The Power of 'Wonder' by R. J. Palacio to Trigger Young Readers’ Emotionally Literate Responses

Readers’ emotions are naturally blended with their cognitive abilities in the transaction with literary texts. From the perspective of emotional intelligence, an emotionally literate reader will be able to read beyond the surface of the text and make inferences regarding shades of feelings, their causes and effects. The purpose of the present study was to observe whether there is any correlation between the emotional intelligence profile of young readers and their abilities to identify the emotional input in literary texts and its impact on themselves. The study was carried out with the participation of 72 students in the first year at the Faculty of Letters in Iași. It consisted in three stages and relied both on quantitative and qualitative data collection. In the first stage, the students filled in a Reading literary texts – Self-report questionnaire; in the second stage they filled in the How Empathetic are You? (The Toronto Empathy Questionnaire, TEQ) (“How Empathetic”) and in the third stage they were given excerpts from the book Wonder by R. J. Palacio in order to check whether the self-reported emotional literacy skills were at work when approaching a literary text. Approximately half of the students (30) offered to watch the film prior to class discussion and work. The answers were compared with the results of the self-reported questionnaires and a natural and fairly consistent correspondence between the profiles of readers in terms of empathy in general and the empathy felt with regard to the fictional characters together with a good command of emotion vocabulary could be observed.

Religious Division and Otherness as Portrayed in 'Shame' and 'The Ministry of Utmost Happiness'

After the partition of India in 1947, religion has become a major catalyst for division and othering in most of South Asia. Bangladeshi author and activist Taslima Nasrin was exiled from her country, primarily for revealing the mistreatment of the Hindu minorities in Bangladesh in her novel Shame. Indian author Arundhati Roy has also faced severe backlash due to her portrayal of the mistreatment of the Muslims in India in her novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Religion has become an extremely fraught issue in South Asia, making almost any criticism of religious fundamentalism a highly perilous endeavor. Yet, both Nasrin and Roy had the courage to do that. This paper explores how the aforementioned novels expose the process of othering of the religious minorities in India and Bangladesh by highlighting the retributive nature of communal violence which feeds on mistrust, hatred, and religious tribalism – a cursed legacy that can be traced back to the violent partition of the Indian subcontinent based on the two-nation theory.

New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles: A Cultural Map of the Beat Generation

This paper explores the topographical and socio-cultural developments during the Golden Age in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, three Beat Generation epicenters, which determined the deconstruction of traditional norms. Modifications at both city and society levels were represented by the emergence of countercultures, such as the Beat. The visibility received by urban problems, due to the increase in social demonstrations and activism, fostered the formation of a unified front that demanded equality and encouraged social and political movements, such as the Civil Rights and the Second Wave Feminism. The socio-political challenges which the American society was confronted with from the 1950s to the 1970s in these three cities, also reveal a few problems regarding the status of the Beats as well as of minorities in metropolises.

Turning Romanticism on its Head: The Peripheral Symbolic Geography of Aldous Huxley and Ira Levin

Within the present paper, I aim to discuss how Aldous Huxley and Ira Levin have employed the peripheral symbolic geography of their two works (Brave New World and This Perfect Day) to articulate their debate between different sets of social values. Unlike other authors of negative utopias such as George Orwell or Yevgeny Zamyatin, neither Huxley nor Levin idealized pre-modern values. In order to highlight how the two articulated their views with the help of symbolic geography, I will also make use of Michel Foucault’s theoretical concepts of heterotopias, heterochrony as well as the ideas developed by the critics Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre in their seminal work Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. My purpose is thus firstly to point out how and why Huxley and Levin divided the symbolic geography of their works in two parts as well as how they employed the Romantic critique of modernity. Secondly, I aim to show how despite using this analytical tool, they also employed symbolic geography with the purpose of turning the critique on its head, thus unveiling both its strong points as well as its shortcomings.

The Annex-Metaphor and the Nature of the 'Blind Self' in D. H. Lawrence’s “England, My England”

The article explores D. H. Lawrence’s technique of portrayal in the short story “England, My England” (1921) by applying the key terms annex-metaphor and “blind self” to Egbert, the central male character. The former term is coined by the author of the article as a means of understanding Lawrence’s treatment of his protagonist’s inner life. With the help of the daughter figure, the British author manages to shape the abstract character of notions, and to produce a figurative, volatile version of the father’s psyche. The latter concept, “blind self,” belongs to Lawrence himself, and can be transferred, the paper argues, from one character to another in the process of uncovering Egbert’s metaphorically shaped responses to different types of environment: the mystical, the social, the political. The idea of blindness is materialized as attraction towards nature, as denial of society or, on the contrary, as denial of the self, and, last but not least, as automatic response to the whims of history and national politics.

The ‘Handmaid’ and the ‘Chambermaid’: A Comparative Analysis of Atwood’s Seminal Novel from a Feminist Perspective

This article is an analysis from a feminist perspective of the two Romanian translations of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. By adopting Antoine Berman’s three pronged model of translation criticism, I attempt to identify several differences between the translations. Therefore, it will prove pertinent to see whether the translators adhere to the author’s style, are faithful to the tone, imagery, wordplay and ludic nature of the text, if they prefer to steer clear of more adventurous translation strategies and opt for a source-oriented translation, keeping to the initial structure and employing mostly syntactic strategies. Another important element that surfaces and plays a paramount role is that of the translator’s visibility, more precisely those instances wherein she makes her voice known, be it through an explanatory footnote or, perhaps, a translator’s gloss at the end of the translated text. The translators’ own backgrounds are relevant in the case at hand as well, as their experience and formation influence their preferences for a certain style and translation strategies

"You all are sisters! We are all family!" The construction of parenthood in 'RuPaul's Drag Race'

Drag queens epitomise gender fluidity, where the heteronormative binarism male/female is blurred and parodied. Their unconventional nature is reflected in the structure of their community, where they have created alternatives to the heteronormative family, which is historically based on heterosexual marriage and parenthood. Drag families are to be seen as places of personal and financial support, a refuge for young gay men who have been rejected by their “real” families and have financial problems. This study seeks to give prominence to the construction of parenthood in RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-2021) by analysing the discourse – i. e. the system of statements – around drag family, parenthood and sisterhood in a corpus of 174 episodes. The research is carried out in the light of Corpus Linguistics, with the use of #Lancsbox, a software for the analysis of language data and corpora.

Yan Fu's Unfaithful Translation of Thomas Huxley's 'Evolution and Ethics'

This paper analyses Yan Fu’s translation of the title and the key terms in Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and shows that his unfaithfulness was mainly due to his personal intention to inspire the Chinese people to fight against foreign enemies and the feudal system in late nineteenth-century China. In his famous The Heavenly Theory of Evolution, the translation of Evolution and Ethics, Yan Fu added the traditional Chinese value of ‘heaven’ by translating ‘evolution’ as ‘heavenly evolution’ in order to make Darwin’s theory more acceptable and easier to understand by target readers. When he translated terms such as ‘competition’ and ‘natural selection’, Yan Fu borrowed the slogan of the Westernizing reform to explain the relationship linking evolution, competition and selection. Yan Fu wanted to arouse people’s attention to the theory of evolution and hoped they would use evolutionary thought as a theoretical weapon to save themselves and the country from a national crisis. His unfaithful translation appealed to the scholars to make them spread the theory through their social influence.