Ileana Marin

Ileana Marin’s Victorian Aesthetics of Erasure in Fiction and Illustration demonstrates how a technique she calls ‘“reading” erasure’ can shed light on the delicate negotiations between authorial self-examination, the strictures of the society in which an author lives, and the plots and characters an author creates (p. 11). The result is a book that makes visible how Victorian social mores and the fear authors had of being judged by them shaped the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope and Charlotte Brontë. Marin’s approach forces her to tread dangerously close to the line dividing appropriately speculative commentary from biographical fallacy, but her project demands that she walk this line. The reason these novelists excised passages echoing their lived experience was to prevent their readers from seeing ‘how imperfect they were’, Marin claims (p. 271). Her argument, then, depends upon her ability to delineate the striking ways in which these excised passages echoed the known biographical details of their lives. Marin’s second chapter on Charlotte Brontë is especially interesting, for it depicts a clear relationship between the author’s anxiety about meeting Victorian standards for gender propriety and the plots and characters she created.1 The most intensely private of all the writers in Marin’s study, the eldest surviving Brontë sister, was acutely aware of the high personal cost self-revelation demanded from women writers who chose to depict passionate heroines engaged in ardent love relationships, especially after reviews of Jane Eyre called the heroine a person who behaved rudely, as well as a character unlikely to flow out of the pen of a lady. Such responses to her novel increased both her sensitivity about being judged as a woman rather than as a novelist, and her vigilance against the leakage of personal details into her novels. The story of how this woman writer’s publication process evolved from Jane Eyre through Shirley and Villette is central to Marin’s second chapter, ‘Charlotte Brontë’s Cancelations by Scissors’. During the editing stage of her first novel, Marin explains, Charlotte Brontë simply drew a line through the passages of text she wanted deleted before publication. Her work with her publishers on Shirley, however, suggests she lost confidence that even her publishers could judge the work according to literary merit rather than her society’s gender code. Thus, while she still simply crossed out some text, she resorted to extreme measures when excising passages that she worried called attention to how her heroines’ stories echoed her own life. Interestingly, these new strategies for excision derive from the particularly female sphere of nineteenth-century British society — the work of sewing. Calling her ‘an author in a closet’ at a time when ladies sewed rather than wrote, Marin describes the novelist’s excision strategy in a manner that calls to mind how a seamstress might cut down a dress to fit a new owner. Charlotte Brontë, Marin explains, resorted to literally ‘scissoring’ out those passages she considered too self-revelatory for publication (p. 85). Marin develops this metaphor further in her own book when she notes that, at one point in Villette, the writer uses her scissors to make ‘nine short excisions (only two for censoring), which create the impression of embroidery in paper’ (p. 80). The other chapters in Marin’s book also have a lot to offer those interested in the Victorian era. Her approach reveals, for example, how the process of excision contributed to Dickens’s fictionalization of ‘part of his own emotional experience — his legal separation from his wife’ in

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is considered an artist of “double talent”1 because he frequently alternated painting with writing poetry, in many cases combining the two media. Throughout his corpus, there is a constant going back and forth between these two artistic media with no other justification than his consistent effort to express beauty exhaustively. Paintings inspire poems and vice versa, as if the writing table was abandoned for the palette, and the palette set down in the midst of composing a theme in favor of sitting again at the table to record the quintessence of visual representation. Rossetti constructed a completely artificial environment for his art, one opposed to the Victorian materialistic world of his contemporaries. Aware of the discrepancies between his artistic universe and Victorian reality, he tried to isolate his art as much as possible. As such, he anticipates or intersects with aestheticism in two important ways: by disregarding the goal of art as a receptor-centered activity and by ignoring the major source of most artistic inspiration, namely the reality outside the artistic phenomenon. Embedded in his literary and pictorial works are his readings of other artifacts, either alluding to or making explicit references to what he considered the greatest artistic achievements, and sometimes to his own artworks. In doing this, Rossetti multiplies art’s meaning by recontextualizing visual icons and/or poetic syntagmas. This intricate aesthetic system is both a world in itself and its own interpretative consciousness.

... the “withdrawal of the watchers from the gates of intellect” in the process of literary creation that was described by Schiller in one ... In the same vein, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in “Self-Seduced,” one of his contributions to the collective volume Unauthorized Freud notices the alluring ...

... the “withdrawal of the watchers from the gates of intellect” in the process of literary creation that was described by Schiller in one ... In the same vein, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen in “Self-Seduced,” one of his contributions to the collective volume Unauthorized Freud notices the alluring ...

Published in numerous editions starting in 1814, Rev Francis Cary’s translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy had an impressive impact during the nineteenth century. It was not until it was illustrated by Gustav Doré in 1866, however, that Dante’s imagery opened a decisive path towards modernity. By reshaping specific medieval motifs, Doré’s vision of Dante’s Inferno gave them a new life in the visual arts. Doré thus acted as a middleman between Dante and Frederic Leighton, Edward Burne-Jones, and Gustav Klimt, to mention only a few of the modernists influenced by the Dante-Doré co-production.

... poems generate diverse and strong responses, which carry readers beyond aesthetic expectationstowards reality for ... enunciation in order to exhaust all conceivable meanings from corroborating visual aspect, acoustic image, and semantic ... Basic Problems of Phenomenology. ...

In the last decades of the nineteenth century Shakespeare’s translators were abundant. They succeeded in publishing their versions and in having them performed: Adolph Stern published Hamlet in 1877, Julius Cesar in 1879 and The King Lear in 1881; Scarlat Ion Ghica translated Richard the Third in 1884 and The Merchant of Venice in 1885. Three of these plays were illustrated: King Lear contains fifteen illustrations; Merchant of Venice twenty, and Richard the Third twenty-two. The latter plays, published by Socecu & Teclu, opened with the same engraved portrait of Shakespeare, inspired by British Romantic iconography. Although only some of the engravings in the Socecu and Teclu editions are signed, they all obviously belong to the same artist with an impeccable technique. He draws regular lines, renders shadows and dark areas minutely using different line textures, while he treats white like a light bright colour subtly surrounded by multilayered contrasts. He seems to have worked out his images as wood engravings. They recall the refined craftsmanship, which descends from both the old German tradition spread by Dürer and from the French contemporary experiments in litography (Gustave Doré, Théodore Chassériau, or Eugène Delacroix).

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is considered an artist of “double talent” because he frequently alternated painting with writing poetry, in many cases combining the two media. Throughout his corpus, there is a constant going back and forth between these two artistic media with no other justification than his consistent effort to express beauty exhaustively. Paintings inspire poems and vice versa, as if the writing table was abandoned for the palette, and the palette set down in the midst of composing a theme in favor of sitting again at the table to record the quintessence of visual representation. Rossetti constructed a completely artificial environment for his art, one opposed to the Victorian materialistic world of his contemporaries. Aware of the discrepancies between his artistic universe and Victorian reality, he tried to isolate his art as much as possible. As such, he anticipates or intersects with aestheticism in two important ways: by disregarding the goal of art as a receptor-cen...

La scurt timp după revoluția din decembrie 1989, care a readus libertatea de exprimare după 50 de ani de comunism, Marin Sorescu și-a adunat poemele respinse de cenzură în volumul Poezii alese de cenzură (1990). câțiva ani mai târziu, Sorescu a reușit să adune o altă serie de poeme pe care cenzura comunistă le interzisese și să le publice în volumul Traversarea (1994). din aceste două volume, John Hartley Williams și Hilde ottschofski au selectat 87 de poeme pe care le-au publicat sub titlul Censored Poems (2001). comparația dintre textul original și traducerea în engleză pune în evidență alunecările traducerii către analiza literară, explicația contextului cultural prin aplicarea metodei interpretative și lectura saturată ideologic. Mai mult decât textul original, tradu-cerea este impregnată de aluzii subversive la realitatea comunistă. în această lucrare voi demonstra că traducerea a fost marcată de ideea că textele originale au fost respinse de cenzură ca neconforme cu standar-dele propagandei socialiste în ceea ce privește mesajul pe care trebuia să-l promoveze literatura. această situație a condus la o receptare deformată a textelor din română și, în mod neașteptat, traducerea a căpătat accente politice chiar acolo unde poemele lui Sorescu nu păreau să le aibă. Mai mult, în prefața volumului de traduceri, John Hartley Williams îl citează pe Sorescu care descrie experiența lui de scriitor în contact permanent cu cenzorii de la cabinetul II: "Many poems were continually returned with the explanation 'it isn't the right moment' or 'these verses could be interpreted'".

Translation is by far one of the most used skills in academic fields, research, professions, and social media. Academics and researchers read the translated works of their colleagues from abroad even though, in some cases, they may have access to the original; physicians, computer engineers, government employees, writers, or filmmakers, to mention only a few of the professions that rely heavily on translation, are all constantly seeking updated information irrespective of the language in which the original work was initially published. On social media, we all aspire to participate in the experiences shared by our friends and relatives in the languages of the places where they live. Even if we complain about the inaccuracy of Google translate, we still "copy and paste" posts to make sense of a message posted in a language we don't know. The majority of these people are not trained translators; yet, for better or worse, they try their hand at translating with no idea what they are getting themselves into. Serious things aside, our leisure time is also measured by the quality of translation. When we read a poetry volume or a novel, when we watch a film or attend a play, most of the time, someone has facilitated our access to the voice of the poet or narrator, to the heroes on the big screen or on stage. Carmen Ardelean's book Translating for the Future: What, How, Why Do We Translate?, published by Tritonic in 2016, captures the strenuous work of the behind-the-scenes translators in an impressive tour du force that combines theoretical approaches with a plea for interdisciplinarity and teamwork as nowadays no one person can possibly cover the vocabularies of all disciplines. Translators are, from the very beginning, defined as "cultural mediators," and this statement sets the tone of Ardelean's scrutiny into the future of the field of translation, preparing her readers for a drastic change. While her 2009 volume, Exploring Translation Studies, was an evaluation of the field of translation studies that can be seen as a dialogue with Anthony Pym's course, Exploring Translation Theories, published the same year, her most recent book is a prospective inquiry into what looks to be a "dynamic science in continuous development" (106), as she puts it in the chapter dedicated to translation training. In order to appreciate Carmen Ardelean's endeavor to see in past theories of translation the ideology of their times as well as the potential of future developments, one has to grasp the fact that the future of translation cannot be imagined separately from the rapid progress of technology, the diversification of communication platforms, and the vast expansion of the field of knowledge with its multifaceted specialized sub-fields. For many, translation is either dismissed as a secondary activity or an imperfect rendition of the truly creative, imaginative, and original text. The original text to be translated appears to be the only one that matters, deserving the full attention of the critics and readers alike. This condescending view of translation cannot be more wrong: translation is an important factor in the "soft power" exercise of making foreign cultures attractive to communities speaking different languages. As such, the three questions in the title-what, how, and why do we translate?-indicate the responsibility that lies with translation: the selection of the texts to be translated, the strategy or the practice put to work, and the purpose served by a cultural appropriation through translation. Structured in eleven chapters, Ardelean's book, although an academic study, is a pleasant and engaging read. The author sets the readers' expectations at a comfortable level where even the most

La începutul lui 2019, suntem la aproape 50 de ani de la digitalizarea primului text, Declarația de Independență a Statelor Unite, cu care Michael S. Hart a lansat Proiectul Gutenberg în 1971, și la aproape 90 de ani de când Bob Brown, scriitor, producător de film și impresar, a imaginat eliberarea cărților din constrângerile fizice ale tipăririi pe hârtie. Într-un manifest din 1930, Brown a creat termenul „readies” (cărți citite) pe modelul „talkies” (filme vorbite), după ce și-a văzut primul film vorbit. În acest text, de care ne reamintește Jennifer Schuesslen în articolul „The Godfather of the E-Reader” din New York Times din 11 aprilie 2010, Brown a definit cartea citită--readie--ca pe „o simplă mașină de citit pe care s-o port la mine, s-o pun în priză, și care să citească romane de câte 100.000 de cuvinte în 10 minute când vreau eu”. Astăzi suntem martorii instalării depline a digitalului și cu toate acestea, fascinația manuscriselor a rămas intactă, dacă nu cumva a crescut. În ciuda faptului că accesul la imaginile scanate ale manuscriselor se află la un click distanță de utilizatori, fiind puse la dispoziție pe website-urile marilor biblioteci ale lumii, aura manuscriselor nu s-a umbrit cu nimic. Cercetători din diverse domenii solicită accesul direct la manuscrise pentru a studia materialitatea scriiturii, traseul unei idei, versiunile unei opere, formarea unui autor, sau ritualurile de creație, intruziunea editorilor și a colaboratorilor, condiția socială a textului, fenomenul cenzurii și al autocenzurii. În căutarea unui răspuns, acești cercetători se folosesc de manuscris pentru a-l interoga direct pe autor. Autorul, sublimat în propriile grafeme, devine un sfinx căruia i se adresează întrebări la care nu mai are cum răspunde, dar căruia privirea inchizitivă a cititorului de manuscris îi descoperă mesaje ascunse în opțiunea pentru un anume format de text, în tăieturile, corecturile, substituirile, uneori chiar desenele care se strecoară între rândurile unui text.

"Născociri neobişnuite" poate titlul tuturor desenelor în peniţă pe care Daniel Ursache le-a expus la Galeria A/NT din Seattle şi, poate, al operelor sale în general. Ceea ce le caracterizează pe toate este minuţiuozitatea cu care graacianul execută ecare linie şi deliberarea cu care aşază ecare punct în încercarea de a ajunge cât mai aproape de esenţa desenului. Cele 12 născociri vizuale mizează pe abundenţa detaliilor nefamiliare care, prin reiterarea insistentă, sfârşesc în a deveni familiare, în componenţa universurilor labirintice care-l seduc pe privitor. Itinerariul, cum îi place lui Daniel Ursache să se refere la propria biograe, este, la rândul lui, neobişnuit: născut la Turnu Severin, fostă cetate romană de pe malul Dunării, se mută la Constanţa, fosta colonie greacă la malul Mării Negre, unde termină Liceul de Arte Plastice. Studiază Geologia la Iaşi, capitala Moldovei şi urmează cursurile Facultăţii de Arte din Timişoara, capitala Banatului. Adăugând o referinţă istorico-geogracă la numele locurilor prin care trece, Ursache

With the recent studies on bibliographical code and its contribution to the understanding of the text (McGann, McKenzie, McCloud, Werner), the issue of the writing materiality and technology has been transferred to digital media. The awareness that there is yet another signifying factor in the production of the meaning makes McGann, Landow, Drucker, Hayles, and Kirshenbaum explore the newer codes that produce an electronic or digital work. Most ordinary readers of digital literary texts remain at the screening level (Aarseth) and miss the architecture behind the flat surface of the computer screen. I argue that by applying the reading skills acquired for printed texts to digital works, readers lose a rich experience and the complex understanding generated though sensorial channels, intellectual endeavor, and constant experimentation with several layers of the work. I contend that the terms naming literary digital experiences do not reflect their complexity. I propose the term "experiential reading" to define the experience of digital works, and the term "experientors" to name the people engaging in the exploration of such works. Derived from the Latin verb experiri (to try, to test, to experience), "experientors" and "experiential reading" better reflect current reality. Exploring John Zuern's poem "ask me for the moon" from the Electronic Literature Collection-Volume 3, I will demonstrate that experientors need an adequate education to make sense of their experience, the same way literature students rely on critical theories to interpret a printed text.

In the last decades of the nineteenth century Shakespeare’s translators were abundant. They succeeded in publishing their versions and in having them performed: Adolph Stern published Hamlet in 1877, Julius Cesar in 1879 and The King Lear in 1881; Scarlat Ion Ghica translated Richard the Third in 1884 and The Merchant of Venice in 1885. Three of these plays were illustrated: King Lear contains fifteen illustrations; Merchant of Venice twenty, and Richard the Third twenty-two. The latter plays, published by Socecu & Teclu, opened with the same engraved portrait of Shakespeare, inspired by British Romantic iconography. Although only some of the engravings in the Socecu and Teclu editions are signed,  they all obviously belong to the same artist with an impeccable technique. He draws regular lines, renders shadows and dark areas minutely using different line textures, while he treats white like a light bright colour subtly surrounded by multilayered contrasts. He seems to have worked out his images as wood engravings. They recall the refined craftsmanship, which descends from both the old German tradition spread by Dürer  and from the French contemporary experiments in litography (Gustave Doré, Théodore Chassériau, or Eugène Delacroix).

Cecilia Beaux (1855-1942) and Abby Williams Hill (1861-1902) belong to the artistically diverse contingent of American women artists who enriched American painting by adding their particular “ways of seeing” to the American society and nature. Cecilia Beaux became famous due to her portraits, which are subtle studies of human souls emerging from the characters’ intimate space, body postures and little gestures. Abby Williams Hill was acclaimed for her Northwest landscapes and portraits of Native Americans. In spite of their different artistic formulas and obviously different thematic preferences, they shared the same sincere interest in capturing the identity of their sitters as faithfully as possible and displaying the same sensitivity towards the colors of nature. I will compare two pairs of thematically related artworks created almost at the
same time by the two women painters: 1. Hill’s White Bull (1905) with Beaux’ Mrs. Richard Low Divine (1907); 2. Hill’s Flathead Indian Reservation Looking East from Ronan (1905) with Beaux’
Dorothea in the Woods (1897).

In the second half of the nineteenth century, national identities were the cultural, social, and ideological stimuli for national state formation all over Europe. While on the old continent major ethnic groups functioned as catalysts of affirmation of national rights and wars of independence, the United States faced a record number of immigrants struggling to adapt to their new environment. Among those groups, the Romanians represented a part with only one visually obvious sign of their identity, their folk costumes. At the beginning of the twentieth century, another aspect was attached to Romanian identity by means of the presence of Romanian artists in the cultural centers of the U.S.A. The most famous was Constantin Brâncuşi, who became known to the American art public as a participant in the well-publicized controversy in modern art and also as a plaintiff against the U.S. customs authorities. During the Cold War, Romanian immigration decreased. However, among the immigrants, the number of intellectuals was greater than that of other social groups; consequently, Romanian identity was expressed more abstractly. I will analyze the process of transformation from the most concrete form of expressing identity through the old customs to the more abstract, intellectual modes.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti is considered an artist of “double talent”  because he frequently alternated painting with writing poetry, in many cases combining the two media.  Throughout his corpus, there is a constant going back and forth between these two artistic media with no other justification than his consistent effort to express beauty exhaustively.  Paintings inspire poems and vice versa, as if the writing table was abandoned for the palette, and the palette set down in the midst of composing a theme in favor of sitting again at the table to record the quintessence of visual representation.  Rossetti constructed a completely artificial environment for his art, one opposed to the Victorian materialistic world of his contemporaries.  Aware of the discrepancies between his artistic universe and Victorian reality, he tried to isolate his art as much as possible.  As such, he anticipates or intersects with aestheticism in two important ways: by disregarding the goal of art as a receptor-centered activity and by ignoring the major source of most artistic inspiration, namely the reality outside the artistic phenomenon.  Embedded in his literary and pictorial works are his readings of other artifacts, either alluding to or making explicit references to what he considered the greatest artistic achievements, and sometimes to his own artworks.  In doing this, Rossetti multiplies art’s meaning by recontextualizing visual icons and/or poetic syntagmas.  This intricate aesthetic system is both a world in itself and its own interpretative consciousness. 
In this chapter, I trace “aesthetically saturated readings”: (1) Venus Verticordia and its sonnet with the same title; (2) Lady Lilith and its sonnet Body’s Beauty together with Sybilla Palmifera and its sonnet Soul’s Beauty; and (3) Proserpine and the two sonnets of the same title, one in Italian, one in English.  I use the term “aestheticall saturated reading” to refer to the various inter- and intra-artistic mutations of the myth of beauty and love that appear between Rossetti’s Sonnets for Pictures cycle and his corresponding paintings.  As my analysis will show, owing to the construction of aesthetic spaces outside public reception, the multiple levels of inaccessibility that result from the dialogic relationships between poetry and painting, and the intertextual and intermedial network of artistic media, Rossetti’s art intersects with art for art’s sake and its process of de-humanization.

Two internationally known Romanian cartoonists adopted different strategies of artistic survival during the communist era. Ion Popescu Gopo chose, as did many Romanian writers and artists, the aesthetic escape, which meant to embellish his
historically circumstantial identity into universal concepts, wrapping his topics and motifs into a highly artistic expression with no obvious reference to his ideological context. In contrast, the younger caricaturist, Mihai Stanescu, preferred to confront the communist ideology with its own caricature, and he suffered from being censored in Romania, yet published abroad. Allowed to sell his ideologically inoffensive artifacts, Stanescu earned
perhaps more money under the communists than in the competitive, free market, in spite of the fact that he can now publish his caricatures freely; they are now simply volumes with
no other restrictions apart from financial ones. Neither the aesthetic defeatism of Gopo nor the aesthetic engagement of Stanescu has survived after 1989. Is this “failure” a matter of
ideology? Is it a sign of a more profound change in contemporary Romanian society? My paper tries to answer these questions, which are not necessarily solely applicable to
Romanian culture, but which are, I dare say, vital for other societies facing transitions from communist to democratic regimes.

The self-portraits of Anguissola, Gentileschi, Labille-Guiard,
Cassatt, and Beaux, ranging across five centuries from the
fifteenth century of the Italian Renaissance to the beginning
of the twentieth century, present an unusual pictorial
perspective: the painter’s body leans towards the viewer,
invading the viewer’s space. Through physical closeness
and through the depiction of the act of painting, these works
attempt to persuade the viewer that apart from their
presentation of allegories of painting or genre scenes, what
lies at the heart of these works is the reinforcement of
gender identity as professionalism in art. The fact that the
number of paintings representing women painters painting
their own portraits is very small raises the question of why
these particular women painters chose such an unorthodox
formula of composition when they painted themselves
painting.
My paper examines two possibilities: first, the female
artists were more inclined to experiment with representation
while painting themselves since they did not necessarily
expect to sell the painting; and second, their occasional
clients were aristocratic women who wanted to make a
statement through the artwork they purchased.

My study focuses on the extensive practice of erasure and revision in a selective group of Victorian novels and their illustrations, specifically, Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853), Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations (1861), George Eliot’s Romola (1863), and Anthony Trollope’s Orley Farm (1863). To analyze the legible erasures in a literary work rather than simply considering the published final text puts the whole work into a much greater context. A printed work is usually analyzed either as an independent artifact or in an intertextual dialogue with other printed works, all of which have been revised and are considered finished. A manuscript, however, establishes numerous other connections with documents that have never been published or with artifacts that are not part of the literary corpus. The examination of erasure in Victorian manuscripts also offers a unique glimpse into a publication system which was growing fast and needed many professional writers able to satisfy the market expectations and to work collaboratively with publishers and sometimes with illustrators as well.

Since the end of the 1990s when electronic texts were first uploaded on the internet inviting a hypertextual, nonlinear reading, E-Literature has expanded the range of poetic multimediality. By adding voice, music, and foley sound effects to the auditory images created exclusively by the poetic texts themselves, e-poets-multimedia poets-create a new melos. I will work with various definitions of aural expression provided by Aristotle, Northrop Frye, Ezra Pound, Charles Bernstein, and John Barber to support my claim that e-poetry offers soundcentered poets an enormous repertoire to generate meaning through the interaction between the reader/user and the electronic or digital poems. Analyzing Deena Larsen's Carving in Possibilities, Andrew Campana's Automation, Alan Sondheim's Dawn, and Katherine Norman's Window, I will show how digital tools transform the process of reading into a complex multisensory experience and poetry into an attempt to recover the natural language.