZĂR, Bodies out of Bounds: Embodying the Monster in Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherry ………………………	58
Iryna GALUTSKIKH, Human Body Is A Sign: On the Semiotic Nature of Corporal Imagery in English Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction (A Conceptual Study) ……………………………………	71
II. EXEGESIS	88
Cornelia MACSINIUC, Touristifying the Nation: Liquid Englishness in Julian Barnes’ England, England ...................................................	90
Sorin IVAN, Exile as a State of Being: Taking Refuge in the Utopia of Words and Surviving through Poetry……………………………..	102
Nicoleta-Loredana MOROŞAN, La mise à nu de la ruse langagière comme dénégation du vice ……………………………………………….	117
Oana Elena STRUGARU, Grief and the Crisis of Meaning in Jonathan Safran Foer's Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close………………	126
III. REVIEWS	135
Ioana-Crina Coroi, Normele Imaginarului lingvistic în presa literară, Editura Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, Cluj-Napoca, 2013, 352 p. (I. C. CORJAN) .......................................................................................	137
La Francopolyphonie, no. 7, vol. 1/2012. L’interculturalité à travers la linguistique et la littérature, sous la direction d’Ana Guţu, Chişinău, 2012, ISSN 1857-1883, 342 p. (Ana-Maria CURELARU) …………………………………………………...	142
Onoriu Colăcel, Mediating and Capitalizing on Cultural Competence: The Contemporary British Novel, Editura Casa Cărţii de Ştiinţă, Cluj Napoca, 2013, 248 p. (Luminiţa-Elena TURCU)	149
IV. NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS	154

 

THE BODY (LANGUAGE) OF “The Saboteur” OBSTRUCTIONISM AND BANDITRY IN THE DIGITAL MEDIA ENTERTAINMENT

 

 

 

Onoriu COLĂCEL

Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania

onoriucolacel@yahoo.com

 

Abstract: The Pandemic sandbox video-game “The Saboteur”, released by Electronic Arts Games in 2009, addresses the pervasive 21^st-century terrorism concern. Factually, it is the same old grand-narrative of the (Western) world under siege. The game is worthy of a 2013 reassessment because of its candid elaboration on terrorism. The gamer is exposed to the video transubstantiation of the (terrorist) body into the site for the inscription of devious socio-cultural practices. The virtual corporeality is the embodiment of agency and politically motivated violence. The wide currency of the topic makes it particularly inflammatory, while playing such (political) games, a vocabulary of dissent and repression advances the ends of our beliefs and values versus theirs. The armed struggle behind whatever enemy’s lines rings the bell of familiar, on-going alarms. Conclusively, “The Saboteur” attempts to commit the issue of terrorism to the customary (violent) practices of the contemporary culture, as they are conveyed by the embodiment of the male ethos in digital media.

Key words: terrorism, video game industry, pop culture, public discourse, socio-cultural practices, male ethos, proxemics

 

 

Transgressive Sexuality and THE Politics of Female Body IN EARLY MODERNITY: A Study on the Subversive Body of the Duchess in Webster’s the Duchess of Malfi

Paromita DEB

Hijli College, Kharagpur, India

paromita00@rediffmail.com

 

Abstract: The modalities of conceptualizing corporeality shifted dramatically in the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages. The early modern body in drama was a stage in itself where political, religious, cultural and medical discourses intersected and merged. The paper intends to explore the contemporary medical, socio-cultural and theatrical obsession with the female body, which bordered on male voyeurism and complex politics involving the fantasy of controlling female sexuality. By studying together the interpretive conventions of the conduct manuals, the scaffolds of punishment, and the anatomy theatres, the paper argues that the tortured body of the Duchess in Webster’s Jacobean tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, can be understood as part of a subversive strategy employed by the playwright. In the conclusion, the paper proposes that, the play highlighted that the psycho-somatic modalities of conceptualizing gender and the one-sex model were no longer viable, and more importantly, that sexuality is flexible. Above all, Webster’s contemporary audience, the paper surmises, witnessed an epistemological shift in the empirical understanding of woman’s body and identity.

Key Words: corporeality, Jacobean tragedy, Webster, woman’s body.

 

ModalitĂŢi de reprezentare a corporalitĂŢii

în creaŢia lui Beckett şi Antonioni

Diana PRESADĂ

Universitatea Petrol - Gaze din Ploieşti

dianapresada@yahoo.com

Abstract: Beckett’s metaphysical theatre and Antonioni’s cinematographic work dealing with human alienation in modern society mark an important stage in the artistic evolution in the latter half of the 20^th century. One of their aesthetic innovations regards the manner in which heroes are conceived as both of them shift the focus from the traditional character delineation to corporeality which becomes a major means of expressing human condition and destiny. The transformation of the body into a meaningful sign of interiority led to the establishment of a new artistic paradigm that constitutes the purpose of our analysis.

Keywords: Beckett, Antonioni, corporeality, representation, comparison.

 

WRITING ON the shame of the flat nose,

short height and “black” skin

Sarat Kumar DOLEY

North Lakhimpur College, Assam, India

doelysarat@gmail.com

 

Abstract: Black is not beautiful. In fact, there is no such thing as “black beauty”. A nose is a nose when it is sharp, as sharp as the Brahmins’; otherwise, it does not qualify to be a nose at all. The women in the house and the men in the field will talk about the skin colour and the shape of the nose of a new-born baby. If the baby happens to be born “black”, this will result in a gradation closer to the lower side. If that baby is adorned with a flat nose, the chances are that it will be a baby that deserves to be born in the house of an enemy. The “black” flat-nosed baby grows up to be a short man (women excluded), and he grows up at his own risk. He is never thought of as someone capable of being anything close to a “normal” human being. He becomes an object of hatred and, at the most, an object of pity.  In this paper, the author attempts at reading some select pieces of oral and written literature of the Misings, a group of Mongoloid people that speak a Tibeto-Burman language and live in the eastern part of the Indian state of Assam. They sing and pray the glory of a beautiful body with reference to their political history and to the cultural implications of that political history.

Keywords: body, the Misings, “black” skin, flat-nosed, shame, prejudice.

 

BODIES OUT OF BOUNDS: EMBODYING THE MONSTER IN JEANETTE WINTERSON’S                    SEXING THE CHERRY

Mihaela-Cristina LAZĂR

Ovidius University of Constanţa

mihacryss@yahoo.com

Abstract: This paper explores aspects of bodily transgression and female monstrosity by looking at the construction of identity in Jeanette Winterson’s “Sexing the Cherry”. The analysis gyrates around feminist sociological approaches regarding the meanings inscribed upon the female flesh and tackles avatars and representations of the body: the size, aesthetics and strength of Dog-Woman’s body illustrate versions of active, transgressive and defiant femininity. I will pinpoint arguments in support of the idea that this novel is ultimately a novel about “limitless” bodies as metaphors for regeneration and for a feminist “persistence of memory.”

Keywords: the grotesque body, the abject, transgression, limit, identity, femininity, motherhood, the “Other”.

 

HUMAN BODY IS A SIGN: ON THE SEMIOTIC NATURE OF CORPORAL IMAGERY IN ENGLISH MODERNIST AND POSTMODERNIST FICTION

(a conceptual study)

Iryna Galutskikh

Zaporizhzhya National Universit, Ukraine

irina_galutskih@mail.ru

Abstract: The paper focuses on the semiotic nature of literary corporality, special attention being paid to the mode of conceptualizing human body by means of a conceptual metaphor - HUMAN BODY IS A SIGN - activated in the course of imagery system formation. The conceptual analysis, that implies the process of reconstructing conceptual metaphors in the literary text, has been applied to the research of English modernist and postmodernist literary prose. The results thus obtained have revealed the wide scope and specific ways of figurative semiotization of the human body in the poetics of modernism and postmodernism. Whereas the modernist vision of corporeal semiotics is mainly concerned with the role of the body in socializing, the one of the postmodernist period highlights the individual psychological states.

Keywords: corporality, human body, conceptual analysis, conceptual metaphor, semiotics, sign, literary text

TOURISTIFYING THE NATION: LIQUID ENGLISHNESS IN JULIAN BARNES’ ENGLAND, ENGLAND

Cornelia MACSINIUC

Ştefan cel Mare University, Suceava

corneliamacsiniuc@yahoo.com

 

 

Abstract. The present paper approaches Julian Barnes’ novel England, England in the light of Zygmunt Bauman’s metaphor of the tourist syndrome – a further explanation of his concept of  ‘liquid modernity’ –, examining the comic-satirical representations of the commodification of national memory and identity as an inevitable aspect of the process of globalisation, and the way in which the fictional project of the nation as theme-park highlights the challenges that postmodern tourism brings to the idea of authentic experience and of historical awareness.

Keywords: tourism, identity, memory, capital, theme-park, Englishness, liquid modernity, authenticity, otherness

 

EXILE AS A STATE OF BEING:

TAKING REFUGE IN THE UTOPIA OF WORDS AND SURVIVING THROUGH POETRY

 

Sorin IVAN

Titu Maiorescu University, Bucharest

sorivan@gmail.com

 

Abstract: In Ion Caraion’s poetry, exile is a recurring theme, of extraordinary poetic power. This power is rooted in the fact that, more than a theme, in Caraion’s case, exile is a state of being, the state of being of the poet in the world. His poetic universe must be viewed in relation to his life, a tragic existence, in a cruel and absurd history. From this perspective, the theme of exile reveals its complexity and tragism. It becomes acute after the poet’s final departure in Switzerland, in 1981, to the end of his life (1986), in a fierce communist period, when the totalitarian regime evolves towards its climax. In his last years, the poet lives, at paroxysmal intensity, the exile condition, in all its forms: the geographical exile, the linguistic exile, the exile in space and time, the political exile, the ontological exile, the inner exile. Poetry becomes a form of survival, the refuge in a utopia of words and in the transcendence of ideas, in the last, supreme, exile, the aesthetic exile, beyond time, beyond being and non-being. In the context of this thematic universe, of a tragic essence, Caraion’s poetry knows remarkable aesthetic metamorphoses, in an essentially expressionist key.

Keywords: exile, Caraion, political ideology, communism, ontology, utopia of words, poetic transcendence, Romanian litterature, expressionism

LA MISE À NU DE LA RUSE LANGAGIÈRE COMME DÉNÉGATION DU VICE

Nicoleta-Loredana MOROŞAN

Université Ştefan cel Mare, Suceava

nicomorosan@yahoo.fr

 

Abstract: The following paper is centred upon identifying the dimensions of the role played by the verbal ruse in nourishing the devouring vice of miserliness in Molière’s play L’Avare (The Miser), written in 1668. The nature of Harpagon, the character whose name has become in the French lexis synonymous of being “obsessively greedy and cheap”, can be summed up in one word naming a mania: parsimony. Although inherent to Harpagon, the ridicule of his mania remains unknown to himself. His unawareness is partly due to his constant refusal to talk about it. Words pertaining to the semantic field of “money”, such as “affluence”, “treasure”, “well-being”, “revenue”, “expenses”, “stinginess”, to name but a few, become taboo in Harpagon’s universe. Besides the avoidance of uttering the lexemes related to his obsession, the miser resorts to a wide array of cunning language contrivances meant to divert the attention of his entourage from his prevailing preoccupation with accruing his wealth. Among these there are the evasiveness through repetition and rephrasing, prevarication, dithering and equivocation.  By making use of the tools provided by textual linguistics, we shall single out the manifold shapes taken by miserliness when coming up to the surface of language in the Avare’s speech.

Keywords: miserliness,  unawareness, ruse, prevarication, dithering

Grief and the crisis of meaning in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close

Oana Elena Strugaru

Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava

oanas@usv.ro

Abstract: The present paper is taking a look at Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close by dealing with the crisis of meaning generated by trauma. After a traumatized experience, the individual is struggling with the impossibility of making sense of reality because his entire existence is coordinated by the absence of the one lost. In this context, the narrative gains an important role, as it is an endeavor to find meaning in an otherwise meaningless world. In this article we will analyze the story of Oskar Schell and that of his grandfather, Thomas Schell, who construct their world according to traumatic patterns. The conclusion we have reached is that only by a genuine contact with the other, as the interlocutor of a negotiation process, can the crisis of meaning, and in turn, the trauma, be overcome.

Key words: trauma, meaning, otherness, crisis