A Journey through Knowledge

Book excerpt: A Journey through Knowledge: Festschrift in Honour of Hortensia Pârlog is a collection of articles dedicated to one of the best known Romanian university teachers and linguists, both in her home country and well beyond its borders. The heterogenous material (both in terms of the range of issues tackled and in terms of the approaches adopted by the authors) in the three sections of the volume finds itself a common denominator in the idea of “traveling” and “journey”, around which they are organized. In the first section, Traveling across Identities and Emotions, Pia Brînzeu touches upon some identity issues, in dealing with a form of subversion in Coz Shakespeare, by Marin Sorescu; Jaques Ramel argues against the opinion that Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream was written to be performed as an epithalamium during wedding ceremonies; Adolphe Haberer brings to the fore the non-hero features of the main character in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room; Liliane Louvel writes about the mirror in literary texts, insisting on its potential to send back graphic reflections onto these texts; and Maurizio Gotti discusses definitional criteria, i.e., the principles according to which a term should be defined. In section two, Traveling in Time and Space, Slávka Tomaščíková speaks about the status, functions and characteristics of media narrative discourse during the last decade; Aleksandra Kedzierska follows and characterizes various types of journeys in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, highlighting their significance for celebration; Alberto Lázaro traces the changes that medieval stories, abundant in sexual references and instances of adultery, have suffered to meet the publication requirements during Franco’s regime in Spain; Stephen Tapscott focuses on the relationship between contemporary American poets’ lyric and previously written works (especially Modernist); while Fernando Galván examines a number of literary texts centering on cities that have been dreamed of or imagined by various writers, to illustrate decay, deconstruction and regeneration. The third section, Traveling between Languages and Cultures, opens with Smiljana Komar’s account of the translation of some frequent English discourse markers into Slovene and continues with Loredana Pungă’s illustration of the issue of loss and gain in translation. Irma Taavitsainen and Päivi Pahta highlight the functions of the English politeness marker please, pliis in Finnish, and investigate whether and how its meanings have changed when it has been adopted into the host language. Lachlan Mackenzie’s contribution rounds off the volume with some suggestions on how recent changes in the English language should be taken into consideration when teachers of English evaluate the linguistic performance of their students.