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Horst Bredekamp, Théorie de l’acte d’image. Conférences Adorno, Francfort, 2007: Essai traduit de l’allemand par Frédéric Joly, en collaboration avec Yves Sintomer (Paris : Éditions de la Découverte, 2015), 376 p.
No full textQue les images se trouvent au coeur de notre culture contemporaine, qu’elles déclenchent des polémiques, des prises de positions et des réactions des plus frénétiques, sinon radicales, tient de l’ordre de l’évidence. Bien que Horst Bredekamp entende ancrer sa réflexion dans l’économie actuelle des images, depuis une perspective redevable à ce qu’on appelle depuis quelques décennies déjà « le tournant iconique », l’enjeu de sa réflexion n’est pas d’investiguer nos différentes manières de comprendre l’image, mais tout au contraire, d’opérer un revirement du rapport que nous entretenons avec celle-ci dans le sens où le schéma sujet regardant / objet regardé se voit renversé, sinon dépassé. L’auteur s’interroge ainsi sur un paradoxe propre aux images : immobiles et inanimées, elles ont la capacité d’agir sur le spectateur d’une manière qui leur est propre ; cette force intrinsèque les propulse hors de leur statut passif pour relever des images agentes. En d’autres termes, le regardeur perd de sa position centrale pour devenir un médium par lequel s’exprime l’image. La Théorie de l’acte d’image se propose ainsi comme une phénoménologie de l’image active qui prend appui sur toute une série de théories et de pratiques de l’image, depuis Platon jusqu’aux formules contemporaines (artistiques, scientifiques, politiques et même militaires), attachée à rendre compte de la nécessité de placer l’élément iconique au coeur de toute tentative de compréhension du monde
Emmanuel Alloa, ed. Penser l\u27image (Paris: Les Presses du réel, 2011), 304 p. Penser l\u27image II: Anthropologie du visuel (Paris: Les Presses du réel, 2015), 316 p.
No full textAs the editor of (and one of the contributors to) the first two volumes of the Penser l\u27image series published by Les Presses du réel in their "Perceptions" collection, Emmanuel Alloa manages to assemble an unprecedented theoretical kaleidoscope, having in its invisible center a protean and fluid conception of the image. The metaphor is not too farreached, if one sees the two anthologies – distanced only in time, not so much in substance – as "optical" devices serving to an imaginative examination (skopeō) of the beauty (kalos) of images (eide)
READING AND WRITING AS WEAVERS OF INTERTEXTUAL WEBS. ANALYSIS OF AN ADAPTATION: MRS DALLOWAY AND THE HOURS
No full textIn her essay “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”, Virginia Woolf recognises the pivotal role of the reader 40 years before Reader Response Theory came around, as she argues that reader and writer should see themselves as equals in the creation of a book (Woolf 1924: 23). In this article, we investigate how writing and reading together weave intertextual webs. Although Barthes’ wide sense of intertext informs many of this paper’s claims, we will focus mainly on a phenomenon of intense intertextuality: adaptation. More specifically, we will analyse writers and readers as character typologies in a miniature intertextual web: Virginia Woolf’s own Mrs Dalloway, Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, and the film The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry. We chose these three texts, because the processes at play in adaptation are mirrored by an intensified preoccupation with readers and writers when it comes to the content proper. This is a methodological artifice meant to instrumentalize metatextual phenomena to shed light on how one should approach texts themselves. Finally, we decided to include in our analysis the film adaptation as well, even though it does not deviate greatly from its hypotext, because the specificity of the medium does in fact reveal insights and demands theoretical repositioning in regard to our analysis of reading and writing
NEGOCIEREA ABJECTULUI: GEN ȘI IDENTITATE ÎN INCIDENTUL DE VSEVOLOD GARȘIN: NEGOTIATING THE ABJECT: GENDER AND IDENTITY IN AN INCIDENT BY VSEVOLOD GARSHIN
No full textThis paper analyzes Vsevolod Garshin’s short story An Incident (1878) through the perspective of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and Julia Kristeva’s concept of the Abject. By focusing on the character of Nadezhda, a young prostitute, the article explores how her identity is constructed and constrained by societal norms, male expectations and patriarchal discourse. This research aims to investigate how gender roles, social recognition and abjection shape Nadezhda’s subjectivity, revealing the limits of her personal agency within inflexible social structures. This analysis demonstrates that the protagonist’s attempts to maneuver between socially prescribed roles are temporary and eventually coerced, while her encounter with her counterpart, Nikitin – a civil servant who falls in love with her –, illustrates the destabilizing power of the Abject. Ultimately, the fates of both characters exemplify the inevitable tension between desire, social regulation and identity, thus highlighting the structural forces that trap individuals in liminal roles
DIFFERENTIAL OBJECT MARKING IN CHILD HERITAGE ROMANIAN IN ITALY: IS LANGUAGE CHANGE ACCELERATED UNDER CONDITIONS OF LANGUAGE CONTACT?
No full textLanguage acquisition can drive language change. Incipient changes tend to get amplified to rates higher than those in the input (Cournane 2019). According to some authors, such amplification is accelerated under conditions of language contact (Kupisch & Polinsky 2021). Other authors argue that not every type of language change is accelerated under conditions of language contact (Avram et al. 2021a,b, 2023a). This study aims to contribute to this debate investigating the acquisition of differential object marking (DOM) in child heritage Romanian in Italy. The Romanian DOM system is undergoing a change, from a system which allows two DOM markers to one which uses exclusively one of them. The data come from a corpus of 52 narratives of child heritage speakers of Romanian. Results indicate that child heritage speakers do not advance the language change attested in contemporary Romanian, supporting the view that not every language change in progress gets amplified in language contact situations
THE USE OF GENERIC SUBJECTS BY ROMANIAN HERITAGE LANGUAGE SPEAKERS IN MULTILINGUAL CONTEXTS
No full textThis study examines the use of plural nouns in generic contexts among heritage speakers of Romanian growing up in an English-dominant context in Canada and acquiring French as a third language through the French Immersion program. Building on crosslinguistic research on genericity, we investigate whether these children produce target-like plural noun forms in Romanian compared to English and French, and whether their performance reflects crosslinguistic influence or factors tied to heritage language maintenance. Sixteen heritage Romanian children and five Romanian-dominant controls completed elicitation tasks in all three languages, testing both generic and specific contexts. Statistical analyses revealed significant differences across languages, with Romanian showing the lowest accuracy, particularly in generic contexts, and English showing near-target performance. These results provide new empirical evidence from a rarely studied population, highlighting the vulnerability of heritage morphosyntax to dominant-language structural patterns. The findings underscore the importance of heritage language input and the potential for typologically related languages, such as French, to support heritage language maintenance
HERITAGE LANGUAGE ACQUISITION: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM ROMANIAN CHILDREN
No full textThe last thirty years have seen the emergence and burgeoning of the field of heritage languages and linguistics (Montrul & Polinsky 2021, Polinsky 2018, Rao 2024) and, naturally, the acquisition of heritage languages (Montrul 2008, 2016, Rinke et al. 2019). Heritage languages are socio-politically minority languages that are acquired in a bilingual and multilingual context, simultaneously or as a first language (sequential bilingualism), under pressure from the socio-politically majority language. Immigrant languages in the diaspora, minority historical languages in diverse territories, and aboriginal languages in America, Australia, Northern Europe and Asia can be heritage languages, depending on their circumstances. A significant body of linguistic research on heritage languages has focused on major standard languages in the diaspora, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Russian, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Arabic, to name just a few, and on the language of second-generation immigrants, also known as heritage speakers. The early interest in this young adult bilingual population (Silva-Corvalán 1994, Polinsky 1997, Song et al. 1997) arose from the observation of marked differences in the proficiency and structural changes observed in the grammars of these speakers compared to the grammars of the first-generation immigrants, i.e., the parents of the heritage speakers who immigrated in adulthood and were full speakers of their native linguistic variety. These patterns were also found for Romanian as a heritage language in the United States (Montrul et al. 2015)
Diana Ștefan-Dinescu. 2023. On the Syntax of Deverbal Nominalizations in English and Romanian: Bucharest: Editura Universității din București. 250 pp.
No full textDeverbal nominalization, that is, the linguistic process through which a verb is turned into a noun/noun phrase by the addition of a (zero) suffix (e.g. examination < (to) examine or smile < (to) smile), has attracted a lot of interest from numerous scholars, thus, it has been the subject of thorough investigation over the last few decades. This interest dates back to Chomsky’s (1970) preliminary remarks on nominalizations but receives special attention due to, first and foremost, Grimshaw’s (1990) tripartite division of derived nominals into complex event, simple event and result nominals. The distinction proposed in this seminal work has become so foundational that it has not only generated keen interest in the deeper understanding of this phenomenon (cf. Borer 2012, Alexiadou & Borer 2020 a.o.) but also prompted syntacticians and semanticists to go beyond English and bring forward novel data from a wide variety of genealogically unrelated and typologically distinct languages. The book under review here, the slightly revised version of the author’s doctoral dissertation defended at the University of Bucharest, is one of these cross-linguistic works, which aims to delineate and characterize the parameters that underlie the differences between the system of deverbal nominalization in English and Romanian
Connecting demographic growth to housing prices in Bucharest’s neighbouring towns
No full textLarge cities have always been popular among young professionals worldwide. However, their real estate availability is limited, leading to an increase in housing prices. As a result, people are looking towards the peripheral areas for affordable housing options. This study explores the relationship between house prices and demographic changes in the areas around Bucharest. It analyses the reasons that led people to buy homes in the towns near Bucharest. The methodology used a combination of research methods to investigatethe factors influencing home buyers’ choices in Otopeni, Voluntari, Chitila, Pantelimon, Popești Leordeni, Măgurele, and Bragadiru. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to identify the main factors contributing to buyers’ convictions. Results show that affordable prices are a significant factor in buyers’ decisions. The study’s limits stem from analysing a short one-year period, which prompts further analysis. The findings of this study can provide valuable insights for local development strategies and improvements in transportation infrastructure between Bucharest and its neighbouring towns
On the margins: exploring barriers to health service accessibility for tribal women in India
No full textSince the country’s independence, the Constitution of India has implemented separate provisions for the socio-economic development of local tribes. However, after 75 years of independence, the tribal population remains one of the most marginalised groups, characterised by low socio-economic status and poor health indicators compared to the non-tribal population. Therefore, this study tried to understand the barriers to low healthcare utilisation among tribal women in India. The study is a review paper conducted for the years 1995-2023. Fifty-three research papers were included in the study. With the help of Penchansky and Thomas’s five dimensions of accessibility, the included papers were categorised to understand better the factors contributing to low healthcare accessibility among tribal women. This helped in studying the dimension responsible for low healthcare accessibility. This analysis revealed that Availability, Accessibility, and Acceptability were the primary dimensions responsible for the low healthcare utilisation observed among tribal women in India. It is imperative to prioritise these dimensions in healthcare planning to achieve Universal Health Care and Sustainable Development Goals