9
Introduction
At the end of times,
At the prolongation of the shade of shades,
When death no longer is discussed
Without the pondering on life,
Will there be one to call himself a poet?
  Uroš Mozetič, “As I Was Saying My Introit Prayers”
This issue of ELOPE is dedicated to its co-founder and long-time co-editor Prof. Uroš Mozetič, 
who passed away suddenly earlier this year. The immediate feelings of distress and devastation 
over the untimely loss of a distinguished colleague, beloved professor, and dear friend, and the 
profound grief and sadness that followed the initial shock, have been, over the passing months, 
increasingly acquiring a patina of appreciation and gratitude. Appreciation of his work, his 
guidance, his sparkling intelligence and humour, and the gratitude for having had the privilege 
of knowing him, working with him and being his friends. Remembering Uroš’s passing is not 
so much about pain anymore as about missing him as we recall countless events that nourish 
our appreciation and gratitude, memories which today, more often than not, make us smile. 
Dedicating this issue of ELOPE to him is a way of saying thank you and an opportunity to 
acknowledge the versatility of the personal and professional interests which endowed him with 
an erudite knowledge of literature in all of its manifestations, linguistic sensibility, rhetorical 
prowess, poetic sensitivity, and a profound curiosity about what comprises the timeless ethical 
and moral core of Western religiosity and metaphysics. Although Uroš passed away when the 
present volume of ELOPE was already in preparation, the broadness of his scope – ranging 
from writing poetry and criticism, translation, narratology and stylistics, English and American 
drama, to Joyce, Milton and biblical studies – allows us to remember him also through the few 
articles in this issue that were sent to us prior to his death. The majority, however, were inspired 
by the various memories the contributors have of Uroš – be it as his colleagues, admirers of his 
work, former students, or his friends.
The opening section of the Literature rubric, dedicated to Uroš’s poetry, was prepared by 
renowned Slovene translator Nada Grošelj because she was his colleague, admirer, student and 
friend. In other words, she was best qualified both to make a selection of poems representative 
of his poetic statement, and to translate those which Uroš had not translated himself. In the 
brief introduction to the poems, Grošelj provides an overview of Uroš’s poetic legacy, charts his 
main poetic influences, comments on the background of some of the more topical poems, and 
presents the recurrent thematic threads and concerns in his poetry. The selection of his poetry is 
followed by a detailed overview of his published works, prepared by Kristina Pegan-vičič.
The regular part of the Literature section begins with Tadej Braček’s investigation into the world 
of Gothic romances, specifically Ann Radcliffe’s first novel, The Castles of Athlin and Dumbayne. 
The focus of his article “Reaction to crisis in Gothic Romance: Radcliffe’s The Castles of Athlin 
Mojca Krevel
University of Ljubljana
Slovenia
2016, vol. 13 (2), 9-13(246)
revije.ff.uni-lj.si/elope
doi: 10.4312/elope.13.2.9-13
10 Mojca Krevel  Introduction
and Dunbayne” are the ways in which male and female characters in this novel react to crisis. His 
analysis shows that the differences in these reactions are not so much a matter of gender as they 
are about the benevolence and malevolence of the protagonists, even though in other respects the 
novel reinforces the conventions of the old, medieval order.
As a nod to Uroš’s interest in contemporary theatre, Urša Gavez’s article “The Reception of 
Harold Pinter’s Plays in Slovenia between 1999 and 2014” accomplishes the important task of 
filling the temporal gap in the research of Pinter’s reception in Slovenia between Darja Hribar’s 
overview, covering the period from 1967 to 1999, and the present. The results of Gavez’s analysis 
show that it had been an important decade and a half in which the number of premiers of Pinter 
plays in Slovenia more than doubled compared to their frequency in the preceding three decades. 
Also, the less-than-enthusiastic critical responses, largely paradigmatic of Pinter’s reception 
in Slovenia prior to the 2000s, had been increasingly replaced by a newly-found critical and 
scholarly interest in and appreciation of Pinter’s style, which had had a profoundly positive effect 
on the quality of translations of his plays.
David Hazemali and Tomaž Onič’s “The Proud Prime Evil of Hell: characterization of Satan as 
the capital vice of Pride in Milton’s Paradise Lost” calls to mind Uroš’s appreciation of Milton 
and his passionate lectures on that epic. Drawing on Robert charles Fox’s assertion that Milton 
used the seven capital vices as a structural device in Paradise Lost, Hazemali and Onič’s take on 
this classic focuses on the characterization of Satan as the embodiment of the capital vice of pride. 
The authors’ detailed analysis of Milton’s text from the perspective of the correlation between 
Lucifer and (Milton’s view on) pride convincingly supports Fox’s assertion. Pride is revealed 
as the prime motivational force behind the dark lord’s deeds, a vehicle for pursuing decidedly 
self-serving interests. This significantly relativizes the popular notion of the independent, free-
thinking and proud monarch of Hell – a hero, even. Since pride, Milton suggests, encompasses 
and employs all other vices, Satan’s role in the epic is that of the ultimate manifestation of evil 
– not only on the outside, but, perhaps even more disturbingly, within.
“The complex Nature of Power and Language: verbal Strategies in Martin crimp’s The City” 
by Dilek Inan and Ayşe Didem Yakut takes us again to the innovation and experimentalism of 
contemporary British drama. The authors focus on crimp’s use of language, specifically on the 
verbal strategies he employs to depict the ways in which power relations are established and 
maintained between and among his characters. Inan and Yakut’s analysis of the play reveals that 
even though elegantly concealed in eloquence, repetitions, interruptions, silences and pauses, 
denial, concealment, other enhancement, negations, formulations as well as topic-shifting and 
turn-taking are employed to exercise oppression, domination, disapproval, victimization and 
destruction. The authors argue that through the expert use of evasion, miscommunication and 
incomprehension in conveying inter-personal power-relations in his dramas, crimp incessantly 
directs our attention to the ominous core of banalities and politeness that constitute so much of 
our daily verbal encounters.
Though Uroš’s interests were varied indeed, poetry was his undisputed favourite. Not only had 
he been writing poems for as long as he could remember, he was also a respected translator who 
granted Slovenians superb renderings of such luminaries as Whitman, Auden, cummings, Tate 
and Muldoon. What his former students most often recall are his brilliant and inspiring poetry 
seminars. The last two articles in the Literature section would certainly attract his interest as they 
focus on topics that have hitherto received very little critical attention despite their importance 
for understanding contemporary American poetry. The first, Kristina Kočan Šalamon’s “Thematic 
11
Reading: Disorientation and Disillusionment in Post-9/11 Poetry,” analyses the ways in which 
American poets reacted to the 9/11 events. As opposed to the prevailing discourse in the media 
after 9/11, poetic responses to the events reveal the intimate and personal side of the crisis, 
and, more often than not, examine the matter of responsibility for what happened. By means 
of thematic analyses, Kočan Šalamon identifies the dominant thematic clusters with regard 
to which she then, through close reading of individual poems, charts the ways in which the 
established themes of disorientation, loss, and despair, as well as the issue of a changed world and 
disillusionment, are conveyed.
In “Personal Geographies: Poetic Lineage of American Poets Elizabeth coatsworth and Kate 
Barnes,” Ellen Taylor examines the production of American poets Elizabeth coatsworth and 
her daughter Kate Barnes from the perspective of their close relationship. Based on a thorough 
study of coatsworth’s poems, essays, and memoir, and Barnes’s poems, interviews, and epistolary 
archives (which Taylor was the first to be granted access to and which are presently no longer 
available to the general public), Taylor provides an exclusive insight into the dynamics of their 
relationship. Also, the article intricately records the impact that growing up in the immediate 
vicinity of her mother’s poetry and that which inspired it – poetic influences, travels, the 
relationship with writer-husband Henry Beston, and her role as a mother – had on Barnes’s own 
life and poetic work.
The Language section opens with Tina Balič’s investigation of the attitudes of users of English in 
EU institutions towards non-standard uses of English they encounter in their work. In “Attitudes 
towards Euro-English in a European Union Institution,” Balič presents the findings of a survey 
of how both native and non-native speakers of English perceive instances of deviations from 
Standard English which the author identified in a corpus-based analysis of EU texts. High 
acceptability rates of the non-standard uses both among the native and non-native speakers of 
English allow the author to conclude that Euro-English is perceived by its users as EU jargon, 
rather than a separate non-standard form of English for EU institutional settings.
An oblique personal wink at an old anecdote involving Uroš’s somewhat innovative approach 
to teaching the gerund is implicit in Gašper Ilc’s selection of the topic of his contribution titled 
“construction or constructing? Some Observations on English Deverbal and Gerundial Nouns.” 
The vantage point of Ilc’s analysis is traditional theoretical approaches to gerundial and deverbal 
nouns, which standardly analyse these two nominalisations in terms of the verb-to-noun cline (the 
s.c. gerundial cline). These approaches assume gerundial nouns to be more verbal since they give 
rise to the eventive interpretation and preserve the underlying syntactic properties of the verbal 
root. Deverbal nouns, on the other hand, are associated with the result-object interpretation, 
and the structure of the nominal phrase headed by a deverbal noun is less dependent on the 
underlying syntactic properties of the verbal root. By examining different properties of English 
gerundial and deverbal nouns, and by using examples for referential corpora, Ilc establishes that 
the boundaries between these two nominalisations are not so clear as suggested, since there is an 
apparent overlap between the two categories: they both allow event/result-object interpretation, 
and can but need not display the syntactic properties of the verbal root.
As an homage to Uroš’s studies of Joyce and specifically his analysis of the narrative perspective and 
focalisation in short story “Eveline” from Dubliners, Monika Kavalir investigates his suggestions 
and discoveries from a linguistic perspective. In “Paralysed: A Systemic Functional Analysis of 
James Joyce’s ‘Eveline’,” she uses Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics as a model for stylistic 
analysis in order to establish the linguistic means by which the heroine is rendered as a passive 
12 Mojca Krevel  Introduction
and paralysed character. Kavalir establishes that the short story predominantly uses material 
verbal processes. This is seemingly in opposition to predominant views in literary studies of 
Joyce, which generally explain the feeling of stasis in Dubliners through the prevalence of stative 
verbs. However, the potential for change, inherent in material verbal processes, is diminished by 
Joyce’s selection of aspect, tense and usuality, which assign Eveline the role of a passive receiver, 
i.e. senser, and not an active agent in her life. 
In “The Effects of verbal and Non-verbal Features on the Reception of DRTv commercials,” 
Smiljana Komar examines the efficiency of various strategies employed in Tv advertising to 
appeal to consumers’ emotions. The article presents the results of a survey of emotional responses 
to the Eggies DRTv short form spot in a sample of 96 viewers. Specifically, Komar’s research 
focused on the efficacy of frequent recurrence of identical lexical items, syntactic structures and 
the advertised product’s name in the commercial, the influence of highly marked audio-visual 
delivery on enhancing interest in the product, and the emotional impact of the speaker’s voice, 
speed and volume. Apparently, Eggies are not about to revolutionise the ways eggs are boiled and 
peeled in Slovenia, as most of the participants in the study felt that the overload of verbal and 
non-verbal information in the advertisement lessened its persuasiveness and hence attractiveness 
of the product, while highly marked prosodic delivery was generally perceived as either funny 
or annoying. 
Delving further into the issue of advertising, Agata Križan’s “The Language of Appraisal in 
British Advertisements: The construal of Attitudinal Judgement” is concerned with the ways 
in which manufacturers and advertisers essentially sell us our values and life-styles. By analysing 
200 randomly selected British print advertisements from British women’s magazines in terms 
of the occurrence and frequency of use of attitudinal judgement, Križan establishes that the 
categories of capability and propriety significantly prevail over other attitudinal categories. Her 
study shows that capability and propriety generally occur with a positive status, emphasising 
the manufacturers’ superior knowledge, skills, willingness to help, as well as their generosity, 
compassion, eco-awareness, etc., thus assuming the social role of a trustworthy and caring friend. 
On the rare occasions when consumers are targeted with negative capability and propriety, 
consumers’ lack of knowledge and information about the problem they may have is implied. The 
predominance of the categories of capability and propriety in advertising is revealed as strongly 
socially motivated and directed towards imposing values upon potential consumers and society, 
assigning them social roles in the advertising interaction – and everyday lives – in the process.
The only article in the Translation section focuses on the central dilemma practically all 
translators encounter in their work, i.e. whether (and when) to stay close to the source language, 
or adapt the translation to the circumstances of the target language. The dilemma is perhaps 
most pressing when the translators’ selection may affect major decisions regarding tangible issues 
of our daily existence, which is definitely the case in legal translation. In “Free vs. Faithful – 
Towards Identifying the Relationship between Academic and Professional criteria for Legal 
Translation,” Mette Hjort-Pedersen presents the attitudes of Danish legal professionals and legal 
translators towards the practices that result in a more or less close relationship between the source 
text and the translation, as well as their views on the translator’s power to decide on the nature 
and the mode of manifestation of this relationship. By analysing the responses of Danish lawyers 
and legal translators, Hjort-Pedersen established that lawyers tend to prefer direct translations 
of materials to be certified, used in a court case, etc. However, when translations are meant to 
be used as working papers, lawyers generally prefer indirect translation. Legal translators, on the 
13
other hand, tend to prefer translations related to the context in which the original documents 
were prepared, regardless of their usage in the target culture. The examination of responses of 
both groups to the translator’s power to decide upon the relationship between the source text 
and the translation showed that neither lawyers nor translators are comfortable with it. The 
results suggest that the translator’s power to decide on the extent of the preservation of the source 
material in the translation is more restricted in legal translation than in other types of translation. 
To conclude, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all who contributed to the completion 
of this issue of ELOPE, dedicated to the memory of Prof. Uroš Mozetič: the authors who chose 
our journal for dissemination of their research and who through the selection and diversity of 
their topics call to mind Uroš’s various interests; the reviewers who kindly accepted the extra 
work-load and responsibly assessed the manuscripts; and ELOPE technical editor Andrej Stopar, 
who not only oversaw the technical part of the realisation of this volume, but also helped me 
immensely with precious advice, suggestions and solutions regarding the content.