Papers by Cristina Cheveresan
British and American Studies, 2008
British and American Studies, May 30, 2023
Transnational social review, May 4, 2015
it along towards a politics of solidarity, social justice, and transformative social change. As t... more it along towards a politics of solidarity, social justice, and transformative social change. As the authors in this chapter have acknowledged, “frameworks for human rights – for women, for migrants, and for all persons – are not self-enforcing” and “historical social relations between nation-states, economic and political agendas, and rigidity in administration make this collaboration ineffective” (p. 382). Therefore, the conversation needs to shift away from a rights discourse within systems of domination and oppression to envision more socially just alternatives.
Linguaculture, Dec 10, 2018
The article focuses on Romanian-American Ramona Ausubel's 2012 No One Is Here Except All of Us. W... more The article focuses on Romanian-American Ramona Ausubel's 2012 No One Is Here Except All of Us. Written in English by a second-generation immigrant to the United States, the World War II story unfolds dramatically as a fable that relies upon community, memory and imagination. It revolves around the protagonists' shared belief that by erasing and reinventing their past, by starting their lives anew via reshuffled creation myths, their small assembly of forgotten individuals might survive in an enclave of its own, fantastic. This makes Ausubel's unique approach to the Holocaust and its pogroms part of a compelling series of trauma narratives, as a biographically-informed fictional account of factual circumstances. By emphasizing the crucial, cathartic dimension of storytelling and employing it textually and meta-textually, the book blurs the boundaries between genres. The author's mediated insight into community stereotyping, persecution, solidarity and, ultimately, migration, and its skillful integration into a postmodern (counter) fairytale, will be scrutinized as valuable and effective contemporary awareness-raising tools.
British and American Studies, May 30, 2022
The paper revisits Philip Roth's 1988 The Facts, an unconventional attempt at public self-explora... more The paper revisits Philip Roth's 1988 The Facts, an unconventional attempt at public self-exploration / representation. It focuses on the intriguing mixture of inventive confession, nostalgic (re-/de-) construction and critical fictionalization that derives from the writer's belief that "in autobiography you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning".
Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai, Mar 29, 2019
British and American Studies, 2007
British and American Studies, 2010
Philip Roth Studies, 2020
Arcadia, 2013
Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels t... more Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels that focus on issues of (ethnic) identity construction and performativity in metropolitan New York, at the end of the twentieth century. Belonging to two distinct immigrant communities (Chinese and Korean), their protagonists are Americans in the making, whose personal evolutions and involutions are shaped by the social and cultural dilemmas of transition and (mal)adjustment. The present article scrutinizes the fictional interplay of public and private (hi)stories and discourses, and analyzes the ways in which stereotypical definitions and representations of otherness, investigations and exploitations of memory, and manipulations of individual and communal belief are called upon to illustrate the intricate mechanisms of contemporary United States. Citizenship, ethnicity, education, language, power relations, discrimination, consumerism and, last but not least, politics, are important elem...
1. IntroductionIn his 1997 Neither Black, Nor White, Yet Both. Thematic Explorations of Interraci... more 1. IntroductionIn his 1997 Neither Black, Nor White, Yet Both. Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature, among other equally fascinating topics - like the Curse of Ham, the calculus of color, the "tragic mulatto" -, Wemer Sollors dedicates an entire chapter to the study of passing as a social phenomenon, which greatly influenced the literary production of a particular American epoch and milieu. In order to emphasize its importance, he starts by clarifying the term and its special use in the context of official and unofficial discourses as to the ongoing plight of the "near-white" population of the United States (but not necessarily restricted to this territory).While Sollors does acknowledge the initial - rather general and neutral - meaning of the term ([it] "may refer to the crossing of any line that divides social groups"), he refers the reader to an entire line of seminal works on the AfricanAmerican experience, which employ the term in a nar...
ARCADIA (de Gruyter), Jun 2013
Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels t... more Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels that focus on issues of (ethnic) identity construction and performativity in metropolitan New York, at the end of the twentieth century. Belonging to two distinct immigrant communities (Chinese and Korean), their protagonists are Americans in the making, whose personal evolutions and involutions are shaped by the social and cultural dilemmas of transition and (mal)adjustment. The present article scrutinizes the fictional interplay of public and private (hi)stories and discourses, and analyzes the ways in which stereotypical definitions and representations of otherness, investigations and exploitations of memory, and manipulations of individual and communal belief are called upon to illustrate the intricate mechanisms of contemporary United States. Citizenship, ethnicity, education, language, power relations, discrimination, consumerism and, last but not least, politics, are important elements that this comparative approach questions. By studying the two novels together, the article argues that the two writers capture different, yet equally relevant hypostases of the (Asian) immigrant’s self-questioning and self-inscription into the American nation, whose updated versions of the “Dream” have been dominated by the material rather than the spiritual concerns.
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Papers by Cristina Cheveresan