Căutarea unei morți glorioase/ Macedonski și Literatorul - pagini de final (2)
Literary text by Robert Șerban - "Looking for a Glorious Death"/ Literary text by Radu Pavel Gheo - "Macedonski and Literatorul - Final Pages (2)"
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Literary text by Robert Șerban - "Looking for a Glorious Death"/ Literary text by Radu Pavel Gheo - "Macedonski and Literatorul - Final Pages (2)"
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“Less is more” seems to be the (age-old saying—it turns out) statement that has prompted the experiments described as minimalism in the first half of the past century: first in architecture and the arts, then in music and literature, gradually also becoming the description of a deliberately chosen life style. In literature—whose “building material” is language—things are more complex, mainly because of the relationship between words and meanings; so negative criticism soon joined in. The second part is an experiment in itself: Hemingway’s “Cat in the Rain,” accompanied by several abbreviated “versions,” that prove unconvincing as the meaning of “less is more” or the “iceberg theory of fiction.”
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Essay by Robert Șerban - "Not Even the Dead Want a Poor Cemetery"/ Essay by Radu Pavel Gheo - " Literatorul - A ”Heretic”'s Magazine".
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Why does fate remain implacable for certain works and certain personalities on which criticism passes over with relative negligence or worse still, which remain ignored by the public and critics? Is it just the imponderables of fate or is it also an unfavourable social context? Mărgărita Miller-Verghy represents one of these “cases” of marginality, she is among those “forgotten” of Romanian literature. She follows by her destiny the path that women's literature has travelled: from anonymity to full acceptance, from submission to liberation. Her portrait is representative for this social category which at the beginning was not accepted, but which finally imposed itself as an indubitable reality: ,,the woman-writer”. The woman she has gone through different stages of life, remaining the same, beyond social challenges and confirming the model of the heroic woman who, like Phèdre or Antigone, makes the great journey beyond death.
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Essay by Radu Pavel Gheo - "Literatorul in 1882 (I)"/ Short story by Robert Șerban - "The Trustworthy Stand-In"
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The Minulescian epic work remained in the shadow of poetry, being ignored by literary critics and published much less than the lyrical one. Because of this, the prose was not valued, it was not brought into the spotlight of the readers and it was not given its true value at the time of its publication according to the comments, specialized analyzes. Ion Minulescu has taken steps since the beginning of the symbolist movement to popularize this current through aesthetic refinement in his poems, short stories, sketches and novels. The minulescian epic imagination accepts libertinism, indiscretion, spiciness, sociability, the pleasure of conversation, exoticism, eroticism and the instability of feelings, traits that become dominant in his prose.
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Today's Romanian prose is distinguished, above all, by diversity: of themes, of vision and of style. Undoubtedly, in all this diversity, which is a distinctive sign of the relief of contemporary epic, an important role is played by the issue of generations, because each generation of creation brings with it a different set of values, levels of narrative and specific ways of processing reality. To illustrate the diversity of styles in today's prose, we have chosen three writers with relevant particularities: Nicolae Breban, Dan Lungu and Florina Ilis. Seductive, dilemmatic, fascinating through epic and subtextual ideas, Nicolae Breban's novels in the volume Act gratuit exhibit the essential qualities of his prose, from the chaste lucidity to the fascination of storytelling or the obsession of the past, through a rhetoric of the truth of being, in an energetic, dense and supple writing. Dan Lungu's novels have acquired the fame of a redefinition of the exposition of the everyday, in dense, varied, paradoxical images. Florina Ilis's prose is also based on a subtle play between appearance and essence, the narrative having a palimpsest aspect, with overlapping layers and constructions, the past being reconstructed through well-twisted fictional strategies.
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The subsequent paper aims to circumscribe the specifics of the travel prose proposed by Radu Tudoran in the volume “The Rearview Mirror”, as well as to inventory the main techniques and procedures of subjectivization through which the objective poetics of the travel memorial is converted into novel like subjective fiction.
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Spoken and written language is a phenomenon that came on earth along with the human being. It is a diversity that developed during centuries and it is also an ongoing evolution. There are so many languages on the globe but there is one thing that connects them: the fact that they are produced by the human brain and their power to express the human self, thoughts, feelings and most of his inner anxieties. Words are associated in essays, speeches, writings such as poems or novels, but very interesting is the case of short stories. Unlike the other narrations, a short story is less extended but it comprises the depth of the message in just a few pages. Stories in general are a fascination for anyone because they approach the most touching issues through fantasy and fiction. This paper aims to describe such a short story and to follow the way in which it reveals the identity related to the otherness. The main objectives are to explain the chronology of the story, to find its underneath striking details through the lens of speculative fiction. Not only a research for literature lovers, but also a useful reading for anyone who wants to know himself better, this study is a mirage of reality through fiction. It shows that each experience changes something within us, being it a positive or a negative one.
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Naturalism implies the exact observation, the documentation that paints life, nature with all its conditions. Arno Holz is the naturalist theorist and his theory is based on the fact that art tends to be nature. German naturalism found its own form in drama. Arno Holz and Johannes Schlaf discover a style of seconds: which records the smallest movements, noises, shades. This naturalistic style accurately notes reality.
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The study aims to explore the dissociation of identity and the reconstruction of the subjective space as forms of self-exploration and searching a subjective Paradise placed outside the Christian moral space. The Gods of Vices are proof of the need of a subjective pantheon, capable of replacing both the classical mythology and the Christian one.
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The article aims to present Istrati from the perspective of transdisciplinarity, beyond the position of the loser or the winner, reporting him at the time of the publication of “Confession for the Losers”. The opposition “victorious” – “defeated” will be replaced by the ternary “victorious” – “defeated” – “absurd man”, the approach starting from the analoguey between Istrati and Camus’ absurd hero Sisyphus. After sixteen months in Soviet Russia, and especially after the "Rusakov Affair", Istrati unmasks the injustices discovered in order to make them right and thus win the Revolution. Because the Russian authorities knew the reality, but were not willing to give up their social positions, they will accuse Istrati of treason through Bolshevik propaganda magazines. Not so much the accusations as the fact that no friend, old revolutionary, will be on his side causes Istrati a profound suffering, causing him to give up being part of the realization of the communist ideal as those in power understood it. He declared himself defeated in this respect. He is also victorious, through his rebellious attitude, the constant revolt giving life and the individual greatness. But beyond that, he is like Sisyphus, Camus' absurd hero, who will come to understand that the price for his passion, for his intense living, is to fight knowing that all this has no sense, meaning, to accept the absurd as part of your condition as a man. And Istrati accepts.
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In this critical essay I have been trying to define some of the most important works published by the Romanian American professor of Literary Theory from Indiana, Bloomington University, focusing on two different works, The Five Faces of Modernity, one of earliest studies on Postmodernism and on his last essay, Rereading, taking into account the fact that they had a great impact when they ve been translated to Romanian language, stronger than the impact they had on USA’s academic life. I have been witnessing his conference at the Faculty of Letters when I was a student and it had a powerful effect on me, so I am trying now both to analyze and give a tribute to the Romanian American literary critic, as well as being focused on his biography, that in his case form a continuum, as in the postmodern drawings of Escher. Last but not least I have focused on his last study, Re- reading, one of the most important essays of Literary Theory published worldwide, that has been also translated to Romanian. Never the less, I have mentioned different studies published before or after his settlement to USA, his private diaries and studies on Eugene Ionesco, Mircea Eliade, Ioan Petru Culianu, and so on, and so forth.
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The aim of this study is the identification of theories referring to the configuration of Romanian perspective on time and space, the way it crystalizes itself in the option of 70’s, with the necessary references to the narrative experiences proposed by the new French novel and, in subsidiary, by the anglo-saxon one. The exegesis is interested in the reconfiguration, in the meta novels of the 70’s, of a new poetic of space and time, closely following the manner in which the two dimensions intertwine or, as the case, untwine in the works of representative authors of this cultural and political space. After a thorough analysis of the narrative dynamics we find that in the configuration of the texts we deal with there is an abundance of interdependence between space and time. The binder of the literary chronotype proves itself, in this case, its consubstantiality through the diversity of reporting on the spiral from honorific to involuntary memory, a step which unveils narrative spaces and times reconfigured in the 70’s novel through the blueprint of a coherent network between the societal dynamic and the relativity of the literary phenomenon found, in his turn, in the position of an operative agent in history. The hypothesis from which we start reclaims from the option of 70’s novelists its ability to oppose the modern blueprint revived by Marin Preda, Dumitru Radu Popesu, Nicolae Breban, Ștefan Bănulescu and so on, with the hopes of taking part in the making of a work placed on the limen between “to write” and “to be”. In other words, part of a work lowered off of the “art for art” pedestal and let free to find and attach itself to the supremacy of the empty forms by any historical meaning. The difference which we highlight is part of a narrative register, precisely from the novels of the 70’s class which propose to rediscover the hidden face of immediate reality and to probe the layers of depth of historical truth. In these books there will be a type which we have categorized as the “new political novel”, in equal measure realistic and objective, type which attempts a rearticulation of “personal duration” accepted as a metamorphosis of time and space.
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One of the most intriguing Romanian cultural figures of all times, was Max Blecher, the young writer from Botoșani. In his brief and tragic life, the interwar Romanian writer wrote under the influence of his emblematic illness, the spinal tuberculosis. The affliction is to be found through Blecher`s literature, especially in his two last novels. What is so intriguing about Blecher`s writing, is the way he approaches his memories that form a very dense and alive inner world. The blecherian personages seem to start their travels into o space of inner worlds, beginning with a trigger found in the external, objective world. Usually, these triggers are represented by sensorial stimuli, as odors, colors, or textures, that are receiving a quality of vehicles between the two worlds. From this ground formed by the sensorial stimuli, Blecher`s heroes seem to plunge into a fictional version of reality, that the author calls the „Immediate Ireality”. This space, although an almost magical one, it is felt very real by Blecher’s personages, that rather choose the fictional space over the real one.
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Julian Barnes’ “The Man in the Red Coat”, the biography of the French celebrity surgeon, Samuel Jean Pozzi is, in fact, much more than the life story of an outstanding medical figure. Barnes achieved an inciting historical study of an epoque, ‘la Belle Epoque’, bringing to the foreground the most prominent figures of the time. In doing so, Barnes repeatedly states that a biographer should not refrain from acknowledging that ‘one does not know all the truth’. The Prince Edouard de Polignac, the Count Robert de Montesquiou, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Sarah Bernhardt, Henry James, James Whistler, Guy de Maupassant, Stephane Mallarme – and not only – are part of Pozzi’s dazzling circle of contemporaries. But “The Man in the Red Coat” is not a succession of linear events of the epoque. It is the pretext for amazing artistic and literary discussions, and an interesting depiction of the exaggerations and excesses of the period between the 1870s until the First World War. This article aims at showing how Julian Barnes succeeds in bridging the gap between the beginning of the twentieth century and our times. By alluding to recent events, especially Brexit, the author points out similarities between ‘la fin de siecle’ and the present. What we do not know is whether English-European ‘cultural/ literary’ exchanges will be the same after Brexit. Probably not!
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The rich bear mythogy finds an interesting approach in Cezar Petrescu’s “Fram, ursul polar” (“Fram, the White Bear”). The story follows the fairy tale’s organization, bearing also archetypal dimensions, like the initiatory journey, the lost paradise, the cave and the island, turning into a heroic myth, although it looks like a story of a child that searches for his family. Fram’s route leads to the restoring of the world’s order, but adding the hunt myth, another hero, Petrus, reveals the vocation of the savior hero. The reading that the present paper proposes uses the lens of mythology, archetype and folklore, in order to find the hidden meaning of this fairy tale looking book. Although the book is thought to be a children book, it leads to meaningful findings that underline the value of the novel.
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One of the main characteristics of Assia Djebar’s writing is the fact that she intersects her personal journey with the past and contemporary history of herself, of her country and of her Algerian community. This is a testimony that she experienced very closely the significant and often tragic events of the colonization. This is the reason why all the protagonists that she created in her novels are concerned with the same burning question: the quest for oneself. Actually, every character seem to be another mirror for the author herself, an author almost obsessed to find out and to reveal the real memory and identity of herself and of her people.
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