Editorial: Reading between the Lines: Old and New Vulnerabilities

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The present article considers two metafictional novels published at the end of the 20th century against the background of cognitive literary studies. The formal features of the novels are discussed with a view to the way they defamiliarize various concepts: fiction itself, consciousness, memory, science, art, reading, the internet, artificial intelligence, etc. The novels’ attempts at fostering a dialogue between fiction and the humanities, on the one hand, and science and technology, on the other, are mirrored by the reader’s vacillation between engagement and detachment and the effects of the texts’ self-reflexivity on the reader’s mind.
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Metafiction, Defamiliarization and Cognitive Science: Andrew Crumey’s <italic>Mr Mee</italic> and Richard Powers’ <italic>Galatea 2.2</italic>

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The <italic>strandentwining</italic> intertext of <italic>Finnegans Wake</italic> both obscures and unveils meaning. The cultural ramifications of James Joyce’s intertext, however, run deep, as he subjects the relevant intertexts to subsequent rewritings in order to multiply meaning. In such context, intertextuality in itself can be likened to a translation, whereby otherness is adapted into a literary space to enable the construction or reconstruction of new significance, thus facilitating a far-reaching cross-cultural dialogue; both author and readers, in turn, assume the role of <italic>poeta doctus</italic> and <italic>litteratus doctus</italic>, respectively. Accordingly, the intertexts Joyce has sewn into the text are in constant transformation both <italic>via</italic> their medium and their audience, as is the case with the Viconian intertext. Giambattista Vico’s <italic>The New Science</italic> was carefully integrated by Joyce into <italic>Finnegans Wake1</italic> and adapted to Irish society; Vico’s philosophical thought, which permeates the <italic>Wake,</italic> provides structure and enables the layering of intertextual units, thus multiplying significations and intended meanings. Vico’s theories on language and history enable diachronic and anachronic explorations within the <italic>Wake</italic>, as well as a simultaneous existence of different systems of thought. Joyce’s use of the thunderwords as a primal linguistic expression, coupled with his creative cultural exploits and the systematic structuring of the <italic>Wake</italic> find their origin in Vico’ <italic>The New Science.</italic>
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Vico’s Thunderous Echoes: <italic>The New Science</italic> and <italic>Finnegans Wake</italic>

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This article explores the political dimension of Junot Díaz’s work, focusing on the figure of the dictator as depicted in the footnotes to <italic>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</italic>, in an attempt to analyze his view of the “dangers of dictatorship” in both literature and politics and to prove that the political attitudes of writers influence the way their literature “does” politics. Thus, a thorough analysis of the footnotes exposes <italic>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</italic> as a story about a nerd in New Jersey “dictated” by the narrator, which is challenged by the story of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo who “dictated” the recent history of the Dominican Republic.
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Politics and Literature: Dictatorship in Junot Díaz’s <italic>The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao</italic>

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The short story “Theatre 6” is one of three post-apocalyptic short stories included in Sarah Hall’s collection <italic>Madame Zero</italic>, first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2013. The story is inspired by the real-life case of Savita Halappanavar, who died of septic shock at Galway University Hospital in 2012 because of being denied an abortion on grounds of septic miscarriage. The text paints a dystopian vision of a not so far away future where the Hunter fetal care act legislatively places the life of unborn babies higher than the one of mothers. The protagonists are a genderless anaesthesiologist, Dr. Rosinski, and a nameless patient, brought to a London hospital in septic shock, following a denied abortion in spite of a miscarriage suffered several days before. The time of narration is uncertain; however, the story is generally taken to be placed in a future where present-day anti-abortion tendencies have taken over the British judicial system. The story discusses the being/non-being dichotomy from a variety of perspectives: life-death, morals-hypocrisy, religion-secularism, male-female, empathy-bureaucracy, truth-duplicity. The ultimate question the text raises is what or whose life is sacred in a world that has jettisoned all semblance of sanity?
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Death Is Sacred: Being and Non-Being in Sarah Hall’s “Theatre 6”

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The community-based performance <italic>Do You Know Who I Am?</italic> (2013; Motus Theater, Boulder; dir. Kirsten Wilson) relates the lived experience in the U.S. under the DACA (Deferred Action for Child Arrivals) programme, told by an undocumented Mexican cast. By reclaiming the label ‘undocumented migrants’ whose residency on American land without legal authorisation implies a dehumanising dimension of the ‘illegal alien,’ the cast defines the state of <italic>undocumentedness</italic> as the lived conditions of vulnerability, exploitation, displacement and perpetual fear determined by living under ‘illegality’ and non-citizenship. My purpose is to analyse the stylistic and thematic oratorical components of the dramatic performance in line with the ontological construction of its performers as undocumented – undocumentedness itself becomes a “space of legal nonexistence” in Susan Coutin’s understanding –, unwelcome (by virtue of Derrida’s theorisation of the standards of <italic>hostipitality</italic>), as well as subjects/objects of racial hatred. Immigrants become collective projections of criminality, a threat to the nation within a “we” against “them” horizontal conflict (Ahmed 51). Within this framework, the performance consolidates an ontology of the Mexican migrant rooted in social stigma and the constructedness of labels, and undocumentedness becomes the locus of a collective imaginarium with repercussions on the immigrant’s survival in society.
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“My Nine-Digit American-Dream”: Undocumentedness and Unwelcomeness in <italic>Do You Know Who I Am?</italic>

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This article sets out to explore the ambiguities and points of rupture in the lyrical works of one of the best-known Irish poets of the last fifty years, Eavan Boland. I intend to zoom in on poetic sequences where the text does not flow seamlessly and will try to find possible explanations for these ruptures, illuminating, in the process, the merits of a poet who has tried to recuperate the image of the Irish woman, saving it from stereotypes and cliches. However, I will also shed light on how Boland herself falls prey to more or less the same stereotypes. What the article ultimately does is raise questions which are still waiting for answers.
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Ambiguities and Points of Rupture in Eavan Boland’s Poetry

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The article below sets out to demonstrate that a long-time underestimated concept in linguistics, the phonaestheme, may find its rightful place in morphological theory alongside the morpheme, traditionally defined as the smallest linguistic unit carrying meaning. The analysis includes a critical survey of literature in the field intended to offer a more comprehensive and integrated theoretical perspective on the nature of the phonaestheme and reject the idea that the sign is exclusively arbitrary. Once this objective has been achieved, the focus of the article will switch to determining how phonaesthemic meaning occurs cross-linguistically and to what extent. In order to achieve this, Margaret Magnus’s phonosemantic classification will be discussed and applied in the case of Romanian phonaesthemes.
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Challenging the Morpheme: Cross-Linguistic Occurrences of Phonaesthemic Structures

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This article examines the representation of the connection between religious beliefs and the natural environment around sacred places in <italic>God Was African</italic> by Nkemngong Nkengasong and <italic>Chronicles of a Corpse Bearer</italic> by Cyrus Mistry. Comparing the eco-cycle around Zoroastrian Fire Temples, the Towers of Silence in Bombay and the shrines of Fuondem and other gods in Lewoh traditional religion, this article argues that the inter-connectivity between these Parsi-Bangwa religions reveals that gods reside in our immediate environment and only our eco-politics can preserve this supernatural connection. Using ecocriticism, therefore, I contend that the Parsis in India and the Bangwa in Lebialem revere and protect natural abodes of the gods like earth, water, hills, valleys, forests and fire against the devastating environmental crises heralded by the modernist backlash. The modern transformation of these sacred places into sources of generating renewable and artificial energies accounts for the different physical and ideological conflicts that abound in the two novels. As such, by protecting the different forms of life that inhabit these sacred places, this article concludes that Nkengasong’s and Mistry’s eco-poetical language and style in <italic>God Was African</italic> and <italic>Chronicles of a Corpse Bearer</italic> reflect Lewoh traditional religion, Zoroastrianism and the environment, participating in the Afro-Oriental artistic crusade for biophilia and environmentally friendly belief systems.
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Negotiating Afro-Oriental Religious Eco-Political Space and the Modernist Backlash in <italic>God Was African</italic> by Nkemngong Nkengasong and <italic>Chronicles of a Corpse Bearer</italic> by Cyrus Mistry

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 23 (2023): Issue 2 (December 2023)

Volume 23 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 22 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Volume 22 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 21 (2021): Issue 2 (December 2021)

Volume 21 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 20 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Volume 20 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 19 (2019): Issue 2 (December 2019)

Volume 19 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

East-West Cultural Passage

 Publishing House and Owner: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania  East-West Cultural Passage appears biannually and publishes work by scholars interested in the cross-cultural dialogue in areas such as literature, history, film, popular culture, institutions, politics and related subjects. The journal is devoted to the study of cross-cultural understanding with a clear humanistic emphasis. Articles with an interdisciplinary character are particularly welcome. The journal also publishes notes and comments, review essays and book reviews.  The East-West Cultural Psassage Journal focuses on theoretical and empirical research in the humanities disciplines. The journal welcomes the submission of articles from the following fields:   Anthropology  Cultural studies  Education  Language  Linguistics  Literature  Novels and short stories  Poetry  Teaching   Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

East-West Cultural Passage

Volume 23 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Editorial: Reading between the Lines: Old and New Vulnerabilities

Metafiction, Defamiliarization and Cognitive Science: Andrew Crumey’s Mr Mee and Richard Powers’ Galatea 2.2

Vico’s Thunderous Echoes: The New Science and Finnegans Wake

Politics and Literature: Dictatorship in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Death Is Sacred: Being and Non-Being in Sarah Hall’s “Theatre 6”

“My Nine-Digit American-Dream”: Undocumentedness and Unwelcomeness in Do You Know Who I Am?

Ambiguities and Points of Rupture in Eavan Boland’s Poetry

Challenging the Morpheme: Cross-Linguistic Occurrences of Phonaesthemic Structures

Negotiating Afro-Oriental Religious Eco-Political Space and the Modernist Backlash in God Was African by Nkemngong Nkengasong and Chronicles of a Corpse Bearer by Cyrus Mistry

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