Corina Selejan | "Lucian Blaga" University of Sibiu (original) (raw)

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Papers by Corina Selejan

The Limits of (Un)translatability: Culturemes in Translation Practice This paper attempts a criti... more The Limits of (Un)translatability: Culturemes in Translation Practice This paper attempts a critique of the concept of “untranslatability” as it has been posited by comparatists (Emily Apter in particular), by a reactivation of the concept’s implications for translational practice. It therefore first engages theoretically with untranslatability and its current critical status, with an emphasis on its detractors, who mostly hail from the translational camp. This is done with a view to ‘unhardening’ the concept of untranslatability while also paying attention to its substantial overlap with other concepts, such as that of cultureme, a concept which has caught on in Central and Eastern Europe in particular. The second half of the paper illustrates the tension between translatability and untranslatability through two case studies regarding two culturemes, one historical, the other ideological. Ultimately, this article advocates practical translatability over its arguably elitist theoret...

Transylvanian Review, 2019

This paper attempts a critique of the concept of “untranslatability” as it has been posited by co... more This paper attempts a critique of the concept of “untranslatability” as it has been posited by comparatists (Emily Apter in particular), by a reactivation of the concept’s implications for translational practice. It therefore first engages theoretically with untranslatability and its current critical status, with an emphasis on its detractors, who mostly hail from the translational camp. This is done with a view to ‘unhardening’ the concept of untranslatability while also paying attention to its substantial overlap with other concepts, such as that of cultureme, a concept which has caught on in Central and Eastern Europe in particular. The second half of the paper illustrates the tension between translatability and untranslatability through two case studies regarding two culturemes, one historical, the other ideological. ultimately, this article advocates practical translatability over its arguably elitist theoretical counterpart.

The Campus Novel: Regional or Global?, Eds. Dieter Fuchs and Wojciech Klepuszewski, Leiden: Brill ǀ Rodopi, 2019. , 2019

Starting from Richard Rorty’s claim that “good criticism is a matter of bouncing some of the book... more Starting from Richard Rorty’s claim that “good criticism is a matter of bouncing some of the books you have read off the rest of the books you have read”, this paper brings together Romanian, German, English and American academic or campus novels published during the last decade in an attempt to reveal the convoluted relationships between what might still be tentatively called the “center” and the “(semi)periphery”.
In an endeavor to avoid the typical pitfalls of comparative undertakings, the assumptions underwriting this cross-cultural comparison will be made explicit, starting with the by no means unproblematic issue of the choice of the novels to be discussed. The self-reflexive – metafictional and metacritical – bent of academic fiction will provide for the Ansatzpunkt of the analysis.

The virtues of self-reflexivity in fictional texts have become something of a critical orthodoxy:... more The virtues of self-reflexivity in fictional texts have become something of a critical orthodoxy: texts doing (or purporting to do) away with the transparency of their own medium have been hailed as ‘new’, ‘original’, ‘revolutionary’, politically ‘progressive’, fostering ‘active’ readings, etc. – in short, everything that sounds critically correct. This complacent view has been challenged of late from a variety of vantage points, notably film studies and literary criticism. This paper engages with two self-reflexive texts, one literary and one filmic, in an attempt to illustrate the reductiveness of certain still prevalent critical truisms. The choice of Stranger than Fiction and Book: A Novel, the former not a filmic adaptation of the latter, has been made with a view to eschewing the pitfalls of ‘fidelity criticism’, another quondam critical commonplace. Nevertheless, envisioning what their respective counterparts in the other medium could possibly look like will prove to be a thought-provoking imaginative exercise.

CALL FOR PAPERS MARIA CURIE-SKŁODOWSKA UNIVERSITY LUBLIN, POLAND SEMINAR ON ACADEMIC FICTION 18-1... more CALL FOR PAPERS
MARIA CURIE-SKŁODOWSKA UNIVERSITY
LUBLIN, POLAND
SEMINAR ON ACADEMIC FICTION
18-19 MAY 2018

This paper engages with academic novels and an academic play on the one hand and their film adapt... more This paper engages with academic novels and an academic play on the one hand and their film adaptations as well as ‘academic films’ based on original screenplays on the other in an attempt to analyse to what degree the two art forms – literature and film – and the two mediums – language and cinematography – reflect upon themselves and each other and what cultural implications the (self)reflexive impetus might have. The films under scrutiny are Possession, Finding Forrester, Dead Poets Society, A Love Song for Bobby Long, Stranger than Fiction, and Wit. The paper advocates the self-reflexive over unreflective narrative – literary and filmic – consumerism in full awareness of its asymmetrical treatment of the two arts, i.e. of its privileging the linguistic over the visual.

This article considers two metafictional academic novels from the reader’s point of view. It argu... more This article considers two metafictional academic novels from the reader’s
point of view. It argues that this critical vantage point is suggested (if not
imposed) by the fictional texts themselves. The theoretical texts informing
this reading pertain either to reader response or to theories of metafiction,
in an attempt to uncover conceptual commonalities between the two.
Apart from a thematic focus on academic conferences as pilgrimages and
the advocacy of reading as an ethically valuable activity, the two novels
also share a propensity for intertextuality, a blurring of the boundaries
between fictional and critical discourse, as well as a questioning of the
borderline between fiction and reality. The reading of fiction is paralleled
to the reading of (one’s own) life and self-reflexivity emerges as crucial to
both types of literacy.

Rewriting Academia: The Development of the Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies of Continental Europe, 2015

This paper engages with campus/academic/university novels (depending on the chosen classification... more This paper engages with campus/academic/university novels (depending on the chosen classification) placed (conspicuously) outside the comic-satiric tradition of the genre: Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, André Aciman’s Harvard Square and Patrick McGuinness’s The Last Hundred Days. It proposes to highlight the ways in which the idea of and obsession with memory is fleshed out in these novels by drawing on Pierre Nora’s concept of “lieux de mémoire” and on Paul Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting. The argumentation aims at evincing the self-referentiality at work in fiction, memory and language.

ABSTRACT Given the fact that more than twenty Austen-related cinematic adaptations have been rel... more ABSTRACT
Given the fact that more than twenty Austen-related cinematic adaptations have been released over the past fifteen years alone, the analysis of this cultural phenomenon emerges as a necessity for gaining a complex understanding of Austen’s work and the way we perceive it today. Two centuries of interpretive history necessarily come to bear on any reading, be it critical or filmic, of Austen’s novel Emma. Critical material relating to Emma’s being a difficult read due to its hermeneutic versatility and ambiguity has been insisted upon, as opposed to criticism with political and other than aesthetic agendas. As five cinematic adaptations of Emma are analysed in terms of their relationship to the novel they are based on, to literary criticism and interpretation, and to each other, adaptation emerges as steering increasingly away from mere intersemiotic ‘translation’ towards more and more creative interpretation, involving, at times, the displacement of the literary work from its original socio-historical and cultural context. This development is shown to have a crucial relevance to contemporary culture.

KEYWORDS: Austen’s interpretive history, Emma’s hermeneutic difficulty, cinematic adaptation, fidelity, intertextuality, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, recent trends in filmic adaptation.

Books by Corina Selejan

by Lucian Vasile Bagiu, Monica Manolachi, Carmen Darabus, Gabriela Chiciudean, Felix Nicolau, Nicoleta Popa Blanariu, Adina Curta, Crina Herteg, Petru Stefan Ionescu, Corina Selejan, Vistras Ivona, Mihaela Muresanu, Ionuț Tomuș, Ligia Tudurachi, Andra Iulia, and Maricica Munteanu

Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies, Apr 30, 2020

The third volume of Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies encompasses a wide range of subjects rela... more The third volume of Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies encompasses a wide range of subjects related to Romanian literature, theatre, film, translation studies, and culture. Academics from famed universities situated in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Bulgaria, and Romania, treat a variety of issues in English, Romanian, French and Spanish. In consequence, the collection of papers provided by this volume includes fourteen articles, a translation and two book reviews.

Transylvanian Review, 2019

The Campus Novel: Regional or Global?, Eds. Dieter Fuchs and Wojciech Klepuszewski, Leiden: Brill ǀ Rodopi, 2019. , 2019

Rewriting Academia: The Development of the Anglicist Women’s and Gender Studies of Continental Europe, 2015

KEYWORDS: Austen’s interpretive history, Emma’s hermeneutic difficulty, cinematic adaptation, fidelity, intertextuality, ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, recent trends in filmic adaptation.

Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies, Apr 30, 2020

by Lucian Vasile Bagiu, Felix Nicolau, Simina Pîrvu, Carmen Dominte, Iosif Camara, Zabava Camelia, Adina Curta, Carmen Darabus, Jarmila Horakova, Monica Manolachi, SILVIU Mihaila, Antonio Patras, Dana Radler, Corina Selejan, Adrian Tudurachi, Rodica Chira, and Marius MIHEȚ

Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies, 2019

In the second volume of Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies we are delighted to welcome ten artic... more In the second volume of Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies we are delighted to welcome ten articles and four book reviews on Romanian language, literature, translation, culture and theatre, written in English, French or Romanian, by academics from various traditional universities.
Literature section is illustrated by authors with affiliation to The “A. Philippide” Institute of Romanian Philology, Iași, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, and West University of Timișoara. The articles advance novel insights when inquiring into enticing subjects such as: the bodily community and its representations in the common space of the members of Viața românească literary group, analysed through Roland Barthes’s and Marielle Macéʼs theories; the remix of hajduk fiction in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Romanian literature, conveying a modern lifestyle; the exile and nostalgia for the native lands in a comparative reading of the works of two seemingly unrelated writers: Andreï Makine and Sorin Titel, both of whom revealed to undergo a pilgrimage to reinvent themselves.
Translation studies is a perfect ground for “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia to present a paper dealing with a view on the concept of fidelity in literary translation with an analysis of the Romanian poet Mircea Ivănescu’s work on the overture of episode eleven, “Sirens”, from James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. The paper is not intended to elicit the imperfections of the translation but rather to illustrate the intricacy of the task, the problems of non-equivalence that are difficult to avoid by any literary translator.
Theatre section benefits from the original intuitions of academics from National University of Music Bucharest and Military Technical Academy, Bucharest, concentrating on modernity: the importance of the Romanian theatrical project – DramAcum, as a new type of theatre and dramaturgy, within the larger European influence of the verbatim dramatic style performed in theatres under the slogan of the in-yer-face; staging O’Neill’s Hughie by Alexa Visarion makes way for an investigation of several drama reviews that discuss the play’s first night, revealing that the performance was a successful attempt at communicating and debating the conflicted values of American pragmatism and equally a crowning of the Romanian director’s effort to unfold the “anti-materialism” and the fatalistic approach to existence of the American playwright.
Owing to University of Bucharest in Cultural studies we witness the reconstruction of the attitudes of Romanian peasants towards the vestiges of prehistoric material culture, finding out what people thought about the origin of prehistoric artefacts and what meanings were associated to them.
In the Linguistics section thanks to Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University of Skopje, and Lund University we are introduced to three perspectives on Romanian language: the destiny of the Latin in the East is interpreted through the pastoral character of Romanity, which led to a population mobility that influenced the language at diatopic level, with a focus on the transhumant shepherds whose travels played a linguistic levelling role, despite the territorial spread of the language; the modern French impact on the Romanian language (the redefining of the neo-Latinic physiognomy of the Romanian language) is detailed from a chronological perspective, the influence of French language being considered from a linguistic perspective, but also with a view to the various social circumstances; last but not least, we are proposed a plea in favor of a linguistic updating, namely the acceptance into the literary language of feminized denominations of professions.
Due to University of Oradea, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, and University of Craiova the Book reviews section engages: a tome written by Paul Cernat, an essential study for those interested in the phenomenon of the Romanian avant-garde; a book by Carmen Mușat, which analyzes and systemizes the relational character of literature and the discourses on literature, a plea for the theorist and his presence in the world, retaining a valid purpose; a volume proposing multiple interpretations, in which Carmen Dărăbuş traces the (evolutionary) trajectory of male characters, by highlighting the permanent capabilities of metamorphosis of the primordial pattern; a literary magazine bringing into attention of the contemporary readers the cultural activity of the Romanian intellectuals from exile, with a focus on Camilian Demetrescu.
Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies is published in collaboration with “1 Decembrie 1918” University of Alba Iulia, Romania, and welcomes contributions from scholars all over the world.