LEFTIST MYTHS AND THE COMMUNIST CENSORSHIP

Author(s): Iulian Băicuș / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 33/2023

In this critical essay I have been trying to link the concept of leftwing political myths to some articles written by the famous historian of Religions, Mircea Eliade, during his years of Exile, when he was living in Paris, against the process of denationalization under the Soviet Union occupation. The Iron Curtain has separated the Romanians in exiled people and those who couldn’t leave the huge prison of the former Democratic Romania. Mircea Eliade is quoting different examples of censorship, the purge of public libraries of so-called Fascist literature, the ban of several great Romanian writers, considered to be to bourgeois to fit in the new proletarian culture, named after a famous Soviet word, The Proletcult.

DIASPORA MISSIOLOGY THEORY, METHODOLOGY, AND PRACTICEIN AMY TAN’S ‘THE VALLEY OF AMAZEMENT’

Author(s): Maria Cristina Chintescu / Language(s): English Issue: 33/2023

This piece of writing focuses on the theme of ‘Otherness’ in Amy Tan’s novel ‘The Valley of Amazement’ but from an opposing view now, that of a genuine woman and mother who skillfully struggles to mingle and adapt to the Chinese way of life proposing a cultural theme now, that of the Courtesan Houses in China. The balance switches for the time being. We are dealing in the reversed In-group (the genuine Chinese) and Out-group (Lucia Minturn, born American and who came to China in the hope to marry the father of her daughter, Violet). The article brings the following themes to the center of attention: assimilation, ethnicity, family, prostitution, Chinese and American worlds. The article underlines the alterity between the In-group and the Out-group. The connection is made by Violet, who, as a regular half- Chinese, is hesitant to learn about her Chinese origins. We focus on the constant gap between Lucia's life and Violet's. What is spectacular about this novel is Lucia's return to America and Violet's staying in China.

ROMAIN GARY ET LA BULGARIE

Author(s): Maya Timénova-Koen / Language(s): French Issue: 4/2023

This paper is meant to trace the Romain Gary’s experience like diplomat in Sofia, 1946 – 1948. The writer is testifying to methods of communist Dictatorship during the Stalinist period of Bulgarian History and to country’s transformation on satellite of U.R.S.S. My Research is based on Gary’s novels “La nuit sera calme” and “Le sens de ma vie”, and on movie “Le Libraire” (“The Bookseller”) of Catherine Bernstein and Assen Vladimirov.

Cultural Contexts and Masculinity Shifts

Author(s): Florian Andrei Vlad / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

Masculinity and men’s studies, initially seen as one particular section of explorations of what it means to be a man, appeared as a secondary field, even if linked to Simone de Beauvoir’s “the first sex.” In de Beauvoir’s feminist manifesto of the second wave, “woman” apparently had an identity of her own, but was only defined as being the absence, the “lack,” the Other, against which man defined himself. The current essay examines the historicity of gender roles and the developing contexts in which perceptions of them and theories about them are largely defined by new contexts for which the activation of hegemonic or feminine masculinities, for example, is more than a reasonable choice. The last section engages with literary responses to masculinity as articulated by Lowell, Vonnegut, and Heller in a less-than-heroic age where significant masculinity shifts emerged in American fiction as well.

Митологични и фолклорни елементи в юношенския фентъзи роман в Румъния

Author(s): Lora Nenkovska / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2021

This article will look at two exciting ways to return to the roots of the magical Romanian folk tale and the whole mythological universe in two contemporary Romanian fantasy novels intended for a teenage audience. Both works indicate the revival of the Romanian children’s book and the return to local folklore as a successful strategy to build a magical literary peace that simultaneously recalls “tales, plots, characters” and opens the gates to a new fantasy world. The two authors – Sunziana Popescu and Florin Bican- choose different schemes of “living in a world of fairy tales”. Sunziana Popescu writes a modern fairy tale inhabited by all sorts of mythological images. At the same time, Florin Bican chooses “to weave a meta-fairy tale” from the most popular and favourite Romanian tales but told from the point of view of the faithful helpers of the boy heroes - their whirlwind horses.

Завръщане в социалистическото минало. Опит за очертаване на една тенденция в новия български роман

Author(s): Mihaela Ilieva / Language(s): English,Bulgarian Issue: 1/2023

The paper examines one of the most popular topics in the Bulgarian novel over the last 20 years – the past of the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. The text also traces the decades that writers prefer to choose as the background of their plot, and discusses what is the value of the historical period and how authors “return” to it – through the autobiographical or by choosing a specific historical event.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SEQUENCING IN VIRGINIA WOOLFS’ FLUSH

Author(s): Oxana Creanga / Language(s): English Issue: 35/2023

The article explores the concept of “psychological sequencing”, an important constituting principle of perspective actualization introduced by the linguist Mick Short in the realm of fictional storytelling. Employing a cognitive-linguistic model of analysis, the study aims at specifying the mechanics of psychological sequencing manifestations and its effect in creating immediacy and reader immersion, focusing specifically on Virginia Woolf’s Flush, a biographical work portraying Elizabeth Barrett Browning's cocker spaniel. The analysis explores how linguistic means mirror the order in which impressions arise in the mind of the conceptualizer/focalizer, conveying a filtered and colored view of the story world. Focusing on extensive excerpts of psychological instances in Woolf's narrative, as units of analysis, the study undergoes a detailed examination of lexical, syntactical, and discursive tools, including sensory-related expressions, schema-oriented language, under lexicalization, fronting, agentless passive constructions, mimetic forms of discourse with a view to elucidating the way psychological sequencing contributes to the nuanced representation of the internal limited viewpoint in the fictional narrative under analysis, thus revealing the complex interplay between linguistic choices and reader perception.

THE SAMIZDAT- LITERATURE OF THE WHISPER

Author(s): Maria- Andreea Rasoveanu (Pădurean) / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 35/2023

The purpose of the article is to talk about the phenomenon of samizdat in the countries of Central Europe. Appearing as a form of protest and resistance, it played an important role in the struggle for freedom and constituted a valve of cultural survival for those who did not accept censorship and uniformity. Thus, in a context where dissenting opinions were oppressed and suppressed, samizdat became a way in which activists and intellectuals sought to convey criticism and alternative ideas. Although censorship and oppression were stronger in the Romanian space than of the other countries in the communist bloc, here too there were timid attempts at samizdat that the article highlights.

Old and Middle English Literature. The Literature of the Renaissance/ Cătălina Bălinișteanu-Furdu

Author(s): Nadia-Nicoleta Morăraşu / Language(s): English Issue: 28/2023

Review of: Old and Middle English Literature. The Literature of the Renaissance. By Cătălina Bălinișteanu-Furdu, Alma Mater Publishing House, Bacău, 2021,

Psychopoetic Encounters: Figurations of Difficulty

Author(s): Mieke Bal / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

While going through some cultural expressions in texts and images, this article proposes reflections on ways in which the practice of poetics, in the sense of creative making, needs to encounter, address, and overcome difficulty in order to facilitate the contribution of the imagination and the acts of “imaging” it allows, to the figuration of the new. Encounter is the key word, indicating plurality and process. Nothing is fixed; hence, not “identity” as something permanent, but instead, in the encounter, identification with others, other fields, other ideas, other images becomes appealing and possible.In the painstaking attempts to think up new ideas, one encounters difficulty, which needs to be overcome. Only through encounters this becomes thinkable, and that makes imaging something so far unheard of, possible. The ‘poetic’ side of psychopoetics, making through (as traversing) and with (as its material) the reflections emanating from the unconscious as they appear at the edge of consciousness, is what binds together the different disciplines as we know them, in a knot of creativity, imagining, and thinking what we did not know.

The Biological Unconscious, Memory and Identity in Charles Fernyhough’s A Box of Birds

Author(s): Maria Margaroni / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

This essay proposes to critically engage with dominant materialist and narrative models of human identity, addressing the old, ‘tired’ question of subjectivity from a twenty-first century perspective. Drawing on contemporary neuroscientific theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis, I aim to read Charles Fernyhough’s A Box of Birds (2012) as a creative reflection on the nature of memory, consciousness and the unconscious. As I shall demonstrate, what lies at the heart of Fernyhough’s reflection is the Platonic allegory of the mind as an aviary. Taken up and re-interpreted by different characters in the novel, this allegory permits Fernyhough to experiment with contemporary discourses of neuro-subjectivity, tracing a richer, more dynamic relation among mind, brain and body.

Pnin’s Unforgettable Digressions: Towards a Nabokovian Approach to the Unconscious

Author(s): Zihao Liu / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023

Defining the unconscious in a Husserlian manner as that which appears through reproductive acts of consciousness, this article attempts to investigate how Vladimir Nabokov tackles this theme in Pnin both as a stylist and as a storyteller. Nabokov understands literature as the art of language that imposes lived experiences on readers, and he achieves literary representations of the unconscious in Pnin by juxtaposing experiences containing tacit expectations that are incongruent with one another. Tracking the scenes where Pnin performs reproductive acts throughout the novel, it is found that the unconscious functions as a thematic pattern in Pnin and mirrors the protagonist’s progress in his quixotic war against cruelty and callousness in the world.

Le bilboquet, un badinage dangereux ? Une étude sur Le Bilboquet de Marivaux

Author(s): Pan Jingxuan / Language(s): French Issue: 13/2023

The “Le Bilboquet” of Marivaux illustrates the social frenzy incited by this game at that time. Driven by resentment against the bilboquet, which distracts his mistress, the narrator elaborates on how Madness has conquered the people of Europe through this frivolity. Through the depiction of the contagion of the game, we could observe how the pleasure it brings and the mimetic desire of men contribute to the success of the bilboquet. The social disorder resulting from this ludic frenzy leads us to question the nature of the game: is it merely an entertainment or does it actually represent a danger? Such a trifle could have grave consequences, in line with the logic of reevaluating the “nothingness” that we can find in most of Marivaux’s works.

Les jeux d’enfants dans Les Rougon-Macquart

Author(s): Shoshana-Rose Marzel / Language(s): French Issue: 13/2023

This article examines children’s games in Les Rougon-Macquart while relying on a typology that includes toys, symbolic plays, and a children’s ball. In addition to their educational and recreational functions, childhood games play various narrative roles, such as constructing a referential universe, creating key moments in the plot, exploring the complexity of child and parental psychology, parent/child relationships and much more. Furthermore, the author, Émile Zola, employs toys and children’s games to inform his reflections on the joint influence of heredity and environment on the fates of characters, in alignment with the principles of the naturalist movement. This approach offers valuable insights into how Zola utilizes children’s games as narrative and symbolic elements within his grand literary tapestry.

Jeux et hasard dans l’écriture de Patrick Modiano

Author(s): France Grenaudier-Klijn / Language(s): French Issue: 13/2023

Many of Patrick Modiano’s novels involve the motif of the game – predicate and space – in the narration, at characterization, thematic and structural levels. The introduction of this minor element – it never reaches the level of a trope – nonetheless informs us both about the novelistic techniques employed by Modiano and about the metaphysical considerations underpinning his writing. As such, a close reading of various episodes articulated around the motif of the game allows us to better understand the methods adopted by the novelist in the development of his characters and in the architecture of his texts. Furthermore, the insertion of the motif of the game allows us to identify and analyse the value given to chance and indeterminacy in all its forms in the Modianian novel, from which a true metaphysics, if not an ethics, of indeterminacy, can in turn be deployed.

Jeu de sens, jeu de forme, ou les (en)jeux intertextuels de l’écriture de Sophie Divry

Author(s): Anna Opiela-Mrozik / Language(s): French Issue: 13/2023

This paper analyzes various aspects of game in the novels of Sophie Divry, a contemporary novelist as well as a social activist. Her protean work develops the idea of literary ludicity which ensures pleasure for an author and engages a reader but, at the same time, transmits a message about society. In the essay Rouvrir le roman the writer proposes to reinvent the novel genre by means of the spirit of unseriousness which plays a role as a stimulant for literature. Founded on intertextuality, Divry’s writing renews in an original way well-known models such asthat of Madame Bovary (La condition pavillonnaire) or Robinson Crusoe (Trois fois la fin du monde). Narrative games lead the novelist to develop polyphonic writing.The study of the novel Quand le diable sortit de la salle de bain demonstrates the link between game and self-reflexivity and highlights the potential of ludicity at the linguistic, typographical and formal level.

THE PROBLEM OF WAITING IN VAIN

Author(s): Marius Romulus Sălagean / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 36/2024

Waiting is a constant in the different ages of literature, having a psychological invoice function. A first pose of the expectation entered into the archetype is that of Penelope, the queen of Ithaca. Indeed, the paradigm of waiting draws its sap, par excellence, from the tribulations of Odysseus whose wife, Penelope ennobles his existence on the other hand, Lucius the character of Apuleius tries his best to reach that desired called "prosopon" recte the full manifestation as a being human. In Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa is the prototype of vain expectation. Human appearance is denied him forever. In the register of modern dramaturgy, Eugen Ionescu creates the premises of an expectation of invisible characters. The old man and the old woman manage through their lines to establish a climate that we would call: waiting for some specters. Gabriel Garcia Marquez surprises us with the successful atmosphere in the micro-novel: The Colonel has no one to write to. The colonel's waiting in the harbor, where the illusion boat was supposed to appear, is tragic par excellence. The following nuances of waiting will be nuanced in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot where the intrusion of the absurd is total. Also the novels: The Desert of the Tartars by Dino Buzzati and Waiting for the Barbarians written by John Maxwell Coetzee advertise the same coordinate of waiting. Giovanni Drogo and the magistrate, the characters in the two books seem to "feed", paradoxically, on this substance of vain expectation.

Професорският роман – едно ново явление в българската литература

Author(s): Milena Kirova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 2/2024

The article presents a phenomenon that until now has not been the subject of an independent and systematic study in Bulgarian literary studies. Tracing the development of the Bulgarian novel over the last three decades, it brings out the presence of a relatively homogeneous group of works that share common literary characteristics and ways of communicating with the reading audience. Systematizing and summarizing observations on more than ten novels published by contemporary Bulgarian writers, all of them university professors, the paper defines several specific features that are common to them. The phenomenon of the Professorenroman is examined briefly in the historical context of its emergence in the 19 th century, and in more detail as an effect and consequence of the development of Postmodernism in Bulgaria since the end of the 20 th century. Novels published most recently, including in 2022, are in focus.

Д. I. Дроздовський. Проблемно-тематичнi комплекси й філософсько-естетичні параметри британського постпостмодерні-стського роману

Author(s): Margreta Grigorova / Language(s): English,Ukrainian Issue: 1/2023

Nicole C. Dittmer and Sophie Raine, Editors. 𝑃𝑒𝑛𝑛𝑦 𝐷𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑑𝑓𝑢𝑙𝑠 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝐺𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑐: 𝐼𝑛𝑣𝑒𝑠𝑡𝑖𝑔𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑃𝑒𝑟𝑛𝑖𝑐𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠 𝑇𝑎𝑙𝑒𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑇𝑒𝑟𝑟𝑜𝑟

Author(s): Galina Devedjieva / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2023