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This paper analyses the ways in which Romanian culture struggles to forge, at the level of historical and cultural discourse, an identity, a “personality”, and a specificity. It observes, within the process of forging its identity through a series of avatars, the discursive strategies through which specificity is revealed as an essential form of national uniqueness as well as the compensatory trends of identity fabrication. The paper also attempts to highlight the forms of historical and literary mystification through which, over time, Romanian culture responded to complexes related to its age, identity, belatedness, heredity, legitimacy, etc. Thus, the analysis reveals that, in essence, all the efforts, complexes and myths through which an identity was negotiated at the level of the histories of literature and Romanian historiographical texts betray, in fact, the same spectrum of the Identity-Otherness dialectic. Romanian culture, like other emerging cultures, was forced, first to survive and, later, in order to have a potential for prosperity, to define itself as a distinct entity by relating to the surrounding cultural reality, its growth and evolution taking place either under the sign of antagonism (i.e. a refusal of allogeneic import), or under that of synchronism (as permeabilization with regard to foreign influence), but, necessarily, as a reference to the Other. Moreover, the paper highlights, at the discursive level, the two main poles that have obsessively polarized the questions of descent and heredity within Romanian culture: its Roman and Dacian ancestries. The nuanced intentions underpinning the cultural need for international recognition by means of belonging as well as differentiation are discussed in the process.

The foreign reader and viewer can find nothing better -or faster, given the exigencies of modern life- than the film as an introduction to the character, history, identity of a nation. With the awards garnered by directors like Cristian Mungiu and Nae Caranfil, new interest has been focused on Romania’s film, community, and history. That is why, an investigation regarding the Romanian early cinema would be necessary in the field of improving education from abroad. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a number of aspects, such as the importance of incorporating a course on cinema in foreign language teaching, one of the major goals being the opportunity to educate the students in the field of movies and thus offering them distinct cultural perspectives. However, this article does not plea for the need of a pedagogy of media studies in higher education, given the complexity of the topic. It rather aims to focus on the history of two Romanian movies: The Independence of Romania (1912) and The Rest is Silence (2007) and highlight the reasons why an urban icon of the city of Tampere is called “Plevna”. This paper sets out to analyze the two mentioned Romanian films who proved to be interesting for Finnish students since they depict an episode of our common history, the 1877 War of Independence (The Russo-Turkish War). At the same time, the paper aims to familiarize them with the allure of the event when Romanian and Finnish soldiers fought shoulder to shoulder on the same front, at Plevna. The Romanian film, The Independence of Romania shot in 1911-1912, was the first feature film to be kept almost entirely in the Romanian National Film Archive; the other one, The Rest Is Silence directed by Nae Caranfil (and representing Romania’s first entry into the 2009 Oscars) and inspired by The Independence of Romania wanted to show the real story of our first full-length filmmaking. Therefore, this latter film contains like a palimpsest an older mute movie, discovered in Romanian Movie Archive. The current article draws upon the insights provided by the Finnish students after watching the two films and summarizes their conclusions. In other words, these lines provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what they learned and discovered. The films were met with positive reviews, and we tried to follow the students’ spontaneous reactions and emotions. An important part of our work was to put in perspective the two inspiring patriotic marches which are commemorating the departure of the Romanian and Finnish soldiers at Plevna in the Balkan’s theater of War: Drum bun! (farewell song composed by Ştefan Nosievich to the lyrics of Romanian patriot Vasile Alecsandri) and Kauan on Kärsitty / Long have suffered, a well-known patriotic song of the Finnish Guard (Suomen kaarti). This article tangentially discusses the role of perception in educational activity, which is presented under two correlated aspects, namely: the activity carried out in this sense by the teacher and by the students and the role of cinema in creating cultural memory from a general perspective, in a way that transforms the manner we think of film and its social importance. This article starts from a very particular point of view, as we discovered by pure chance the name of Plevna building in Tampere, and goes to a more general aspect, which is the battle of Plevna, one of the most important episodes from Romania’s modern history.

In this paper an analysis of the poetic use of the imperfect tense in El Jarama by Rafael Sánchez Ferlosio is proposed basing on the concept of narrative grounding. The claim made in the paper is that in El Jarama the imperfect is used in a manner that breaks down the narrative foreground-background distinction. As a consequence, the arrangement of the events into a meaningful story line is nullified, which affects the way the narrative is experienced and interpreted.

This paper seeks to examine the impact of academician Eugen Simion on the literary landscape in Serbia, focusing on his contributions to fostering cultural exchange between the two neighbouring countries. Additionally, it explores his efforts to promote Romanian creativity and his perspectives on Serbian artistic expression. Furthermore, this paper will analyse the reception of Simion’s works in Serbia it will delve into the collaborations and partnerships he established with Serbian literary institutions, highlighting the lasting legacy of his efforts to strengthen cultural ties between Romania and Serbia.

In traditional Romanian society, where the vast majority of the population was illiterate, writing remained mysterious and inaccessible. For the peasants from the Romanian village, writing and the book have acquired separate meanings, being used in a particular way through magico-religious rituals. In order to defend against the action of evil forces and for the healing of the sick body, the traditional community instituted ceremonial, apotropaic and thaumaturgical practices, involving a set of alternative uses of writing. The clerics played an important role in consolidating these practices. The village priests made the written amulets (apocryphal texts, prayers and incantations) intended to be worn closest to the body to ward off unclean spirits which could cause harm to women who had just given birth and to the new-born. Books and writing were seen as repositories of healing forces that could ward off disease and trouble. In the Romanian rural society, between the two World Wars, it was still believed that evil spirits, agents of disease, could be drawn from the sick person's body with the help of “healing letters” (rom. “răvașe de leac”), containing prayers, various religious symbols, names of saints but also magic formulas, often presented in an enigmatic and incomprehensible way. The formulas are written upside down, from right to left, then from left to right (like the famous palindrome “Sator arepo tenet opera rotas” or “Abracadabra”) or distributed in geometric figures (spirals, triangles, crosses). These “healing papers”, with a strong iconic charge, were applied to the body or the text and the image were drawn directly on the skin of the sufferer. Drinking water in which one had washed a plate on the surface of which healing formulas had been written or swallowing the paper on which magic formulas were written were other common practices. Romanian ethnologists have documented the survival of these practices until the mid1970s. Similar practices are found in other parts of Europe.

This paper aims to problematize and conceptualize the teaching approaches used by two trainers in the Applied Linguistics MA program at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania. Data collection was undertaken during the first semester of the academic year 2017-2018 for approximately two months during which I attended the first module of my master’s studies as a post-graduate student. The approach adopted combines a conventional literature review with the examination and discussion of two case studies incorporating post-observation field notes and teacher questionnaires for the purpose of triangulating data and methods. The paper lists findings consistent with the idea that the Romanian teacher education program helps trainees develop a reflective stance on their pedagogical practices through micro-teaching and presentation opportunities. Both courses have similar ultimate aims and rely on a non-hierarchical teacher-student relationship, using teaching and presentation sessions embedded in the training classroom to bridge the gap between theory and practice. The ultimate aim of the present study is not to persuade anyone to flip a classroom or let students embark on micro-teaching, but rather to provide potential readers with feasible resources should they decide to modify a university course or a pre-university lesson using one of the approaches described herein.

The article sets out to draw a very brief comparison of the common features shared by the purist attitudes displayed by two 19th-century English and Romanian scholars, William Barnes and August Treboniu Laurian and classifies them according to the set of criteria devised by Thomas (1991). The paper also goes over several concepts regarding purism. The author of the paper analyses the concept of purism in both countries within the intellectual and temporal dimensions of purism. William Barnes was a Victorian reformer, a polymath, a priest, a poet in his Dorset dialect and a utopian prescriptivist linguist capitalizing on the Germanic word stock of English and suggesting the removal of excessive Latin & Greek vocabulary. He wrote several linguistic books and poetry. August Treboniu Laurian was an outstanding Romanian reformer and polymath. He penned a theoretical book heralding his reformist belief: “Tentamen Criticum”, in 1840 and a huge Dictionary of the Romanian language in 1876 (after a seven year work) capitalising on the Latin word stock of Romanian and suggesting the removal of non-Latin lexemes.

The volume 1821-2021. The Bicentennial of the Revolution led by Tudor Vladimirescu, coordinated by Sevastian Cercel and Georgeta Ghionea, brings together 22 papers signed by representatives of the academic and university environment which belong to some prestigious institutions in Romania (“C.S. Nicolăescu-Plopşor” Institute for Research in Social Studies and Humanities from Craiova, of the Romanian Academy, University of Craiova, University of Bucharest, “George Baritiu” Institute of History, of the Romanian Academy from Cluj-Napoca, “Ovidius” University from Constanța, Valahia University from Târgoviște). The volume is the result of the National Symposium dedicated to Vladimirescu (1821-2021. The Bicentennial of the Revolution led by Tudor Vladimirescu), initiated by the researchers from institute from Craiova, held on May 14-15, 2021. The volume is structured in three chapters and all the papers are subordinated to the maine topic.

The present paper focuses on the travel notes by Michel Vieuchange (1904-1930), a young Frenchman who decided to reach Smara, a holy Muslim city located in the middle of the desert, to describe it, and to draw a map. His notes are to be analysed through the prism of autobiogeography. The term used by Michel Collot means telling your life through the places that has affected you. In the case of Vieuchange’s notes the geographical descriptions intervene with the description of the personality of the traveler and form a whole. The paper shows that three cities, Tiznit, Tigilit and Smara, mark three stages of the travel and correspond to different aspects of Vieuchange’s personality.

This paper is made in continuation of the article of Fabrice Marsac, Witold Ucherek and Magdalena Dańko “De l’infinitive de perception dans la pratique traductologique” (Studia Romanica Posnaniensia 46/1, 2019); both papers fall within the framework of the bilateral Polonium program “On the translation of French perception structures into Polish” (n° PPN/BIL/2018/1/00181), implemented and financed by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange (NAWA), the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs (MEAE) and the Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation (MESRI). In the present case, we intend to report on the content and progress of the part “multi-dimensional labelling” of this long-term French-Polish project. Therefore, we describe the formal encoding of structures, categories and functions of the items in the large multi-label corpus (French-Polish) we have been collecting since 2019.

This paper arises from the subject Errors in Spanish as a Foreign Language, taught in the Master of Teaching Spanish at Masaryk University of Brno, Czech Republic. Its main objective is to show how the analysis of lexical errors can be used as a tool in the training of non‑native teachers of Spanish, in this case, Czech and Slovak. To achieve this goal, firstly, the paper presents a brief review of the trends that have investigated errors in foreign language learning, such as contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage studies. Secondly, it analyzes a corpus of texts written by learners of Spanish according to the error analysis methodology (Corder, 1967), as an activity for the Master students. Thirdly, it shows a typological classification of different lexical errors found in the texts and it reflects on the possible connection between mistakes and teaching methodology. Based on the results of the analysis, the paper discusses the usefulness of the analysis of these errors not only for the training of non‑native teachers of Spanish as a foreign language, but also for a better understanding of vocabulary teaching.

Reduction of reading anxiety The purpose of this paper is to sensitize teachers to the phenomenon referred to as reading anxiety and to suggest approaches to reading instruction that may reduce anxiety in high-reading-apprehensive language learners. The activities suggested in this paper are based on pedagogically sound approaches to reading instruction and are also appropriate for learners who do not experience reading anxiety.

In the Italian academic discourse research, Master’s degree theses used to be studied mainly from the perspective of linguistic competencies of their authors. However, strictly linguistic skills are not the only challenge for undergraduate, who must also convey intellectual content in appropriate discursive and rhetorical forms. The paper explores the patterns of a peculiar form of “collaborative writing”, i.e. the cooperation between the thesis supervisor and the student. Using the example of Master’s theses in linguistics, written in Italian as a foreign language, three basic didactic approaches are discussed in the paper. In the didactics of content the supervisors emphasize knowledge, i.e. linguistic concepts expected to be applied in a Master’s thesis. In the didactics of forms, the supervisors focus on the linguistic code, that is, on grammatical and lexical correctness of the Master’s thesis. In the didactics of forms of content the supervisors use regularities observed in academic discourse, such as genre and rhetorical structures, as valuable teaching resources likely to help students develop metacommunicative awareness.

Nicolae Milescu Spătarul, a scholar from Moldova (born in 1636), is known especially for his activity during the second half of his life, from his permanent relocation to Russia (1671) to the year of his death (1708). Within this interval, in which he served the Tsars’ interests as a translator at Posolski Prikaz, some sort of Ministry of External Affairs, he is sent by the Tsar Alexei Mihailovici with an embassy to the Emperor of China, thus becoming the first European scholar who travelled from Moscow to Pekin, crossing through Siberia. This paper is focused on the first half of his life, following, firstly, his studies at the Great School of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the education he received there, his relationships with the princes of Moldova, the relationships with other scholars from his time. Then follows his European journey: Berlin – Stettin – Stockholm – Paris, his relationship with the jansenists of Port Royal and the presentation of his work Enchiridion sive Stella Orientalis splendens Occidentali, in which he analyses a theological dispute that was of interest for the jansenists. The Enchiridion is made in Paris, in the year 1699, and is the first work published by a Romanian in the Occident. Our paper includes, for the first time integrally translated into Romanian, a few pages of correspondence, which illustrate, on one hand, the bond with the French ambassador of Stockholm and on the other, the accreditation of Milescu at the Court of Sweden as a representative of the former prince, Gheorghe Ștefan.

After his demise (in 2010), the philosophical works of Mihai Drăgănescu began to enter the attention of specialists from various backgrounds. His approach's incredible complexity and originality have been viewed and approached from various specific points of view until now. The aim of this paper is to present only a few essential features of the Drăgănescu philosophical approach as a whole, answering the following questions: (a) Is the model he recommended metaphysical, theological, or both? (b) How does the model highlight a certain Logos that becomes primordial in relation to the Being? (c) Why, quite unexpectedly, is the information considered a phenomenon? (d) How does the model he recommends solve some of the problems issued by Husserl and his phenomenology? In a forthcoming paper, we will try to show how Drăgănescu's Ontological-informational model allows a ChaOrdic application („Cha” from Chaos and „Ord” from Order) that characterizes the Reality of today when a natural Chaos appeared under which a new order emerges. Finally, our main conclusion will be that in relation to other similar attempts of recent times, which we know about, the approach of Drăgănescu presents strong originality by integrating the information with the ontological aspect. Furthermore, this confirms what our well-known Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica said a century ago: „Will the novelties of this work make their place in the world?” We should say that we do not doubt if we do not know the inertia that reigns in the world of culture. However, we will say that we do not know about a work that shakes this inertia better than the work of professor Drăgănescu. And if by impossibility it would not impose itself from now on in the culture of the twentieth century, let us be allowed to believe that it will astonish and deeply impress the non-perverted thinkers of the twenty-first century.

This paper examines the grammatical structure of Romanian/ English codeswitching in the speech of a ten-year-old bilingual child. The analyzed data set consists of single-word switches and phrases, the main focus of the paper being the morphological integration of these English elements in Romanian and the relations they establish with their larger syntactic environment. Using the principles of the Matrix Language Frame model developed by Myers-Scotton (2002, 2006), we show that the structural integrity of Romanian is maintained during codeswitching, and that the English material is used according to the rules imposed by the Romanian grammar. Although Romanian inflectional morphology is often absent on switched words and phrases, the placement of these elements in the grammatical frame of the sentence follows matrix language specifications and word order; moreover, function words in mixed constituents, such as determiners and prepositions, tend to come from Romanian.

As the European Union’s Strategy for people with disabilities has been extended to 2030, emphasising the need for these people’s social inclusion, which also comprises accessibility to different information and documents, Romania has to align its legislation and best practices in order to solve its problems concerning this topic. Therefore, this paper focuses on an important aspect of social inclusion, namely Easy-to-Read (E2R) language, which is paramount for the disabled people’s access to information, culture and education. It starts by presenting the concept of Easy-to-Read across Europe, its perception and implementation by various countries, to finally delve into the current situation of Easy-to-Read in Romania. By looking at the analysis and reports on the previous governmental strategies regarding people with disabilities (and especially reading disabilities, for the purpose of this paper), it can be said that Romania still faces challenges in this respect and needs to work on making documents and information accessible by first creating E2R guidelines and then implementing them in printed documents (e.g. adapted textbooks, healthcare leaflets) as well as in the electronic information (e.g. government websites). The paper also traces some future perspectives concerning Easy-to-Read in Romania, namely the Train2Validate “Professional training for Easy-to-Read facilitators and validators” (T2V) project, an Erasmus+ programme, a collaboration between various European countries, that Romania is part of, which goes one step further into helping people with reading disabilities and creating professional roles for them, i.e. facilitators and validators, in order to integrate them on the employment market. Moreover, this research will hopefully raise awareness of the importance of conducting other studies on creating Easy-to-Read guidelines and on simplifying the text according to the different target groups of people with reading disabilities or difficulties and to different text types.

In recent times, Indian ascetics have become pop icons due to the influence of visual entertainment media. Outside their country of origin, they are often negatively stereotyped to foster derogatory understandings of the Others and their cultures. In this paper, we will focus on representations of Indian ascetics. Starting with their early depictions in the memoir of the Transylvanian physician Dr Honigberger, we will examine their representations in Romanian newspapers and journals. In order to account for Romanian interest in ascetics from a faraway land, this paper will take into consideration the historical developments that led to the growth of European interest in them. Through a comparison between nineteenth century British (Osborne 1840) and East-European (Honigberger 1851, 1852) writings on Indian ascetics, we will try to understand whether conceptualization of Indian ascetics in Romanian-speaking territories differed in any way from that of the British colonizers in India. The paper will then move on to examine how the Romanian press conceptualized these ascetics. Evidences point to the fact that the Romanian press became interested in Indian ascetics, erroneously generalized as fakirs, from ca. 1900 to 1940. Analysing Romanian journal and magazine articles on Indian fakirs, which till now remain untranslated into English, this article will try to show how the Romanian press conceived of the ascetics of a faraway country. Our research methodology is based on text analysis, relying on a broader cultural perspective. For the purpose of this paper, we have selected a series of article samples, taking into consideration diversity in terms of regions (southern Romania and Transylvania), as well as the most relevant period (1906-1935). The interest in Indian sadhus and their doings basically emerged starting with the mid-nineteenth century. Yet over the following decades accounts have changed in terms of focus. While nineteenth century authors were primarily concerned with the physical aspects of their work, texts written in the first decades of the twentieth century suggest that journalists and writers generally looked at the more surprising and entertaining side of fakirs’ actions. Finally, the paper suggests why Romanian press lost interest in Indian ascetics after the 1940s.

The language of “True Riches”. French-Algerian relationships through Our Riches by Kaouther Admini The present paper focuses on the novel Our Riches [Nos Richesses] published in 2017 by a young Algerian writer, Kaouther Adimi. The book is set in 20th century Algeria and narrates the history of Les Vraies Richesses, a publishing house and library founded in Alger by Edmond Charlot, which is to be closed in 2017 by Ryad, a young Algerian living in Paris, who has come to Alger to do his internship. The aim of the paper is to analyse the French-Algerian relationships depicted in the book and to study whether the novel may be inscribed in the concept of “francophonie”. It is divided into three parts. The first one investigates the structure of the book, its language and historical events described by the writer. The second examines the character development and the roles of the main protagonists and the last one focuses on the use of pronouns “you” and “we”.

The paper discusses the identity of Polish immigrants in the province of Misiones, Argentina. The first part of the article presents the historical context, while the second one comprehensively analyses the identity of one of the residents of Posadas, Casimira Kotur, based on interviews conducted with her. The working methods is based on the following theoretical concepts: narrative identity according to Paul Ricoeur, review of social roles of social actors and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of polyphony.

The objective of the paper is to analyze the origin and the evolution of the explanatory value of the construction , documented in Castilian texts from the Middle Ages. Through a relatively large corpus of Latin texts (5th–12th centuries) and Spanish texts (13th–15th centuries), the Author explores the main linguistic and discursive reasons that determined its use in the Spanish language.

This paper discusses two topics which are very popular nowadays among the academics dealing with foreign language teaching, namely: intercultural competence and pragmatic error. The author notes the fact that those two notions appear separately, because the starting points for discussing them are usually different fields of science. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that on one hand the two notions need to be treated uniformly, and on the other, that the pragmatic error should be included in error classifications which are references for both the authors of handbooks as well as people educating future teachers. For that purpose, the author defines intercultural competence, presents various approaches to error and its classification in teaching, and then explains what pragmatic error is and describes its linguistic characteristics.

The volume Borders and Contacts. Local, Regional and Global Phenomena, coordinated by Carmen Darabus and Camelia Zabava, brings together 28 papers presented by different scholars (from Romania, Bulgaria, Italy, Poland, Ukraine, the Northern Macedonia, Lithuania, and Sweden) in a panel organized at Veliko Tarnovo, Bulgaria, in June 22nd 2019. The volume is structured in three chapters: linguistics, literature and cultural studies. All the papers, having different subjects, are subordinated to the maine topic and try to demonstrate that the borders separate people, but the culture unites them.

The paper aims to analyse how Romanian has been perceived, known and presented by some of the great foreign linguists of the past one hundred years. They are dialectologists, Romance languages’ specialists, grammarians, mostly from the European space, who have known differently Romanian language and approached it in their work.

The main objective of this paper is to present the historical evolution of the adjectival subsystem in the written Romanian language, as it is reflected in the most representative Romanian religious texts from the time period between the 17th century and the 20th century. The conclusions refer to the permanent interweaving of the Romanian literary language with the special language of the church, to the development of both functional variants. They have influenced each other, imposing forms that have acquired viability and standardised use, not without possibilities of stylistic and pragmatic nuancing, in various other registers, levels, styles. In other words, the essence of our research has been to recompose the moving, i.e., diachronic, picture of the Romanian adjectival subsystem within the general Romanian language system.

The focus of this paper is on father absence in the South African context, a growing concern with significant implications for family well-being, relationships, morality, and children's development. Father absence poses a considerable social challenge for many communities across South Africa, necessitating efforts to address and restore family cohesion. Research indicates that men often struggle to confront their identity crisis, which in turn hinders effective fatherhood and exacerbates the issue of father absence. Addressing this challenge is crucial for promoting healthier family dynamics and societal well-being

This paper is intended as a review of the study in which Cosmin Căprioară analyses the process of metaphorization undergone by many of the terms designating human body parts in the Romanian folk language. The research is based on the cognitive theory of metaphor. In this case, the author has encoded an interdisciplinary analysis grid, using various methodologies and tools from dialectology, language history, lexicology and semantics, psycholinguistics etc. These were necessary in the operation of inventorying and delimiting the types of metaphors, resulting from semantic transfer, namely: [concrete] for [concrete] metaphors and [abstract] for [abstract] metaphors.

The goal of this paper is to present the characteristics of Eugène Ionesco’s dramatic texts, a reason why the genre of avant-garde and theatre of the absurd are also considered, with a view to revealing their major ways of functioning. By pointing out the different dimensions of dramatic language, the emphasis is on those elements that differ from current oral and written language. Starting from the times of decadentism, a crisis of character can be noted in the theater around a type of individual who, as an alienated individual, cannot find his identity in a hostile surrounding world. One of the direct consequences of this crisis will be the impossibility of interpersonal communication, which will be best demonstrated with the concept and tenets of the theater of the absurd. In this context, the study of the theater of the 20th century is done from the perspective of cognitive semantics, as an autonomous level of language. The approach is organised around two notions: dramatic conventions and the actual language of the dramatic texts. The interpretative theory rooted in semantics is applied while analysing Ionesco’s short plays. The starting point is the linguistics of the text as described by Eugen Coşeriu. Capturing the meaning and the means by which it is constructed is one of the objectives in accord with the main principles of cognitive linguistics. The way of analysing the meaning in a text is given by the presence of some textual functions, as possibilities provided by language through relationships that the linguistic sign establishes in the discursive act. The specificity of the discourse comes from the combination of verbal and non-verbal elements, in order to highlight the playwright’s original style. The particularities of this type of language based on an ontological representation of the actional nature in human existence are also investigated. There are two dimensions recognisable in the language of literature: one is specific to the genre and the other one is particular, giving originality and uniqueness. The textual meaning in between these dimensions needs to be reconstructed from all their constituents identifiable at different levels of analysis. Ionesco distanced himself from the conventional and traditional theatre, finding a new formula for the dramatic genre in his own vision of what drama should be like. Ionesco’s dramatic work includes short plays and extensive plays in which the author expresses his adversity against totalitarian regimes. He is the representative of the theater of the absurd and anti-theater. The corpus for this research is composed mainly of the plays The Bald Soprano, The Lesson and The Chairs, the most representative plays for the avant-garde spirit, short plays on the theme of language emptied of meaning and non-communication. Language has an impact on thinking and the resulting actions, which relates it to the ontology of human existence. As dramatic language is preponderently structured on dialogical interactions (and less on monologues, soliloquies and asides), its essence can be revealed by decomposing and recomposing them, from the angle of the conventions specific to the dramatic genre. The analysis of the selected fragments from the corpus has the role to highlight their semantic features in terms of conceptual representations.

The present paper proposes a theoretical approach related to the critical reception of the Romanian literary avant-garde after 2000, a literary phenomenon in‑between marginalization and recovery tendencies. Starting from interwar critical studies from Romania (E. Lovinescu, G. Călinescu, etc.), with predominantly negative perspectives regarding the critical reception of the avant-garde, we will observe how certain clichés of the reception of the phenomenon, seen as “extremist”, as marginal, were perpetuated, with the “barrier” of the apparently impossible literary canonization. After 2000, however, literary studies discuss the historicization of the avant-garde phenomenon, which therefore became canonical in Romanian literary history. However, several elements of the “niche” avant-garde remained in the subsidiary, in the “shadow”. This is what we call the marginal(ized), the secondary avant-garde, which includes a series of less known and researched avant-garde writers, but who contributed to the complex shaping of the avant-garde imaginary. We will analyse several types of works published after 2000, in order to highlight the complexity of the avant-garde, under constant recovery: literary anthologies (Ion Pop, Nicolae Bârna), avant-garde dictionaries (Lucian Pricop, Dan Grigorescu), several critical studies after 2000 (Ion Bogdan Lefter, Ovidiu Morar, Emilia Drogoreanu, Paul Cernat, Dan Gulea, Emanuel Modoc, Delia Ungureanu, Daniel Clinci, Petre Răileanu, Gabriela Glăvan, Ion Pop, etc.). Many of them focus on the recovery trends of some forgotten writers, with the possibility of their inclusion in the central, canonical avant-garde, while other studies pursue new research methodologies, such as the avant-garde seen in a transnational context, in world literature context, etc. An issue that we develop in the context of this extended future research, which is also highlighted upon in the present work, is that of post-Urmuz epigonism within Romanian literary avant-garde, a fact that explains the placement of many writers in the sphere of critical marginalization. Thus, many texts by less researched writers are forgotten, being always associated with the central avant-garde models, especially Urmuz, but also Tristan Tzara or other influential writers within the central avant‑garde groups. It is precisely this problem that made us analyse the way in which the writers who are part of the marginal dimension of the avant-garde are recovered through contemporary literary studies from Romania.

The paper draws a brief parallel between the works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Prometheus Unbound (1820) and of the Romanian Alexandru Philippide The Banishment of Prometheus (1922). It starts from the Greek writers’ image of Prometheus in Hesiod’s Works and Days and Theogony and in Aeschylus’ Prometheus Unbound. It also discusses Harold Bloom’s theory as it analyses the potential anxiety of influence of the Greek writers on Shelley and Philippide and it shows forth this effect seen as a “revisionary ratio” and named by Bloom (1973) a tessera, which means “completion and antithesis”. Both authors create a complex Prometheus character who holds multiple facets. Both authors shape Prometheus as a figure that contains the Western core of values, be they positive or negative. Prometheus actually commits the original sin for man’s sake. This haughty act can be compared to the biblical theft of forbidden knowledge. The author claims that the aim of this theft and the punishment meted out to Prometheus by Zeus are destined to estrange man from nature and from God and to push man into hubris. These also kindle man’s Faustian propensity which turns man into his own divinity, or which recasts the divinity according to man’s own design. If Shelley’s Prometheus turns out to be the Romantic hero achieving moral and intellectual perfection, being uplifted by authentic, selfless and noble goals, Philippide’s Prometheus is the disillusioned, bitter hero from a well-wrought ars poetica, who seeks another mankind on whom to bestow his love and selfless goodwill gestures. His poem represents a symbol of the artist living in his ivory tower failing to be understood by his fellow beings.

This study focuses on a unique collection of personal economic records and additional documents from the 20th century, belonging to a Catholic priest from Satu Mare County, Romania. The material is exceptional, as it represents a rare collection of written documents from the Hungarian-speaking region of the 20th century, authored by a Catholic priest. These records provide an in-depth look into the life of a priest, who, despite his clerical duties, maintained a strong connection to farming, a legacy from his farmer-herdsman parents of Swabian descent. The economic records, which span from 1949 to the 1960s, offer insights into the priest's personal and economic life. They include narratives about managing a parish, engaging in farming activities, and handling personal financial transactions. These documents not only reflect his efforts to balance religious responsibilities with agricultural interests but also illuminate the socio-economic conditions of the time. The study explores the priest's economic decisions, the value he placed on different assets, and his understanding of wealth in a changing society. It also examines the broader context of peasant embourgeoisement in 20th-century Romania, highlighting how a priest and his family navigated the transition from a traditional peasant lifestyle to a more bourgeois existence. This transition is evidenced by their adoption of modern goods and technologies, changes in family dynamics, and shifts in career strategies, reflecting the complex interplay between personal, economic, and social factors during a period of significant societal change. Overall, the paper offers a micro-historical perspective on the life of this 20th-century priest, providing valuable insights into his unique experiences and the broader socio-economic transformations of the era.

The following paper examines effective language-teaching strategies for international students learning Romanian amidst the increasing globalization. Addressing challenges faced by diverse learners, the study employs a methodology encompassing literature review, classroom observations, and interviews with experienced instructors. Emphasizing the importance of pragmatic elements in language instruction, the research explores the integration of technology, cultural immersion, and real-world applications to enhance pragmatic competence. Grounded in sociolinguistic theories, the article underscores the role of pragmatic competence in effective communication. Beyond linguistic structures, language instructors are urged to incorporate nuanced elements reflecting Romanian culture. Pedagogical strategies tailored to international students include task-based activities, role-playing, and language immersion. Assessment involves qualitative analysis of student performance, feedback, and proficiency assessments. The article also delves into the role of technology, discussing the integration of virtual reality, online platforms, and multimedia resources for immersive learning. The study concludes with implications for educators, curriculum developers, and policymakers, advocating for culturally sensitive language curricula. Overall, it contributes to the discourse on language education by emphasizing the interconnectedness of language and culture, promoting pedagogical approaches that foster cross-cultural communication.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the differences and similarities between the latest volume of stories published by the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu (Melancolia, 2019, Bucharest, Humanitas) and his previous literary production. Although Melancolia has been associated with Nostalgia and indeed exhibits many parallels with the first volume of short novels published by Cartarescu, the truth is that the 2019 volume refers to the literary universe created from other texts as well. By comparing and contrasting Melancolia with some of his main works, from novels such as the three volumes of the Orbitor trilogy (Aripa stângă, Corpul, Aripa dreaptă), Travesti or Solenoid to his poetry, through the stories of Nostalgia, the essay aims to demonstrate how this volume dialogues, more or less explicitly, with all the previous ones while distancing itself from them in some narrative and stylistic aspects. After examining elements such as characters, motifs, symbols, metaphors, subjects, intertextuality, and metafiction, the work focuses on space and time as the two main categories in which the most significant changes take place as they move away from their usual context, communist Bucharest (more precisely, from the late 1950s to the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime in the late 1980s). This temporal and spatial framework is one of the fundamental axes of all Cărtărescu’s literary texts, which gives them unity, stability, and continuity. However, as the article tries to demonstrate, the change is not total, but Mircea Cărtărescu, through his usual intertextual play, refers indirectly to this space well known by his readers and, consequently, perhaps also to that historical period. To argue this issue, this article outlines the direct allusion to a specific space mentioned in some of the author’s earlier texts. This is the factory where one of the most important episodes of the first story (Punțile) takes place. The spatial descriptions of the first and third stories are also analyzed to check the parallels between them and some settings of Nostalgia, Orbitor or Solenoid. The work also investigates the possible objectives of these changes and similarities. On the one hand, it is possible to identify some of Cărtărescu’s characteristic elements in Melancholy due to its thematic and stylistic permanence (child and adolescent characters, the games as creation and as a gateway to a magical universe, the mother, rites of passage, onirism, the use of polysemic symbols such as the butterfly, duality, symmetry and twins, fractal images, anti-mimetic references, etc.), as well as the allusions (explicit or implicit) to his previous works. On the other hand, by neglecting (at least unequivocally) the preferred space-time frame of his previous works, Melancolia can be universalized, and the fictitious components can prevail over any possible reference to extra-literary reality. In this way, the Romanian writer achieves a work that is both very similar to and very different from his broader literary corpus, from everything he had written until the moment of the publication of Melancolia.

Romanian children’s literature has always been situated at the crossways of cultural ideologies. The Romanian texts for children lack innocence due to the implicit level of cultural, social, and historical knowledge they mirror at different epochs. In this paper I investigate how literary texts for children written in Romanian communities living abroad present the idea of homeland. I examine literary works written by three contemporary Romanian writers living in Romanian communities in Serbia: Ana Niculina Ursuleanu, Radu Flora and Slavco Almăjan. My selection includes books published in between 1970 and 2010: Cu Soarele-n Creștet [With the sun on the head], (2006); Soare, Bună Dimineața! [Sun, good morning!], (1998); Cărările Nilului [The paths of the Nile], (2008); Piticii au Uitat să Crească [The dwarfs forgot to grow up], (1987); Pianul cu Păienjeni [The piano with spiders], (1991); Când Vine Primăvara [When spring comes], (1970). In my analysis, I focus upon the role of settings in building the image of an eternal Romanian homeland that transcends the national borders. Thus, I discuss three main types of settings that shape the fiction imagined by the proposed authors, related to the following environments: landscape, family, and school. My analysis considers the theory of landscape proposed by Mitchell (2002, p. 5) in Landscape and Power. According to it, landscape implies the interaction between the human, the natural, the self and the other. For each novel, I analyse the role of settings within the literary texts. I explore Radu Flora’s novel in connection with two elements of setting, landscape and school, respectively. In Ana Niculina Ursulescu’s books I look at the bond between family and landscape, while in Slavco Almăjan’s literary work I highlight the importance of landscape in building the image of childhood. These functions are classified according to a sophisticated range, from the purpose of clarifying the conflict or its function as a symbol (in When Spring Comes by Radu Flora), to the task of mood intensifier attributed to setting (in Balul Strugurilor [The party of grapes] by Slavco Almăjan). My conclusions validate the idea that literary texts constantly build and convey an image of the Romanian identity and a sense of belonging to the Romanian homeland as marked by borders. I focus on nostalgia and irony as the main feelings the authors transmit about the image of homeland. On the one hand, the image of homeland in the literary works written by these three writers implies nostalgia, a feeling conveyed through an adult’s perspective of childhood. On the other hand, sometimes, as it happens in the case of the novel When Spring Comes, the narrator adopts a humorous perspective on history and human interactions among characters. As a final remark, I show that the selection of these three settings (landscape, family and school) creates the image of homeland in connection with a nationalist ideology. More precisely, children’s books reinforce the idea of unity between the two Romanian speaking communities (in Romania and Vojvodina) that share common cultural values. The representation of homeland reiterates a history-oriented ideology and legitimates the assimilation of nation to childhood.

My paper problematizes the (non)existence of the fictional beings, addressing a series of important theoretical questions and comparing some relevant (realist / antirealist) answers archived by the modern and contemporary conceptual history. I have examined contrastive philosophical perspectives that define the ontological condition of fictional beings, in an attempt to represent the specific difference of these imaginative constructs and their experiential roles. The argumentative stake of my concise research is to prove that, in the coordinates of the imaginative worlds, fictional beings, their behavior, language, emotions, intentions, help us „read” and interpret real life - they are cognitive tools of exceptional value.

Intellectuals and artists have been crafting an image of the Romanian peasant as the building block of the nation since the second half of the 19th century. The process went hand in hand with the modernization of the elites, and the peasant was thus mainly ‘discovered’ within the cultural framework of Romanticism, as the ‘eternal autochthon’ (Mihăilescu,2017, p.173), creator of the specific Kultur of the Romanian people. However, dramatic social transformations such as the difficult transition period of the ʹ90s have shifted the focus from a complimentary representation of the peasant as the national foundation – and all the positive characteristics of his/her habitus in terms of material, spiritual and aesthetic values– to a rather alienated and anachronistic figure coming across as a burden that has to be carried into modernity by the enlightened social strata. This paper uses visual analysis, grounded in Barthesian semiotics, to explore the changes in modes of representation of the peasant in popular media from the depository of national values to a marginal lower class, striving to keep up with the urban lifestyle. Various portrayals of peasants in TV series and sketches, movies and memes point to the degradation of the peasant figure in the public imagination. Images of poverty, bad taste and a lack of hygiene seem to pollute the bodies, garments and home environments of the rural characters, with a toxic effect on their language and behaviour as well. Although there have always been derogatory images of the peasants in the discourse of the elites (Mihăilescu also coined the term ‘domestic primitive’ for the representation associated with the historical tendency to portray the peasants as a backward population incapable of progress), in recent times this tendency has prevailed, especially with the rural-themed successful TV series Las Fierbinți, for mainly ideological reasons which will be discussed. Thus, apart from deconstructing a national myth, I argue that the representation of contemporary peasants and their degenerating habitus also contributes to the polarization in the Romanian society.

The Romanian and Bulgarian languages share common features stemming from the Balkan linguistic aria. Among the distinctive grammatical constructions in Balkan languages is the new-type analytic subjunctive, a replacement for the infinitive in various languages such as Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, and Greek. The subjunctive can manifest in present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses in most languages. However, Romanian has more limited combinations, employing only the present and perfect tenses. Despite these differences, the subjunctive shares structural, semantic, and usage similarities across Balkan languages. The use of the subjunctive in optative sentences is a common feature in Balkan languages, conveying achievable desires in the present and strong but unrealizable wishes in the past. This paper aims to broaden the research on the Balkan-type subjunctive by illustrating parallels in the modal values of this mood in Romanian and Bulgarian in independent optative sentences. The research underscores numerous correspondences in the use of the subjunctive in optative sentences in Romanian and Bulgarian. In both languages, within the optative context, the subjunctive expresses various sentiments such as desire, wishes, regret, protest, and indignation. The expression of both factual and counterfactual desires using present and past subjunctive forms is also similar in both languages. The present forms of the subjunctive express a factual desire, meaning an achievable wish that could be fulfilled in the future. The present subjunctive forms are very often encountered in idiomatic expressions that convey wishes and imprecations. Many similarities are noted between expressions in the two languages, both in terms of structure and in semantics and lexical means. The use of present subjunctive forms is not typical for expressing counterfactual wishes (unrealizable or difficult to achieve) but occurs in specific contexts. Wishes expressed through past subjunctive forms are counterfactual because the circumstances in which they could have been realized are omitted. Such statements convey the speaker's regret regarding an unfulfilled desire. In Romanian grammar, detailed treatment of the uses of the perfect subjunctive is lacking, but it is noted to have optative value. In Bulgarian, counterfactual wishes are expressed using three past tenses of the subjunctive – pluperfect, imperfect, and perfect. In this regard, the capabilities of the perfect subjunctive in Romanian stand out for expressing multiple meanings. With the exception of some meanings of the imperfect subjunctive in Bulgarian, the perfect subjunctive in Romanian can convey nearly all the meanings of the three past tenses in Bulgarian. The study highlights numerous similarities in the use of the subjunctive in Romanian and Bulgarian in optative sentences, offering observations that contribute to a deeper understanding of this mood within the field of Romanian, Bulgarian, and Balkan linguistics.

The paper deals with Italian helping verbs (modal, aspectual, causative verbs) and light verbs which form complex predicates and with the rules that guide its use in Italian descriptive grammars published in Italy between 1953 and 2005. The author shows that those forms in both – traditional and contemporary Italian descriptive grammars are treated at the level of word classes whereas it could be more appropriate to discuss them as clause elements as they form complex predicates. In our opinion this way of describing such verbs is due to the tradition in Italy to focus on a form and not on function of an element. What is more, Italian grammarians tend to omit in Italian descriptive grammars noun predication and the role of semantic predicate (n pred.). The goal of the paper is to present the advantages of an integrated approach to helping verbs (modal, aspectual, causative verbs) and light verbs in modern Italian. The author emphasizes its importance for contemporary Italian FL syntax teaching

The aim of this paper is to address the issue of teaching politeness in textbooks dedicated to learners of Italian as a foreign language. It is assumed that in today’s ever-changing world, full of conflicts and challenges of various kinds, polite communication has become of increasing importance as it helps overcome differences between the participants of the act of communication and promote a peaceful coexistence. Politeness is a phenomenon particularly sensitive to the situational context: the forms considered appropriate vary according to the parameters such as place, channel, age or status of the interactants. Since the complexity of politeness and the variability of its exponents make it difficult to teach, the purpose of this research is to analyze if and how the current textbooks of Italian deal with this aspect of communicative competence. The paper examines which aspects of politeness are taught and with what methods. The analysis is based on the selected textbooks of Italian published in Italy and Poland, in order to compare their approaches.

This paper explores the nexus between Translation Studies and Oral History on Romanian communism. As such, it aims to map out the challenges posed by the translation of historical interviews from Romanian into English. More specifically, inspired by Portelli’s theoretical framework, the paper illustrates the orality of transcribed historical accounts by bringing into focus their rich imagery. To instantiate the case, relevant data have been extracted from two main books on the era: Memorial of pain: darkness and light, by Hossu Longin, 2013 and The Survivors: testimonies from Romanian communist prison, by Anca & Raul Ştef,2014.

The present paper is aimed to analyze how certain concepts of political identity are translated into poet-ics of identity in contemporary Spanish narrative. The analysis covers four novels published since 1998, written by Spanish authors and which achieved high rates of sales and positive critical recognition. The study was not limited to specific immigrant groups in order to reflect a variety of experiences and political positions represented in the texts. The paper is a study of the image and functions of immigrant characters in selected Spanish novels of the last three decades: Háblame, musa, de aquel varón (1998) by Dulce Chacón, Ventajas de viajar en tren (2000) by Antonio Orejudo, Cosmofobia (2007) by Lucía Etxebarria and En la orilla (2013) by Rafael Chirbes. Sociologists and psychologists indicate three main classes of negative attitudes towards immigrants (citizen insecurity, threat to cultural identity and competitiveness in obtaining resources). Within this context the article aims to determine to what extent the literary representations of immigrant characters constitute reproductions or transgressions of culturally prefabricated images of the Other and explores the different narrative and ideological functions these characters play. The paper also studies the presence of discourses that support social exclusion of immigrants and the means of subverting them.

This paper studies the characteristics of Postcolonial Literature in Portuguese by focusing on the conditions of social, historical and political exceptionallity in which it is created. It explores how these conditions find a reflection on the use of grammar, vocabulary and discoursive patterns to reinforce a cultural and literary identity. The paper also discusses aspects related to the practice of translation into Spanish of this type of literature.

The conjunction como si select usually in the subordinated adverbial clauses (modal, conditional and comparative) the tenses of the subjunctive mood cantara / cantase and hubiera / hubiese cantado. However in some papers is mentioned the possibility of the construction of como si with the tenses of indicative mood. This paper contains the analysis of the modal selection after como si and, particularly, the possible substitution of subjunctive by the indicative tenses. The analyses is realized on the ground of the corpus of Real Academia Española (CORPES XXI, CREA, CREA. Versión anotada).

The paper aims to present the potential, for foreign language students, of the exolingual interactions online in public and open forums. For the analysis of students’ commentaries, I apply the observation categories that were first elaborated for the analysis of posts published in press sites. I focus on narrative commentaries in which web users organize phenomena and events discussed in public discourse and try to give them their individual interpretation. I consider this kind of interaction on press sites as contrib-uting to the civic debates: I argue that they can be also integrated in observation categories used to describe and analyze exchanges between students discussing social issues in reference to foreign lan-guage media information. In the paper I present two kinds of commentaries: those written by native speakers in public forums and those written by FL students in response to public commentaries.

The following paper deals with a view on the concept of fidelity in literary translation with an analysis of the Romanian poet Mircea Ivănescu’s work on the overture of episode eleven: “Sirens” from James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Mircea Ivănescu is a postmodernist poet who prefers to employ an ordinary language when writing. Moreover, he is a self-taught man of letters who didn’t even get a degree in the languages he translated from. When speaking of his work as a translator his attitude is often sceptical. However, “Ulise” is an acclaimed Romanian translation and critics have repeatedly praised Ivănescu’s translation skills and use of language. For that reason, the paper focuses on the concept of fidelity in translation and on the effort of the Romanian poet to efficiently render Joyce’s writing style in the target language and at the same time to preserve the original meaning of words. The paper is not intended to elicit the imperfections of the translation but rather to illustrate the intricacy of the task, the problems of non-equivalence that are difficult to avoid by any literary translator and some potential approaches.

This paper aims at examining the causes of the emergence of French subordinate Noun-Noun com-pounds. It is well known that the Noun-Noun pattern in French remains marginal compared to other lexicogenic processes, especially N-PREP-N or N-A, and it is supposed that its appearance as well as its progressive development took place during the last two centuries (19th-20th). The aim of this paper is to examine more in detail when and why French Noun-Noun structures emerge. As for the first question, empirical data from the Frantext corpus allow to hypothesize that both the type and the token frequency of French Noun-Noun compounds remain stable since the thirties of the nineteenth century until the end of the Second World War and that after this period, especially during the sixties, it begins to grow exponentially. Contrary to Arnaud’s estimate (2003, p. 141), no significant change in frequency or productivity was observed around the middle of the 19th century. As for the second question, the author claims that the emergence of subordinate N-N compounds was triggered by an increase in the productivity of the attributive N-N compounds, for which there is no competitive pattern in French. The theoretical rationale of this hypothesis is anchored in paradigmatic approaches to word formation, with specific reference to the formalization made according to the Construction Morphology framework (Booij, 2010).

Acronyms are lexical units that have been thoroughly explored in terms of their morphology or pronun-ciation. However, their semantic value has not been entirely determined yet. The present paper aims at investigating the manner in which a semantic value of an acronym, and particularly a difference between proper and common acronyms, influences techniques applied to translating them. In order to achieve the aforementioned objective, on the basis of the cognitive theory of proper names, the authors have distinguished Polish and French acronyms being ergonyms as well as acronyms belong-ing to proper names and these designating item classification. The paper concerns the analysis of both Polish and French translations of ergonyms in foreign language press and French common acronyms in the Polish press. The performed analysis allows observing a tendency towards transferring acronyms-ergonyms that play the role of a rigid designator rather than full names in the target text. By contrast, the techniques of translating common acronyms differ, depending on whether they designate phenomena typical of the source culture or universal ones.

The current paper represents a partial bibliography about the life and the works of Publius Ovidius Naso, reflected in the papers written between 2001-2017. The bibliographic inventory made in the bimillennial year of the death of the great Latin poet exiled at Tomis contains reviews, text quotations, monographies, translations and evocations dedicated to Ovidius

The writer Petru Popescu (born 1944) entered Romanian literature in the late 1960s and almost immediately gained the interest of critics and readers. His novels were innovative not only in terms of bold themes but also of narrative strategies. This article focuses on Petru Popescu’s work written in exile in English, i.e., from the late 1970s until 2009. His texts vary significantly, as Popescu tried his hand at several literary genres, from popular novels (Before and after Edith, In Hot Blood), travelogues (Amazon Beaming), adventure novels (Almost Adam), and adolescents’ literature (Footprints in Time) to his memoir (The Return) and the more stylized memoir about his parents-in-law (The Oasis: A memoir of Love and Survival in a Concentration Camp). * The paper was created within the framework of Cooperatio, a programme for the basic institutional support of science and research at Charles University, in the field of Literature.