Against the “Anthropocene Apathy” About the Rescue Potential of Postsecularism (on the Example of Works by the Romany Poetess Papusza)

Author(s): Anna Filipowicz / Language(s): English Issue: 7/2021

In this day and age, the ovewhelming hopelessness in the face of the anthropocentric paradigm makes thinking about the future of our planet constrained, while in turn reinforcing pesimism and helplessness. The foregoing refers also to the ecocritical humanities, which point to the need of conscious transformation aiming at the containement of the climate catastrophy. However, the said current in humanities requires an assistance from reality-changing tools that would respond to the social needs of the whole, sense, and spirituality, whilst remaining open to non-western religiosity patterns. It is especially worthwhile to keep it in mind upon studying post-secular thought, which marries the rational and the intuitive way of understanding reality.

Пейо Яворов в мемоарните текстове на Дора Габе – разрояване на наратива

Author(s): Teodora Kashilska / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5/2021

The article examines the construction of memory in the memoir world of Dora Gabe and the presence of Peyo Yavorov in it. The text follows the chronology of the poetess' memoirs and analyses three narratives about Peyo Yavorov – the “first teacher”, the man whom she knows and understands and lastly the lost Yavorov. The “first teacher” narrative occupies a central place in Dora Gabe's memoirs of the poet in the 1920s and 1930s and convincingly brings forward the figure of Dora Gabe herself – these texts outline the image of the poetess, building the foundations of her own biography. The other two narratives are most pronounced in Dora Gabe's texts in the 1950s, and through them the poetess became involved in the process of acquitting and rehabilitating Peyo Yavorov in the period after 1944.

Човекът във вълшебната приказка („Тримата братя и златната ябълка“, преразказана от Ангел Каралийчев)

Author(s): Ivelina Angelova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 5/2021

This article presents a lesson that seeks, explains and visualizes the world of fairy tales. The idea of its genesis, deeply connected with the myth, is clarified. The students' knowledge of the peculiarities of the fairy tale genre is strengthened. The problems and conflicts in the fairy tale “The Three Brothers and the Golden Apple”, specific to the folklore model of the world, are identified and compared with the personal experience of each person. The character system in the fairy tale is made meaningful through the behavior of the characters. A spatial idea of the world in the fairy tale and the way time flows in it is built, because something has happened somewhere and once.

On the Threshold: Gendered Spaces in Home, by Manju Kapur

Author(s): Elisabetta Marino / Language(s): English Issue: 26/2021

Starting from her first, award-winning novel, Difficult Daughters (1998), Manju Kapur has always chosen to focus her narratives on the controversial condition of women in the context of Indian patriarchal society. Moreover, her characters’ struggle to balance tradition and modernity, their attempts at reconciling the demands of their families and their own individual aspirations, have often been reflected in the tension between the spaces women are entitled to inhabit and those from which they are supposedly excluded. By employing the approach of close reading and critical analysis, this essay sets out to explore the way physical and metaphorical thresholds are trespassed in Kapur’s Home (2006). Therefore, family values symbolically identified with domestic spaces are challenged and transgressed to attain the freedom and self-fulfillment the characters long for.

Technology-prompted Crisis in the 22nd Century – Susan Greenfield’s 2121 – A Tale from the Next Century

Author(s): Andreia Irina Suciu,Mihaela Culea / Language(s): English Issue: 26/2021

The article focuses on an envisaged crisis of humanity in one hundred years’ time, as it is presented in the novel 2121 (2013) by English neuroscientist and writer Susan Greenfield. Greenfield transfers her scientific expertise and pours into the mould of a dystopian view of the future her knowledge of the way in which technology has already, and will, potentially, change people’s brains and the entire course of mankind. The novel, having received mixed reviews, is a “translation”, a transfer or a carrying forward into (the world and language of) fiction of her studies and convictions from her scientific research. The article explores the depicted crisis caused mainly by the excessive and irrational use of technology, with its consequences at individual and collective levels and various types of associated loss and impairment connected to the imagined crisis: loss of measure, loss of control, loss of emotion, loss of the ability to interconnect, loss of environmental equilibrium and connection with nature, loss of purpose, loss of the ability to form mental processes and, subsequently, loss of a sense of identity.

Natura ca Mijloc de Expresie A Câmpului Conceptual Semantic „Frumusețe”

Author(s): Gabriela Adriana Dodenciu / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 3-4/2020

The paper analyzes how English Romanticism gave birth to a poetic care that managed to convey strong feelings to readers. Romanticism has put its mark on the numerous fields of research, but also on the individuality of Man. It is a phenomenon that still has important topics and hypotheses to analyze. We will consider the beauty of their work, the way it was expressed, because it is precisely this concept that is the reference point of the romantic literary phenomenon. In the same way we will also focus on the connection between the author's meditation and the concept of beauty. The preoccupation of the romantics was to give birth to a beautiful eternal to adapt the requirements of the nearby societies in the continuation of the movement. Most of the time, we will see a beautiful relationship, with the ugly antithesis. This is possible in the romantics, because they did not see the opposite of the ugly, but a way of highlighting a unitary system from which the idea that they wanted to present as eloquently as possible came out, using any method of expressing the inner self. They often used contrasting associations, of the beautiful / ugly, finite / infinite, good / bad type. The place where the romantic writer places the action is specific to the romantic lyricism, a favorable place for creation, a place where all the elements form an idyllic frame. English Romanticism was a sort of start on the road to modernity, towards a new sense of aesthetics.

‘To Speak of Cattle Is to Speak of Man’: Anthroparchal Interactions in John Connell’s the Farmer’s Son

Author(s): Paul Mihai Paraschiv / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2021

“To Speak of Cattle is to Speak of Man”: Anthroparchal Interactions in John Connell’s The Farmer’s Son. The present paper intends to build a critique of contemporary farming practices, based on Erika Cudworth’s theory of “anthroparchy.” By exemplifying how anthroparchal interactions function in John Connell’s memoir, I will outline the becoming of a posthuman farmer that awakens certain sensibilities towards nonhuman animals, in ways that compel a rethinking of gendered relations, patriarchy, violence, and capitalist interests. The analysis provides a needed insight into recent developments in Irish rural farming, detailing the position of the human subject in relation to nonhuman otherness and describing some of the changes that need to be made regarding the power relations that are at work within patriarchal systems. To this extent, Cudworth’s theoretical framework and Connell’s memoir are proven to be contributing to the necessary restructuring of farming practices and of human-nonhuman interactions.

Octavia Butler’s Kindred: The Cultural Context of Production

Author(s): Marietta Kosma / Language(s): English Issue: 11/2021

Through Butler’s Kindred, numerous tensions are raised around the notions of accessibility, disability, equality and inclusion exposing the crisis of black futures. My analysis focuses on the way that disability informs Dana’s experiences in the context of slavery, her positioning in the contemporary discourse of neo-liberalism and her positioning in the prospective future. Very few scholars perceive Dana’s subjectivity as an actual state of being that carries value both materially as well as metaphorically. The materiality of disability has not constituted part of the larger discourse of the American slave system. Through rendering disability both figuratively and materially, I establish a connection between the past, the present and the future. The different figurations of space and time exposed through Dana’s time travelling help conceptualize her accessibility in different structures. Previous scholarship has been extensively focusing on the origin and legacy of trauma, inflicted on the black female body of the twentieth century, however, there has been too little, if any criticism in relation to the active construction of black female subjectivity, located at the level of the body. I wish to explore how spectacles of violence against black female bodies function in the wider political imagery of the twenty-first century. The physical and psychological displacement of Dana, as a black female body, exposes her traumatization and the difficulties she faces in order to reclaim her subjectivity in a society burdened by a history of violence and exploitation. Even though Kindred was written before the Black Lives Matter movement emerged, it could be analysed in a way that asserts the continuity of African-American trauma, the perpetuation of systematic racism in USA and the crisis of blackness in the future. Systematic violence threatens black women’s wholeness and renders their bodies at risk.

Editorial Foreword

Author(s): Silviu-Marian Miloiu / Language(s): English,Romanian Issue: 1/2021

The 13th volume of The Romanian Journal for Baltic and Nordic Studies reflects some of the research presented at the 12th International conference on Baltic and Nordic studies titled “Rethinking multiculturalism, multilingualism, and cultural diplomacy in Scandinavia and The Baltic Sea Region,” which will be held on May 27-28, 2021, under the auspices of the Romanian Association for Baltic and Nordic Studies. RethinkMulti-Kulti2021 was called to reflect on multiculturalism, multilingualism, and cultural diplomacy in Scandinavia and the Baltic Sea Region 10 years after German Chancellor Angela Merkel predicted the end of German multicultural society. Many politicians with Conservative leanings praised the confirmation that the half-century-cherished multi-kulti “utterly failed,” and far-right gurus interpreted it as an omen. Furthermore, Merkel’s track record as a committed democratic-minded politician, EU leader, and proponent of migrant integration has garnered near-universal support for this argument. Furthermore, in academia, Merkel’s assertion has never been adequately questioned, but rather taken for granted. Meanwhile, policies governing multiculturalism and multilingualism in the EU and EEA have been stuck in a rut, particularly in what Fareed Zakaria properly refers to as illiberal democracies.

Od redakcji

Author(s): Maciej Skowera,Marta Niewieczerzał / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Legendy warszawskie czytane na dystans. Mapowanie podań lokalnych w perspektywie geopoetyki i geografii literackiej

Author(s): Łukasz Bukowiecki / Language(s): Polish Issue: 1/2021

Words and images, literature and space, texts and a map, a museum and a city – these are the most important pairs of concepts that summarise the assump-tions and results of the research and publishing project of the Museum of Warsaw,Words and images, literature and space, texts and a map, a museum and a city – these are the most important pairs of concepts that summarise the assumptions and results of the research and publishing project of the Museum of Warsaw,the output of which is the anthology Legendy warszawskie [Legends of Warsaw], selected by Anna Marta Zdanowska, edited by Julia Odnous, and with graphic design and illustrations by Wojciech Pawliński, that was published in 2016 (English edition – 2020). The author of the article looks at Mapa legend warszawskich [Map of Warsaw Legends] included in the book and analyses what it shows in the context of research on the relations of territories, their graphic representations, and the accompanying text.

The Mythisation of the Holocaust

Author(s): Katarzyna Jerzak / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

The author of this review article critically discusses the book Dzieciństwo w la­biryncie getta. Recepcja mitu labiryntu w polskiej literaturze dziecięcej o Zagładzie [Childhood in the Labyrinth of the Ghetto: Reception of the Labyrinth Myth in Polish Children’s Literature about the Holocaust] by Krzysztof Rybak (2019). She examines the monograph in the context of, inter alia, the research already conducted in the field, literary works, architecture, memorials, the Holocaust victims’, survivors’, and witnesses’ testimonies, as well as in relation to the pos­sible symbolic links of the Shoah and the antiquity. The paper’s conclusion is that children’s literature can hardly prevent the mythisation of the Holocaust, but Rybak’s book proves beyond doubt the perseverance of myth. The banalisation, simplification, and trivialisation of the Shoah, as well as the issues of appropriateness and memory, are also important concepts that frame the author’s reflec­tions presented in this paper.

D’Amaurote à Dumocala : variations sur les rois en utopie

Author(s): François Rosset / Language(s): French Issue: 11/2021

After recalling the figure of Pantagruel, a grandson of the king of Utopia and king of the Dipsodes - which makes it possible to evoke some of the properties of utopia, and in particular that which consists of searching within utopia itself for filial links it maintains with previous texts - the discussion is narrowed down to the figure of the king in the tradition of utopia, with Sylvain Maréchal's Last Judgement of Kings serving as an example. Next, attention is directed more specifically to the figure of the king of Poland, a figure particularly suited to stimulate the political imagination of Europeans in the 18th century, and then to the person of Stanislas Leszczyński - the only sovereign to have written a utopia. He is the author of the short novel Entretien d’un Européan avec un insulaire du Royaume de Dumocala, which is both faithful to the narrative model it helps to perpetuate and devoid of any revolutionary intentions.

L’Abbaye de Thélème : une enclave soustraite au réel ou le paroxysme d’une société élitiste

Author(s): Matthieu Founeau / Language(s): French Issue: 11/2021

This article aims to analyze the Abbey of Thélème imagined by François Rabelais to get a clear idea about the initial utopian programme, by means of observing its shapes and limits. It will situate this work at an intersection between humanitarian values, contribution from More, spiritual crisis, and above all a pressing demand for renewal and novelty, resulting from societal and political criticism. It is from this opening statement that we will try to approach the structure, the project and the laws regulating and organizing this particular utopian society, before determining its limits. Attention will be paid to its construction, concrete and theoretical, in a parallel with the architecture of the convent Sainte-Marie de la Tourette designed by Le Corbusier. Thus, we will demonstrate how Rabelais’ linguistic games overstep the ideological project for the benefit of a new type of writing, complex and multifaceted. We will have to understand a lot of paradoxes which allow us to determine the importance of the literature beyond the initial utopian project.

Azor d’Aunillon : l’équivoque du langage dans un récit utopique de 1750

Author(s): Stanisław Świtlik / Language(s): French Issue: 11/2021

While included in Garnier’s collection, Azor, a little known work of Aunillon from 1750, does not follow the literary rules of most narrative utopias. However, the complex story presents critical thinking about the development of refined societies. The change which a mute community experiences on an island while learning to speak calls into question the future of this happy society, but no narrator’s commentary elaborates on this turning point in the utopia. In Azor, language becomes an ambiguous object which allows for the critical consideration of the steps necessary to access philosophical sophistication but also implicitly highlights problems associated with too hasty a progress. Through the narrative plot, the judgment on civilization reveals a subtle and skillful examination of hopes and challenges of the Enlightenment, articulated in a narrative utopia as in a laboratory of ideas. Aunillon's work is part of the debates of the mid-century by expressing a nuanced validation of civilization.

Дисертации

Author(s): Nikola Kazanski / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 43/2021

Defended Ph.D. theses in Bulgaria in the field of linguistics, literature, history, folklore, ethnography, and art studies

Научни форуми

Author(s): Emiliya Voleva / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 43/2021

Data about scientific events in the field of the humanities in Bulgaria in 2021

60 години българистика в Китай

Author(s): Chen Ying / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 43/2021

Катрин Мери Макробърт на 70 години

Author(s): Dilyana Radoslavova,Elissaveta Moussakova / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 43/2021

Йоханнес Райнхарт на 70 години

Author(s): Iskra Hristova Shomova,Margaret Dimitrova,Andrej Boyadzhiev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 43/2021