Arhiva OPREANU Lucia
Analele Ştiinţifice ale Universităţii “Ovidius” Constanţa nr. 29/ 2018 nr 2
OPREANU LUCIA - FACTION BEFORE BLOOD: UPROOTEDNESS AND REGROUNDING
IN DYSTOPIAN FICTION
(pag. 1-12)
: One of the most salient aspects of dystopian societies entails the manipulation of identity parameters by replacing the natural bonds of love and kinship with artificial ties and enforced allegiances to the establishment. This paper examines the strategies employed by various fictional regimes to indoctrinate, brainwash, condition or rewire their inhabitants before pushing (or, alternatively, easing) them into convenient boxes. The analysis will briefly identify the main such mechanisms outlined in texts ranging from the classics (Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Fahrenheit 451 and The Handmaid’s Tale) to perhaps less familiar examples such as E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” Ayn Rand’s Anthem, Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun and Foundation and Earth and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? before focusing on the perpetuation and reconfiguration of the same elements in their young adult narrative descendants: Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Lauren Oliver’s Delirium and Veronica Roth’s Divergent series. Attention will be paid to endeavours ranging from rewriting the past (of select individuals or entire societies) and inventing new social castes and professional categories to the vilification and suppression of emotional manifestations, as well as to the extent to which such texts have succeeded in highlighting existing problems, anticipating future developments and hopefully prompting their readers to reassess their perception of human interaction and identity formation
Analele Ştiinţifice ale Universităţii “Ovidius” Constanţa nr. 29/ 2018
OPREANU LUCIA - OTHERS, DOUBLES, MIRRORS, SELVES: SCAVENGED IDENTITIES AND
DOPPELGÄNGER SPACES IN NEIL GAIMAN’S
CORALINE, NEVERWHERE, AND THE GRAVEYARD BOOK
(pag. 40-51)
The paper aims to examine the journeys undertaken by the protagonists of Coraline, Neverwhere and The Graveyard Book in an attempt to highlight the extent to which Neil Gaiman’s prose not only reshapes the uncanny and challenges the conventions of fantasy and horror alike, but also adds new dimensions to the doppelgänger paradigm. Far from being confined to the familiar premise of the ghostly other, Gaiman’s doubles range from surrogate parents and monstrous necrophages to intertextual impostors and, more importantly, extend beyond the level of individual identity into the realm of architecture and landscape. By focusing on salient details of Coraline Jones’s encounter with the Other Mother, Richard Mayhew’s descent into London Below and Nobody Owens’ unconventional upbringing, the analysis aims to draw attention to the numerous ways in which the three texts engage in doppelgänger scenarios, not only featuring stolen identities and mirror worlds but also employing a wide variety of intertextual strategies to cannibalize, recycle and recreate familiar plots and tropes whilst steadfastly reinforcing the value of authenticity.
Analele Ştiinţifice ale Universităţii “Ovidius” Constanţa nr.22 / 2011 vol.1
OPREANU LUCIA - Miss Jones Meets Mr Darcy: Twentieth-Century Avatars of Jane Austen’s Protagonists in Bridget Jones’s Diary
(pag. 83-95)
Jane Austen’s work has inspired an impressive number of intertextual projects, few of which have generated as many controversies as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. The present paper will neither engage in the debates concerning Fielding’s allegiance to or betrayal of feminist ideals, nor discuss her novels’ questionable artistic merits, but will focus instead on the intricate layers of intertextuality at work in the creation of the two main protagonists. If as far as the two plots are concerned Fielding’s borrowings from Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion are relatively straightforward, the portraits of Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy are the result of quite complex fusions that go beyond Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy to comprise various other characters belonging to a wider array of texts. The analysis of the female protagonist will refer in turn to all Austen’s novels and include parallels with her numerous heroines, while the discussion of Fielding’s Mark Darcy will entail an incursion across media, including the nineteenth-century original as well as its most famous film version in an attempt to reveal the numerous levels of dialogic interaction established between the various texts.
Analele Ştiinţifice ale Universităţii “Ovidius” Constanţa nr.20 / 2009
OPREANU LUCIA - The Academic Double Agent : Criticism and Fiction in David Lodge’s EarlyNovels
(pag. 217-225)
Given David Lodge’s double identity as both a novelist and a university professor and writer of academic criticism, it comes as no surprise that one of the most frequently discussed aspects of his work consists precisely in his position on the threshold between theory and fiction. This paper aims to discuss Lodge’s increasing awareness of the crisis faced by contemporary criticism and the evolution of his own writing on the background of constant changes, as well as the way in which these concerns emerge from both his critical and fictional writing. Rather than pay closer attention to the novels belonging to the academic trilogy, universally regarded as his most representative texts in terms of the fusion of criticism and fiction, this paper will focus on the relationship between the theoretical ideas elaborated in his works of criticism and the often tentative allusions to the study of literature present in his early writings, highlighting the extent to which they anticipate the complex and often spectacular interaction between criticism and fiction that characterises his later novels.
Analele Ştiinţifice ale Universităţii “Ovidius” Constanţa nr.19 / 2008
OPREANU LUCIA - The British Museum is Falling Down: the Roots of David Lodge’s Academic Echo-Land
(pag. 77-83)
One of the most frequently discussed aspects of David Lodge’s fiction consists in the intertextual complexity of his novels and the ways in which echoes of countless texts are interwoven in the structure of new and original works. The present paper aims to analyse the various types of such echoes present in one of his first novels, The British Museum is Falling Down, identifying the ways in which it anticipates the increasingly elaborated intertextuality of later works and focusing on Adam Appleby’s anxieties of influence and troubled interactions with various literary texts in order to emphasise David Lodge’s eventual ability to eschew such worries and successfully use the works of the past for his own creative purposes.