WRITING AND THE LAW: EDUCATION REFORMS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON WRITING IN THE ROMANIAN UNIVERSITY SYSTEM
Abstract: This article deals with how major top-down reforms in the Romanian higher education system have affected and will continue to affect student writing and have forever challenged and changed teachers' and students' traditional roles. The reform of student writing in Romania is initially due to the implementation in the Romanian education system of the Bologna Declaration of 2002 and continues ever stronger due to the extraordinary new Education Law passed by the Romanian Ministry of Education, Research and Innovation in 2011. One of the initial outcomes of the adherence of the Romanian education system to Bologna Declaration was that, while previously to this change Romanian universities demanded very little undergraduate writing especially the original, research-oriented one and, thus, grades relied heavily on the results of the traditional sit-down final examinations, most courses now in the Romanian higher education system include student essay writing and other types of writing and systematic teacher feedback. Creative writing has started to appear here and there, too in the university curriculum especially at private universities. As a result of Romania's adherence to Bologna Declaration of 2002, Portfolio Assessment, which demands extended writing, has been also introduced in Romania, both at state universities and private ones. As a result of the new 2011 Education Law, even more emphasis will be placed on writing, research, competences and abilities, included practical ones, and creativity at all levels of education, higher education included therefore. The article presents some results from an evaluation of the educational reforms in Romania, mostly of the initial reforms following Romania's adherence to Bologna Declaration of 2002, but the study considers some of the reforms that follow from the newly passed Romanian Education Law. Mainly the following questions are addressed in this research study (1) Why did the initial reforms change writing practices and how even more we expect writing practices to change as a result of the implementations of the newly passed Education Law?; (2) What other factors have contributed and will further contribute to the change; (3) In what ways have the changes in writing practice, including creative writing practices, affected students and teachers and how further on these writing practices will change as a result of the implementation of new Education Law; and (4) What are unintended results and critical factors in the future development of writing in the aftermath of the new reforms of the Romanian education system?
Keywords: Education, Romanian Socialist Education/Pre-1989 Education, Romanian Post- 1989 Education, Reforms, Bologna Declaration, Education Law, Writing, Creative Writing
HOW ’TRUE’ ARE PHOTOGRAPHS AND THE LIMITS OF PERCEPTION. TEN YEARS AFTER – GROUND ZERO REVISITED
Abstract: The three quotes represent significant approaches to the following aspects which will be central for this essay: 1. the relationship between words and pictures; 2. the temporal significance of photographs; and 3. the relationships between photographs and the world outside. In my discussion of these three aspects I will concentrate in the first part on the event which happened on September 11, 2001 in New York, which was banned on many photographs, became a media-event and definitely changed the world. The second part will deal with Salman Rushdie’s novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet and the interrelationship of medial representation. In the novel Rushdie explicitly deals with limits of perception, with experiences of limits and the phenomenon of transgressing boundaries. For Rushdie photography is the medium par excellence to bring these liminal processes in the readers’ focus. Interpreting both paradigms and commenting on them from a cultural critical point of view I want to ask what role images play at all in our contemporary world and how we read them.
Keywords: Pictures, Words, Rushdie
DEMASSED SOCIETY, NEW NARRATIVES AND MULTIMEDIA
Abstract: The authors of the paper seek to explore the identity, strength and specific aspects of new media, observing the reaffirmed position of a citizen as the one being subject to the informational process. The power of designing and controlling information is becoming the preferable communicative discipline of postmodern society, since media discourse is constituting democratic capacity of the national communities. New media in interrelation with digital platforms abolish the classical journalistic patterns, distinctly articulating new social relations and communication paradigms. The study is particularly oriented toward the investigation of the condition to be found in Eastern European countries, for which minimal degree of media freedom and the necessity for redefining media matrix represent distinct features.
Keywords: Civic Society, New Narratives, Multimedia, Internet, Information, Public Discourse
CULTURE OF DIALOGUE VS. AESTHETICS OF INTERACTIVITY
Abstract: Regarding the comment of the film director Leni Riefenstahl, stated in the context of thorough preparations for shooting the film Triumph des Willens in 1934, and published in the text that describes events that had taken place in the „backstage“ during preparation of the grandiose party gathering of the Third Reich, in which the author claims that everything was “in the function of camera”, and that at the shooting of the National-Socialist Party congress, with participation of a million “extra”, that the whole event was organized with the purpose of realizing one spectacular film, or creating special propaganda material from the Hitler’s era1 , it could be said that the outcome of this unique cinematographic-ideological venture, in the symbolic sense of the word, represented return to the idea of Plato’s cave myth, in which gigantic cinematographic illusion, by projecting moving images on the cave wall, outlines our reality.
THE ARTIST AS A POLITICAL ACTIVIST. THE ARTISTIC AUTHENTICATION OF THE SOCIAL FACT
Abstract: The works of art, as productive forces, cannot be delimited from the social ones, therefore the work of art is subordinated to the social laws, according to the terminology set out by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. There is no conceptual dissolution between art and society and the artistic production is shaped, even in a latent way, by social production. But there is a relationship between society and art that permanently tries to balance the two forces, i.e. to mediate and to negotiate the antagonisms resulting from the dispute over hegemony. The mediator is the artist himself, the only one who has civically and artistically assumed rights and
obligations. The artist is the one who decides when to place himself within or outside society and he claims his statute according to where he stands between these coordinates.
Keywords: Art, Artist, Political Activism, Society, Mediator
HETEROTOPIAS DISTURB: EUGÈNE IONESCO THROUGH THE 20TH CENTURY
Abstract: Not only in the theatre, but there also, the 20th century was the century of the disappearance of space and of time transfigured by massacre. Scientific progress did not produce moral progress. Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Nazism, the totalitarianisms, Vietnam present themselves as the incontrovertible historical evidence.
THE FEMINIST DECONSTRUCTIVE ONTOLOGY OF THE HYPHENATED BEING IN EXILE IN BHARATI MUKHERJEE’S JASMINE AND THE HOLDER OF THE WORLD
Abstract: Bharati Mukherjee’s novels are exemplary for what one can call the ontology of the hyphenated being in exile, of the postcolonial subject on the margins, the one who belongs to no particular landscape, who has no place to call “home.” In Jasmine, for instance, this ambivalence is seen as a cause of personal disintegration and existential difficulty. Only through the extremely personal facets of her life is the narrator of Jasmine able to make some form of resistance and some subversion of the discourse that surrounds her. The Holder of the World, however, is drawn on a much different scale and the ambivalence that is still present—within Hannah who is fragmented between the native Indian and the Puritanism of her homeland, between her assumed English identity and her new place as a lover of an Indian prince—works in a very different way. For on this more epic scale, this ambivalence can be seen as a political weapon of considerable strength. Although Hannah encounters the difficulties of a divided self, the main focus of the ambivalence is how it can alter, the discourses within which she is involved. In all her works, including in the two above novels, Bharati Mukherjee deconstructs the colonial discourse yet does not shy away from equally striking against the postcolonial establishment. She does this from the position of the exile, a hyphenated postcolonial being, within neither culture, despite being produced by both of them, a being in constant shuttling, existing in an ambivalent place that he or she tries to deconstruct and reconstruct in what can be called a deconstructive feminist epistemology, a deconstructive feminist postcolonial discourse.
Keywords: Ambivalence; Being—(in) Exile, Feminism; Genetic, Hyphenated, Postcolonialism; Exile; Home; Multiculturalism.
MONA LISA SMILE
Abstract: After Antiquity, the idea of determinism emerged and the necessity of searching for the implicit causality and specific phenomena in life and its diversity occured.
Renaissance brought a revival of interest towards man, his body and spirit, they started to distinguish between the concept of spirit - soul and psyche. Then there was an intensified interest in the differential characteristics of people, which was possible due to arts in Renaissance. Statues express positions and meanings of human behaviors, portraits present the diversity of faces and gestures, glances, etc. Anything from human existence becomes, or may be considered outside or inside signs.
Keywords: Reality and Paradigm, Figurative or Nonfigurative Marks, About Painting, About The Model, Mystery, Theatricality, Laughter / Smile, Others Through Smile, Medical and Religious Connections of Smiles, Masculine / Feminine Related to Joviality, Age Connections through Laughter / Smile, Sadness.
INTERCULTURAL COMMUNICATION
Abstract: This paper will explain the ethnic, geographic, family, and/or religious culture or cultures of my youth. I relied heavily on my own recollection of my upbringing and several questions from senior family members. Using the required reading material from chapters 1-3 of Intercultural Communication Encounters as a guide, I will provide an explanation. The information in the assigned reading material provided me with a better understanding of how the very words that we use are a reflection of our own cultural backgrounds yet how all cultures appear to have certain universal aspects in common.
Keywords: Communication, Intercultural, Roots
