Persistent and futile are the theories of translation. But so are as those of the fantastic or the acts of public piety. From the posturing of a judgmental above or an insidious aside, little of substance has been said about the swarming, sharp work of translation. As if there were a general of translation, not having to whom to delegate the work of difference across the clouds, the sun gets bored upon seeing than everything underneath is the same. To be sure, there is no interesting theory of translation as...   ⇨ Read more

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

This paper aims to present a brief diachronic and transmedial overview of the development of the features of narration and its atomic unit, the narreme. Across media, narratives change, and so do the techniques and processes involved, giving rise to several distinctions in terms of genre, narreme delivery, audience involvement and relationship between audience and author. This is achieved through an attempt at identifying certain common features of narratives across media and to properly define and isolate the...   ⇨ Read more

The present essay addresses the ideas of radical translation and radical interpretation advanced by celebrated analytic philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine and D. Davidson, attempting to show their relevance for translation theory and, more broadly, for the corpus of literary theory. I aim to reassess the debate over the translatability or untranslatability of a literary or cultural text, taking it beyond the politics of translation and multicultural studies and placing it within the framework of hermeneutic...   ⇨ 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

Over the past 50 years, the understanding of the nymphet has mutated from a special type of becoming, as seen in Nabokov′s master text, to being a Lilith- like essence. There are other rules to be observed by the American artists Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie when portraying a nymphet as contrasted to those Soumei Hoshino has to follow in Japan. They navigate different (sub)cultural contexts and address varying conventions, so that visually “translating” Lewis Carroll′s Alice becoming a nymphet implies...   ⇨ 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

The question “to what degree does metafiction construct and deconstruct worlds” generates a conceptual and paradigmatic rethinking of metafiction, based on the theoretical tools of possible worlds theory, especially fictional worlds. More specifically, to what degree does metafiction succeed in constructing a verisimilar possible world or, on the contrary, undress it of materiality and illusion of reality, turning rather to itself as a text (metafiction is self-conscious, auto-referential fiction, drawing...   ⇨ Read more

For the better part of the last three decades, Romanian poetry has undergone a series of mutations that led to the recovery of the interwar avant-garde, both in terms of poetic discursive strategies and in the militant rhetoric of its manifestoes. Although the first avant- garde influences date back to the 60ies, with a major iteration in the 70ies and the 80ies, because of the socio-cultural context of these periods we can only speak of a formal influence of the avant-garde. This paper intends to analyse how...   ⇨ 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