Papers by Armela Panajoti
Redefining Community in Intercultural Context, 2019
Redefining Community in Intercultural Context, 2018
British and American Studies, 2018
British and American Studies, 2019
1. IntroductionThought to have been written in January 1913 and rediscovered after D. H. Lawrence... more 1. IntroductionThought to have been written in January 1913 and rediscovered after D. H. Lawrence's death by Else, Frieda's sister, The D aught er-in-Law is in many ways coincidental with Sons and Lovers in temporal and paradigmatic terms. Written in "kitchen-sink" fashion and caught in the atmosphere of the 1912 miners' strike, the play captures family tensions to such an extent that the physical strike out there becomes a metaphor for tense family relationships, which are finally released at the end of the play. It centers around two male characters, Luther and Joe, brothers and sons to the overbearing Mrs Gascoigne and three female characters, Mrs Gascoigne, Minnie, wife to Luther and Mrs Purdy, mother of Bertha, who is reported to be expecting a child from Luther. The revelation of this pregnancy after Minnie and Luther have been married for six weeks brings about a tension in the husband-wife, mother-son and mother-in-law - daughter-in-law relationships.Al...
This paper focuses on the importance of teaching cultural courses in the foreign language learnin... more This paper focuses on the importance of teaching cultural courses in the foreign language learning environment. More precisely the analysis introduced here is drawn from my personal experience of teaching the course of Culture and Civilization of English-speaking Countries to MA students who are going to become teachers of English. No matter how common and simplistic the discussion may sound, still using data drawn from discussions, surveys and interviews with my students, I intend to point out that such courses help in reshaping and redefining students' perception and conception of culture, community and cultural communication, especially when these issues are embedded within a comparative approach that contrasts the native culture with the English-speaking cultures.
Poetry is recognizable to readers for its use of certain effects achieved through linguistic “man... more Poetry is recognizable to readers for its use of certain effects achieved through linguistic “manipulation.” In most cases, especially in the case of contemporary poetry, these effects are obtained not through particular word choices or striking literary devices, but through specific syntactic constructions. This paper will focus on poetic syntax by viewing it as the “bone” that holds meaning in poetry. It will not be simply an attempt to revisit poetic syntax, but a demonstration of the importance syntax, as representative of the grammatical structure of poetry, has on meaning. Most poetic effects are achieved through the use of certain syntactic structures. Examples of attempts to undo the original syntactic structures of some poems and adjust them to new syntactic structures will be brought here to suggest that a change of syntactic structure brings about a change of meaning.
Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 2017
The aim of this paper is to instigate the development of theoretical discourse on contemporary tr... more The aim of this paper is to instigate the development of theoretical discourse on contemporary travel writing about the Balkans, especially the works created since the collapse of communism in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The problematization of this discourse is timely, even more so when the unique heritage of the Balkans has to harmonize with that of the rest of Europe. Travel writing vibrantly mirrors this process, but the critical tools through which it is currently read come primarily from postcolonial theory and necessitate revisiting. Although postcolonialism has facilitated the popularity of the genre in academia, it does not adequately satisfy the discussion of an increasingly more complex cultural phenomenon that is that of the Balkans, which cannot be simplistically framed in terms of the 'Other'. While the Balkans can still be viewed as the 'Other' in connection to Europe, as a political and economic union, they cannot be dismissed as such from a wider cultural, geographical and historical perspective. To prove our point, we will list examples of incongruences and suggest possible shifts in perspective. Apart from this, as a polygeneric form, the travelogue demands a multidisciplinary, contextual and comparative approach, while our immediate support will be contemporary travel writing criticism about the Balkans. Theoretical background Opening his Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing, Tim Youngs argues that '[t]ravel writing […] is the most socially important of all literary genres' 1 and concludes that its 'ethical importance […] is stronger than ever' , 2 because '[i]t throws light on how we define ourselves and how we identify others'. 3 This 'we' becomes the most interesting subject when it travels with an intentional mind and later recollects and narrates the experience with a purpose. Yet, to our aim, it receives additional importance when it finds itself on contemporary Balkan roads, when it reveals a pronounced discomfort with the prevailing metonymy 'the Balkans' , and especially when it fights, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, within the narrative frames and strategies determined by postcolonial criticism. Recently produced postcolonial reading of travel writing about the Balkans forces serious limitations on both travellers and critics who speak from a world in which the exoticity of localities-once supportive of the quest for the 'other'-has disintegrated. Although their
The Humanities Still Matter: Identity, Gender and Space in Twenty-First-Century Europe, 2020, ISBN 978-1-78997-279-5, págs. 219-236, 2020
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Papers by Armela Panajoti