In the contemporary world of extremely dynamic movements in the fields of territorial state reconfiguration, economic “colonization”, globalization, Europeanization, migration of population, borrowing of cultural values and intensified cultural exchange or transfer, defining national identity has become a process which registers numerous changes and encounters various challenges. The classical features that assisted this process of defining national identity in the past – a historic territory, common myths, historical memories and values, a common public culture, common legal rights and duties, a common economy with territorial mobility (A. D. Smith 1991: 14) – undergo significant transformations each decade and the definition of a nation’s identity calls for important reconsiderations. One aspect worth considering is that of losing or self-censoring one’s national identity due to a nation’s own intention or some external demands of adaptation to general aspects of political, economic, financial, social, or cultural nature. Our paper intends to explore some of the causes or factors that might lead to twenty-first century Romania’s weakening, degradation or loss of national identity and suggest some possible solutions against such a process.
Having on its background the topic of youth culture and its language, social disorder and its criticism, the general disruption in society and the pitfalls of social and technological progress in the age of modernism, the present article critically looks at Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) with a view to analysing character, language and its functions. After a brief introduction to the context of the book’s publication, its genre, and some general remarks on the novelty of the language created in the novel, the article progresses to the presentation of the major sources of this language. The central part of the paper originally approaches Nadsat from a semantic perspective with the aim of testing and validating the functions of Nadsat already identified and further investigating (individual and group) character portrayal as unfolded by the language used. The analysis is based on a quantitative and qualitative research of the Nadsat code/(anti-)language of the novel.
The complexity of the travelling experience cannot be understood outside the scope of culture (see, for instance, Schulz-Forberg 2005) and travelling is thus often discussed in relation to the human being‟s thirst for knowledge, intellectual or spiritual enlightenment, aesthetic refinement, often as a result of cultural contact, interaction, transfer or exchange. The travelling experiences of Romanian travellers to England through the centuries have been inspired by many of these goals. This paper focuses on the travel accounts of a little known Romanian traveller to England in the nineteenth century, namely, writer, teacher, journalist and politician Ion Codru-Drăgușanu (1818–1884). His travel accounts reveal that travelling was perceived as a source of intellectual improvement, maturation, cultural development, interaction and exchange, as a process of gaining knowledge, an experience also counterbalanced by a tourist‟s adventure dominated by curiosity, pleasure and amusement. In order to reveal how this shift takes place and the multi-fold significance of the travelling experience as such, the paper‟s structure combines theoretical data with textual study and seeks to rediscover forgotten personalities of the Romanian culture who made English-Romanian encounters more numerous and productive. Firstly, the paper presents the conceptual distinctions between the term traveller and other related words, such as voyager, tourist, pilgrim, explorer, or migrant. Secondly, it makes a brief overview of travelling in history and of travel writing with the purpose of contextualizing Codru-Drăgușanu‟s travels. Thirdly, the synoptic presentation of the literary background related to travels to and from Romania in the nineteenth century as well as the brief review of the historical and cultural context specific to England in that period assist us in our exploration of the written accounts of travels recorded by CodruDrăgușanu in his Peregrinul transilvan. 1835–1848 (The Transylvanian Traveller. 1835– 1848).
In the context of new times, new types of writing are created in order to meet the demands and wishes of the contemporary public. Printed books make no exception especially given that the reading of (especially printed) books has declined, despite variable statistics over the years. The book reading habits have thus decreased, so making printed books attractive to readers has been a matter of concern for contemporary writers like Adam Thirlwell, as illustrated in his novella Kapow! (2012). In line with the contemporary mind-set of revolutionizing the way in which narrative is presented and the technique in which it is composed, Thirlwell plays with readers’ conceptions and expectations about literary texts, producing a highly experimental work. Along with the montage/collage technique, which will be discussed in the present paper, such concepts as ergodicity, autofiction, metatextuality, paratextuality, metamodernism or altermodernism are central to a proper understanding of how Thirlwell’s novella works and represent highlights of the exploratory undertaking of this article. Keywords: ergodic literature; metamodernism; altermodernist fiction; contemporary autofiction; revolution of the text; intra-notes; collage/montage.
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