Synergy

2

Authors: Roxana Marinescu

Synergy 1/2021 is a mirror of the times we live in: after a year (2020) in which we learned to deal with a global pandemic both on a personal and on a professional level (but how are we to clearly separate the two when most of our work as academics is now taking place in the private space of the home which we have learned to share with our co-workers, students and colleagues?). Teaching, research, conferences, most our work is now done online and from home, and we have been constantly searching for mechanisms and instruments to help us cope with this constant discovery of teaching and assessment methods and intense search for meaningful activities in the new medium, and also with the all too frequent burnouts or increased stress levels.

2

Authors: Irina DAVID

Perspectives is addressed to Pre-Intermediate to Advanced learners of English and comes with a wide range of study resources, from the traditional printed Student’s Book, Workbook and Teacher’s Book, with the incorporated audio CDs and DVDs, to the online version of the Workbook.

9

Authors: Monica Alina TOMA

This paper analyses the relationship between the author and the reader in two of Borges’s most representative fictions: “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”. In the first writing, the fictional reader and narrator Borges not only challenges the non-fictional reader to interpret correctly the various references that appear in the text, but he also invades his real-life world. In the second story, “Pierre Menard”, the fictional reader and narrator challenges the non-fictional reader again by claiming that two identical texts may acquire different values when they are attributed to two different authors living in different periods of time. By exploring these provoking texts, the article attempts to establish Borges’s own perspectives on “authorship” and “readership” starting from the premise that, in the Borgesian stories, the line between the reader and the author is blurred.

13

Authors: Monica GOT

Drawing on Jan Assmann’s interpretation of cultural memory as devoid of any racial/biological component, as well as James Clifford’s repudiation of the notion of cultural purity, the paper redefines memory as a mentally configured cultural institution, claiming that any reconfiguration of group identity is an act of symbolic violence. By emphasizing the crucial role that identity plays in understanding the fundamental themes tackled by Chicana literature—patriarchal oppression, racial terror, domestic abuse, sexism, homophobia—, the paper illustrates the extent to which the ethnic-gender binomial, i.e. belonging to a group that faces bias on various levels (femininity, Mexican American genealogy and, sporadically, sexual minority status), stands at the very core of the desire to redefine identity that largely fuels contemporary Chicana prose.

18

Authors: Angelica MARINESCU

One of the most controversial discussions in the contemporary Indian arts environment remains the connection of the post-colonial classical dance practice with the DevadƗsƯ or the MaharƯ, the temple dancing girls. Born in the Early Medieval India, amidst and in close connection to the Bhakti and the Tantric movements, abiding in the temple institution, the socalled ‘DevadƗsƯ temple system’ remains a mystery, between awe and fascination to the nowadays practitioner and connaisseur of Indian arts. While tracing back the socio-religious contexts that brought the temple dancers on the foremost place of the stage of Indian art history, the author looks for the understanding of this myth in the imaginary and the reality of contemporary practitioners, from the perspective of a foreigner researcher-cumpractitioner of an Indian art form. The paper is based on consulting the existing literary sources concerning the Devadãsĩ system, and the research is focusing on the nowadays classical dance practitioners’ imaginary (re)construction(s) of this system. Till today, here she stands, the woman-as-dance practitioner, either Indian or from any other part of the world, at the cross-road of all myths, imaginarily rooted in the past, but living all the aspirations of the nowadays social, cultural, religious, political dynamics, neither celestial maiden, nor sacred prostitute.