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Papers by mihaela culea

Processes, Apr 11, 2023

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

Processes

Organic waste management is an important concern for both industries and communities. Proper mana... more Organic waste management is an important concern for both industries and communities. Proper management is crucial for various reasons, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, promoting sustainability, and improving public health. Composted manure is a valuable source of nutrients and organic matter that can be used as a soil amendment in agriculture. Some important benefits of using composted manure in agriculture include: improves soil fertility, enhances soil structure, reduces soil erosion, suppresses plant diseases, and reduces reliance on synthetic fertilizers. Composted manure represents one of the most effective methods of organic waste valorization. Its macronutrients and micronutrients content can increase plant yield, without any reported negative or toxic effects on the soil and plants at various application rates. However, improper use of farmyard manure can have negative effects on the environment, such as air pollution from greenhouse gas emissions, soil acidificat...

Ars Aeterna, 2015

In The Queen and I (1992), English writer Sue Townsend (1946-2014) satirically imagines the aboli... more In The Queen and I (1992), English writer Sue Townsend (1946-2014) satirically imagines the abolition of the British monarchy and the subsequent social, political and even personal trials generated by their new situation. This paper

Ars & Humanitas

In Nicola Barker’s novel H(A)PPY the individual’s struggle to resist and escape from a virtualize... more In Nicola Barker’s novel H(A)PPY the individual’s struggle to resist and escape from a virtualized, monitored and uniform world is masterfully reflected typographically. Just as the individual defies this new reality, the text also subverts narrative and typographical norms, inviting readers to partake in a journey of deciphering codes and signs. This article explores the typographical experiments with form, which assist the textual interpretation at the level of other narrative components. It identifies and analyses twenty artifices connected to typographical innovation in the novel in order to expand the possibilities of understanding the novel’s multiple meanings.

Sustainability

In recent decades, minimization and recycling/reuse policies were introduced to reduce the quanti... more In recent decades, minimization and recycling/reuse policies were introduced to reduce the quantities of generated waste and for alternative waste recovery. Organic wastes represent 46% of total global solid waste. Possible uses of organic wastes include using it as fertilizer and amendment for soil, for energy recovery and for the production of chemical substances. Sewage sludge disposal and reuse are identified as future problems concerning waste. The total amount of sludge generated in the entire world has increased dramatically, and this tendency is expected to increase significantly in the years to come. In most developed countries, special attention is given to sewage sludge treatment in order to improve the quality and safety of using it on the ground surface. Sewage sludge pyrolysis is considered an acceptable method, from an economic and ecological perspective, for the beneficial reuse of sewage sludge. This method has many advantages because, during the pyrolysis process, ...

2022 8th International Conference on Energy Efficiency and Agricultural Engineering (EE&AE)

Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT

Ali Smith’s novel “Autumn” (2016) is a Brexlit novel that depicts aspects of English society asso... more Ali Smith’s novel “Autumn” (2016) is a Brexlit novel that depicts aspects of English society associated with a landmark in British history, the 2016 referendum that decided its exit from the EU. The article focuses on socioeconomic aspects touched upon by Smith, including the social division among communities and the communitarian disunity, financial and economic hardship, bureaucratic insensitiveness, the issue of immigration, as well as the public social submissiveness or protest while facing all of these plights. Even though these may not be the central themes of Smith’s novel, the depiction of the ‘hard times’ of people living during a time of change, uncertainty, division, chaos and mixed feelings emerges as an equally important concern, as the current paper aims to explore.

Comparative Southeast European Studies

Baltic Journal of English Language, Literature and Culture, 2021

The article investigates the concept of authorship in the works of two authors separated by three... more The article investigates the concept of authorship in the works of two authors separated by three centuries, namely, Daniel Defoe and J. M. Coetzee, both concerned, in different ways, with aspects regarding the origin and originators of literary works or with the act of artistic creation in general. After a brief literature review, the article focuses on Coetzee’s contemporary revisitation of the question of authorship and leaps back and forth in time from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) to Coetzee’s Foe (1986). The purpose is that of highlighting the multiple perspectives (and differences) regarding the subject of authorship, including such notions and aspects as: canonicity related to the act of writing and narrating, metafiction, self-reflexivity and intertextuality, silencing and voicing, doubling, bodily substance and the substance of a story, authenticity, (literary) representation and the truth, authoring, the author’s powers, the relation between author and character or betwe...

Elm və İnnovativ Texnologiyalar, 2019

: After more than 450 years since Shakespeare's birth, the present article seeks tobring its ... more : After more than 450 years since Shakespeare's birth, the present article seeks tobring its own contribution to the celebration and understanding of the Bard's everlastingcultural and linguistic legacy. Looking at Shakespeare's use of language, the article focuseson two major figures of speech, simile and metaphor, which richly reveal the playwright'slinguistic creativity and complexity. After a brief introduction to the subject, the paper firstpresents the two figures of speech from a theoretical perspective and then goes on to criticallyapproach a small number of examples from English literary texts that serve as a preamble tothe central section of the study. Thus, the article then narrows down its scope so as to focus ona given set of illustrations from Shakespeare's plays, especially tragedies, with a view tofacilitating a better understanding of Shakespeare's language and thought.

This paper explores the ways in which English writer Sue Townsend, in "The Queen and I"... more This paper explores the ways in which English writer Sue Townsend, in "The Queen and I" (1992), mirrors the socio-economic concerns of the British population, especially related to the differing lives of two social groups placed at opposite poles of the social hierarchy. The fictional work is all the more interesting as it antagonizes the life of the upper classes, represented here by the Royal Family, and that of the lower class of workers. Townsend satirically imagines the dismantling of the British monarchy and the subsequent predicament that living among the poor generates. The article first offers a brief overview of the socio-economic changes following the Victorian era and then it looks at the patterns of social class which exist in present-day Britain. The central part of the paper investigates Townsend's portrayal of the hardships of destitution, this state of poverty being in fact the social condition which ultimately brings the royals and the lowly people to...

Marketing books discuss personality branding, institutional branding, corporate branding, product... more Marketing books discuss personality branding, institutional branding, corporate branding, product branding, or touristic branding, but books are excluded from the discussion on product brands, even though we witness a growing interest in books and writers as cultural products. More than that, we may say that the book is a commodity in the context of the consumer revolution and “the commoditization of knowledge”, to use Roberta Sassatelli’s phrase [31]. If nations, towns, universities, business schools, celebrities, even TV programmes are brands, then books could be considered as brands, too. We could even say that books are commodified brands and the branding process must involve efficient branding strategies, so authors construct a brand as a marker of their identity in the postmodern commodified world. The paper looks at some current strategies for book and authorial branding, which were theoretically launched by American authors, and the ways in which they are practised by Englis...

International Journal of Humanities and Social Development Research, 2021

respondents consider stress resistance as very important. This finding is consistent with that of... more respondents consider stress resistance as very important. This finding is consistent with that of Brennan and Little's study (2010), in which the graduates mentioned stressed management among the skills they used to a large extent in their current job.

Folia linguistica et litteraria, 2020

Having on its background the topic of youth culture and its language, social disorder and its cri... more Having on its background the topic of youth culture and its language, social disorder and its criticism, the general disruption in society and the pitfalls of social and technological progress in the age of modernism, the present article critically looks at Anthony Burgess’s novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) with a view to analysing character, language and its functions. After a brief introduction to the context of the book’s publication, its genre, and some general remarks on the novelty of the language created in the novel, the article progresses to the presentation of the major sources of this language. The central part of the paper originally approaches Nadsat from a semantic perspective with the aim of testing and validating the functions of Nadsat already identified and further investigating (individual and group) character portrayal as unfolded by the language used. The analysis is based on a quantitative and qualitative research of the Nadsat code/(anti-)language of the novel.

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2017

The complexity of the travelling experience cannot be understood outside the scope of culture (se... more The complexity of the travelling experience cannot be understood outside the scope of culture (see, for instance, Schulz-Forberg 2005) and travelling is thus often discussed in relation to the human being‟s thirst for knowledge, intellectual or spiritual enlightenment, aesthetic refinement, often as a result of cultural contact, interaction, transfer or exchange. The travelling experiences of Romanian travellers to England through the centuries have been inspired by many of these goals. This paper focuses on the travel accounts of a little known Romanian traveller to England in the nineteenth century, namely, writer, teacher, journalist and politician Ion Codru-Drăgușanu (1818–1884). His travel accounts reveal that travelling was perceived as a source of intellectual improvement, maturation, cultural development, interaction and exchange, as a process of gaining knowledge, an experience also counterbalanced by a tourist‟s adventure dominated by curiosity, pleasure and amusement. In ...

Khazar Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2015

In the contemporary world of extremely dynamic movements in the fields of territorial state recon... more In the contemporary world of extremely dynamic movements in the fields of territorial state reconfiguration, economic “colonization”, globalization, Europeanization, migration of population, borrowing of cultural values and intensified cultural exchange or transfer, defining national identity has become a process which registers numerous changes and encounters various challenges. The classical features that assisted this process of defining national identity in the past – a historic territory, common myths, historical memories and values, a common public culture, common legal rights and duties, a common economy with territorial mobility (A. D. Smith 1991: 14) – undergo significant transformations each decade and the definition of a nation’s identity calls for important reconsiderations. One aspect worth considering is that of losing or self-censoring one’s national identity due to a nation’s own intention or some external demands of adaptation to general aspects of political, econom...

Folia linguistica et litteraria, 2019

In the context of new times, new types of writing are created in order to meet the demands and wi... more In the context of new times, new types of writing are created in order to meet the demands and wishes of the contemporary public. Printed books make no exception especially given that the reading of (especially printed) books has declined, despite variable statistics over the years. The book reading habits have thus decreased, so making printed books attractive to readers has been a matter of concern for contemporary writers like Adam Thirlwell, as illustrated in his novella Kapow! (2012). In line with the contemporary mind-set of revolutionizing the way in which narrative is presented and the technique in which it is composed, Thirlwell plays with readers’ conceptions and expectations about literary texts, producing a highly experimental work. Along with the montage/collage technique, which will be discussed in the present paper, such concepts as ergodicity, autofiction, metatextuality, paratextuality, metamodernism or altermodernism are central to a proper understanding of how Thi...

Respectus Philologicus, 2013

This paper discusses two literary works by Chinua Achebe—No Longer at Ease (1960) and The Educati... more This paper discusses two literary works by Chinua Achebe—No Longer at Ease (1960) and The Education of a British-Protected Child (2011)—in the context of the issue of diversity in the postcolonial setting. It aims to approach Achebe’s work from a new perspective, by applying a theoretical paradigm employed in business to the study of literature and culture. The “diversimilarity” paradigm, used for managing cultural diversity in organisations, is applied and shown to be pertinent to the investigation of literature, too. The methodology employed combines theoretical data with the practical implications of the conceptual framework on Achebe’s work. The paper starts with a discussion of the diversity concept and then moves on to tackle the diversimilarity paradigm in business. Then the investigation focuses on Achebe’s “duality” and “middle ground” concepts as they assist diversimilarity, concepts which work together at the levels of mentality, ideology, and identity. Finally, the paper...