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        <title>East-West Cultural Passage Feed</title>
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        <copyright>All rights reserved 2026, Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu</copyright>
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            <title><![CDATA[Tales of Merit, Inequality and Hubris. Grigore Alexandrescu as a Critic of Meritocracy and the Enlightening Potential of the Fable in Populist Times]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0006</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The present article opens with a brief remark on populism. And yet it is neither about populism nor about political events. It is simply about an important challenge that arises from populism – the need to bridge the gap between winners and losers in a meritocratic society. By using Michael Sandel’s critique of meritocratic pride (hubris) to interpret two representative fables of nineteenth-century Romanian poet Grigore Alexandrescu (“The Ox and the Calf” and “The Dog and the Puppy”), I mainly seek to draw attention to Alexandrescu as a critic of meritocracy and to reassert the actuality of the fable, i.e. its utility in cultivating a strong sense of community from an early age, by drawing on German Enlightenment thinkers such as Johann Christoph Gottsched and Christian Wolff.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[Achilles in Ireland: The Translation of Epic to Lyric Narrative in Michael Longley’s “Ceasefire”]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0008</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This essay discusses Michael Longley’s sonnet “Ceasefire” and compares the political context of its composition to its classically informed content. Both Longley’s expertise as a translator of ancient Greco-Roman texts and his lived experience as a Northern Irish poet during the Troubles informed “Ceasefire” – a poem which became so much more than Longley’s unique take on Homeric translation and proved to be a highly significant and politically charged call to action for all who live through political unrest. Masquerading as a piece of lyric poetry, “Ceasefire” spoke to the pain of the past, addressed the continuing tension between English and Irish identities, and encouraged the possibility of peace, all without breaking free of the moving Homeric narrative that Longley sought to retell. The resulting poem is both deeply personal and universally applicable. This essay outlines the political and social context for “Ceasefire,” discusses Longley’s relationship to Classical texts and Troubles poetry, analyzes “Ceasefire” as a new translation of Homer, and discusses the reception and enduring legacy of “Ceasefire” in Ireland. Through “Ceasefire,” Longley masterfully combined an epic tale with conventions of the lyric genre and created a powerful political and social commentary for his own time that has maintained its relevance for subsequent geopolitical conflicts.]]></description>
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            <title><![CDATA[The Theme of Climate Change in What We Can Know]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0004</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Ian McEwan’s novel What We Can Know, which is set in the dystopian future, portrays a British professor who is searching for the lost poem amidst the havoc caused by climate change. In What We Can Know, the theme of climate change dominates the novel’s background and liaises several crucial themes, such as the quest for the lost poem, love, and denialism. Whereas the theme of climate change is instrumental in What We Can Know, its significance remains unexplored. Seeking to expand academic research on the theme of climate change in the novel, the article presents a qualitative ecolinguistic study that focuses on (i) how climate change is framed, (ii) what types of metaphors are associated with climate change, and (iii) what aspects of climate change are foregrounded and, conversely, backgrounded in the text. The results of the investigation demonstrate that the theme of climate change in What We Can Know is (i) framed through a scientific prism, (ii) represented as the metaphor of Derangement, and (iii) portrayed as climate change denialism. These findings are illustrated and discussed in the article.]]></description>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[The Convergence as a Transgressive Space in Don DeLillo’s Zero K]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0005</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Don DeLillo’s Zero K envisions a dystopian world where late capitalism extends its reach to the most fundamental aspects of existence – commercializing life, death, and the very spaces people inhabit. This essay analyzes the novel through Henri Lefebvre’s spatial triad of perceived, conceived, and lived space, exploring how the cryopreservation facility known as the Convergence operates both materially and symbolically as a site for the production and reproduction of capitalist ideology. Employing a multidisciplinary approach that integrates spatial theory with postmodern and posthumanist literary criticism, the study reveals how the Convergence embodies the paradoxes of technological capitalism. While promising transcendence over mortality, the facility ultimately reinforces existing social hierarchies and deepens alienation. The disruption of conventional narratives about life and death within the Convergence signals fractured identities and a diminished sense of authentic experience. Ultimately, Zero K uses the Convergence as a powerful metaphor to expose the pervasive influence of capitalist structures on human subjectivity and the commodification of life in contemporary society.]]></description>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Words and Swords to Fight Conventions: Genre and Gender Hybridity in Kingston’s The Woman Warrior]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0002</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[In The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of Girlhood Among Ghosts, the Chinese-American author Maxine Hong Kingston departs from the monolithic literary and cultural discourse to embrace diversity, discarding homogeneity and order as prescribed by patriarchal cultures. The author cuts across canonical literature by presenting a hybrid genre that seeks to disturb the normative genre and gender ideology, just as Fa Mu Lan, the legendary warrior, transcends traditions by encompassing the two genders to neutralize them. Kingston interrogates the cultural constructs of femininity and masculinity through the creation of the counter-stereotypical figure of the woman warrior, who proved to be braver than males in her masculinized martial performance. This mythical transvestite is used in the text to divulge gender illusion, yet while Fa Mu Lan fought with her sword for justice and equality, Kingston fights with the power of the word for the disruption of all binary discourses. The essay concentrates on the second section of the book, “White Tigers,” to examine how the text simultaneously rises above genderism and genericity through its hybridization of both textual forms and corporeal identities.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Editorial: In Defense of Mediation]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0001</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Reviews: Carr, Nicole. Black Feminist Mothering in 21st Century Literature: I Am Not Your Mammy. Routledge, 2025. 176 pages. E-book. ISBN: 9781032719993.]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0010</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Masks and Marriage: Gender Roles in Much Ado About Nothing]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0007</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Much Ado About Nothing, a mature romantic comedy by William Shakespeare, focuses on couples. The presented couples – Beatrice and Benedick, as well as Hero and Claudio – portray gender roles, since the main plotline depends on the false accusation of Hero’s chastity. The play introduces Hero as the obedient daughter who meets the expectations of the patriarchal society as an exemplary female. Quite contrary to the portrayal of Hero, Beatrice poses as the shrewd female that needs to be tamed. Such stereotypical roles attributed to Hero and Beatrice are strengthened through the use of masks. While the resort to masks appears in the play as an element of comedy, it gains further significance in the discussion of gender roles. Therefore, this study intends to associate the function of masks with the representation of gender roles in Much Ado About Nothing. Furthermore, the specific choice of the veil in Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation, instead of the more traditional use of the mask, complicates Hero’s and Beatrice’s gender roles. The use of the veil supports the constructed identities of both female characters based on the expectations of their patriarchal society. Hence, the taming process of not only Beatrice but also Hero will be discussed in line with stereotypical gender roles in a patriarchal society.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[AI in Poetry Translation. Ciaran Carson’s “Dresden.” A Case Study]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0009</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The article sets out to explore the potential applications of AI in literary translation, poetry in particular. It intends to analyze the feedback provided by scholars who have already made use of AI in literary translation, though in an experimental way. It will also include a case study that will foreground Ciaran Carson’s poem “Dresden,” and will offer a platform for the critical analysis of the translation of the poem with the help of AI. The weak points of the AI translation will be singled out in conjunction with the ethical implications of using AI in translation, among which copyright and ownership, but also issues related to how texts are collected, stored, and reused.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Reconsidering A Pale View of Hills in Cinematic and Historical Perspective]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2026-0003</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This essay reconsiders Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills by situating the novel within the cinematic and historical contexts of postwar Japan, with particular attention to its representation of women. The recent film adaptation released in 2025, the eightieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, offers a timely framework for re-examining the novel’s engagement with postwar memory and gender. Although Ishiguro left Japan at the age of five and has lived abroad ever since, he has admitted in numerous interviews that his first two novels, both set in postwar Japan, are shaped by his memory, imagination, and speculation. He has also noted that he frequently watched postwar Japanese films, making it reasonable to assume that such media serve as important points of reference. With this context in mind, this essay first outlines the historical conditions of postwar Japan and then examines selected Japanese films that reflect the social realities of the period. Through these films, it identifies key themes, including the women who were recruited into sexual labor through deceptive government advertisements, the downward social mobility of women who lost family members, particularly fathers and brothers, the ways in which many were forced to abandon the aspirations they held in their youth, and the discrimination directed at these women, the poor, and hibakusha, those who had been exposed to radiation. Building on these insights, this essay contributes to a deeper understanding of A Pale View of Hills.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Editorial: Ecocriticism: Old and New Challenges]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0011</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Reviving a Canon in New Nature Writing: The Cases For and Against Edward Thomas’ ‘Country Essay’]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0012</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article seeks to explore a tension within New Nature Writing, a contemporary British literary genre which has brought editorial success to literary non-fiction. On one side, a traditionalist group of authors who willfully enter in conversation with a previous, rediscovered canon of nature writing is identified; on the other, an opposing group which believes that new, unprecedented circumstances, aptly described by the term Anthropocene, require new sensibilities. Central to this debate, which echoes the friction between the first and the second wave of ecocriticism, is the legacy of Edward Thomas, a poet and essayist who has strongly influenced the work of Robert MacFarlane, and shaped the Romantic Ecology approach to non-fiction writing (the country essay, travel writing). The article will explore the influence of Thomas’ essay writing and understanding of nature on MacFarlane’s successful trilogy Landscape and the Human Heart, affiliated here with Jonathan Bate’s idea of Romantic Ecology, while also analyzing Kathleen Jamie’s widely shared response to his work succinctly titled “A Lone Enraptured Male,” which stands closer to what has been recently called ‘the Self-Conscious Anthropocene.’ Edward Thomas’ prose, in works such as The Heart of England (1906), serves as the backdrop to the negotiations of these new aesthetics and sensibilities within New Nature Writing.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Lumbering Woman: Madge Macbeth’s The Patterson Limit]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0013</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Through the lens of Madge Macbeth’s The Patterson Limit (1923), this article examines women’s entry into the forestry industry. Exploring the feminist, eco-feminine, and ecofeminist positions articulated or anticipated by Macbeth’s fiction, this article will explore feminism and ecology in conversation with The Patterson Limit. Further, this article will show a number of points of intersection between the ecofeminist representations anticipated by Macbeth and the feminist theories articulated in the 1920s, before women’s enfranchisement, by writers such as Nellie McClung. The article will conclude by looking at how women, forestry, and forestry-related industries are figured in the 21st-century works of non-fiction by Elizabeth May and Charlotte Gill, thus demonstrating the ways in which Madge Macbeth’s work anticipates the later evolution of women writers’ understanding of their connection to nature.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
        </item>
        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[An Ecocritical Re-reading of Rousseau’s Julie or the New Heloise]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0014</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Julie or the New Heloise extends far beyond picturesque scenery. It anticipates central questions of contemporary ecocriticism. Through a close reading of gardens, mountain landscapes, and lake shores, this study shows that Rousseau treats nature as an active agent that shapes human identity and moral development. The novel’s first half features scenes of intimate reverie that demonstrate what Zev Trachtenberg calls the “environmentalism of the man,” as nature elicits affect, stimulates self-understanding, and contributes to lovers’ psychological development through influence. The second half, focusing on the Clarens estate and the Elysium Garden, illustrates the “environmentalism of the citizen” (Trachtenberg “Rousseau and Environmentalism”). Rousseau presents an ecological micro-republic where sustainable agriculture, closed-loop exchanges, vegetarian consumption, and cooperative labor cultivate civic virtue and social justice. Rousseau dramatizes a reciprocally beneficial human-nature relationship that echoes debates about environmental justice in the Anthropocene. By situating Julie in early modern ecological thought, the study positions Rousseau as a pioneering voice in the environmental humanities and a precursor to ecocriticism’s emphasis on non-human agency.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[From Frontier Violence to Post-Apocalyptic Ash: Ecological Violence and Environmental Ethics in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and The Road]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0015</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article proposes a comparative analysis of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) and The Road (2006), two novels that trace the trajectory of American ecological violence from its nineteenth-century origins to its post-apocalyptic culmination. Drawing on ecocritical theory, environmental philosophy, and Anthropocene discourse, the article argues that McCarthy moves from an anthropocentric vision of human dominion over nature in Blood Meridian, to a biocentric perspective in The Road, where nature is depicted as a neutral, totally indifferent, post-human force after total ecospheric collapse. Through close readings of landscape, character, and imagery, the article shows how nineteenth-century “mindless” frontier violence against nature and humanity in Blood Meridian functions as a historical precondition for the ash-covered, post-apocalyptic wasteland of The Road. McCarthy’s desert and post-apocalyptic settings in the two novels are active agents that expose the limits of human “suzerainty” in the world and the ethical consequences of ecological destruction. Ultimately, the article situates McCarthy’s fiction within contemporary debates on the Anthropocene, presenting his work as a prophetic meditation on coexistence/interconnectedness, extinction, survival, and death in a damaged world.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[“A Vessel Larger Than Reality to Hold”: Water Crisis and Indian Speculative Climate Fiction]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0017</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[The Anthropocene, today, has gained significant momentum in ongoing environmental, socio-political, and economic discourses. It has revitalised ecocriticism and environmental writing, and has, thus, shaped the social imagination. The effects of this can be seen increasingly in the production and prominence of climate fiction worldwide in recent years. In India, the genre of climate fiction is also growing rapidly. This article critically engages with the emerging genre of speculative climate fiction in India. It discusses three Indian works of speculative climate fiction: Prayaag Akbar’s Leila (2017), Varun Thomas Mathew’s The Black Dwarves of the Good Little Bay (2019), and Veena Nagpal’s Radius 200 (2014). It investigates how the texts weave their narratives around the issue of water crisis and their visions of dystopian and post-apocalyptic worlds through climate catastrophe. While situating the speculative fiction from India as part of the larger canon of climate fiction, this article also categorises its distinctive features. It does so by entering in conversation with the ongoing scholarly debate on climate fiction’s most effective mode of representation – the speculative vs realism debate. In conclusion, the article argues that Indian speculative climate fiction achieves greater effectiveness in dealing with the climate crisis by representing the ‘futuristic climate-changed worlds’ not as a rupture from the present but as a continuation of the ongoing crisis on the ground.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Grim Ambiguity Coupled with Sanguinity: Submergence of Anthropocentrism in Dystopian Climate Fiction]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0018</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This study seeks to carry out a comparative examination of The Drowned World (1962) by J. G. Ballard and New York 2140 (2017) by K. S. Robinson, two examples of dystopian climate fiction, from an ecocritical standpoint. Both the former, written in the 20th century, and the latter, written in the 21st century, speculate on the 22nd century from parallel angles and get involved in unparalleled dialogues with the Anthropocene, which makes it possible to delve into both relatively old and fairly new modes of understanding of the Anthropocene via an ecocritical lens. Despite their parallel points of departures from the severity of ongoing alterations in most spheres of the planet on unprecedented levels, coupled with their parallel subjects of the extirpation of human supremacy in an inundated London and a half-inundated New York, respectively, the comparative eco-spotlight is aimed at the ways in which they submerge the deep-rooted anthropocentrism and bring to light their unparalleled speculations on what emerges when it is submerged. Such a deep dive into the close-knit dialogues of both with the complexities of the Anthropocene is oriented towards unearthing the tangled eco-nets springing from their similarly-formed cores but weaving disparately-based eco-futures.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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        <item>
            <title><![CDATA[Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Class in Monica Krawczyk’s Short Stories]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0021</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[According to various researchers, Monica Krawczyk (1887-1954) was the first Polish-American writer whose stories about Polish-American immigrants were published in well-known American magazines in the 1930s and 1940s, and later, in 1950, in a collection entitled If the Branch Blossoms and Other Stories. Most of the short stories revolve around the daily life of Polish-American immigrants in Minnesota. This essay proposes a close reading of two short stories in the collection, “After His Own” and “Wedding in the City,” with a view to illustrating how gender, ethnicity, and social class intersect in the ethnic and American spaces navigated by Krawczyk’s characters, and the ways in which they impact the female protagonists’ identities as women, wives, and mothers.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[“Melting Pot” or “Salad Bowl”: Lupine Metaphors and the Myth of American Assimilation in Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0020</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article examines Karen Russell’s “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” as a vivid illustration of the struggles minority groups face during assimilation into mainstream American culture. Through lupine metaphors, Russell critiques the myth of the American Dream, which promises equality and opportunity but often marginalizes and erases minority identities. The story’s depiction of the wolf girls – raised in a culturally distinct lupine environment and later compelled by nuns to embrace human civilization – parallels the experiences of minorities pressured to conform to dominant norms. Their diverging fates – some fully assimilating and losing their original identity, while others resist and cling to their heritage – highlight the complexities of cultural dislocation. This tension underscores the alienation faced by individuals caught between their original community and the dominant culture. Situating “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” within broader discussions of assimilation and the abjection of the “other,” this article argues that Russell dismantles the illusion of harmonious multiculturalism, revealing how forced assimilation leads to alienation rather than true inclusion.]]></description>
            <category>ARTICLE</category>
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            <title><![CDATA[From Meme to Coin to Government Body: DOGE, a Case of Cruel Irony in Contemporary Politics]]></title>
            <link>https://reference-global.com/article/10.2478/ewcp-2025-0022</link>
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            <pubDate>Tue, 23 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT</pubDate>
            <description><![CDATA[This article traces the cultural biography of the Doge meme – from a trivial Internet meme to a meme coin and the acronym of an unofficial U.S. government body, the Department of Government Efficiency – to show how irony emerges and operates in contemporary politics. It argues that DOGE is cruelly ironic in the way its trajectory exemplifies the co-optation of collectively produced vernacular signifiers by financial and political discourses, revealing the deep entanglement of capital and political power in platform capitalism. At the same time, the article reads the DOGE trajectory as representative of a top-down memeification of politics and governance, in which memes and vernacular aesthetics migrate into institutional identity and into the relation between institutions and citizens to obscure damaging politics. In the case of DOGE, an ironic dissonance emerges between the playful memetic signifiers used in the department’s identity design and the gravity of its austerity-driven agenda. This dissonance is cruel in its effects: it generates ambiguity, dilutes institutional accountability, and creates an illusion of populist transparency while the department’s opaque operations have harmful material consequences for American bureaucracy and democracy. This cruel irony further interpellates citizens to take part in memetic humor and unseriousness while hiding that they are the victims of this humor: its delegitimizing effects on governance ultimately harm supporters and critics alike.]]></description>
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