Bulletin of the Transilvania University of Brasov. Series IV: Philology and Cultural Studies

Revenants reimagined: The persistence of Balkan vampire lore in contemporary digital contexts

Alton Arnold — 2025-11-11

This article examines the transformation of Balkan vampire folklore, particularly revenant figures such as the “strigoi” and “vampire” within contemporary digital environments. Based on immersive fieldwork in Romania and Serbia, the study explores how myths that once served as communal tools for processing grief, fear, and survival are now mediated through memes, movie tropes, and algorithmic fragments. Drawing on Jungian archetypes, digital folklore theory, and public history frameworks, the research traces the tension between cultural preservation and commodification. While online platforms offer new avenues for storytelling, they risk flattening the emotional depth and communal voice of traditional myth. This study argues for a more intentional engagement with folklore in the digital age, one that honors ancestral narratives while recognizing their evolving role in shaping identity, memory, and intergenerational transmission.

Facets of narrative perspective in Ioana Parvulescu's novel Viata incepe vineri

Lidia Bratu (Iacob) — 2025-11-11

Studies on narrative perspective, published over time by linguists who have enunciated various theories of narrative typology – even if the terminology is quite eclectic – represent the foundation for a pertinent linguistic analysis of literary narrative text. Based on theoretical notions about narrative perspective and analyzing texts from Ioana Pârvulescu's novel Viaţa începe vineri [Life Begins on Friday], this paper aims to demonstrate that the technique of narrative perspective, which multiplies and becomes ambiguous, is an essential means of lending authenticity to the narrative, thus contributing to the construction of a complex narrative text.

(Re)Examination of The American Dream in selected short stories from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Short Story Collection The Thing Around Your Neck

Ismet Dilaver — 2025-11-11

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009) explores a tapestry of themes, while the American Dream (and/or the American Nightmare) from the perspective of (transnational) migrant Nigerian women stands out as a prominent one. This paper has a twofold aim: to explore the representation of the American Dream in a transnational context and text of three distinct short stories from this collection, namely “Imitation”, “The Thing Around Your Neck”, and “The Arrangers of Marriage”, and to observe the voice of (trans)migrant women in relation to the American Dream and American Nightmare.

From Hastings to Montesquieu: Franco-English cultural interferences

Virgil Borcan — 2025-11-11

The theme "From Hastings to Montesquieu: Franco-English cultural interferences" explores the cultural, political, and intellectual relations between France and England from the Battle of Hastings (1066) to the Enlightenment of Montesquieu (the 18th century). The direction of influence is biunivocal and manifests itself in numerous areas: the introduction of feudalism along the French model, the influence of the French language on medieval English, as well as architectural and legal transformations inspired by French traditions. I propose to trace the cultural exchanges from the Plantagenets to the Age of Enlightenment, including Eleanor of Aquitaine, Chretien de Troyes, Geoffrey Chaucer, Erasmus, Thomas More, Rabelais, Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Montesquieu. It will be noted that the two cultures form a complex system of communicating vessels.

Resistance et agentivite feminine dans l’Iran postrevolutionnaire: Persepolis (2007)

Beaton Galafa — 2025-11-11

This article examines how the autobiographical animated film “Persepolis” (2007), co-directed by Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, illustrates women's agency against oppression in contemporary Iran. The film is set both in the final days of the Shah's regime and in the years that follow Iran's Islamic Revolution, and highlights how female resistance helps shape the ongoing quest for freedom and justice. The analysis draws on feminist theory to demonstrate that Persepolis depicts the challenge to patriarchal norms and religious exploitation through collective resistance, the construction of a subversive identity, and a general struggle for freedom.

Narrating the mind: Psychological dimensions in postmodernism

Corina Foldi — 2025-11-11

Literature and psychology are deeply interconnected, both offering insights into human emotions, thoughts, and behaviours. The purpose of this article is to explore the intersection between psychology and postmodernism by analysing how postmodern narratives reflect and challenge traditional understandings of human nature, identity, and morality. The pursued premise is that postmodernism paved the way to an increased literary focus on psychological states such as trauma and mental disorders. Furthermore, this article seeks to highlight the way in which literature contributes to a deeper understanding of psychological and moral dilemmas in contemporary society and its increase in books on mental health in the era of post-postmodernism, where psychological introspection and authenticity have become dominant literary concerns.

Graphic (im)politeness. A pragma-linguistic study of the graphic elements in CMC

Raluca Oprescu (Anghel) — 2025-11-11

Starting from March 2020, pandemic-induced online communication necessitated new forms of expression. This paper analyses graphic elements – emoticons and emojis – accompanying verbal communication in computer-mediated communication (CMC). The absence of paraverbal/verbal or visual cues from face-to-face interaction prompted users to seek alternative expressive methods through nonverbal visual graphics. The corpus contains interactions in virtual communities (two Facebook groups and two forums) organized by gender according to platform themes (culinary/mountains). Pragmatically, the analysis reveals how users employ emojis to manage positive face and preserve negative face. Emojis can mitigate threatening speech acts but may also damage face when used inappropriately or offensively. Sociolinguistically, I examine emoji frequency and roles in gender-structured groups. In predominantly female groups, graphic elements appear more frequently with varied functions, while men prefer emotionally neutral messages, prioritizing sequence relevance.

Muted sequential art: A cross-cultural discourse

Cecilia Peleggi — 2025-11-11

When speaking about discourse, we tend to think about words. Here, I propose that a cross-cultural discourse doesn’t necessarily involve words, taking as an example Sequential Art. Comics in their modern sense are born as commercial objects and developed as a full narrative language and art, erasing borders to speak worldwide. How did they do it? They stopped talking. In this article, we will be analyzing the millennial history and future potential of wordless sequential art, seeing it as a powerful tool for inclusive and global communication. Our case study will be Shaun Tan’s "The Arrival", a sublime wordless comic book about migration, belonging, war, and hope. In depicting the travel and the struggles of a man leaving his country for a better future, the author creates a condition of equal foreignness through shapes, creatures, and language, ultimately creating through silence and unreadable words an universally understandable discourse.

Romanians’ lexical creation under COVID-19 times

Ana Ene — 2025-11-11

This paper investigates Romanian lexical innovations that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the sociolinguistic approach is tangentially present, the main objective is to describe the lexico-semantic mechanisms of the analysed language facts. The methodology used required the tools of semantic, lexical-paradigmatic, and stylistic analysis. The sources of the corpus are: online press, news on local TV channels, social networks, and some oral attestations. The results of the research are a contribution to the inventory of the pandemic lexicon in the current Romanian language and to the analysis and framing of these facts of language in the broader typology of lexical creations, regardless of whether they are ephemeral or whether some of them will find their permanent place in the language.

The Ukrainian dove. A metaphor of peace and war in political cartoons

Stanca Mada — 2025-11-11

This article investigates the evolving symbolism of the white dove—a universal emblem of peace—within contemporary political cartoons portraying Viktor Orban, Donald Trump, and Vladimir Putin in the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war. Drawing on visual rhetoric, semiotics, and theories of political discourse (Gombrich 1985, Burke 1966, Bourdieu 1991), the study explores how cartoonists deploy multimodal metaphors to expose the contradictions between declarations of peace and the exercise of authoritarian power. By tracing the metamorphosis of the dove motif from World War II propaganda to twenty-first-century satire, the analysis reveals its inversion into a symbol of hypocrisy, performative diplomacy, and ideological manipulation. The findings suggest that the degradation of the peace symbol reflects a broader moral and representational crisis in global politics, in which “peace” functions less as an ethical value than as a rhetorical commodity within populist and illiberal political narratives.