Synergy

6

Authors: Anca COLIBABA, Monica VLAD and Cezar VRÎNCEANU

The aim of this article is to offer language teachers a series of tools and practical guidelines for improving their usage of the online environment. We will cover mainly two coordinates. Firstly, we will study the concept of Personal Learning Network (PLN). In this respect, we will present an example of how to create such a network, both from the perspective of the teachers (for their own learning) and also from the perspective of the learners (how a teacher can help the learner build a PLN). Secondly, we will focus on one of the greatest challenges for teachers and learners today: how to make the most of the online language resources available. If in the past the challenge was to find any resources on the internet, the challenge of our day is to select quality resources and to ensure that the learners have access to learning material that is relevant to their needs.

6

Authors: Virginia Mihaela DUMITRESCU

The present article looks at a type of reading which Paul de Man calls “theretical” to distinguish it from the traditional, “aesthetic” approach. The “theoretical” close reading, characterised by increased analytical rigour and focused on a clear-cut distinction between the linguistic and the phenomenal, aims to identify the “literariness” of literary language (a term used by the American critic with reference to “the autonomous potential of language”, to all the non-intuitive linguistic “factors” and “functions” that are not accessible to perceptive knowledge and constitute the incontrollable, “inhuman”,mechanism of language). The “linguistics of literariness” underlying it is used as an instrument for denouncing “ideological aberrations”, or the confusion between the materiality of the signifier and the materiality of the object designated by it. Unlike the traditional, totalising, “aesthetic reading” which starts from the premise of the possibility of knowledge, and the intelligibility of the text, the non-cognitive “theoretical” reading is an extreme example of linguistic and epistemological scepticism. Ironically, the critic himself cannot escape the error he criticises, as shown in the initial stage of his reading of a fragment of Rousseau’s Confessions: he tends to resort to the totalising, defensive strategy he later denounces as pure mystification, in an effort to elude the “blind force” of the linguistic mechanism by attributing meaning to structures created mechanically through the “positing power” of language.

7

Authors: Monica CONDRUZ-BĂCESCU

Business communication is how you communicate in your line of work. It is also a matter of human relationships. Good business communication is a must to meet the demands of the business environment. Most of us spend a lot of time communicating our knowledge, thoughts, and ideas to others. Your communication at the workplace can make all the difference between success and failure. Communication is described by many as the single most important factor in choosing managerial level staff, yet despite this fact many people are unable to convey their thoughts and they are struggling to communicate effectively.

8

Authors: Mădălina ALAMĂ

The following article focuses on virtual space and on identification processes and stages in order to show why the virtual space is endlessly resourceful for the user who finds this particular space to be the ultimate identity enhancer. The article begins by defining some key terms and by putting forth that the mirror stage (as cited in Lacan, 2006) is instrumental in understanding identification processes that the subject is to undergo throughout his/her life. Other identity theories are brought into discussion in order to broaden the theoretical understanding of identification in virtual space.

9

Authors: Lora CONSTANTINESCU

Advertising is commonly viewed upon as a multi-layered process of stimulating attention, acceptance and desire. Disappointingly enough, it is a means to ”reach the consumers’pockets”. Let us look again at this system of interwoven semiotic analysis, mercantile profit planning, psychological implications and ideological considerations. Since advertising still offers post modern society an exhaustively debated topic and interdisciplinary research area, this article discusses advertising as text genre and its use in FLT (here German) as a) a means of building genre awareness as well as of developing communicative competence (the intercultural included), and b) a device of shaping ways of thinking and inducing ways of acting.

14

Authors: Alexandra Anca CODREANU

At borderline of language philosophy, rhetoric and pragmatics topoi as understood by Aristotle, Perelman or Ducrot underlie legal reasoning. This article looks into the use of topoi in non argumentative, normative texts. The claim is that the knowledge representation function performed by topoi validates their use in laws and contracts. Legal provisions on quality assurance in higher education in the British and Romanian systems of law will be used as corpus. A clear identification of the way topics operate and are dealt with in professional communication using such normative texts will contribute to more efficiently teaching English for Legal Purposes.

22

Authors: Raluca ŞERBAN

This article deals with John Barth’s most autobiographic book, Once Upon a Time. A Floating Opera. The genre is subverted, as autobiographic parts are carefully balanced by imagined situations or characters. What results, despite its author’s firm refusal to admit to inserting any autobiographic elements in it, is a “postmodern”, or a “fictional autobiography”, one that could be approached, at least partly, via psychoanalytic criticism, again despite the author’s irony vis-à-vis such possibility.

5

Authors: Virginia Mihaela DUMITRESCU

Like Søren Kierkedaard and Friedrich Schlegel (among many other prominent thinkers), Paul de Man is fascinated by the highly disruptive potential of irony, a trope traditionally defined as “saying one thing and meaning another”. In “The Rhetoric of Temporality”, he looks at irony as a typical example of the disjunction between “sign” and “meaning” that is totally in keeping with his notion of the linguistic “emptiness” of meaning, or the insubstantial character of language. At the same time, and more significantly, irony is reevaluated from an epistemological perspective, as a major figure of disjunction whose temporal structure seems to point to a problem that goes far beyond the area of rhetoric, or literary studies in general, into the much wider field of cognition; an analysis of its “empty” temporality throws light on human existence considered as “a succession of isolated moments lived by a divided self”. The subtle distinctions previously made by Baudelaire between “le sentiment du comique”, “le comique absolu” and “le comique significatif” are used as arguments in favour of the Demanian account of the temporal structure of irony – the key to understanding its epistemological thrust.

8

Authors: Doru ENACHE

This article focuses on Schopenhauer’s masterpiece – Viata, amorul, moartea – analysing the author’s view on some essential aspects of human existence. The center of his approach relies on the famous concept of “will”. The will to live appears as the only motivator of our existence, the only trigger of our actions. Also, while all things have their reasons, existence is the only one lacking motivation. Thus, the only way we can reach serenity is by accepting the absurd of our own life.

9

Authors: Ioana STAMATESCU

This article analyzes identity construction strategies in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel‘Tender Is The Night’, in an attempt to show that the two main characters (Dick Diver and Nicole Diver) use a process of othering in order to achieve a ‘complete self’. Whereas Diver sees completeness as a flawed self and achieves it through eroticizing what is abjected: his union with Nicole and the symbolic adoption of her broken psyche, Nicole achieves a valid self through a vampire-like energy transfer from Diver. The latter turns from the eroticized other into the abjected other, in Nicole’s process of self construction.

11

Authors: Mihaela ARSENE

This article surveys the major models currently available for classroom observation purposes, duly pointing out their basic tenets and limitations. The survey is followed by a practical application to the author’s teaching situation by means of a peer observation session conducted for professional development purposes. The paper finally documents the design, resources, implementation and outcomes of the observation session, attaching due attention to the conclusions emerging from this instance of reflective practice and to the observation refinements required for the next stages of this teacher education project. Keywords: collaborative supervision, non-directive supervision, error correction, reflective practice, post-observation analysis

13

Authors: Roxana MARINESCU

This article examines British colonialism in South-Asia and the violence of this process, as well as the internal post-empire violence, as reflected in a number of novels, among which Midnight’s Children or The Ground Beneath Her Feet,Shalimar the Clown or Shame by Salman Rushdie, The Hungry Tide by Amitav Gosh, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai or Brick Lane by Monica Ali. The discussion revolves around the idea of institutional violence of the Empire or the new merging state(s) over the collective body of a nation (or several nations or ethnic groups) or over individual people. Colonial violence has a different impact on the common bodies of both colonisers and colonised, depending on spatial and temporal location, but more importantly on other factors, such as gender, caste, or religious denomination.

17

Authors: Mariana SĂNDULESCU

The present article focuses on the various modalities of conceiving broadcasting speciality information for the wide public in the view of the latest approaches of the communication theory. At the level of super-textual structure we demonstrate that speciality broadcasting, as explicit rephrasing, tends to provide a text S2 (Speech 2) - a speciality popularizing, openly declared as an outcome of a rephrasing process of S1 (Speech 1) this not only does not hide it, but regularly highlights it, on many levels, rendering the essence of communication into a global declarative structure of reported speech.