Vol. 1 No. 1 (2017): ROMANIAN STUDIES TODAY I, 2017

Abstract

During the Cold War, the former “satellites” of the former USSR were approached, in the US academia and, consequently, in security studies, under the umbrella of Area Studies. The study of the languages and cultures of those countries, among which Romania was one made the core of Area Studies. The seminal book of Charles Jelavich (Jelavich, 1969) set the standard for Area Studies in the region, and stated clearly the role of languages and national literatures in the field. Shortly after,  Richard Lambert (Lambert, 1973) coordinated an ample review of the status of the language/area studies in Central and Eastern Europe, which showed serious imbalances within a field that was supposed to appear homogeneous. His research was based on the number of enrollments, as well as on the academic/social relevance of the academic programs.

The fracture within Area Studies in the region deepened after 1989, when the Post-Communist countries faced individual issues that raised different types of research/academic/security interests in the US. Based on my personal experience as a Romanian language and culture instructor and curriculum designer at the Nicolae Iorga Chair at Columbia University (Romanian Language Institute), the article will examine the status of Romanian Studies within the new ideological landscape. Caught between the irreversible fears of the postmodernist “millennialism” (see, Jameson, 1998), and the in-betweenness (Chakrabarty, 1998) brought by globalization, Romanian Studies, and Area Studies in
general have faced a rapid adoption of theoretical ‘parlances’, some of which are incompatible with the very nature of the field, yet they make the field ‘recognizable’ and ‘user-friendly’.

Abstract

Romanian Ethnology (named, at first, either Romanic Philology or Ethnopsychology) became an academic discipline at the end of the ninenteenth century, as part of Philology studies and in tune with European theories regarding comparative researches on folk (peasant) cultures as a means to identify origins, interrelations and evolution of peoples. As part of European Ethnology, Romanian Ethnology has evolved as a science engaged in the project of national construction and practising the discipline has always implied resisting political bias, especially during the communist period.

After 1989, Romanian ethnologists have freely explored the limits of their science, criticising tradition and practising interdisciplinary approaches that have induced a fruitful state of internal crisis, out of which a „new Ethnology” has emerged. Although rural tradition and national and multiethnic cultural heritage remain the most important topics of Romanian Ethnology, there are also a series of recent themes (work migration, exploring socialism and postsocialism, urban cultures and many others) that integrate research into international trends. As far as specific practices are concerned, Romanian Ethnology (or its most „fashionable“ equivalent, Sociocultural Anthropology, as I demonstrate
there is no substantial difference between ’Ethnology’ and ’Anthropologies’) is grounded in the research field which is explored by using qualitative methods.

Abstract

The present paper tries to emphasize the importance of some key-concepts from the philosophy of language in the contrastive approach of the didactic process – teaching and learning of a foreign language in the linguistic and cultural mediation, focusing on the role of the translation in this process.

Abstract

The paper provides a broad overview of the linguistic landscape of present-day Romania and of the official educational policies dealing with the protection of the linguistic rights of the persons belonging to the national minorities, in accordance with the international legislation. Comparing data from 1999 and 2013, the paper examines several components of the educational system for national minorities in Romania (types of tuition, the school network, teaching experiences by language of tuition, framework plans, curricula, textbooks, principles of assessment,
the training of the teaching staff, acquisition of L2) and points out both the undeniable achievements and the shortcomings.

Abstract

The Romanian Corpora and their importance in creating teaching materials for Romanian L2

The article has two aims: 1. to describe the corpora of contemporary non-dialectal Romanian, including both electronic corpora — The Romanian Balanced Annotated Corpus (ROMBAC), RoCo_News (a Journalistic Corpus of Romanian), The Reference Corpus of Contemporary Romanian Language (CoRoLa), etc. — and raw oral corpora, available in print only — Româna vorbită actuală (ROVA), Corpus de română vorbită (CORV), Interacţiunea verbală în limba română actuală (IVLRA), Corpus de limbă română vorbită actuală (CLRVA), etc.; 2. to plead for using corpora for pedagogical purposes, especially in creating teaching materials for Romanian as a foreign / second language. The article gives a short general description of the corpora and their applications in Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Teaching. The Romanian corpora are hardly known even by the Romanian researchers; their presentation takes into account the stylistic structure, annotation, number of words and tokens, etc. (for electronical corpora); the number of texts, the period of time when the records were made, the type of texts, etc. (for oral corpora in print). The second part contains some examples of possible corpora applications for Romanian as a foreign/ second language: a list of the most frequent words; the refinement of the characteristics of various types of texts (medical, legal, journalistic, fiction, etc.); the most relevant contexts for the argumental structure of verbs, adjectives, etc. 

In fact, the aim of the paper is to argue for developing annotated corpora for Romanian, easily accessible to researchers, professors and even students, and for using the existing corpora for pedagogical purposes.

Abstract

Romanian Language at NTNU, 2010-2011

The Romanian language lectureship in Trondheim was established on June, 5th, 2008. As a novelty the optional  course in Romanian language made its debut in January 2009, for the spring semester of NTNU. The course is intended for students from all specializations. It is divided into Romanian 1 and Romanian 2, each of them holding 7. 5 credits. The course is concluded with an oral examination and a short dictation as means of assessment during the semester and the final four hours of the written exam. The present paper aims to explore the assimilation of
Romanian language by the foreign students in the written exams from December 2010 and May 2011, followed by a grammar analysis of the errors identified in the written tasks of the foreign students (the present indicative, the subjunctive, the definite article, the gender of the adjectives, the number of the nouns and of the adjectives, the preposition, the construction of the genitive/dative). At the end we share a brief unconventional history of the lectureship. 

Abstract

Starting from a comparative perspective on Romanian and Serbian grammar, this paper deals with the acquisition and use of the Romanian possessive dative by students with L1 Serbian, who study Romanian as a foreign language. Various structural and functional differences between Romanian and Serbian account for the difficulties incurred
by students when it comes to correctly producing the dative external possessive in Romanian. We propose a preliminary experimental study meant to analyze the degree and role of transfer in the acquisition of the structure, as well as the developmental differences between beginner, intermediate, advanced and heritage students.

Abstract

The paper presents the situation of the negative imperative in Romanian in comparison with that of Italian. The comparison shows a strong similarity between the two Romance languages, in that both languages exhibit the same contrast between singular and plural in the realization of the negative imperative.
The contrast in Italian is explained in a well-known book of Rafaella Zanutinni (“Negation and Clausal Structure”) through the existence of two kinds of imperatives: imperatives with and without mood morphology. I show that this explanation cannot be adopted for Romanian, even if, given the fact that the explanation is built within the framework
of Universal Grammar, this would be desirable. I propose instead to explain the contrast in both languages through the scope properties of the imperatives with respect to negation. This leads to a more general reformulation of the distinction between the two types of imperatives, as a distinction between imperatives with scope over negation and
imperatives with scope under negation. In the rest of the paper I show how this new distinction may be applied to other cases of Romance imperatives, as well. A semantic typology of Romance imperatives emerges, accordingly.

Abstract

This paper attempts to reopen the issues of formal innovation and literary originality in the context of contemporary literary theory. One of the “common places” (Compagnon 1998) of European Romanticism, the concept of author understood as a genial expression of human spirit will undergo numerous reinterpretations in the following literary
periods. The most profound of these is probably its separation from the notion of originality as a mark of creative individuality. Contemporary literary theory has shifted its interest towards other concepts and themes: language and discourse as creative forces, the problems of literary reception, etc. It was necessary for the author to come back as protagonist of the postmodern narrative in order for the theories of literary authority to regain their place in the international academic debate.
Among the traits of authority, the individual dimension has almost always seemed natural, matter-of-fact; its constructed and conventionalized character due to literary tradition have been rarely challenged. Harold Bloom, in his Anxiety of Influence and The Western Canon defined canonicity as strangeness, following a Romantic and formalist
line of thought. It was Bourdieu’s sociological theory of art that has rediscovered the theoretical force of the Foucauldian ‘author function’. In this context, I shall discuss several recent positions regarding the changes brought to the postmodern concept of the author by the plural/collective authority (Couturier 1998, Meltzer 1994, Stone and
Thompson 2007). In order to illustrate the reinterpretation of literary originality from the perspective of plural authorship I shall analyze a cult novel of Romanian postmodernism, Femeia în roșu (The Woman in Red, 1990), written together by three writers, members of the ’80s generation: Adriana Babeți, Mircea Nedelciu, and Mircea Mihăieș.

Abstract

The article presents new perspectives on East-European and Romanian studies in relation with travel literature by discussing two recent books: a complex memoir written by the journalist and American historian Robert D. Kaplan, recently translated into Romanian: În umbra Europei. Două războaie reci și trei decenii de călătorie prin România
și dincolo de ea (In Europe`s Shadow. Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond ) and the literary history book on Romanian travel literature Lâna de aur. Călătorii și călătoriile în literatura română (The Golden Fleece. Travelers and Travels in Romanian Literature) written by Mircea Anghelescu. 

Abstract

Anchetă realizată de prof. univ. Ioana BOT, Universitatea „Babeș-Bolyai” din Cluj-Napoca

Abstract

Mircea Anghelescu, profesor emerit la Facultatea de Litere a Universității din București, publică în 2015 la editura Cartea Românească, volumul de critică și istorie literară Lâna de aur – Călătorii și călătoriile în literatura română. Titlul,
alăturat subtitlului, rezumă conținutul volumului, iar textul este o ordonare a tipurilor de călători-cititori și, implicit, o privire atentă spre esența literaturii de călătorie „și a contribuției sale la maturizarea unor teme, la dezvoltarea unor percepții în spațiul public și, în ultimă instanță, la construirea și la afirmarea unui puternic sentiment național pe baza căruia s-a împlinit statul în sine, România de astăzi” (p. 6)

Abstract

It is no longer a secret in the history of thought that a theory, a thesis, a proposal is often both borrowed and accommodated; the transit of a set of ideas from one cultural place to another may be easy, but it isn’t in itself
enough for validation or, indeed, even for disgruntled acceptance. And it is even less of a secret that what it takes for a theory to catch on is sometimes so obscure or relying on such complex arrays of social, historical and intellectual
circumstances that some have given up on defining them and have relegated them to chance. The book being reviewed here has a more optimistic outlook and, through the many contributions from its various authors, puts
forward instances of how theories – literary, psychological, philosophical – are carried over the boundaries of nations or of political blocs, how they’re being driven through the more pervious, but not always more accessible, boundaries of arts or art departments and disciplines.