MARTANOVSCHI LUDMILA - POLITICAL ENGAGEMENT
IN FOUR PLAYS BY LYNN NOTTAGE
(pag. 62-75)
Since the 1990s, Lynn Nottage’s drama has constantly spoken to audiences and critics alike, as her plays have depicted characters whose individual struggles question the status quo and inspire selfinterrogation for audiences in the United States of America and elsewhere. Working with an expanded definition of political engagement, the analysis here examines four plays in which Nottage turns a seamstress from the turn of the twentieth century into a protagonist capable of holding the audience’s attention for the entire length of a play (Intimate Apparel), reevaluates the communist overtones of the fight for racial justice at mid-century (Crumbs from the Table of Joy), exposes lingering colonialism and cultural appropriation (Mud, River, Stone), and attacks extreme violence enacted on women as part of the ravages of war (Ruined). In an interview, Nottage talks about the need to challenge oneself and she does live up to her goal of defying labels. As the current study shows, she cannot simply be celebrated as an African American woman playwright, but as an important voice in American drama today.
MARTANOVSCHI LUDMILA - ‘The I Embodied from Somebody Else’ – place and Memory in Ioan Flora’s Poetry
(pag. 67-72)
Ioan Flora (1950-2005) comes from the Serbian Banat, a region which shapes his poetry and makes him generate themes and techniques along and against the mainstream culture. This multicultural region becomes poetic matter in his texts as geographical references are recurrent throughout Flora’s work. Another interest here is to analyze the ways in which the poet, a major representative of the postmodern canon, dwells on memory and uses irony to rewrite landmarks in Romanian literature such as Bolintineanu in the bilingual volume Cincizeci de romane și alte utopii / Fifty Novels and Other Utopias (1996). The text quoted in the title of the present study, “Din altcineva se întrupează Eu” / “The I Embodied from Somebody Else”, included in the bilingual volume Medeea și mașinile ei de război / Medea and Her War Machines (2002), concentrates on a third person figure who seems to be intent on otherness while scrutinizing his own self. Identity is shaped from a permanent relation to previous authors who have to be integrated into a sense of one’s own place in the history of the Romanian literature.