Cultural Intertexts

*** *** — 2025-12-16

***

Editor’s Note

Michaela Praisler — 2025-12-16

***

Virtual Reality Environment: Between Artistic Display and 3D Formation

Sara A. ABDOH — 2025-12-16

Recently, virtual reality (VR) has been widely used in many different fields, including art, entertainment, education, and training. The rapid and massive development of digital technology has been directly reflected in the arts, as the art world today witnesses the rise of virtual, augmented, and mixed realities. And extended reality. Digital technology has enriched the creative atmosphere for artists and provided more tools that help them implement their innovative ideas, tools that are now in the hands of artists. Not only to simulate reality but to transcend it. Several artists have recently pushed the boundaries of three–dimensional digital art by incorporating virtual reality into their works. Thus, virtual reality has provided the audience with a unique experience, which is watching a work of art in an animated image, three dimensions, and has enabled the viewer to interact with it more deeply than a static work. The research will discuss the vital role that virtual reality plays in artistic display and 3D formation, and the extent of its effectiveness in achieving sustainability.

Frames of Isolation. A Reading Through HIV/AIDS Documentaries

Aneetta ALEXANDER — 2025-12-16

The question is: how can a documentary create social impact on its audience and, in turn, on society? Film critics and social scientists have considered this question since the inception of documentary filmmaking. Moreover, in the context of disseminating knowledge about infectious diseases, particularly during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, documentaries played a significant role in educating the public about the disease. Following the epidemic, documentaries were used to understand the disease and to witness the lives of people living with the virus. This article further extends the discourse of documentary studies by critically analysing two specific HIV/AIDS documentaries, 5B (2018) and Desert Migration (2015). This analysis provides insight into how the frames of the moving image capture the isolated spaces occupied by people with HIV/AIDS. For this study, Edward Branigan’s concept of frames is adopted to explore the essence of isolation. This is achieved by examining frames captured by the filmmakers through the camera lens, with a focus on the immediate surroundings of the person being interviewed. The article refers to these frames as “Frames of Isolation,” as the images reflect the spatial and emotional isolation associated with the virus.

Myth and Memory at Sea: Feminist Mythmaking and Oceanic Space in Contemporary Fiction

Nicolae BOBARU — 2025-12-16

This article examines feminist rewritings of maritime mythology and oceanic identities in three contemporary novels that reconstruct the sea as an archive of feminine memory, ecological interdependence, and mythopoetic resistance. Moving away from canonical maritime literature dominated by masculine narratives of conquest and heroism, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (1993), Lisa See’s The Island of Sea Women (2019), and Witi Ihimaera’s The Whale Rider (1987) centre female experiences shaped profoundly by water, cultural continuity, trauma, and regeneration. Each novel positions oceanic spaces as sites of narrative transformation, employing
distinctive feminist strategies of mythmaking. Proulx’s portrayal of the Newfoundland coast constructs a psychic and material shoreline where women’s embodied experiences catalyse personal healing and subtle agency. See’s exploration of Korea’s haenyeo divers reclaims female labour and communal memory as potent forms of resistance against patriarchal and colonial erasure. Ihimaera reconfigures Māori cosmological narratives through a young girl whose spiritual and ecological inheritance disrupts established patriarchal traditions, redefining her community’s mythic and cultural relationship with the ocean.
Drawing on feminist theories such as Luce Irigaray’s sexual difference, Hélène Cixous’s écriture féminine, and Judith Butler’s gender performativity, the study situates female embodiment as integral to narrative and symbolic reconstruction. Theoretical insights from Stacy Alaimo’s material ecocriticism and Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic subjectivity further frame the sea as a dynamic, relational, post-anthropocentric space. Ultimately, these narratives enact a feminist poetics that reterritorialises maritime myths, articulating oceanic spaces as arenas of ecological and cultural renewal, embodied knowledge, and intergenerational continuity.

Reading the Film: Filmic Narrative in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama

Nela HACHLEROVÁ — 2025-12-16

Drawing on intermedial theory, this article examines how elements traditionally associated with film are adapted in Bret Easton Ellis’s Glamorama, a novel that offers a vivid portrayal of celebrity culture. Ellis uses filmic narrative techniques to mirror the highly visual medium of film with the visual–centric nature of the celebrity world depicted in the novel. Furthermore, he creates a hybrid narrative form that juxtaposes the realist conventions of film with Victor Ward’s fragmented, hyper–visual, and often hallucinatory narration. Ellis uses filmic techniques not to ground the narrative, but to heighten its paranoia and instability, highlighting the performative and constructed nature of reality within a celebrity culture dominated by surfaces, spectacle, and image. While the theoretical framework will provide a foundation for analysing the novel’s interplay between filmic and literary forms, this article will demonstrate which filmic narrative strategies are employed and what they aim to achieve by presenting specific examples from Glamorama. These strategies include, among others, an establishing shot to situate scenes within a broader visual context, a montage, mirrored by quick, successive
descriptions or by events edited together to condense time, space, and information, and a soundtrack, adding an auditory dimension to the predominantly visual narrative.

Horses of Healing and Hope in Heartstone

Kylo–Patrick HART — 2025-12-16

This article analyses the forms and functions of horses in director Guðmundur Arnar Guðmundsson’s 2016 Icelandic drama film Heartstone, which explores the summertime coming–of–age experiences of two male teenagers and best friends, Christian and Thor, as they gradually come to terms with both their burgeoning sexuality and true depths of their feelings for one another. Because daily life in their small, isolated fishing village lacks any semblance of privacy or secrecy, Christian — as he continues to acknowledge that he is gay and falling in love with Thor — increasingly seeks out moments of healing and hope, both individually and with his best friend, among the horses at an adult friend’s farm, far from the prying eyes of others. The limits of the horses’ ability to provide solace to Christian, however, are deleteriously tested after it becomes evident that other young people in town have become aware of his sexual orientation. In contrast to other films that feature horses as primary or supporting characters, this article instead focuses on the symbolic and storytelling significance of noteworthy representations of horses in their natural environments, as they demonstrate their natural behaviours. In doing so, it illustrates how these animals provide a greatly expanded understanding of the range of emotions this central teen character is experiencing — as well as the various kinds of comfort they can offer humans — as the plot moves forward. Christian finds himself contemplating suicide as a potential alternative means of escape from his repressive daily circumstances.

Colonial Identity in School Textbooks in the British West Indies. Some Preliminary Remarks on Edward W. Daniel’s West Indian Histories

Antony HOYTE–WEST — 2025-12-16

Dispersed across the vast Caribbean Sea, for much of the twentieth century, the wider British West Indies consisted of eight colonies: the islands of The Bahamas, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, the Windward Islands, and the Leeward Islands, as well as the mainland possessions of British Guiana and British Honduras. With markedly different ethnic, sociocultural, and religious compositions, each colony was shaped by a panoply of economic, social, and geographical factors, including the lasting imprint of the slave trade and, at different points in history, the desire of various European powers to dominate and control the territories. Given that education is a key vehicle for promoting British colonial identity and cohesion in these diverse lands far from the ‘mother country’, this paper aims to explore how this identity is depicted in a well–known series of colonial–era school textbooks. First published in 1936 and designed for pupils in the British West Indies, Edward W. Daniels’s three–volume series of West Indian Histories was commonplace in the late colonial and early independence periods. Accordingly, utilising a postcolonial perspective and applying a case study approach, this preliminary contribution aims to examine how dominant narratives were presented through the analysis of two selected historical events (the Atlantic slave trade and the Second Maroon War), thus illustrating how history was portrayed and contextualised in the pages of these volumes.

Feminism and Gender Roles in Bridget Jones’s Diary

Raluca-Ştefania IACOB — 2025-12-16

A cornerstone of contemporary women–centric fiction, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary (1996) continues to charm readers by playfully exploring womanhood through an emotionally resonant character – a single cosmopolite woman juggling self-expectations and socially imposed standards. A prominent exponent of the much–discussed chick–lit genre, Fielding’s novel reveals its complexities by satirically addressing the feminist and gendered discourses. This paper investigates how feminist discourse is introduced and discussed in Bridget Jones’s Diary, how different female characters engage with it, and the critical interpretations that arise from their interactions with its agenda. After addressing the presence and impact of feminist discourse in Helen Fielding’s novel, the focus shifts to the depiction of gender roles, exploring how the novel negotiates or reinforces traditional gender(ed) expectations.

Cyborg Image in Modern Ukrainian Media Discourse: Strategies of Representation, Hybridisation and Mediatisation

Tetiana IVANIUKHA — 2025-12-16

This essay explores the hybrid portrayal of the cyborg figure in contemporary Ukrainian media. By 2014–15, defenders of Donetsk airport in eastern Ukraine were dubbed “cyborgs” due to their resilience, bravery, and near-invincibility. To honour their bravery, early photo exhibitions were organised, books chronicling their deeds were published, and later documentaries were produced. The mediatization of the cyborg image continues to develop. This concept has shifted from technological origins to a literary and cinematic symbol. In Ukrainian media discourse today, it represents the unwavering spirit of Ukrainian soldiers and the nation.
The research aims to uncover the hybrid structure and the strategies involved in the representation and mediatization of the cyborg image across various Ukrainian media spheres. The article analyses the emergence and development of the hero–defender motif within the context of the Russian–Ukrainian war. Multiple media forms depict heroes: films, news reports, government websites, comics, social advertising, and more. The warrior image is merged with references to a Cossack (a Ukrainian national hero), a modern brave soldier, the national poet Taras Shevchenko, a cyborg, among others. It is demonstrated that through strategies of militarisation, hybridisation, and emotional framing, the cyborg figure has become a core element of the sociocultural landscape. The selected photographs and media portrayals illustrate the comprehensive concept of the Ukrainian warrior–cyborg and its depiction in contemporary Ukrainian media.

Liminal Crises: Gendered Space, Culture, and Colonial Dystopia in Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950)

Angeline M. MADONGONDA — 2025-12-16

Cultural intertextuality is often viewed from the perspective of the oppressed, rather than the other way round. This is evident in the analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Grass is Singing (1950). Interpretations of the text have rarely considered space. Therefore, this article investigates the intersections of gendered, racialised, and colonial spaces in Southern Rhodesia.
Drawing from Lessing’s own experiences as a white settler in colonial Africa, we critique the oppressive structures of colonialism while examining the gendered dynamics of space as they affect the subaltern, particularly women. Lessing’s portrayal of Rhodesia as a melting pot of tensions reveals the contradictions of cultural intertextuality. Through textual analysis, the article highlights the challenges faced by Western feminist readings. It suggests that women’s crises stem from spatial and cultural displacement rather than mere patriarchal oppression. We argue that the interpretation of The Grass is Singing aligns more closely with African cultural perspectives, emphasising intercultural influences of survival and communal resilience in gender struggles. Analysing the novel through a geocritical lens shows how space is created, contested, and re-territorialised under colonialism. The Rhodesian landscape, marked by racial and gendered divisions, becomes a microcosm of broader imperial anxieties.

Philosophy and the Fabrication of Truth: Nietzsche, Foucault, Plato, and Baudrillard in the Metaphysical Constructs of Select Cults

Josephine MERCY — 2025-12-16

Examining cults from metaphysics to epistemology, this study also analyses the construction and dissemination of truth from a cultic belief–system perspective. Cults generally profess to know the ultimate truth–whether metaphysical or esoteric–and, hence, they often take themselves to be the only bearers of knowledge and the true nature of reality. Drawing on postmodern and existentialist theories, this research examines the tension between subjective truth and objective reality, thereby critiquing the creation of cults as their own metaphysical
systems and knowledge frameworks. Through a study of cults such as The Branch Davidians (David Koresh), The Rajneesh Movement, and Heaven’s Gate, this study will examine how these groups present their worldviews as higher or ultimate truths, using philosophy to support their doctrines. The paper is strongly informed by Michel Foucault’s concept of epistemic power: it examines how specific structures control knowledge, how knowledge is constructed, and how it is distributed within society to exert control over cult followers by producing an exclusive truth. In addition, the study shall include hyperreality theory by Jean Baudrillard, which postulates that cults manufacture an illusory picture of reality for their adherents. This paper shall, by studying and commenting on the productive clashes between these cults’ manufactured truths and the search for truth in larger philosophical traditions, such as Plato’s Cave Allegory and Nietzsche’s critique of absolute truths, explore how these cults pose questions to traditional epistemological discussions of knowledge and truth now. Ultimately, cults are the subjects of sociological critique, but cults can also be understood as philosophical examples that challenge metaphysical and epistemological views about truth.

Rehearsing the Storm: Shakespeare’s Text, Taymor’s Tech, and Greenaway’s Ink

Lidia Mihaela NECULA — 2025-12-16

This article traces my engagement with Peter Greenaway’s Prospero’s Books (1991) and Julie Taymor’s The Tempest (2010) through the twin prisms of Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation and Jean Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum. Both filmmakers, I argue, turn Shakespeare’s play into an intermedial palimpsest – less an act of replication than a gesture of creative re-inscription. In Hutcheon’s sense, adaptation becomes a living dialogue between past and present, between the ink of the page and the light of the screen. Meanwhile, Baudrillard’s vision of simulation helps reveal Prospero and Prospera as shimmering doubles – hyperreal figures adrift in a culture where copies forget their originals. Greenaway’s baroque excess unfolds like a library in flames, while Taymor’s digital tempest breathes with the pulse of rebirth and illusion. Ultimately, these films remind one that The Tempest endures not as a monument, but as weather–restless, recurring, and perpetually rewriting itself.

The Nouveau Roman and Cinema:

Višnja PENTIĆ — 2025-12-16

This paper reexamines the potential of the film medium to depict what cannot be seen or
represented by established visual and narrative conventions by analysing the relationship
between the French Nouveau Roman and the emergence of innovative cinematic strategies in
French cinema during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It argues that both collective and
individual trauma serve as sites from which the world can be reimagined and reconstructed
according to new aesthetic and epistemological rules. The Nouveau Roman is marked by a
symptomatic interrogation of realistic – or illusionistic – conventions, which it redefines
through denarrativization, dedramatization, and depsychologization. The paper contends that
members of the informal group of Left Bank writers and filmmakers, including Nouveau Roman
authors, developed some of the most radical formal solutions for representing postwar reality—
one shaped by the traumatic legacy of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Their works depart
from conventional realism and engage reflexively with the act of representation itself, revealing
its fundamentally illusionistic nature. Special attention is given to the first two feature films by
Alain Resnais: Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras, and
Last Year at Marienbad (1961), written by Alain Robbe–Grillet – both key figures of the
Nouveau Roman. These films reflect the mid–twentieth–century intellectual shift in the
humanities and sciences, which increasingly viewed reality as a subjective construct. Through
their formal experimentation, they systematically deconstruct the codes of realism in
representing the present and the past, as well as internal and external experiences of reality.

Brand Communication as Intertextual and Intermedial Myth: A Cultural Semiotic Reading for Audiovisual Campaigns

Manuel PINTO GRUNFELD — 2025-12-16

In a context of pervasive connectivity and multimedia environments, brand communication increasingly relies on discursive forms that transcend literal description to produce cultural meanings. These representational structures combine image and text across diverse formats and media, strategically engaging audiences and reconfiguring real referents into widely circulating symbolic narratives. This article advances conceptual foundations for a cultural–semiotic reading of brand communication, conceived as an intertextual and intermedial myth. The focus is on audiovisual and digital campaigns that adapt and appropriate authentic attributes, benefits, and spaces, transforming them into narratives of identity, belonging, and consumption. For exemplification, three main areas are considered: products such as food, clothing, or automobiles; services such as mobile telephony, entertainment venues, or urban transportation; and places such as tourist countries, heritage regions, or developed cities. Recent Portuguese campaigns illustrate these dynamics, demonstrating how cultural references are reworked into intertextual and intermedial myths within the online world. Without
constituting an in–depth case study or a closed methodology, the article proposes an exploratory reading framework that can be applied to different communicational fields and sociocultural contexts. Ultimately, reflecting on brands as cultural semiotic myths clarifies their role in shaping collective imaginaries, generating symbolic value, and constructing shared social realities in the digital age.

Our Daily War as a Window to the World: Shaping International Perception of Ukraine

Nataliia POTAPENKO — 2025-12-16

This paper presents research on Andrey Kurkov’s sequel to the diary series “Our Daily War” as a unique literary document that records not only the chronicle of war events in Ukraine but also the author’s deeply personal experiences and observations of life in the country during the war. This article analyses how the author’s view, through the prism of everyday situations and reflections, reveals the multifaceted nature of Ukrainian culture and its defining role in shaping international perceptions of Ukraine.
The study shows that “Our Daily War” goes beyond the traditional military narrative, focusing on the resilience of Ukrainian identity, manifested in the preservation and respect for traditions and a persistent desire for an ordinary life despite constant threats. Analysing Kurkov’s diary entries, the article reveals how these cultural aspects become a powerful tool for providing the European community with a completely new perception of the country, reflecting the social and political changes. It should also be noted that “Our Daily War” is regarded as an important means of communicating with the world. It has been observed that Kurkov’s diary transmits to the international community both the facts of the war and the rich culture of the Ukrainian people, their values and aspirations. This helps dismantle simplistic, stereotypical ideas about Ukraine, fostering a deeper, more objective understanding of it as a distinctive nation with its own history and culture.

Kafka’s A Crossbreed: A Postmodern Cultural Critique of Pet Keeping

Mira REYES — 2025-12-16

This work endeavours an elliptical reading of Franz Kafka’s A Crossbreed, to critique the postmodern culture that subtends pet keeping, subsequently unpacking Kafka’s contribution to animal ethics. The research question is: What unjust structures underpin the postmodern cultural practices of pet–keeping implied in the story? This critique argues that Kafka’s story intends to advance an animal ethics. This is primarily supported by the author’s reputation in biographical accounts of his life as being sensitive to the miserable plight of animals. This question will be addressed in three parts. The first discusses the aesthetic category of ‘cute’ from Lorenz’s idea
of Kindchenschema, identifying it in the crossbreed’s physiology and behaviours. It then exposes the grim background of the cultural fetish of ‘cute’ that arises in societies within the grip of political regimentation, which gave rise to pet keeping as a therapy. It also motivated the selection and rejection of pets on the basis of mere physical appearance. The second delves into the tactile phenomenology and psychology of ‘petting,’ revealing the ambivalence about the ethical issue of care in exchange for anthropogenically initiated animal domestication. The third focuses on the haunting question of the end–of–life disposal of the crossbreed, which is somewhat linked to cognitive dissonance over the issue of meat and the moral status of the pet animal.

White Girls, Eating Disorders and Tumblr: Laurie Halse Anderson’s Wintergirls Meets Audre Lorde and Edwidge Danticat

Stella SAPPINGTON — 2025-12-16

A site of increasing inspection, criticism, and attention, young adult literature has the power to shape eras of adolescent life. This paper centres Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Wintergirls (2009) as a case study for representations of disordered eating in literature aimed at young cis–women from the white, Western world. Specifically, I deconstruct the poetics of food and eating as consumed by the young readers of Wintergirls, alongside analyses of images from the oft–forgotten era of “pro–ana” Tumblr communities. By putting Anderson’s poetics in conversation with, for example, the haptic, sensory language of consumption in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, and Valerie Loichot’s analysis of Caribbean writer and poet Edwidge
Danticat, I aim to explore not only the deep relationship between language and eating, but also the connections between eating and pleasure, and between food and diaspora. To examine the phenomenon of American YA literature’s preoccupation with adolescent disordered eating and the suffering body, I employ Sabrina Strings’ study, Fearing the Black Body: A History of Fatphobia. The Western literary canon neither centres on the role of pleasure in eating nor acknowledges the role that food can play in repairing the harms of diaspora. In an effort to provide a transversal analysis of the adolescent disordered eater from the Western world, the pan–Africanist Black American author, and both visual and historical research on American attitudes toward the body, I argue that Loichot’s analysis of Danticat’s oeuvre holds true regarding food as a language, social binder, and symbolic tool for community–building-an ethic greatly lacking in contemporary American society.

Whiteness as a Fractured Construction: Race, Class, and the Internal Frontiers of White Identity in the United States

Florian Andrei VLAD — 2025-12-16

This article examines the evolving constructions of whiteness in the United States by bringing together two often-separated strands of critical inquiry: whiteness studies proper (with its emphasis on white racial identity and systemic privilege) and the more recent field of “white trash” studies (which reveals the internal class hierarchies and boundary work within whiteness itself). Drawing on scholarship from Peter Kolchin, Toni Morrison, Steve Martinot, Veronica Watson, Matt Wray, Nancy Isenberg, and others, it argues that whiteness has never been a monolithic or stable identity. Instead, it has continually been defined both against the African-American Other and through the exclusionary stigmatization of poor, rural, and working-class whites. The article traces these dynamics from the antebellum period to the present, showing how the erasure of white ethnic particularity, the instrumentalization of poor whites as a buffer class, and the persistent interdependence of white and black identity constructions continue to shape American racial and class formations. Furthermore, it incorporates recent developments in whiteness studies and critical race theory, highlighting ongoing debates around “whitened fascisms”, the “whiteness pandemic”, and the mobilization of white identities in contemporary politics.

The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers: Allusions and British Interwar Audiences

Marie VOŽDOVÁ — 2025-12-16

Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace’s Documents in the Case (1930), an epistolary novel published during the Golden Age of British crime fiction (1920s–1930s), represents an ambitious project that attempts not only to entertain readers with a murder story but also to capture the contemporary sociocultural background of its publication. The novel is notable for its frequent allusions to works published and staged in the 1920s, making it an authentic portrayal of contemporary opinions on literature. A significant part of the analysis is the consideration of best–selling novels that show the reading preferences of the majority. The paper aims to explore the novel through the lens of intertextuality. A special focus is given to the character of Margaret, who identifies with the bestsellers and shapes her life in accordance with these works. As will be demonstrated in works such as If Winter Comes and the Sacred Flame, the consumption of such pieces alters Margaret’s worldview, perception of herself and her approach to morality, leading her to the wrong solution to her marital problems. The use of literary allusions in the crime novel thus reflects the audience’s attitudes towards the interwar period in Britain.

Iulia Veronica COCU, Isabela Merilă. A Student’s Guidebook to Textual Detective Work. București: ProUniversitaria, 2025.

Ioana MOHOR-IVAN — 2025-12-16

Recognising that the gap between theoretical knowledge and practical analytical work can be difficult for students to bridge, Iulia V. Cocu and Isabela Merilă (2024) have designed a guidebook that resembles the detective-in-training's clue-finding, mystery-solving journey. The tasks are created on a gradually increasing scale of complexity and activate knowledge acquired by students over the three years of an undergraduate program in English.

Alex Ciorogar, Ascensiunea autorului în epoca globalizării digitale [The Rise of the Author in the Age of Digital Globalisation]. Cluj–Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2025. 395 pp.

Oana Celia GHEORGHIU — 2025-12-16

Alex Ciorogar’s Ascensiunea autorului în epoca globalizării digitale offers a comprehensive reassessment of authorship theory. The volume, a revised doctoral dissertation, positions itself at the intersection of literary theory, cultural studies, sociology of art, and posthumanist philosophy, aiming to rethink the figure of the author beyond the familiar binary of “death” and “return”. The result is an erudite investigation that proposes a new conceptual framework, an “ecology of authorship”, capable of accommodating the multiplicity and heterogeneity of contemporary creative practices.