Volume 17 (2020): Issue 1 (December 2020)

Critics belonging to cultural materialism consider that Shakespeare’s work has its own political dimension by demystifying specific forms of power. The paper deals with the way Shakespeare’s three great tragedies reveal how the authoritarian power could function through terror based on violence and dictatorship, and the abuse of that power in the world of globalisation.

This essay analyses Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending and argues that the concepts of the past and history are redefined by the narrator’s subjective memories and stories in a postmodernist manner. This essay shows that the past is reread as a letter and as a diary fragment which ask for the readers’ various interpretations regarding their absolute truth.

I intend to explore Philip Roth’s representation of aging in his 1997 novel, American Pastoral, and in the allegorical, medical life story of his generic hero, Everyman (2006). My arguments connect the writer’s constant preoccupation with the biological life of the body and the cultural significance of aging, divergently projected in these two novels.

This study analyses two seminal American memoirs that depict female captivity: A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682) by Mary Rowlandson and Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). My aim is to discuss, using the tools of Critical Race Theory, the intersections of gender and race, focusing on how the two women’s femininity, as well as their individuality, is linked to Christianity and motherhood.

My paper focuses on studying the representations of black masculinity in the Harlem Renaissance’s discourse, and investigates how these representations challenged the limited, reductive and one-dimensional stereotypes which were adopted and further disseminated by the popular culture of the time. To do so, I will analyze a number of black male characters depicted in the silent film, Within Our Gates (1920), of the African American filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.

There is a growing interest in cognitive approaches to literature in recent years; undoubtedly conceptual metaphor has become one of the favourite topics for analysis. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Metaphors We Live By (1980), assert that metaphor is not just a matter of words; rather it is inherently conceptual and conceptual metaphors help us comprehend abstract concepts in terms of more concrete ones. This article proposes that metaphor is used to overcome the inadequacy of language in the face of indescribable phenomena, such as slavery, racism and multiple oppressions of black women throughout history in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad (2016). Patricia Collins tries to convey through her work, Black Feminist Thought (2000), which will be used here, that all these oppressions exist even today. The result of this study indicates that Whitehead has picked up and given life to the old slavery story to emotionally engage a global audience at the present time, when racial hatred seems to be a thing of the past.

The present article analyses the issue of subtitling for the d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing audience in Romania, or more accurately put, the need for SDH services and the (postponed) implementation (on a large scale) of such projects that would pursue audience accessibility while following national and international regulations. At the same time, we detail on a selection of specific features of SDH, in both intralingual and interlingual parametres of television services.

The present paper investigates the difficulties in preserving humour in translating euphemisms in a specific, popular comedy genre: stand-up comedy. The investigation goes beyond the lexical level and focuses on the constraints of the audio-visual translation as well.

This study attempts a multimodal discourse analysis of a newspaper article during the Brexit campaign. The aim is to help the audience decode and evaluate photographs and texts from media by providing a few strategies as guidance. The approach adopted for this analytical research is inspired by Halliday and Matthiessen’s An Introduction to Functional Grammar (2004). Consequently, the objects in a photograph and words in a text function similarly conveying information to the audience, and additionally, involve a similar strategy of analysis. To sum up, these strategies are intended to improve the audience’s comprehension of decoding article meaning and journalist’s intention.

Print advertisements, a denominator of social realities have been approached from varied linguistic orientations. Studies that have dealt with how religious groups and churches utilize print advertisement to elicit patronage are discovered as inadequate. Anchored on the principles of linguistic stylistics, this study therefore investigates some religious advertisements with a view to determining how meaning is stylistically indexed in religious discourse at the graphological level. Qualitative research method with the analysis of corpus of selected texts was adopted at the graphological level of stylistics. Data for the study consisted of a total of thirteen (13) religious advertisements which are purposively sampled from selected church handbills, posters and flyers. The language of religious advertisement indicates how people’s linguistic choices are influenced by their religious persuasions and beliefs. The advertisers employ diverse linguistic features such as pictorial elements, graphological devices of italicization, icons, capitalization, punctuation marks and figures. The choice of the words is very simple, and there are elements of code – mixing. Also, a lot of images common to the Christendom are used such as the sign of the cross and the pictures of dove, clock and cup of wine, as an indication that the adverts are meant for Christians. The study provokes a deep understanding of how language gives expression to religious discourse. The advertisers’ understanding of the people of the religious inclination inform their choice of language and semiotic features.

The present paper brings into discussion a very topical issue for students and teachers alike nowadays – the development of digital competence for students in the field of humanities. The research focuses on investigating possible changes in the attitudes of philology students towards the use of technology, as they are facing the reality of having to adapt their learning and/or their teaching to the new educational demands. Since the present educational context involved a quick change to online teaching and learning, the research focused on how the group of students in humanities have adapted to this setting, whether operating in this digitalised learning/teaching environment has any implications for their future career and whether the identified changes are connected to any lessons learnt both in their capacity of learners and teachers.

Given that the notion of telicity was simply defined by English linguists as a situation which tends towards a goal, this paper will additionally explain and define telicity in the English language. Moreover, the issue of telicity in the Serbian and Romanian relevant linguistic literature has been scarcely analysed. This paper aims to ascertain and define telicity as an indispensable semantic characteristic of Serbian and Romanian verbs. Since the paper proves that the concept of telicity can be detected in languages other than English, telicity can and should be considered a linguistic universal.