Applying Clifford’s broad concept of travel, I discuss American homeless blogs as autobiographical travel writing serving the struggle for recognition of the street people. The analysed travelogues are hitchhiker Ruth Rader’s Ruthie in the Sky blog and self-made woman Brianna Karp’s Girl’s Guide to Homelessness – a memoir published on the basis of the blog bearing the same title. In the travelogues I analyse the characteristic features of a personal travel writing: travel of the self, advice for future...   ⇨ Read more

Lady Precious Stream by Shih-I Hsiung was the first successful West End play by a Chinese playwright. Based on a traditional Chinese opera but with many changes, the play had an enormous appeal to the modern audience in the West. This paper argues that the play is essentially an ingenious re-creation in which Hsiung has undertaken a combination of three roles: translating the original into English; adapting it to the English theatrical practice while maintaining the Chinese convention; and re-writing some of...   ⇨ Read more

This paper aims to shed light on the different aspects of transnationalism and transnational literature in regard to the German cultural space and the so-called (Im)Migrantenliteratur (immigrant literature and migrant literature, respectively). By this approach, the historical context of post-war Germany will prove itself to be of great relevance, especially in studying the sociological consequences brought about by the import of Turkish work force in Germany, the concept of difference and its modes of...   ⇨ Read more

Gerhard Richter's books Text – a collection of painter's verbal statements about his artistic method – and Atlas – 783 sheets with images, mainly photographs and visual notations – are two archives that complement the understanding of his diverse artistic practice. The paper presents a textual model that experimentally simulates a possible ordering principle for archives. Richter's statements in the book Text are cut up and used as short quotations. Those that relate to multiple aspects of the painter's oeuvre...   ⇨ Read more

This paper inquires whether video games, as cultural artefacts stemming from the digital environment, can be interpreted from the angle of transnational literature. As such, two main hypotheses are reviewed: first, that video games are transnational in content, recycling in a syncretic manner the themes and archetypes that were once rooted in local, nationalized mythologies, but that are now decontextualized and revaluated in a transnational narrative space; and secondly, that video games create transnational...   ⇨ Read more

The present paper participates in the discussion about the differences between masculine and feminine modes of travel in terms of interests, perception, and representation, by exploring the Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M--y W--y M--e Written during Her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. As a traveller, Lady Mary engaged in the contemplation of cultural landscapes: she attempted to understand the social logic of the communities she met and to assess the cultural distance...   ⇨ Read more

Drawing on scholarship on transnationalism, this paper resorts to concepts such as “trans-ethnic identity” and “multiple social identities” for making sense of two autobiographical writings authored by scholars who articulated a leftist counter-memory in telling their life stories spanning before, during, and after Romanian socialism. The study compares and contrasts the memoirs of Andrei Roth and Ion Ianoși, arguing that their retrospective writings document the articulation of a different strand of...   ⇨ Read more

Having as a theoretical premise the idea that “essential personal identities” do not always synchronise with the essential identity of the group they are supposed to belong to, and that this de-synchronisation can have an ethical opposition at its core, the paper focuses on the way in which Mircea Nedelciu’s typical protagonists – nomads, socially marginal individuals with confusing, “unaccomplished identities” – attempt to (culturally and morally) reconstruct their damaged personal identities by disengaging...   ⇨ Read more

Ekphrasis is a text genre based on the intertwining of visual and verbal features, involving the processes of both reading, and priming a visual image or a related action. We argue in this study that this genre, which has been object of many disputes and critical claims over the times, is a powerful tool in order to stimulate a particularly intense activation of the reader/listener’s emotions and imagination. This because of the double nature of the inputs triggering more powerfully the embodied simulation by...   ⇨ Read more

In this paper I try to highlight the ambiguous voice of the writer Dumitru Țepeneag, passing from author to auctor, in his exile through an Europe where characters are as “flags” on the map, moved from time to time, having no destiny or a clear direction. In his almost oneiric way, the writer tries to put together lives balanced between two worlds: on one hand, there is the world where meanings are so worn-out that they cannot convey anything any longer, and, on the other hand, there is the world of abstruse...   ⇨ Read more

European film festival venues are explored in their relation to transnationalism, a “supranational sphere”, as well as with political and economic implications (Acciari, 2014). The international film festivals are seen as cosmopolitan spaces (Chan 2011, 253), yet, the new morphology of film festivals - perceived as "public spheres" or as new objects of historical research - bring a new light on film festivals and the theory of culture and visual discourse, especially with the new reconfiguration of festivals in...   ⇨ Read more

Edited by Asunción López-Valera and Ananta Sukla. Champaign, Illinois: Common Ground Publishing, 2015, ISBN 9781612298245, 443 p.

Helen Small. The Value of the Humanities, Oxford University Press, 2016, ISBN 978-0-19-872805-4, 204 pages

Clive HAMILTON, Christophe BONNEUIL, François GEMENE (ed.). The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis. Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, Routledge, 2015.

Andrea Virginás, Cultural studies approaches in the study of Eastern European Cinema: Spaces, Bodies, Memories, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2016