« La parole de l’eau » dans la poésie de Benjamin Fondane

Author(s): Annafrancesca Naccarato / Language(s): French Issue: 66/2017

This essay focuses on the study of water metaphors in the poem Le Mal des fantômes by Benjamin Fondane, which corresponds to the second section of the homonymous collection, published for the first time in 1980. The aquatic imagery underlies the passages illustrating most clearly the pain of these phantoms, which the writer evokes through the use of a continuously reworked writing. The present analysis shows how the analogy contributes in particular to the release of this « courant » which, according to Fondane, represents the final goal of the creative process as the realisation of a different « aesthetic » but also and above all as the reproduction of a « movement of the soul ».

«Театральный вкус» современной эпохи (театр андерграунд в России и Румынии)

Author(s): Mihaela Moraru / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2018

In modern dramas, plots are usually simplified, reduced to describing one or more situations. Heroes are not endowed with proper characters, but rather with functions, and thus the dialogue is a combination of events and heroes’ actions, in the sense that the abundance of lines literally replaces their need to do something or to go somewhere. The fact that a person should be genuinely good, as one of Chekhov's protagonists liked to say, is not at all true in new dramas, that tend more and more to depict precisely the opposite: the violence, cruelty, loneliness, sometimes even turning into some sort of “tragic rejection”. In such dramas, the world is artfully stylized. It is not reality itself that is displayed, but some postmodern super-reality ready to erase all previously known features. And in fact, this is only destruction hidden under the mask of building.

ÉCRIRE POUR GUÉRIR : LA PORTE INTERDITE DE GABRIEL LIICEANU . UNE LECTURE PRAGMATIQUE

Author(s): Simina Mastacan / Language(s): French Issue: 20/2016

La porte interdite de Gabriel Liiceanu met en mouvement un mécanisme moderne d’énonciation. L’écriture devient une écriture « sui generis », un remède censé recomposer une identité brisée.

Început de secol XX. Contacte ale poeţilor români cu poezia lui Walt Whitman

Author(s): Gabriela HECTOR / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2018

In the first decades of the 20th Century, in the Romanian literary environment were searched formulas that outlined the ‟poetry of new poetry”. Very different, their framing in the single paradigm was not possible, unity being realized, but by diversity. Both Tudor Arghezi and Lucian Blaga, the poets reffered to this article, found such formulas and, moreover, they gave their poetry a poetic art. In Arghezi, being a Bucharest origin with Gorj roots, dominates the infuence of Ch. Baudelaire, while Blaga, being Transylvanian, tends to German expressionism. The influences of the great literatures have found in the aspiration of the two Romanians to originality, a favorable environment, and, ennobled by their personal filters, have acquired the glory of authenticity. There is a tangent in their creation, and this is the American W. Whitman. His controversial poetry awakened interest in the workers movements that have grown since the late nineteenth Century and stood among the preferences of the symbolist Stephen Petică. And the question arises: ‟What artistic spark did Walt Whitman kindle to the two great Romanian poets Tudor Arghezi and Lucian Blaga?”. A question to which this article is intended to be an answer.

Începuturi publicistice eminesciene

Author(s): Narcisa Dinu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 4/2015

The present article tries to emphasize the role of Mihai Eminescu, the publisher. Even if he is more well‑known as poet or novelist, Mihai Eminescu also excelled in the field of journalism. Serban Cioculescu speaks of a parallel vocation and combat incompatibility between literature and journalism for the poet. The idea of the unity of Eminescu’s entire work is revealed by Perpessicius, the critic and the editor of his manuscripts. A proof of intellectual maturation of the poet, his spirit critical development is the articles of his early years: „A critical writing”, „Our repertoire theater”, „Let us make a congress”, „In Union is strength”, „Balance”, in which the young journalist assiduously supported the cause of nationalism, opposed the establishment of the national theater and defamation of his Professor, Aron Pumnul, and the abuse of the Romanian nation after the Austro‑Hungarian agreement concluded in 1867.

ÎNCERCĂRILE DE RECUPERARE A MODERNITĂȚII ȘI INTEGRITĂȚII CREATOARE ÎN LITERATURA ȘI TEATRUL ROMÂNESC DE LA MIJLOCUL ANILOR '60 AI SECOLULUI XX

Author(s): Veronica Turcuş / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2020

The insertion of the Soviet models in Romanian culture after the Second World War and the imposition of socialist realism as a unique method of creation at the end of 1947 were outclassed in the mid-1960s, when an attempt was made by artists and writers to revalue modernity and creative integrity. At the literary-artistic level there is an attempt to partially recover the old cultural elite (which had survived and been marginalized in the first two decades of communism), reconnecting to the European cultural trend, the links being forcibly and unhappily broken in the postwar years. The phenomenon is noticeable at the level of Romanian journalism, literary creation (where poetry successfully overcomes the phase of militant poem, agitprop poetry, prose is emancipated from the formula of „critical realism”, class pamphlet, canon based on antinomy, drama from the bodice of proletarian works, which thematically proposed the rural world marked by the new breath of agrarian reform and collectivization or the proletarian universe, necessarily transposing everyday realities and literary criticism from the constraints of socialist realism, which promoted the absolute truth of the ideological message, imposing itself now the principle of the variety of the literary meaning, the reinterpretations of the classics exceeding the deterministic-historical criterion and the analysis of the ideology of the work), theatrical movement (which knows the phenomenon of reteatralization and internationalization), highlighting the attempts to connect the Romanian cultural process to the western European evolutions.

Înfrângerea şi/sau cucerirea corpului de neatins din basmul fantastic românesc

Author(s): Costel Cioancă / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 17/2014

Place and significance in the traditional mentality led body, especially in some epic productions at a certain determinism of being. Quality double body (biological and spiritual), allowed to imagine a traditional mentality an epic scheme which they can pose to the daily, the need for something else, non-ephemeral, the transreality. Where is the subject brought me into the discussion in this study, in which the hero always tries to close, purpose erotic and marital, a superior being to his human nature, profane, ephemeral. Coveted, sought so feminine beings produce in psychology hero, by their nature substance, a certain re-structuring, re-psychological and behavioral modeling which eventually will give meaning and motivation epic. But how and why it will get here? What are the traditional epic scenarios ahead for final success? Where are located, epistemic speaking, such situations? Phenomenologically, all these efforts the hero had only a social basis or reflects a (diluted) scheme mythical thinking, absolutely necessary for self-fulfillment of the individual person who is the hero?

Însemnările de pe cărţile bisericeşti – valori culturale, literare şi istorice

Author(s): Duşiţa Ristin / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 2/2011

This article is meant to discuss the cultural, literary and historical values of the recorded notes that could be found on the church books from Banat area in the medieval and modern age. These recorded notes are relevant in describing the identity of Romanian and Serbia communities, pointing out their religious and everyday life. They extended and took the shape of the “local chronicles and histories” in the second part of the XIXth century.

Înstrăinare și refuz. Evadări din provincia Hertei Müller

Author(s): Gabriela Glăvan / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2020

I intend to explore the specific ways in which fiction projects and contextualizes the complex issue of the homeland in some of Herta Müller best known works. I also aim to integrate this issue in an analytical process that correlates memory, trauma and nostalgia, understood as fundamental identity components. Herta Müller relies in her fictions, to a rather significant extent, on biographical elements, and she often revisit in their writing, in various forms and contexts, her Romanian homeland, the Banat.

Întâlniri cu Blaga

Author(s): Onufrie Vinteler / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 4/2012

I first heard about Blaga a long time ago. In the fall of 1957 I had the opportunity to meet him at the place he was working in that period. His first question was: “How am I seen in the Soviet Union?”

Ştefan Aug. Doinaş – între tradiţie şi modernitate Reflecţii la centenarul scriitorului

Author(s): Alexandra-Teodora Mândra / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 06/2022

On the 100th anniversary of Ştefan Augustin Doinaş’s birth (1922 - 2002), a prestigious name in Romanian literature, it is necessary to bring him up again in order to articulate some less accentuated dimensions, yet fundamental for the heirs of his work. His exegesis is a reflection on modern poetic language. The critic manages to capture the oscillation of the poetic verb between modality and substance, between form and content. Through the interpretive corridor opened by Doinaş in the volume modern poetry topicalizes the limits of language, in dialogue with a logocentric cultural tradition, for which the act of utterance coincides with the act of creation. The study emphasizes the importance of the stylistic approach of the poetic text, defined as a language that asserts itself and not as an explosion of feelings conveyed through the transparent environment of words. Consequently, Doinaş’s critical revisitations of Romanian poetry reflect his conception of modern poetry as a form of resemanticization of tradition.

Ştefan Aug. Doinaş. Despre real ca distanţă a imaginii

Author(s): Dorin Ştefănescu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 16/2014

The study discusses Ştefan Aug. Doinaş’s reflections – disseminated in his theoretical works – about the connections between the real and the poetic image. The real of the image appears as an atypical world, a field of possibilities which are not unreal in relation with the already given reality. That what appears as an image in the world of the poem is put in the light of an apriorical meaning, so that the poem lightens the possibility of an interior distance in the real itself, making the unapparent visible. The paradox is that the image cannot be real than paying the price of its liberation from the real. The new reality it assumes passes through the distance of its appearance, in the very substance where the hidden one is opened.

Ştefan Baciu, Archipelagic Poet from Romania

Author(s): Yoshiro Sakamoto / Language(s): English Issue: 30/2016

Ştefan Baciu, a Romanian exile poet born in Braşov who escaped the oppression of the communist regime after WWII in his country, vastly wandered across the oceans, travelling through many cities such as Berne, Rio de Janeiro or Seattle, and reaching the Hawaiian Sandwich Archipelago. During his odyssey, he created his own cosmological geography through the poetic fusion of his fragmental memories of places and people. It was also generated by the melancholic nostalgia caused by the loss of his “home.” This article attempts to carve out the force of Baciu’s “poetry” through the “archipelagic vision” advocated by Ryuta Imafuku. He promotes an alternative view which dissolves the modern dominant and normative world-perception into the fluid and contingent world of the ocean. Imafuku was also inspired by Baciu’s poetic life to weave this vision. Their views of the world resonate with each other across the ocean.

Ștefan Baghiu, Ovio Olaru, Andrei Terian (eds.), Beyond the Iron Curtain. Revisiting the Literary System of Communist Romania, Peter Lang, 2022

Author(s): Maria Chiorean / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Review of: Ștefan Baghiu, Ovio Olaru, Andrei Terian (eds.), Beyond the Iron Curtain. Revisiting the Literary System of Communist Romania, Peter Lang, 2022, ISBN: 978-3-631- 87107-2, 273 p.

WOMEN AT A TIME OF HARDSHIP: TWO ANTI-HEROINES IN ROMANIAN CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Author(s): Anca Tomoioagă / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The present study is intended to feature two representative characters in Ioana Nicolaie’s recent novels Cartea Reghinei (2019) and Tot înainte (2021). Firstly the article describes in short the communist politics regarding Romanian women including some references to the traditional understanding of the gender roles, the patriarchalist mentality of the time in the rural areas, the feminine ideal proclaimed by communists, the pronatalist policy and the abusive measures. Second part refers to Reghina, the mother of twelve children and analyses how the writer manages to transmit through her character the stoicism as a way to deal with communist society. The third part analyses Arsenia, a character whose destiny is crushed by the communist system. Through these two characters, Ioana Nicolaie brought into the spotlight the destinies of the blind, of the mute and of the deaf women – the anti-heroines of the communist epoch. Finally, they have got a voice in the literary discourse.

World-Literature and the Bessarabian Literary System. Combined and Uneven Development in The Semiperiphery

Author(s): Mihnea Bâlici / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

This essay proposes a theory of interperipheral relations in Eastern Europe, starting from the cases of Romania and the Republic of Moldova. The aim is to affirm a more materialistic interpretation of world-literature studies, starting from the thesis of separation and inequality between the two Romanian-language literary systems. Thus, the essay starts from a critique of several directions of world literature and postcolonialism, returning to the method of world-systems analysis (as conceived by Immanuel Wallerstein and his followers). Another method is that of the Warwick Research Collective, which conceives global literature as defined by the Marxist theory of combined and uneven development. Romania, being in a geopolitical position that is closer to the neoliberal ideologies of “civilizational progress” and “artistic modernity”, represents Moldova's access point to the transnational market. The cases exemplified in the second part of the essay highlight the way in which a series of Bessarabian authors use and recontextualize some narrative forms specific to post-communist Romanian literature. The authors brought into discussion are the Fracturists Dumitru Crudu and Alexandru Vakulovski, the journalist Vasile Ernu, the anthropologist Dinu Guțu, the Bessarabian novelists Iulian Ciocan and Liliana Corobca, and the émigré writer Tatiana Țîbuleac.

WRITING AND READING ADVENTURE PROPOSED BY THE NOVEL TELL ME WHO I AM (BY JULIA NAVARRO)

Author(s): Larisa Ileana Casangiu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 13/2018

Although on the cover of the Romanian edition of the novel is mentioned "Intrigue, espionage, love and betrayal! A story that lasts from republican Spain to the fall of the Berlin Wall! ", and all of these are found in the first level of reading the work, we believe that from a post-modernist point of view, the book "Tell Me Who I Am" illustrates both writing adventure and reading adventure. That is why we try to analyze this novel through the prism of several symbols that allow plural interpretation. In the same time, the novel reconstructs more than five decades and a half of Europe's history, starting with the political turmoil in republican Spain and until the fall of the Berlin Wall, presented from the perspective of the first decade of the twenty-first century, numerous elements giving authenticity to the writing. We also identify some aspects that place the Spanish novel in intertextuality with the Romanian novels Bietul Ioanide [Poor Ioanide] and Scrinul negru [The Black Chest of Drawers], written by G. Călinescu.

Writing Back: Identity and Representation in The Journal of Dracula

Author(s): Anca-Luminita Iancu / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2013

The Journal of Dracula (2004) by Marin Mincu is Vlad Dracula’s fictional journal, in which historical Vlad Ţepeş, the ruler of the Romanian province of Wallachia in the fifteenth century, reacts to the historical events that occurred during a period of one and a half years (February 1463 to August 1464) when he was imprisoned by the Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus in the castle of Visegrád (Hungary). Vlad Dracula’s quest for identity is depicted in a multilayered narrative that unfolds in contact zones between the East and the West, and his journal entries illustrate the tensions between his private story and the public history, which has cast him into the role of a bloodthirsty ruler because of his impaling practices. Thus, this essay examines the complexity of Vlad Dracula’s quest to claim his voice and identity by writing back to his contemporary enemies.

Xavier Montoliu Pauli, Ilinca Matei (ed.), Viața printre vieți / La vida entre vides. Festschrift für Jana Balacciu Matei, București, Editura Omonia, 2017

Author(s): Oana-Dana Balaș / Language(s): Catalan,Romanian,Spanish Issue: 10/2017

Xavier Montoliu Pauli, Ioana Alexandrescu, (eds.), El prodigi de les lletres: aproximació a l’obra de Mircea Cărtărescu, Cerdanyola del Vallès: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2021, 160 p.

Author(s): Víctor Peña Irles / Language(s): Catalan Issue: 14/2021

Xavier Montoliu Pauli, Ioana Alexandrescu, (eds.), The Prodigy of Letters: an Approach to the Works of Mircea Cărtărescu, Cerdanyola del Vallès: Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2021, 160 p.