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

Our study investigates the possible ways of discussing the functions of the identity in fictional work. As point of departure we have chosen the novel Jacob se hotărăște să iubească (Jacob beschließt zu lieben, C.H. Beck, 2011) by Cătălin Dorian Florescu. Identity is multilayered, having being formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems, as Stuart Hall (1992, 1997) stressed out. The approach is heavily influenced by postcolonial and...   ⇨ 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

The main purpose of the present study is to detect and portray the way in which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari aligned their views with a movement of annihilation of the self-otherness equation. It also tackles with the explanation of the concept of transindividuality, by which the overtaking of the polarised obsession of the ipseity-alterity definition is proposed. This concept encapsulates both a space of indeterminacy of identity and the incorporation of the multiple alterity – the collective. The present...   ⇨ Read more

What would a dystopian version of London look like? How would the architecture of the near future engage with personal and collective memories in order to define, or even transform the identities of the inhabitants? In an attempt to answer these questions, British New Wave science fiction turns its attention to the exploration of urban dwellers in relation to their dystopian surroundings. This article explores the extent to which the novel High-Rise by J.G Ballard highlights the erasure of memories and ultimate...   ⇨ Read more

This paper explores Romanian literary histories in the light of the theoretical acknowledgements of “World Literature”. Its foremost representatives define the international literary space as a competition for universal acknowledgment among nations. The complex dynamic between culture and socio-economic power is responsible for the hierarchical distinction between (semi)peripheral and core literatures. The case of Romanian literature is significant for the East-European struggle to overcome the socio-political...   ⇨ Read more

As a literary genre, the travel literature was considered a literary hybrid made of several other sub-genres, or a literary sub-species made of the autobiographic writings (Paul Fussell) or of the ethnographic writings (Patrick Holland). Being defined on several axes, such as fiction/non-fiction literature, internal/external travels, poetical/historical form, time/space perspective, the travel writings differ not only in terms of narrative strategies but also in terms of method or purpose of writing. The travel...   ⇨ 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

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

Although contemporary Romanian filmmaking is recognized today as an important part of the global cinema and the young Romanian filmmakers have created a cinematic culture accepted as a model in Europe and internationally, there has been much criticism about the role of the “New Wave” in Romanian culture. The most common critiques describe the productions of this new generation of filmmakers as promoting a negative image, clearly “denigrating” the Romanians, Romanian education or medical systems, suggesting that...   ⇨ Read more

The author’s intention is to analyse the themes of madness and imagination as means of world-making and mediators between them in Cervantes’ novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. The premise of the central argument is that each of Cervantes’ characters relate to the world through their own imagination. The first conclusion generated by this hypothesis is that Don Quixote himself deliberately makes up his world and defines himself as an archetype. This paper proposes a classification of three...   ⇨ Read more