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My present study problematizes the postural variables in the writings of Gellu Naum, in an attempt to demonstrate that all his poetic texts are based on recursive enunciation schemata, rules of coding
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The anthropological approach to issues commonly discussed from a political and economic point of view offers an interesting insight into the latest Russian fantasy literature. This text introduces optics taken from the already classic in some circles works of David Graeber into the field of reflection on Russian contemporary prose. Beginning with Graeber’s concept of bullshit job, outlines an anthropological interpretation of the actions of Yevgeny Lukin’s hero of the novel Чушь собачья . Its point of focus is the problem of emotional exploitation at work, leading to psychological destruction, to the point where the outside of work self of the worker is reduced to an uncomfortable remnant, sacrifice of which no longer seems to be any serious loss and the highest sacrifice becomes welcomed as a kind of a relief.
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Tess Durbeyfield is the heroine of the novel. According to the concept of Greek Tragedy a hero or a heroine should be great figure by birth or achievement. But Hardy created his heroes and heroines from ordinary Wessex men and women. In tragic grandeur and sublimity she stands in front rank. The simplicity of her nature, the nobility of her soul, the capacity to suffer, the spirit of effacement, and her purity all make her one of the sublimest heroines of English Literature. Tess is the simple sincere and passionately faithful and as different as possible from those fickle and elusive young women was display, in some of his other tales affections as veering as weather-cocks. Her stoicism and her devotion to her husband win the admiration and sympathy of many generations of readers. She has dominated the novel not by the aggressiveness of her character but by her sweet and tender humility. The present paper is an attempt to explore the different shades of Tess’ vivacious character.
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A prisoner of his own phantasms of demiurgical power in the aesthetic realm, and not only, the total writer is the author of a kind of literature that no longer wants to be subdued, but aims to run parallel to or even become emancipated from the ideological discourse of power. Although duplicitous (and complicitous) with “what oppresses” him – if I were to sponge here a phrase from Groys’s ideologically suspicious interpretation, the total novelist from the period of socialist aestheticism cultivated a compensatory bovarism. Whether consciously or not, he rivalled the political decision- makers of the time and their ideological fiction. In relation to previous periods – of the Jdanovist doctrine and socialist realism– the literature of the 1970s fulfilled the authors’ phantasm of power. The nationalism and authoritarian centralism of political will were reflected in the centralism of the will to authorial power, a power that was all-encompassing, totalizing.
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Multiple works have been written on the topic of Saracen-Christian interaction in Medieval romances, while combining and commenting on the similarity between Said’s theory and the hostility between two ethnic groups. For a more expanded analysis and further research on this field, current article will explore friendly occasions, shared experiences, tolerant and accepting attitude while at the same time focusing on the hostile side of the relationship as well. Because both ways will be examined, the approach of this paper is seeking a broad framework within which the descriptions of Saracens/Christians, friendships and familial affiliations will be analyzed. Three Anglo-Norman romances have been selected for this purpose, namely Boeve de Haumtone, Gui de Warewic and Roman de Horn. This paper will particularly focus on Said’s Orientalism and subsequently combine his notion with the romances. However, rather than merely emphasizing the inimical tone, the aim is to communicate the fuzziness that seems to surround the romances by means of both positive and negative portrayals. The paper at hand will discuss examples from medieval texts that point to a Saracen-Christian interaction of a more complicated kind rather than entirely conflictual matters as has often been stated.
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The huge issue of identity representation in fiction seems to have gained ever more weight over the past decades by an unprecedented variety of problematics in the “ethnic writing” by authors from minority communities that have been marginalized before the favorable cultural shift occurred in the Canadian society of a recent past through more hospitable legislation. Such ethnic writers expand the social concept of identity more often than not by blending sexuality and race, nationality and ethnicity in their narrated experiences with the struggles for recognition and integration. Cultural division in such a society is the focus of this article, in conjunction with a Chinese family’s drama which particularly affects the child protagonist and her personal experiences during the process of acculturation in the novel Midnight at the Dragon Café by Judy Fong Bates.
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In this text, I interpret Karel Čapek’s novel War With the Newts (1936) as a sociological work and analyze the concept of the modern age that it presents. First, I show in what sense Čapek’s work was sociological. Following Theodor Adorno, I suggest that the difference between literature and sociology is not of a fundamental but of a historical and analytical nature, and that what defines sociology is not method, empiricism, or explicitly defined concepts, but the insightful notion of social totality. In Čapek, I analyze a totality that I find in his concept of the modern age. Such an analysis provides insight into the self-destructive power of modern society. I suggest that Čapek’s portrayal of modernity still applies today and that we can recognize the same patterns he presented in the world around us.
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The Zuckerman project is characterized by a variety of narration techniques. The first book of the project is a first-person narration. A different narration technique (third-person narration) is adopted with the second installment, i.e. Zuckerman Unbound (also maintained through The Anatomy Lesson). Then Roth switches back to first-person narration and the diary style in the “Prague Orgy” and introduces fractures specific to metafiction in The Counterlife. Next, with the American trilogy he draws heavily on the technique called paralepsis. Finally, with Exist Ghost he surprises again. Over the course of the Zuckerman project, Roth submits his authorial audience to a continuous puzzlement, disregarding expectations or better said mocking at their expectations and their urge for the logical linkage with what the previous autonomous books conveyed.
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The focus of this article is the correspondence between Nadezhda Mandelshtam and Lydia Ginzburg from 1959 to 1968. Nadiezhda Mandelshtam is the widow of the poet Osip Mandelshtam, a biographer and essayist. Lydia Ginzburg is a scholar specializing in literary studies, novelist, esseyist and biographer. This is the first time Ginzburg’s letters have been a subject to systematic analysis. This article is devoted to one of the multiple layers of meaning of their correspondence — a dispute about the nature of poetry and to approach to its study by these two great women, who possessed a powerful male intellect, literary gift and extraordinary experience.
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Adrian Păunescu is the initiator of an unprecedented cultural phenomenon in communist Romania, Cenaclul Flacăra, which, together with poetry, incorporates music and choreography into a show that synthesizes nationalist themes with those of Western pop culture. From the perspective of literary postures and the idea of the author as the sum of social representations and theatricalization of the self as theorized by Jérôme Meizoz, Nathalie Heinlich or Boris Groys, Adrian Păunescu assumes different “roles”; from that of poeta vates to that of court poet, from the entertainer to the educator of a new generation of young people, the bluejeans generation, from the propagandist to the liberator from the yoke of conventions. The present study reviews these roles by analyzing their significance in the context of the age, also called “the Golden Age” in termes of propaganda.
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The article aims to identify possible worlds and their mediators in their metaphorical, symbolic and archetypal properties in fairy tales and Afro-American rap lyrics. The rap lyrics semantic structure involves a great worlds variety. Some of them intersect with the fairy tale magic worlds. The world of death imagery indicated in the rap lyrics by demetaphorized compound imagery with a naturalistic-physiological component, is associated with the archetypally bound fairy tale “the other world”, denoted by fabulous toponyms and fairy topoi. The mediators of these worlds encompass some magical tools and super-abilities, designated by conceptual metaphors, metonymies and hyperbolized similes in the rap lyrics and by narrative means in fairy tales. The oneiric world is mediated by nominations of hallucinogens in the rap lyrics and sacred food and drinks in fairy tales. While the latter mediators add strength or serve as a means of correction of an evil character, based, respectively, on the narrative motifs of redemption and victory of good over evil, the rap oneiric mediators refer to fear and degradation, indicated by visual oneiric images. The mediators of world of inspiration, not appropriate to fairy-tales, use wings (ability to fly and counteract the gravity), designated by conceptual metaphors. The world of wonderful status transformation, inherent to the rap lyrics, is denoted by the symbols of material well-being, based on the archetypal narrative motifs of the hero transfiguration and reward.
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Redefining auctoriality involves both literary and extra-literary criteria. Relying mostly on Jérôme Meizoz’s concept of posture introduced in Postures littéraires. Mises en scène modernes de l’auteur, the purpose of this article is to investigate or to (re)evaluate the ways in which the writer imposes himself on the literary scene through self-figuration, involving, at the same time, the reception process. I analysed, for instance, the different representations of Alexandru Mușina, a writer from 80s generation, from the collective corpus, defined in the group formed at Monday Literary Circle, to individual presence. I was interesed in the position of the Romanian writer during the totalitarian regime and which were the alternative ways of obtaining visibility, taking into account the influence of rock star or the influence of Beat Poets. Another point of interest was the engagement that the writer adopts after ’89, in his fiction and as a public figure.
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Always refusing poetic abstractization, the visions of Alexandru Musina are rather bent on the concrete; they feed on the fibers of the most acutely phenomenal reality. The call to the direct perception of the world is intertwined in many poems with the exposure of being to the translucent regime of dream, through which the elements of reality lose their everyday weight, are transferred to another ontic mode, of levitation, of the separation from the terrestrial, and of the ecstasy of living. Stylistically, Alexandru Musina’s epigram enjoys all the expressive benefits of the genre. We find here the lapidary drafting of moral drawing, the sober notation, the accurate capturing of specific characteristics, the quick emphasis on the revealing detail, and also the asceticism of notation. Moral judgment is not exposed ostentatiously, but rather suggested, allusively exposed in an expression retrenched in itself.
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Angela Carter’s fiction offers readers an example of the way male fetishism transforms woman into an object, a toy seduced by other toys, a living doll. The majority of her tales take up the theme of fetishist entrapment in an attempt to make the forbidden voice heard, beyond the confines of rationality. The portrayal of the eccentric feminine takes shape in a new literary space populated with male and female protagonists. This study focuses on the most extreme female into doll transformation in two novels and various short stories by Angela Carter.
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Operating under a definition of authorial postures advanced by Jérôme Meizoz, the present study aims to identify the postures adopted by women prose writers who started asserting themselves in the interwar period and, later on, after 1948, partook in the doctrinal ratification process by publishing Socialist Realist novels. Thus, I have identified two overarching categories of postures that engaged literature written by women. In a first phase, I discuss a position that forcefully presses for the articulation of certain postures born of macho prejudice that have become established during the same period in the shape of such concepts as femininity and the feminine creative method, but which ultimately represent merely a strategy for the marginalization of the literary production of women. With the change of regime, which marked the capitalization of the creative space by the field of political power, the systemic adjustment of female prose writers is reified, at the rhetorical level, by revealing the social function of the text. The pretence of them being heroines of the proletarian class marks a radical change in behaviour and discourse from one epoch to the other. What we can conclude from this is that even at the level of an analysis of authorial postures, the minor community of women prose writers submits to predestined postural acts, rather than following the path of articulating an authorial posture, at least not as it was proposed by Meizoz.
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The article reconstructs the life and analyzes the poetry of Olga Cantacuzino (Olga Cruşevan, Olga Cruşevan-Florescu).
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What was it really like being a Beat? What exactly shaped the identity of the artists that started both a media craze ridiculing them during the containment era in America and a literary revolution which later brought them recognition as some of the most influential writers in world literature? The term ‘Beat’ referred both to the ‘beaten-down’ state and, at the same time, the state of beatitude one could get from spiritual epiphanies. The Beat artists were enchanted by any ideology having to do with peace and the search for the true nature of the human soul. They used alcohol and drugs in order to find spiritual freedom and inspiration. This consumption practice, along with their back-then scandalous lifestyle, appearance, preferences and subversive reaction to the postwar American ‘heyday of mass consumption’, became a bearer of meaning for their identities both as individuals and as a group. This article will discuss the spiritual space in which the Beats were living while practicing philosophy, enjoying music and consuming alcohol and addictive substances.
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In the novel City Written from Memory by Yelena Chizhova published in 2019, the siege of Leningrad is inscribed in several different thematic lines. It determines the fate of the family, becomes a reference point for many situations, events and facts. The article is devoted to the process of constitution and slow formation of separate, individual postmemory of the siege in the consciousness of the author’s subject. The analysis of the novel’s text shows that this process was never uniform, but consisted of several phases, the diversity of which resulted from the factors such as i.a. the age of the post-remembering subject, external (cultural, socio-political) circumstances, family relationships, readiness of memory bearers to share their experience, the ability to express in words the heritage received from them. The article focuses primarily on issues related to the distinctive features of individual phases of postmemory, as well as its impact on the personality of the subject being its owner.
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CAMELIA DINU, Cazul Daniil Harms. Supraviețuirea avangardei ruse [The Case of Daniil Kharms. The Survival of the Russian Avant-Garde], București, Tracus Arte, 2019, 477 p; COSMIN CIOTLOȘ, Cenaclul de Luni. Viața și opera [Monday Literary Circle. The Life and the Work], București, Pandora M, 2021, 464 p; MARIN IONIȚĂ, Kiseleff 10. Fabrica de scriitori [Kiseleff 10. The Writer Factory], revised and extended edition, București, Corint, 2018, 376 p; ȘTEFANIA MIHALACHE, Copilăria. Reconstituiri literare după 1989 [Childhood. Literary Reconstructions after 1989], Pitești, Paralela 45, 2019, 372 p; LAURA PAVEL, Personaje ale teoriei, ființe ale ficțiunii [Characters of Theory, Beings of Fiction], Iași, Institutul European, 2021, 338 p; MIRUNA RUNCAN, Teatru în diorame. Discursul criticii teatrale în comunism. II. Amăgitoarea primăvară 1965–1977 [Théâtre en dioramas. Le discours de la critique dramatique pendant le communisme. II. Le printemps illusoire 1965–1977], București, Tracus Arte, 2020, 578 p; IULIAN BOCAI, Filologii (Instituționalizarea studiului literar în Europa) [Philologies (L’institutionnalisation des études littéraires en Europe)], București, Tracus Arte, 2020, 379 p; ANA SĂNDULESCU, ed., Prietenii și Literatura. Club 8, OuTopos și invitații lor [Friends and Literature. Club 8, OuTopos and Their Guests], București, Casa de pariuri literare, 2019, 320 p; EMANUEL MODOC, Internaționala Periferiilor. Rețeaua avangardelor din Europa Centrală și de Est [The International of Peripheries. Avant-Garde Networks of East- Central Europe], București, Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2020, 277 p;
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