Published in East-West Cultural Passage
In the academic novel of the 1980s, which Elaine Showalter dubs the feminist towers, women characters are not limited to beautiful and seductive students or faculty wives, whose husbands’ academic career appears to be also their own goal. Although the very presence of women in academia is often interpreted as a threat to the male reign over the ‘sm...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
Like most conflicts across the world, the Niger Delta crisis has generated a body of works now labelled Niger Delta literature. These cultural art forms, which are not only programmatic in thrust but also carry a dissenting temper that is laden with counter hegemonic rhetoric, are primarily geared towards underpinning a brutish kind of colonization...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
In his novel Netherland, Joseph O’Neill discusses several issues that arise for a contemporary wanderer or immigrant, namely, issues of adjustment, cultural transition, becoming visible, etc. The search for a new home is accompanied by the idea of a new place and the memory of the native place. Immigrants provide a particular perspective of the cit...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
“The Boys in the Band,” a play by American playwright Mart Crowley (1935-2020), represents a milestone in the representation of urban gay men in theater. By exploring on stage the lives of a group of male gay friends in the late 1960s, Crowley challenged social and dramaturgical norms and conventions. As an integral part of the narrative, New York ...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
“Paul’s Case,” suggestively subtitled “A Study in Temperament,” by Willa Sibert Cather, thematizes some of the main concerns regarding the moral decay of American society and the disillusionment with the American Dream that would be addressed twenty years later by F. Scott Fitzgerald in his iconic novel The Great Gatsby. The story provides ample pr...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
This article analyses the main drama translation strategies pertaining to the rendering of dialect and slang from English into Romanian with practical emphasis on “Pygmalion” (1914; 1941) by George Bernard Shaw. Moreover, it aims to review translation techniques and strategies which facilitate the translation of slang and dialect, more precisely Co...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
The article sets out to investigate the way in which Colum McCann depicts New York City in his 2009 novel, Let the Great World Spin. While starting from the idea that the novel falls in the category of 9/11 fiction, the article will argue that it makes clever use of the technique of deterritorialization in order to look at the USA from an external ...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
John Guare distinguishes himself as a playwright who has represented New York City’s various neighborhoods and has fought realist conventions throughout his work. By relying on considerations advanced by Robert Bennett in his study of the literature, art, jazz and architecture of New York City after World War II, the current analysis shows that Gua...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
“Always Symmetrize!,” the title of this essay – which echoes Fredric Jameson’s better-known admonition to “always historicize” – alludes to a type of literary analysis, inspired by the Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco’s concept of “symmetric logic,” which I have been working on for several years. Briefly, it treats the makers of literary ...
Published in East-West Cultural Passage
This article analyzes the concept of food in Cormac McCarthy's dystopian, (post-)apocalyptic fiction, aiming to prove that in the American writer's universe the act of eating is deprived of its social and spiritual dimension, being restricted to its basic functionality similar to that of a meal-replacement product. The analysis draws a parallel bet...
