“People Eat Their Dinner, Just Eat Their Dinner…”: Food Discourse in Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters and Beth Henley’s Crimes of the Heart

The essay sets out to explore the functions of food discourse in the plays Three Sisters by Anton Chekhov and Crimes of the Heart by Beth Henley. Based on the critically established continuity between the two plays, the essay looks at the ways the dramatists capitalize on food imagery to achieve their artistic goals. It seemed logical to discuss the alimentary practices within the framework of everyday life studies (Edmund Husserl, Alfred Schütz, Fernand Braudel, Bernhard Waldenfels and others), moved to the forefront of literary scholarship by the anthropological turn in the humanities. Enhanced by a semiotic approach, this perspective enables one to understand food products and consumption manners as performing a variety of functions in each play. Most obviously, they are instrumental in creating the illusion of “everydayness” vital for new drama. Then, for Chekhov, food comes to epitomize the spiritless materiality of contemporary life, while in Henley’s play it is predominantly used, in accordance with the play’s feminist agenda, as a grotesque substitute for the lack of human affection. Relying upon the fundamental cultural distinction between everyday and non-everyday makes it possible to compare representations of festive occasions in the two plays seen through the gastronomical lens of “eating together.” Despite substantial differences, the emphases on alimentary practices in the plays serve to realize the inexhaustible dramatic potential inherent in the minutiae of quotidian life.

The Image of the River in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills

This essay focuses on the theme of the river in Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills which will be analyzed in relation to the nuclear devastation of WWII. Rivers have a special meaning to the inhabitants of Nagasaki since the rivers were filled with the corpses of people who were exposed to radiation after the atomic bombing. It is also known in Nagasaki that unidentifiable fireballs called onibi float over marsh ground at night in summer. Especially in his first novel, A Pale View of Hills, the river evokes the image of Sanzu No Kawa, a river which, in Japanese Buddhism, the souls of the dead are believed to be crossing on the seventh day of afterlife. The river imagery signifies the boundary between life and death, and it has been used as a metaphor for the transience of time. As such, the river displays an ephemeral texture. In A Pale View of Hills, the protagonist Etsuko reminisces about her days in Nagasaki. In her memories, she becomes friends with Sachiko and her daughter Mariko. One night, Mariko confesses to Etsuko that she sees a ghostly woman coming from the other side of the river. Ishiguro also writes about the rivers in other novels. For example, in Never Let Me Go, he uses the river as a metaphor for Kathy and Tommy’s fate. In The Buried Giant, at the end of the novel, Axl sets Beatrice free and lets the boatman carry her alone to the island, which can be read as Beatrice’s departure from life. My analysis explores Ishiguro’s intentions when using the river and various apparitions in his novels, with a special focus on A Pale View of Hills.

Gender and Ethnicity: Life Stories of Jewish-American Immigrant Women in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

In the first half of the twentieth century, immigrants left oral and written testimonies of their experience in the United States, many of them housed in various ethnic-American archives or published by ethnic historical societies. In 1942, the Yiddish Scientific Institute in New York City encouraged Jewish-American immigrants to share their life stories as part of a written essay contest. In 2006, several of these autobiographical accounts were translated and published by Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer in a volume entitled My Future Is in America. Thus, this essay examines the autobiographies of two Jewish-American immigrant women, Minnie Goldstein and Rose Schoenfeld, with a view to comparing how their gendered identity (as women and as members of their families) has impacted their choices and lives in their home countries and in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century.

Phonological Patterns in the Translations of Poe’s “The Bells” into Romanian

Of all translation work in the world at any given time, poetry makes up just a small proportion. And of all theorists in translation, only a few tackled the issue of poetry translation for reasons that need no expatiation. The article below discusses two translations into Romanian of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells,” focusing on the approaches and techniques used by the translators in what concerns the transfer of phonological patterns from English into Romanian. The aim is to determine to what extent the target-language texts are faithful replicas in terms of orchestration and aesthetic function, and, whether the outcome has suffered any meaning transformation as a result of the transfer of phonological patterns.

The Challenges of Translating The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn into Romanian

A classic of American literature, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has had a huge impact not only on American literature but also on world literature. Its bold and freshly creative style, its humor and the author’s endless verve and vitality, the multifaceted and novel approach to life have all contributed to its success and popularity. However, Twain’s greatest merit probably lies in the way in which he used language, crafting art out of the speech of ordinary people. His experiments with language, the vernacular in particular, have meant a huge step forward in American literature and have been a source of inspiration for many writers. However, the translation of the novel has generated huge challenges related to the linguistic register appropriate for the translation of the novel and the strategies for rendering dialect, the African-American one in particular. It has also divided Romanian translators with regard to the target readership the original novel addressed: children, adults or both.

Japan’s Food Culture – From Dango (Dumplings) to Tsukimi (Moon-Viewing) Burgers

The purpose of this essay is to present how Japanese eating habits have changed in the context of globalization. We start from the premise that eating is not merely about meeting a basic need, but about creating a relationship with nature. It can be regarded as a ritual practice because it reveals a culture and its people’s beliefs, values and mind-sets. As Geert Hofstede et al. note, life in Japan is highly ritualized and there are a lot of ceremonies (192). Starting from the idea that food consumption is based on rituals too, we intend to explain the relationship between eating habits and lifestyle change in contemporary Japan. Considering that the Japanese diet is based on whole or minimally processed foods, we ask ourselves how Western food habits ended up being adopted and adapted so quickly in the Japanese society. With this purpose in mind, we intend to describe some of the most important festivals and celebrations in Japan, focusing on the relationship between special occasions and food. In other words, we aim to explain the cultural significance of food and eating and to see if and how these habits have changed in time.

“The Reason for War is War”: Western and Eastern Interrogations of Violence in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost

Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost (2000) is set in civil war-torn Sri Lanka. This contemporary violent moment becomes a rupture through which the writer interrogates the division between Western and Eastern ways of approaching a violent situation. This essay sets out to investigate historical instances of violence and justifications for violence in the Buddhist context. The essay then turns to Buddhist scholars’ contemporary critical examination of violence and war in light of the teachings of ancient Buddhist texts. Then, having established the Buddhist history and contemporary debate around violence and war, the essay explores how Ondaatje comments on this history through the contemporary moment of civil war in Sri Lanka. The essay argues that rather than illustrating the need for a purer Buddhism or the separation between the political and the religious, as some scholars have argued in relation to Anil’s Ghost, according to Ondaatje, the only way to approach the problem of violence with any hope of reaching understanding is through appreciating the different ways of knowing offered by the East and the West.

Understanding Arab American Identity through Orientalist Stereotypes and Representations in Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006)

Arab-American women’s literature has emerged noticeably in the early years of the 21st century. The social and political atmosphere in post-9/11 America encouraged the growth of such literature and brought it to international attention. This diasporic literature functions as a means of discussing the Orientalist discourse that circumscribes Arab American identity and its effects in determining their position in the wider American society. As such, this article investigates the extent to which Edward Said’s discourse of Orientalism is employed by Mohja Kahf in her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf (2006) to project the stereotypes and misrepresentations that confine the identity of Arab and Muslim characters in the US society. This article suggests that post-9/11 Arab American fiction serves as a literary reference to such stereotype-based discourse in the contemporary era. The arguments in this article, while employing an analytical and critical approach to the novel, are outlined within postcolonial and Orientalist theoretical frameworks based on arguments of prominent critics and scholars such as Peter Morey, Edward Said, and Jack Shaheen, to name just a few.

Ali Smith’s There But For The: Identity, Hospitality and Transcendence in the Age of Surveillance

The aim of this essay is to prove that, throughout Ali Smith’s There But For The (2011), the “narrative” subjective identity (Alphen 83) accessed via the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), as well as through storytelling itself, is liable to be turned into archivable information under the pressures of a surveillance state in which its citizens are complicit. I will use this archival/narrative identity dyad as articulated by theorist Ernst van Alphen in order to investigate at length the novel’s staging of hospitality as corrupted by surveillance. I will oppose the notion of identity as information against Emmanuel Levinas’s conception of the face-to-face relation (Levinas and Hand 42), whereby true hospitality depends upon the mutual respect one person has for the absolute singularity of the other, which involves personal information and the right to privacy. As it will become apparent, these identities lose or gain agency according to the engagement of the self with a newly arrived foreign alterity. Thus, the arrival of strangers throughout Smith’s novel thematizes the scenario of hospitality in tension with the stranger as surveyor or as surveyed. The doubling of language, the self-editing of one’s discourse and the risky openness towards the Other are modes of resistance that eschew the artificial categorizations upon which the archival identity is contingent. However, the bridge from interiority to exteriority is mediation. Smith therefore develops a conception of secularized Grace that works by exploring the revolutionary potential of this very mediation and can disrupt the logic of tyrannical surveillance. Part of this approach to history and language is informed by the witnessing of the traces left on the bodies of martyrized dissidents by unjust systems at their apex. There But For The is narrated by four characters in the mediatic aftermath of a bourgeois dinner party in an affluent suburb of London that witnessed the sudden and unexplainable reclusion of Miles Garth into the spare room of his stunned hosts. The event, as well as those leading up to and following it, is recounted by a grieving nature photographer in his sixties named Mark; May, a rebellious old woman suffering from dementia; an unemployed, middle-aged Anna; and Brooke, a ten-year old girl and voracious reader. The essay will approach these characters’ meditations upon the nature of identity as split between its narrative and archival forms.