Volume 16 (2019): Issue 1 (November 2019)

This article will focus primarily on the ending of The Awakening: A Solitary Soul, probably the most discussed and debated part of Kate Chopin’s novel. The ending can be best understood if the novel is read as an exercise in late Transcendentalist philosophy, with Gothic undertones, plus realist, social commentary and modernist concerns. Walt Whitman’s hedonism meets Guy de Maupassant’s melancholy in a novel that speaks about multiple awakenings (hedonistic, erotic, artistic) but also about several deaths, all necessary for the creation of a new female consciousness.

Death and the mass-media represent two recurring and connected presences throughout Don DeLillo’s fiction. While his canonical novel White Noise is themed around the paradoxical link between the pathological fear of dying and consumerism, his latest novel Zero K is about the deferral of death through cryonics. Using the analytical tools of critical theory, the current paper aims to analyse how the portrayal of death appears in the media saturated and consumer-driven environment in which DeLillo’s characters evolve, and how technology contributes both to fuelling the obsession with dying and to feeding the illusion of immortality.

This article examines the protagonist of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Helen Huntingdon/Graham) as an anomaly in the novelistic tradition. Helen Huntingdon is a character who decides for herself, without heeding the advice of her aunt and uncle (exercising “a will of her own”, “I take the liberty of judging for myself”). Helen Graham, in this manner, challenges society, the Victorian novel, and also the sentimental novel that preceded it. She suffers domestic violence at the hands of her husband and, in an extraordinary act of rebellion, courage and determination, abandons him, taking her son away with her. The author’s depiction of Helen’s spouse, the alcoholic and abusive Arthur Huntingdon, also constitutes a divergence from the status quo of the era, as affairs of this kind were not normally portrayed in novels about the affluent Victorian society.

This article analyses Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time, a postmodernist parody of the Russian communist world, and shows that historical truth is turned into a story which is remembered with bitter irony and which offers various interpretations. Being nothing but a story, history, associated with the symbol of noise, becomes subject to parody. Emphasizing the role of irony in revealing the dramatic effects of the Russian communist past, this essay remarks that parody functions as severe criticism.

The novels of Caryl Phillips often deal with the experiences and identities of those displaced and marginalized by society. Caryl Phillips is well known for employing different textual strategies such as spatiotemporal fragmentation, intertextuality, naming, and point of view shifts in order to portray the struggles and suffering of his characters. The aim of this article is to examine how Phillips uses naming of his characters to depict the effects exile, slavery and other forms of oppression may have on their lives and identities. In order to accomplish this, different characters from Phillips’s novels Cambridge (1991), The Nature of Blood (1997), Crossing the River (1993) and Higher Ground (1989) will be discussed. The analysis of the characters will draw upon three concepts of naming first proposed by Bénédicte Ledent (2002): anonymity, (re)naming and name alteration.

This essay examines the scenes in Shakespeare’s romances in which music has a healing and revitalizing power, but it also contains its own subversion. In Pericles, in the palace at Pentapolis, Pericles asks for a musical instrument, which he plays while he sings to himself. The wise doctor Cerimon revives Thaisa’s apparently dead body with the help of music in Pericles. In the final reunion scene with his daughter, Marina, the music of her voice has healing power for her father. In The Winter’s Tale, Hermione’s apparently lifeless statue is brought to life while music is playing. Finally, The Tempest is one of Shakespeare’s most musical plays, with songs and music and a masque reviving the action. Shakespeare used songs to establish the character or the mental state of the singer. Music and allusions to music in these plays’ scripts can be interpreted as forms of indirect and covert propaganda, attuned to the politics of the time, but also as individual musical parts, in which music has healing power over the mind. They are like the music of the soul, suggesting interiority. Music is used, therefore, to achieve theatrical effect.

The paper explores the way in which Romanian readers, experts in literary studies, react to how Romania, Romanians are perceived by British foreigners travelling to Romania for the first time as instantiated in Olivia Manning’s The Balkan Trilogy. The trilogy is based on the author’s experience of living in Bucharest during WW II as wife of a British Council officer. The theoretical frame underpinning the study draws on reader-oriented theory and the role of stereotypes which are viewed as culturally and historically rooted.

In “Borderlands/La Frontera” (1987), Gloria Anzaldúa writes about the “tradition of long walks” (11) across physical and imaginary borders, which defines her Mexican-American people. The borderland is both a space of transit and a state of transition from where the Chicanos venture into unknown territories. Their identity is constructed around and across space(s). In this paper, I seek to examine the Chicanos’ fluid spatial identity in their searches for a real home, in Pat Mora’s “House of Houses”, Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street”, Gloria Anzaldúa’s “Borderlands/La Frontera”. I argue that in these literary and autobiographical works, the cosy domestic home is impossible to find because of constant displacement and imposed mobility.

From Philip Roth’s characater Merry Levov in American Pastoral to real-life figures such as the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre, the young domestic terrorist has become the archetype of a dramatic and unpredictable social and political climate. This paper intends to explore the real and fictional avatars of this contemporary anti-hero, its dynamics and specific place in contemporary imagination.

Ambiguity has played a central role in the formation of modern grammatical theory. The article revisits the topic of structural ambiguity in particular, by looking closely at the sentences ‘The shooting of the hunters is terrible’ and ‘Flying planes can be dangerous’, both taken from Chomsky’s works. The question posed is whether the data provided by corpora verify their ambiguity.

Even if there may be types of translation errors which have a rather general character, in most of the cases they are closely related to the genre that the text to be translated represents. The paper offers an analysis of the translation errors contained by the assignments of 30 MA students in Translation Studies from the West University of Timisoara, Romania. The assignments consist in the translation from English into Romanian of texts belonging to three different genres: travel guides, legislation, and medical case reports. The errors are analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively, with a view to arriving at conclusions of relevance for the improvement of the training process.

In this paper, we explore the morphological structure and semantics of 89 English compound terms and their Serbian equivalents, as employed in air traffic and waterways transport and traffic engineering. In order to facilitate the process of translating these English metaphorical compound lexemes into Serbian, 10 translation patterns and strategies are designed. The results of the analysis also show that English compound terms and translation equivalents in Serbian do not pattern in most cases. To obtain the findings, we develop a semantico-morpho-translation method.

This paper attempts to explain language as a process of meaning creation by a speaker (implicature) and meaning disambiguation by a hearer (inference) at the basis of which there is a complex mechanism of reality perception, internalization and verbalization. This mechanism of implicature/inference is studied from two interconnecting perspectives: Conversation Analysis and Neuro Linguistic Programming. While the former investigates the function of the utterance in context, the latter explores the way speakers and hearers internalize reality depending on how they see, hear and feel the world around them.

Gesture, outlined in terms of physical activity, philosophical theory and linguistics are strongly connected in the course of human interaction. Utterances are accompanied by facial expressions, shifts of gaze, movements, posture, etc. Therefore, we support the thesis that a gestural approach to analyzing communicative events is appropriate, since non-verbal components communicate attitudes and emotions and complete the verbal interchange in numerous ways. Disagreements are especially prone to such an analysis.

Hedging has become a topic of interest among discourse-oriented linguists. The paper will discuss ways in which the term “hedge” has been understood and defined in the literature within the academic writing discourse. As epistemic devices with significant characteristics, hedges are often seen as features in academic writing practices that may cause problems, being often a serious source of pragmatic failure in written discourse in a foreign language. It is suggested that the appropriate use of hedging, which clearly requires subtlety and awareness of pragmatic competence of written discourse, is utterly important in avoiding “communicative failure” (Thomas, 1983) and allowing authors to find a way of expressing their true voice in a target discourse.

An examination of the political discourse of presidents establishes an understanding of the factors that influence word choice and communication. Most notably, the context provided by presidents in their political discourse conveys the meaning intended by the speeches, which then influences the way the public reacts to what they have to say. Through knowledge of these factors, linguists can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between language and the perceptions of American presidents by both Americans and non-Americans. The purpose of this paper is to examine the political discourse of two American presidents – George W. Bush and Barack Obama – in order to identify the overall message intended by their speeches and the factors that influence their discourse.

This study was motivated by the recent study on informality in academic writing carried out by Hyland and Jiang (2017), to see the status of informality in Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian local journals. To this end, 50 research articles from two Journals of “Research in Applied Linguistics” and “Iranian Journal of applied Linguistics” were selected. The research articles were published in 2014 and 2015 issues. They were analyzed based on Hyland and Jiang’s (2017) taxonomy. The results imply that unattended anaphoric pronouns and sentence initial conjunctions have received the greatest attention from Iranian writers of Applied Linguistics writers while exclamations and contractions were totally ignored. Compared to the results reported by Hyland and Jiang (2017), the use of features of informality by Iranian writers of the present study varies to a great extent. The variations could stress the necessity of awareness of Iranian Applied Linguistics and related fields of study writers concerning the use of these features by successful writers.

Evaluation of discrete skills such as reading comprehension as well as vocabulary and grammar multiple choice testing are commonplace in Medical English examinations in higher education. But are these approaches to evaluation practically oriented enough so as to provide a clear image of what students can do with the language in a real life communicative context? This paper will present a case of projectbased evaluation with students in English for Medical Cosmetics likely to meet such challenges.