ioana zirra

University of Bucharest, English Department, Faculty Member

Followers

Following

Public Views

I am a follower of James Joyce's Ulysses scholarship, also interested in Irish hyphenated identity and Celtic Cultural Memory in the British Isles (Ireland). in Cultural Anthropology and Poetry (Victorian and Twentieth Century British and American, my favourites being Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Wallace Stevens, Louise Gluck)

less

Steven Yao

Hamilton College

Fabio Frosini

Urbino "Carlo Bo"

Mary Chadwick

University of Huddersfield

Mário Farelo

Universidade do Minho

Matthew Hart

Columbia University

Lev Lukhovitskiy

National Research University Higher School of Economics

Sita Steckel

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main

barbara baert

KU Leuven

Pasquale Terracciano

University of Rome Tor Vergata

Darryl Jones

Trinity College Dublin

Interests

Uploads

Papers by ioana zirra

Just Violent Intertextual and Dystopian Recent Reinscriptions of Mother Nature in James Joyce’s Ulysses and Doris Lessing’s the Fifth Child?

DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals), Apr 1, 2012

A balkan millenarian hobby-horse of tales: Milorad pavić's star cape. An astrologic guide for amateurs - A staging (abs)tract

The Humour-Pathos Link from Late-Victorian Aestheticism

University of Bucharest Review Literary and Cultural Studies Series

By using Freud’s theory of humour (1927) and his Jokes in their relation to the unconscious (1905... more By using Freud’s theory of humour (1927) and his Jokes in their relation to the unconscious (1905), we follow the dominant features of the humour-pathos nexus from the late Victorian to the postmodernist literary decadence, taking in our stride the two peaking twentieth century modernist texts published by T.S. Eliot and James Joyce in 1922 Britain. We begin with Oscar Wilde’s popular The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) in relation to Walter Pater’s less well-known autobiographical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885), showing what relation the latter has with T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The modernist genial humour of Eliot’s 1939 Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is contrasted with Tom Stoppard’s in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) and with the dark humour closer to pathos in The Life and Songs of the Crow (1970) by Ted Hughes.

The Garden City and the Socialist Victory City: From Colonial to Dictatorial City Schemes

DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals - DOAJ, Jun 1, 2016

Download

Poetic Kairoi in “Lapis Lazuli” and “A Dialogue of Self and Soul” by Yeats and in Seamus Heaney’s “A Snowshoe” (Shelf Life VI)

The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity

What this paper is trying to show is how poetry can perform something that theology theorizes abo... more What this paper is trying to show is how poetry can perform something that theology theorizes about. For concepts, I am turning to Paul Tillich's ultima verba, in the volume titled The Future of Religions, which was edited posthumously by his wife right after the theologian's departure, in 1965, and which also gathers three last homages paid by various peers of Paul Tillich's in the domain of contemporary religious thinking. 1 In itself, this volume is a living proof of the active role played by theology in the world of today, remaining in full awareness of the most recent challenges to modern humanity and attempting to keep the profound dialogue with God going-and systematically, too. The kairoi in the title were selected from "The Decline and the Validity of the Idea of Progress", the third of the last four texts authored by Tillich, in a series that also comprises an essay on "The Effects of Space Exploration on Man's Condition and Stature", one on "Frontiers", and a third on "The Significance of the History of Religions for the Systematic Theologian". The systematic presuppositions to be accepted regard five theological beliefs, presented at the beginning of the latter text: that "revelatory experiences are universally human" (81); "that revelation is received by man in terms of 1 In the table of contents order, the tributes to Paul Tillich, which precede his four essays, are "Paul Tillich's Impact on America", by Jerald C. Brauer, "The Sources of Tillich's Richness", by Wilhelm Pauck, and "Paul Tillich and the History of Religions", by Mircea Eliade. All the quotations will be from Paul Tillich's own mentioned texts, indicating just the page numbers in brackets. his finite human situation" (81); that, in the revelatory process, "the limits of adaptation and the failures of distortion are subjected to criticism" [of the mystical, prophetic and secular types] (81); "that there may be a central event in the history of religions. .. that unites the positive results of those critical developments [and of the revelatory experiences]. .. and which makes possible a concrete theology that has universalistic significance" (81); finally, and more categorically, that "the sacred does not lie beside the secular, but it is its depths. .. " and it "is the creative ground and at the same time a critical judgment of the secular" (82). It is because of his speaking as a systematic theologian (who can counter, with belief translated for the benefit of any systematic thinkers, recent humanity's loss of heart) that Paul Tillich can go beyond the tormenting thought about the impasse of the important modern idea of progress so as to prepare its return to validity. He gives an atomistic turn to the commanding modern idea of progress, by bringing to the fore "great moments", "right times, decisive times, turning points" (74). Tillich speaks in the spirit of the New Testament and of the classical Greek concept, 2 when he isolates "the right time, fulfilled time", which "is not the same as chronos, chronological time, [alias] watch time" but means 'the qualitative time in which "something happens"' (75). In history, great moments, kairoi are times "in which something new happens" (76). As manifestations of 2 One relevant New Testament reference, merging Mark 1: 15 and Titus 1:3, is "the appointed/fulfilled time" in the purpose of God, enacted at present. In classical Greek this is traceable to Plato's Statesman where "ho kairós", "the right moment" is constitutive for the standard of excellence in the art/method of identifying and applying the due measure (284 e); it becomes the locus of reference for Aristotelian rhetoric and for (earlier) sophists, who joined, in the context of an expert discourse's utterances, prepon, dyna and kairos, the attention to the audience confronting the speaker, the clarity of the discourse intention and, relevant for our discussion, the consideration of the right time of the discursive delivery for securing success, respectively. qualitative time, however, they do not happen "in a progressivistic line with the other new things before and after it" (76) but proffer answers to the question about the meaning of life and of the great moments in history. According to Paul Tillich, "[t]here is in these great moments not total fulfillment but there is the victory over a particular power of destruction, a victory over a demonic power which was creative and now has become destructive" (77). And the theologian insists that "this is a possibility, not something that must happen. It might not happen; that is a continuous threat hanging over development in history"(77). Still, he continues, moving optimistically on the affirmative branch in the balance of possibilities, as a theologian would: "But there may be a kairos" (77), stressing the modal verb and the concept. Also, Tillich is ready to take in his argumentative stride not only history, to address the issue of the kairos and the meaning of life, but art also. Without focusing on art to develop the subject of the kairoi, he only theorizes on the impossibility of speaking about progress in art (just as in the moral domain). After demonstrating the validity of "the [moral] freedom of contradicting every possible instance of progress" (73), he adds that "creativity in culture" and particularly "the freedom of spiritual creativity [in the arts]. . ." admits of maturity, admits of "great moments-kairoi. .. but it does not admit progress from one style to another" (74). We consider, however, that artistic kairoi come closer to the recognition, by Tillich, of the fact that "there may be a kairos" (77), not as a matter of necessity, but of balanced optimism. Consequently, to analyze poetic kairoi one must put together qualitative moments which assert fulfillment and perform it at decisive times, creating turning points. Putting the poems together does not involve, however, making them into any palpably demonstrable, demonstrative or catechetic series. With art, fatalism or resignation in existential or historical times of protracted crisis (all the more oppressive in ages rather dogmatically marked by the idea of progress) can be overcome-and it need not be a matter of necessity. We will begin with the presentation of two groups of poems by W.B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney, respectively, in their creative and thematic horizons (as intra-texts), in order to find and justify the appearance of peaking, qualitative moments and performative turning points, moments of timely meditative action proffered by poetry in response to realities that torment man in the age of (often counterproductive) modern advancement. The intra-textual shall be combined with intertextual discoveries capable to extend and cross over the individual poetic kairoi and help explore them typologically.

Download

The Culturalist Brand in the Recent British Literary Tradition : National Self-Portrayal in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and John Fowles’s the French Lieu

University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series, 2008

Download

Literary into Popular into National Memory: The Art of Blasphemy in a Romanian Novel of 2012

Literature and Cultural Memory, 2017

James Joyce’s Ironical Memory: Jungian versus Parallactic Literary (Re-)Cognition in the Cultural-Gift Novel Titled Ulysses

Theoria et Historia Scientiarum, 2016

Approaching James Joyce's Ulysses from the point of view of the cognitive field of cultural memor... more Approaching James Joyce's Ulysses from the point of view of the cognitive field of cultural memory studies involves an account about the difficulties encountered on the way, followed by the discovery of limitations that the ironies of the Joycean fictional experiment introduce in the standard handling of four cultural memory modes (experiential, mythicizing, antagonistic and reflexive, according to Astrid Erll's 2008 study "Literature, Film and the Mediality of Cultural Memory"). The complexities of the modernist cultural intra-mediation memory modes are explained by reference to self-reflexive postcreation, fabrication, parallelism and parallax; the latter complicates parallelism, just as postcreation, a self-reflexive term coined by Stephen Dedalus in the Ulyssean episode "Oxen of the Sun" complicates fabrication; with help from The Parallactic View by Slavoj Žižek, the species of Joycean irony are explained so as to refute Carl Gustav Jung's dismissal of Ulysses as meaningless in 1932.

Download

The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity

Torun Studies in Language, Literature and Culture, 2016

Download

Techniques of Indirection in Two Generations of Postcolonial Poets

1. IntroductionTo communicate, poetry juggles with memory in the public space, constructing and r... more 1. IntroductionTo communicate, poetry juggles with memory in the public space, constructing and revisiting "sites of memory" (Pierre Nora's term in 1989), remediating them (bringing them to public attention in renewed memory broadcasts, as theorized in the cultural memory frame by Astrid Erll (2008:389398).I shall demonstrate how dialogic, intertextual indirection paradoxically works to bring the artist's image "in immediate relation to others" (Joyce 1992:232), by focusing on the communication between generations of poets who belong to The Belfast Group and on the techniques which allow them to share (inter)textual memories. Indirection disengages literal, lyrical statements, just as the novelistic image used by Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) to theorize about discourse in literature should be plucked out from the mimetic continuum to acquire its full significance. In this paper, I chart the way one is invited to move back from the poems of the younger and notor...

A Plea in Favour of Guilt

The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity

i don’t want the soothing colours' : visual-verbal configurations of expressionism in Wopko Jensma’s poetry

The verbal text, 2020

Religion as Philosophy and Art in the Work of Lucian Blaga

The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity

C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot: Christianity through the Looking Glass

The Literary Avatars of Christian Sacramentality, Theology and Practical Life in Recent Modernity

Turning Away from Modern Secularisation: T. S. Eliot and His Poetic Space for a Metaphysical Quest

Empirical Religion vs. Secularisation in Postcommunist Romania

Does Art Imply Theology?: Henry James, Hans-Georg Gadamer, David Jones and Hans Urs von Balthasar

“New wine in new bottles”: Some Aspects of the Twentieth-Century English Catholic Novel