MAGIA NEAGRĂ A CONFESIUNII. MITURI, SIMBOLURI, COMPLEXE

Author(s): Natasa Maxim / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 31/2014

Cette recherche envisage les symboles, les complexes pshychologiques ou les mythes qui se reflètent dans l'écriture confessive. Pour pouvoir être décrypté, le journal intime exige la participation du lecteur. Du point du vue de Mircea Mihăieş, l'intime nécessite l'adhésion au champ sémantique du mystère, de la protection, du secret, du camouflage, comme un ensemble plus large de l`intimisme: reflet d'un état d'esprit, d’une attitude, d’une façon d'être. Chaque écrit confessif est empreint des propres fantasmes de l’auteur, de ses angoisses existentielles, qu’il essaie d’exorciser par l’acte d’écrire. Eugen Simion voit le diariste comme un Œdipe, abandonné dans une forêt de symbols – peut-on ajouter. Cette recherche se propose à mettre en lumière les mythes de Narcis, Persée, Proteus, Sisyphe, les symboles du miroir, du labyrinthe, le complexe de Faust, le syndrome Villon dans le discours de la confession. Les symboles du cercle, d'égarement dans le labyrinthe, l'intersection se produisent d'ailleurs, dans le mythe négatif du journal intime. Le point central de cette magie noire de la confession reste le mythe du Créateur qui projette autour de soi l’ombre de son narcissisme afin de se sauver

El Popol Vuh : interpretaciones de investigadores serbios

Author(s): Vesna Dickov / Language(s): Spanish Issue: 10/2019

Resumen: El presente trabajo está dedicado a las interpretaciones del Popol Vuh,una de las obras literarias más conocidas de los antiguos mayas, hechas por investigadores serbios a lo largo de la segunda mitad del siglo XX y durante las primeras dos décadas del siglo XXI. Con este objetivo,se presentan críticamente, respetando el criterio cronológico de su aparición, los textos sobre el Popol Vuh (estudios, ensayos,prefacios, postfacios, artículos), escritos por autores serbios y publicados, tanto en libros como en revistas literarias, en el idioma serbio. El marco metodológico que ha resultado más apropiado para comprender el proceso comunicativo en cuestión, así como su papel en la modificación del horizonte de expectativas de los lectores serbios, se apoya en el análisis y comparación de todos los elementos relevantes que forman parte de la recepción interpretativa en Serbia de la obra. Abstract: The present work is dedicated to the interpretations of the Popol Vuh,one of the best-known literary works of the ancient Mayans, which were made by Serbian researchers throughout the second half of the 20th century and during the first two decades of the 21st century. With this objective, the texts on the Popol Vuh (studies,essays, prefaces, postfaces, articles) written by Serbian authors and published both in books and in literary magazines in Serbian language, are presented critically, respecting the chronological criterion of their appearance. The methodological framework that has been most appropriate to be applied in order to understand the communicative process in question as well as its role in changing the horizon of expectations of Serbian readers, is based on the analysis and comparison of all the relevant elements that form part of this aspect of the interpretive reception in Serbia.

Transfer Points: Artistic Intersections and Cultural Transitions in John Dos Passos's Fiction of the 1920s

Author(s): Robert McParland / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

John Dos Passos conveyed multiple intersections of art and culture and the spirit of the 1920s in his prose. His novel Manhattan Transfer is characterized by intermediality: a combination of theatre, film, and visual art. With this novel, Dos Passos became a chronicler of American life. A passionate critique of modern society runs through Manhattan Transfer. The city is presented in this novel as a site of cultural intersections and transition and this focus is matched by the fragmentary qualities of the text. From his war novel Three Soldiers through his city novel Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos places his readers in the swirl of the human currents of his time and argues for the human spirit against the forces of a mechanistic world that would crush them. The harshness of the vibrant city is illustrated through the strivings and affairs of these immigrants, Broadway stage performers, journalists, and business aspirants. The relationships between Dos Passos’ experimental fiction and modern art and film are explored, along with the cultural transition of the American 1920s.

'The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf': Constructing Diasporic Muslim Identities in a Coming-of-Age Narrative

Author(s): Lin Ling / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

The paper explores the representation of diasporic Muslim identities in a coming-of-age narrative: Arab American female novelist Mojha Kahf’s bestseller The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf published in 2006. It examines how the religious diasporic hybrid identity is mobilized within the female protagonist Khadra Shamy, including the ways she struggles to negotiate her identity across different cultural terrains and gendered, racialised, intergenerational configurations. It attempts to show how these literary representations construct --and help conceptualize—the ways we understand diasporic Muslims in the U.S. The individual experiences as narrated in the novel illuminate a series of essential socio-political questions facing the community as a religious minority in a secular context. This study will address these questions through the representation of cultural hybridity in the literary narrative within the framework of postcolonial theory. It focuses on three constructs of the novel central to the conceptualizing of a hybrid identity of the female protagonist: firstly, the mirror images and moral panics that generate cultural clashes in the East-West encounter, which foreground, secondly, the predicament of an ambivalent existence of the protagonist as a diasporic individual, and thirdly, the ways she forges her hybrid identity as a New Woman within the diasporic context.

"Only in Dying Life": Ursula K. Le Guin's Dry Land and Its Cultural Contestations

Author(s): Gabriela Debita / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

In his seminal essay theorizing the concept of heterotopia, “Of Other Spaces”, Michel Foucault insists that his focus is on external spaces. However, given the ability of certain spaces, especially those associated with trauma and torment, to simultaneously be inhabited and inhabit the psyches of their denizens, it stands to reason that some heterotopic spaces are internal as well. One such example is Ursula K. Le Guin’s Dry Land, an inner hellscape which appears throughout her Earthsea series. The Dry Land serves to mirror, invert, and contest not only the world of Earthsea, but also the pervasiveness of Western literary and cultural influences on the genre of fantasy itself. Inspired by classical and Renaissance sources (Homer and Dante) and modernist ones (Rainer Maria Rilke and T. S. Eliot), the Dry Land, a jarring spatial and literary aberration in the context of Earthsea’s Taoist framework, serves to confront both the resistance to the finality of death and the supremacy of the Western literary canon. In doing so, it demonstrates Le Guin’s desire to distance herself from Western canonical influences, while nevertheless highlighting the fact that, given the cyclicity of literary rebellion, she is, in fact, walking in Dante’s and T. S. Eliot’s shoes.

Cyber Experience as a Resource for Making Alternative Worlds in the Georgian Postmodernist Novel "Chewing Dawns: Sugar-Free"

Author(s): Irakli Khvedelidze / Language(s): English Issue: 10/2020

The paper analyses a contemporary Georgian novel – Zura Jishkariani’s Chewing Dawns: Sugar-free. The novel belongs to the sub-genre of bio-punk. The aim of the paper was to identify the defamiliarized and ironized socio-cultural processes taking place in the contemporary Georgian society, considering the narratological concept of alternative worlds and the theoretical framework of conceptual metaphor. The outcomes of the research would draw the cultural-intellectual orientations of contemporary Georgian society. Based on these two conclusions, the paper aimed to find an age-long similarity between the social-political challenges of the 1920s and the contemporary problems of the Georgian society. Research has proved that numerous systems of values have been deconstructed and carnivalized by means of a play with alternative worlds. The development of the world depends on the activation of the human brain capacity, which ensures the cognition of the “higher reality“. The literary text under analysis reflects current achievements in cognitive sciences. The mental trips reflect the capacity of the human brain. The text describes the protagonist’s aspiration towards manipulating and stimulating of the human brain. This is the only way to overcome the banality of life. The manner of narration and the idealization of the aim serve the purpose of description of the revolutionary spirit.

Editorial Foreword

Author(s): Silviu-Marian Miloiu / Language(s): English,Romanian Issue: 2/2020

The second issue of volume 12 of The Romanian Journal for Baltic and Nordic Studies continues to reflect the academic discussions occasioned by the Eleventh Conference on Baltic and Nordic Studies of May 2020. Prof. Radu Carp was one of the keynote speakers of the conference and his address on Combining soft power with the geopolitical approach - how difficult is it for the EU to change its attitude? elicited a great interest among the presenters and attenders of the scientific event. As in any such scholarly event, especially an international gathering with a critical focus on the construction/reconstruction of Europe in vital moments of its past and recent past aspirations, the viewpoints of the participants, including the analysis of Prof. Carp on the current challenges of the EU are passed on to the wider community of fellow researchers, the public and decision-makers. The call for stepping up to a new level of integration and geopolitical power projection is dissected both in its soft and hard power dimension without eschewing the focus on democracy, climate change mitigation measures or cybersecurity.

Olivia Chirobocea-Tudor. History and Fiction in American Postmodernist Novels: Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon

Author(s): Raluca-Nicoleta Rogoveanu / Language(s): English Issue: 35/2020

The review of: Olivia Chirobocea-Tudor. History and Fiction in American Postmodernist Novels: Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller and Thomas Pynchon. Constanța: Ovidius University Press, 2019. Pp 262. ISBN: 978-606-060-000-8.

Ëndrra në eposin e Kreshnikëve në suazën e eposeve të tjera mesjetare e paramesjetare

Author(s): Drita Isufaj / Language(s): Albanian Issue: 38.2/2019

The motive of the warning dream is one of the most widespread and one of the oldest in the epic gender. In epic dreams appear at the key moments of the narrative as a prediction or interpretation of what is to come. They usually contain a series of symbols that have to be interpreted by the dreamer. In epic creations, dreams have a significant influence on the course of the story. In most cases they encourage the heroes to continue their journey. We encounter the warning dream in the earliest literary work found until today, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Also in both Homeric poems, Iliad and Odyssey, the motive of the dream is widely encountered. This motif appears densely also in our epic, we remember here the dream of Muji in the song "Rapture of Muj's wife", his next dream in the rhapsody "Gjogu i Mujit", the dream of Krajl's wife in "Halil's Marriage" warning of kidnapping of Tanusha. Among the medieval European epics, we mention the prophetic dream of Cid, the Spanish epic hero. He dreams about the archangel Gabriel, who tells him that he will eventually triumph. Encouraged by this dream, Cid enters the city of Toledo. In the French epic, the dream of Charlemagne is evident; the king sees two dreams that warn of misfortune; the first dream predicts Ganelon's betrayal, and the second the death of his nephew Roland. The purpose of this paper will be to examine the motive of the dream in the Epic of the Kreshniks by considering it as part of the cadre of the medieval and pre-medieval epics.

Epifani poetike të I. Kadaresë ose sprovë mbi një tipologji të mundshme të vendit poetik të ëndrrës

Author(s): Ermir Xhindi / Language(s): Albanian Issue: 38.2/2019

The aim of this work is the study, on the narrative poetics level, according to the reader's response, of the nature of the relationships on the fictional structure between the Dream as an isotopic closed unit, with the text as an opened one, dynamic and isotopic body. In our view, as the elaborated version of the merging of traditional post-structuralism with the phenomenological instance of structural meaning constructed by the reader, The Dream as a poetic unit, stands in front of the text, just as the word stands in the front of its explanation in the vocabulary. In its relationship with The Dream the text becomes embezzlement, displacement, conventional expansion of The Dream, its cultural interpretation through non-individual mechanisms, it expresses itself as a tension between the fictional necessity to produce coherence with the structure’s balanced build-up, that is, the relativization of The Dream, which naturally tends to acquire the authority of the symbolic structure of the text. But, first of all, on what indicators The Dream is defined, where is the place of The Dream in the structure, what are the functional relationships The Dream is implicated with, what kind of dialectics does it lead to? In this perspective, with this research, conducted through a critical instrument based on the theoretical model of the Possible Reader, in the story of ‘Forgetting a Woman' by I. Kadare, we have tried to define the initiation of a possible poetic typology of The Dream’s place in the texts of this author.

Narracioni në trajtë zhgjëndrre tek aksidenti i kadaresë (psikonarrativa e zhgjëndrrës)

Author(s): Jorina Kryeziu - Shkreta / Language(s): Albanian Issue: 38.2/2019

In this paper work will be reviewed the Accident novel written by Ismail Kadare through narrative techniques/several specific of: the suspense, the inversion, complex and inverse characters, as well as the narrator-detective through trick stories, which starts with eye-sighting and the view on the taxi mirror. The appearance of the character of Rovena as her form relates to the “mental” situation of Besfort Y. and to the situations in which the narrator places her own narrative actress. Thus, one side of the analysis is also the characters’ couple, Rovena St., and Besfort Y., who appears in the reader’s eyes through evocations, feelings, photos of letters, which serve as “factual evidence” to discover their life and their speculative relationship which is not ante-mortem but post-mortem; a suspicious relationship (Rovena St. she was fall in love with Besfort Y. from the back – not by eyes, voices, or walking). The evolution of lexical semantics, and decoding of language elements leads us back to the first narrative moment; so, the time freezes and turns back to discover the mystery that captures the narrative story, which is related to the accident or/and murder of Rovena St. (“Besfort Y.'s psychiatrist from the murderer did away with him”).

Mitrush Kuteli, protagonist i një ëndrre në kufijtë e fantastikes

Author(s): Jorida Sotiri / Language(s): Albanian Issue: 38.2/2019

This paper, aims to have as its object, features of fantastics in the Albanian literature and more specifically of the dreamer character in the Kutel's prose, as one of the distinguished representatives of the dreaming, symbolistic and fatastics prose in the Albanian literature. The Methodology of the research focuses on psychoanalitical studies, and aims to point out main literary features that the author holds, by describing the unconscious of his caharacter. The psychoanalytical point of view is an approach of surveillance and analysis over characters in terms of sensitivity and emotions they convey. In the Freud's assertion “ the dream interpretation is the gold way toward the acknowledgement of the unconscious element in the psychic life”. This approach creates the opportunity for an investigation of an incentive or impulse that effects in the unconscious of the character, that can be expressed in his conscious as result of suppresion and becomes a source of expression only in dreams. Kuteli as a writter has a certain individuality and tendency in the " narrative of dream" which was introduced as a lireary novelty of those times. By analysing the prose of this author, i will try to unbuckle the dream as a forbidden desire in the codification of fantastics in order to create the impression of satisfaction of the narrative. Following on this logic the author himself in a certain number of its narratives besomes a genuine witness of the psuchological analyses. We know that one of the most important functions of the literary elment in the text of prose is closely linked with the description of the emeotional state of the character, which witness in the text for indicators of linguistic diversity.

Ëndrrat e Ago Jakupit: semiotika e ligjërimit onirik

Author(s): Blerina Rogova Gaxha / Language(s): Albanian Issue: 38.2/2019

This paper aims at providing an overview of the oneiric discourse in fiction. The short story “How Ago Jakupi found God’s way” (Qysh e gjeti Ago Jakupirrugën e Zotit), from the author Mitrush Kuteli, shows us how dream works as a generator of fiction and its particularity. In the story about the old man that seeks God’s way, the oneiric sign which comes from “the other” world, puts into the function the coordinates of the subconscious and the divine. Entering into the dream world, which as a fictional text, is doubly fictional, and receiving divine signals or signals from the subconscious show or initiate the changing fate of the protagonist and the changing of the narrative course. The author incorporates the dream as a deux ex machine tactic, where do the narrative and philosophical worlds confront, synthesizing the two fundamental philosophical concepts of the human being: his inner voice and the relation to the supernatural. According to the symbolism of dreams and their interpretation, here, whether dreams represent the dialog with the subconscious or they refer to the divine revelation, as a supernatural approach, we will mostly rely on the biblical interpretation of dreams. By reading the language of dreams, interpreting their signs, symbols and their meanings, we intend to represent the space and function that oneiric discourse has in the literary work of MitrushKuteli, as an author of Albanian literary modernity.

‘Ëndrra në funksion të zbërthimit të vdekjes në veprën ‘’Aksidenti’’ të I. Kadaresë

Author(s): Klotilda Margjeka-Zalli / Language(s): Albanian Issue: 38.2/2019

The literary work of Ismail Kadare "The Accident" offers several reading ways in the function of dismounting the occurrence of death, throughout the evidences, but even through the fantastic element, and through the dream that ëill be the object of the short work. Build upon various interpretation variants, which is the technique of the author the dream as an inseparable part of the characters, plays an important role in the occurrence of death, in the accident of characters Besfort and Rovena. So our analysis will be detailed in the identification of the dream, its symbolism as a specific language of subconsciousness, subjected literary art, its role and its type in this ëork, being concentrated on the analysis of the text as a study method. After a detailed study of the characters, the effort of consciousness or unconsciousness, gives them fluctuation, ëhere the process of dreaming sometimes is ignored and sometimes is given importance, to give the occurrence not a small dimension and the connectivity of the events with each-other. A terminology which is rich in terms of the time of socialist realism, the figure of Stalin appears in a dream, like an archetype symbol. A particular issue will be devoted to the way of how the period of communism comes through the dream, knoëing as well the relationship of the author with it. One of the functions of the dream referring to C.G.Jung, is that it could predict situations before they happen. It is exactly this function that serves the event and that will get even the next issue in our work, in order to see the relationship of the characters with it. Also we will identify some "dream" expressions being invented from the author or from our popular culture, inherited in time, the dreaming process as a form of snoozing etc.

Средновековният скален манастир „Алботин“

Author(s): Vanya Pekova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 02/2020

Raz jeszcze o Paryżu Wokulskiego (u źródeł polskich rozpoznań własnej peryferyjności)

Author(s): Michał Kuziak / Language(s): Polish Issue: 6/2020

Rereading Bolesław Prus’s novel The Doll, Kuziak explores how the protagonist Wokulski experiences Paris. This perspective sheds light on the emergence of Poland’s marginal position in the nineteenth-century world system, where Paris was a centre of civilisation. Prus’s novel portrays the birth of the Poles’ Great Other in the nineteenth century – the European, notably the French, and it provides an analysis of the reasons of Poland’smarginality.

Smutek miasta/smutek w mieście. Koncepcja hüzün w prozie Orhana Pamuka

Author(s): Filip Ryba / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Ryba examines the notion of hüzün in Orhan Pamuk’s fiction with a focus on the historical and linguistic context. He draws on theories of affect as well as memory and postcolonial studies. His aim is to highlight the multidimensionality and functionality of the notionof hüzün, and to make its complexity accessible to Polish readers.

Językowe oraz pozawerbalne wyróżniki XIX-wiecznego savoir-vivre’u i rozmów salonowych w opowiadaniu Stefanii Ulanowskiej Babie lato

Author(s): Dorota Krystyna Rembiszewska / Language(s): Polish Issue: 20/2020

The article discusses linguistic and non-verbal features of 19th-century savoir-ivre. Babie lato [Indian Summer] by Stefania Ulanowska (1839–?), the source text under scrutiny, is a 21-page short story, which has most probably never come out in print. There are four conversation situations in the text: 1) a symmetrical setup (the interlocutors have equal social status and comparable pragmatic rank), 2) a symmetrical setup with asymmetrical features, related to the conversation between a man and a woman, 3) a less distanced asymmetrical setup, where the participants of the conversation are the mother and children, 4) a full asymmetric setup, in which the mistress of the house addresses the maid. The short story moreover features non-verbal etiquette features, such as a man tipping over his hat when he sees a woman and a man kissing a woman’s hand. The characteristics of etiquette observed in Babie lato are a supplement to the deliberations on savoir-vivre in the 19th century and confirm the changes that took place at that time in terms of courtesy in comparison with the old Polish period. They are also a testimony to the old culture of the nobility, transferred to bourgeoisie houses.

Tolkien a teologia

Author(s): Tomasz Garbol / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2020

The review of: 1) Piotr Anicet Gruszczyński: Problematyka zła w twórczości J.R.R. Tolkiena: Ocena w świetle teologii katolickiej, Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2018. Ss.320 2) Zob. S. Sawicki, Teologia literacka – teologia w literaturze – teologia literatury. Kilka uwag o terminach i metodzie, w: tenże, Wartość – Sacrum – Norwid 2. Szkice i studia aksjologicznoliterackie, Wydawnictwo KUL, Lublin 2007, s. 59-64. 3) Zob. tenże, O utworach religijnie podejrzanych, w: tenże, Z pogranicza literatury i religii. Szkice, Redakcja Wydawnictw KUL, Lublin 1979, s. 25-41.

Anuradha Roy in conversation with Mihaela Gligor

Author(s): Mihaela Gligor / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

All the Lives We Never Lived started with the idea of a boy who can enter pictures and live in their world – through his imagination. I wrote quite a few false starts with this boy and nothing seemed right. Then came my second visit for Bali, for the Ubud Writers Festival and a whole world slowly started taking shape at a museum there, looking at the paintings of Walter Spies. I discovered Tagore had met Spies during his travels; that Beryl de Zoete, who wrote a book with Spies, had come to India to write on dance.