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Wittgenstein's idea "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world" inspires us to ask ourselves if the means of communication and the code intervene in the construction of our world. This is the premise from which we started to develop this paper, considering that a formal system and formalization (a term used in an extended sense) not only have the role of solving specific problems but also radically modify the epistemic universe - "epistema", (from the perspective of the object and the subject) in which manifests. It is emphasized the idea of formalization is used broadly. This required a definition of the term, developed in the paper's first part. After, we underline the importance of writing, analyzing Plato's myth of Theuth. To support our point of view, we refer to some examples of the "epistema" metamorphosis that have as their cause the changes of a formal system, in this case, writing. The example from this article is Hangeul writing. In the framework of the paper, we analyze four directions of the epistema change: communicational, axiological, aesthetic, and socialpolitical, pointing out how these changes occurred within the Korean writing system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first months of 2020, the whole world was affected by the restrictions caused by the authorities' attempts to stop the spread of SarsCov2 as far as possible. Initially, the most effective measure was quarantine, which could slow the spread of the virus. In Romania, the first case of Covid19 was confirmed on 23 February 2020, and after a period of hesitation, the national authorities imposed the quarantine on 15 March, i.e., a series of restrictions on the movement of persons and on participation in events involving more than eight persons. Obviously, the introduction of this special regime for the movement of persons affected all areas of social and economic life, including its vital branches, such as the industrial and educational activity. Of course, under these conditions, the first temptation of any ethnologist was to observe the transformations of the rhythms of life, practicing a kind of armchair ethnography and transforming into the observed "field" even their own home, their own life or the lives of those close to them, but also what came to them from the outside world via online. In contrast to these approaches, this paper studies several cases where, through contractual obligations, the ethnologist had to do the field in the classical sense of the term, i.e. to observe real (not virtual) communities, located far away (even geographically), and to participate in their social and cultural life. The constraints imposed by quarantine practically forced ethnological fieldwork to reinvent itself, making researchers reflect on the criteria for selecting their informants under the new conditions, on the manner of interacting with them, on the logistics involved in producing interviews and, last but not least, on the ethical implications of approaches of this kind. The remote field experiences of two projects were presented and analyzed: Educational and Networking Tools on Development of Authentic Performance for Professional Integration - PAN and Colecție digitală a patrimoniului alimentar românesc si transfer spre societate -- FOODie. Analyzing in particular the interviews conducted in the FOODie project, the paper highlights a number of advantages of remote fieldwork, such as: the possibility to overcome quarantine restrictions, the possibility to make a quality video recording, the openings of a collaborative ethnology. A number of difficulties of this type of remote research are also highlighted, such as: communication difficulties due to lack of direct interaction, internet signal fluctuation problems, difficulties in understanding some aspects due to ignorance of the informant's living space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to describe the Information Structure (IS) of Romanian negative statements by using an F0 contour interpretation at the cognitive level. The IS analysis of contours is based on a cognitive (pre-linguistic) model. The descriptions of IS partitions deduced from F0 contours are then related to the semantic aspects of the negation phenomenon: the phrase accent and the focus position of the new information element within the rheme part of sentence. Important prosodic characteristics are added to those presented in Dascălu-Jinga 2001 şi Dascălu-Jinga 1998 related to Romanian intonational contours of negative sentence utterances. The new aspect introduced by the paper in the F0 contour analysis is the cognitive IS model which interprets melodic forms of prosodic words as functional element marks. In section 2 the IS model at the cognitive level is presented by defining information unit, the two structural levels and nuclear accent rules. The model can describe a cognitive reality of information packaging within utterances that is different from the syntactic and semantic organization of sentences. In section 3 are presented 5 utterances of negative sentences. After their F0 contours partitioning, IS model-based descriptions are applied to the resulted partitions and they can explain how is implemented at the pragmatic level the semantic focus function of the constituent which is responsible from the non-realization of the action within negative sentence. The examples of negative sentences include cases where the negation particle bears only acoustic prominence (constituent negation) and others, where it also bears functional prominence at the cognitive and semantic IS level. In the latter case, the particle nu negates the whole sentence and it has a positive acoustical prominence (melodic peak) and a functional prominence at the cognitive and semantic level. The F0 contour analysis leads to the conclusion that focus event usually shares the same position with the nuclear element within one partition but there are cases when they have different positions. This is an argument to treat them as different structural aspects of utterances at the semantic level and at the information packaging level, respectively. We conclude that the paper is useful for students and linguist researchers who are interested to deepen the comprehension of the pragmatic realization of the negation phenomenon within Romanian utterances by identifying the IS partition hierarchy of utterances at the cognitive level, including local and global nuclear elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The gynocritical study of Anna Terék's latest book of poems, Dead Women (2017) is an analysis based on the outline of a subcultural framework of feminine experience. The string of poems is narrated by women in times of war, sickness, adultery, cruelty and aggression. The poems are told by women from an unconventional perspective. The traumas of the characters are persistent and cannot be overcome in a lifetime, thus they are "dealt with" after their death. This way Terék touches upon a key element of feminist criticism, "the art of dying". Suicide appears as a solution, as well as something natural and an act of free choice. Another topics that emerge in the poems are matrophobia, adultery, identity, patriarchal relations. Along with the intrinsic analysis of Terék's poetry, the paper also touches upon the ideology and history of development of the female literary tradition, biological determinism and limitations of gynocriticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current study, the author aims to continue the detailed analysis of the inherited Latin adjectives used adverbially in Romanian in order to highlight the lexical-semantic and functional features of the word adevăr 'really' in the ancient period, when it had different uses. The starting point for the analysis was some previous contributions, in whose pages aspects concerning adjectives with similar morphosyntactic behavior have been described, some of them, at that time, being presented sequentially, revealing the typological characteristics of the class and less the morphological or the phraseological (implicitly prepositional) variation of each lexical unit. The choice of this adverbial adjective as the main topic of the current analysis is also explained by the fact that, in ancient texts, its number of occurrences was relatively significant because it was often found in the structure of adverbial phraseological units. For a proper interpretation, the author uses a corpus of ancient language (SOR Corpus), which facilitates an objective analysis of language facts. It also refers to similar studies and dictionaries of Romance languages to show the similarities between them, more exactly similar uses, confirming the unity of the Neolatin idioms regarding the adverbials. In this paper, the author will prioritise several perspectives: the etymological, the Romance, the morphological, the structural and the syntactic. The main aim is to illustrate the dynamics of this adverb in the ancient language, which was, naturally, much more striking than nowadays. This analysis will undoubtedly make it possible to identify certain constants and relate them to other adverbial adjectives in order to confirm or refute some trends in the language or to seek the fixing of some structures or the generalization of some particular phraseological variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses how written corrective feedback was provided during the online teaching of Romanian as a foreign language at an Italian university in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. The retrospective analysis focuses on the most common types of mistakes identified in the students' homework and on the strategies applied by the author as the lecturer for Romanian language in the revision of the homework. The first part of the research aimed to identify and classify the errors appearing in the students' texts, investigating the possible causes of the errors. The findings revealed that grammar errors were made more frequently by the students at beginner level, while lexical errors were made by students at an intermediate or advanced level of knowledge. Results also show that the teacher tended to use various types of corrective feedback, depending on the error type that was identified. The teacher's feedback took different forms, ranging from simple error correction to extended comments and the proposal of alternative solutions. Moreover, the corrective feedback was offered directly for beginner students, while the corrections tended to be hedged when addressing advanced students, in order to avoid their discouragement. The students found the teacher's feedback useful and even used the homework as a means to signal their difficulties with learning and ask for help. These results contradict previous research claiming that effective feedback involved direct indications using the imperative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to analyse from a pragmalinguistic point of view the promise and the oath as discursive genres located at the individual level of language. We take into consideration the mechanisms by which they are constituted and the functions they update in communication. To promise and to swear are two performative verbs with semantic repercussions on the success or failure of communication. They not only have a simple role to play in "how to do things with words", but they also lead the way in fulfilling the commitments that, once verbalized, become part of the world around them. The violation of promises and oaths "flagellates" the language regarding the two verbs mentioned above because they announce exactly this judgement: the transformation of language into an act of creation. The consequences of non-compliance with this moral law may also affect the receiver: whoever commits perjury is rejected by the community they used to belong to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an important personality of Romanian classical philology. Professor Mihaela Paraschiv is a complex personality that combines linguistic rigor with a special literary sensibility. The article lists all the fields in which this professor from the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi asserted herself. I emphasize that she made important contributions of a linguistic nature, she analyzed important aspects of ancient literary works and of Italian and Romanian humanism and made numerous translations from ancient Greek and Latin for the first time in Romanian. At the same time, she carried out an exceptional didactic activity, some of her former students becoming personalities in the field of classical philology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the various forms of kitsch - aesthetic kitsch, social kitsch, tourist kitsch and kitsch-world - in the theoretical and poetic texts of A.E. Baconsky. His essays on the new poetic paradigm interrogate the forms of mimetic kitsch, seen as part of an extensive metamorphic process of aesthetic thinking throughout the '50s-'60s. The quest for a new aesthetic paradigm challenges the artistic hierarchies of modernity and puts forward unsettling simulations. In addition, Baconsky's travel notes in the Western world, fallen prey to technology and consumerism, bring to the fore alienating forms of social kitsch. The writer describes the tourist kitsch, followed by the degradation of artistic objects, all summarizing a whole tradition of souvenirs and memorabilia. Moreover, his poetic texts from Corabia lui Sebastian interrogatively stage a reified space where objects look more alive than human beings, while weak individuals read the signs of an apocalyptic world. The literature itself is mechanized and written language becomes the compressed matter of kitsch collage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the report the Secretary General Xi Jinping delivered at the 19th Party Congress, the paper analyzes the relation between traditional culture and socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era. Since socialism with Chinese characteristics has always been discursively related to the Chinese tradition and political speeches abound in references to tradition, we intend to find out what role tradition plays in the "new era" and what makes it important. The paper discusses the relation between the guiding Marxist ideology and tradition and looks at how the importance of tradition is explained to the masses by employing ritualistic formulae. The analysis is based on the elite political discourse and subsequent academic discourse acting as commentaries to the political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors' aim was to revisit a few aspects, as well as some types of observations concerning the phenomenon of massive penetration of the Anglo-American lexicon into Romanian, which were also addressed in some of their previous papers. In this article, emphasis is placed on the reality of translation, as a vehicle, and a linguistic and cultural mechanism by means of which such Anglicisms are taken over. The authors did not intend to insist on the normative perspective, which they dealt with only in a collateral manner, as a matter of principle. Instead, a perspective on the strategies of translation (cf. L. Venuti) was addressed, which can be subsumed into the opposition between domestication and foreignization - in keeping with which the penetration of many "barbarisms" in Romanian (with results that are more than evident in the Englished neologistic vocabulary used in thousands of texts, especially in the sphere of the media and in the webosphere) can be assimilated with the latter option - i.e. it can be (also) considered a matter of strategy, thus a conscious choice. Numerous examples were provided, excerpted from the authors' remarks and notes over the years, based on corpora consisting of own selections from various linguistic material, while, in parallel, it was argued that, as often as not, these results unfortunately prove to be (also - or especially) a matter of competence. In other words, it is ignorance that urges the (superficial, hasty or poorly trained) translator to provide versions that are simply wrong - at least in terms of the linguistic standards or norms in force -, many of them representing cases of semantic ambiguity, nay even involuntary humor -, or else real "howlers". Despite the general belief that language standardization should enjoy a tolerance of a cultural, and also human type, indiscriminately and unwisely introducing some neologisms which prove to be, after all, mere barbarisms, is tantamount to speaking and writing with words that actually do not (yet) exist in our language. Of course, the fact, which can be easily seen, that the linguistic sensitivity of the average Romanian speaker has declined to a great extent is worrying - and therefore many quite recent Anglicisms arising through loan translation are virtually accepted unreservedly. We believe that the illustrations provided in this paper will be likely to give a rather detailed, though naturally limited, picture of the role of translation (not necessarily literary translation - and often not admitted as such), within the complex and intense process, manifested especially in recent decades, amounting to enriching Romanian both lexically and semantically, based on Anglo-American sources, in the wider context of the growing linguistic and cultural globalization in today's world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The introduction of culture and civilization elements in the process of learning Romanian as a foreign language is still lacking and controversial. Either the course support is not conceived from a cultural perspective that is ample enough - the theory behind this probably being that the access to a foreign culture is impossible as long as the linguistic barrier persists, or the „modern identity complex", characteristic to the 19th and 20st centuries makes the presentation of the Romanian culture to ignore the anthropological, behavioral, daily, lived culture and lingers in the area of the national canon, of its personalities and monuments, that are considered to be, on a local level, to be representative. This paper presents the arguments and the ways for understanding language as a binomial object of teaching and learning, made up from an idiom and a culture, on all levels, starting from the beginner and up to the advanced level. We follow the development of this idea in the field of teaching French as a foreign language, starting with the 1970s and offer the examples of the manuals, teaching materials and curriculum programs for the French language, culture and civilization. Teaching the Romanian language, culture and civilization needs to reach the same standards. This paper does not only reflect upon the methodological orientation, but also on gradual contents and the ethos that might consolidate the specialized Romanian culture and civilization courses for foreigners. The desire to learn a foreign language does not only mean, in a restrictive sense, mastering grammar and vocabulary, but also the capacity to sink into a new culture, discovering new ways of understanding and acting, acquiring a secondary identity and an elective homeland, the consciousness of an enhanced, more informed and vivid presence in the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent reflections on the return of the aesthetics (Michael Bérubé, Vincent Jouve) have triggered debates in French and American cultural contexts on the need to re-evaluate the literary according to a set of contingent criteria. The paper investigates the impact of these theoretical debates on literary studies in the post-2000 period, by questioning the concept of value in the field of postcolonial studies (concerned with the relation between high and low culture), new reception theories (preoccupied with the revival of the „aesthetic emotion") and the ideology of literature. On the one hand, the article Debates on Literary Value in Contemporary Theory shows that postcolonial studies have never ceased to functionalize value principles. Recent American theorists (Martha Nussbaum, Rita Felski) have maintained the utility of the literary work by redefining the readers' interaction with the literary work. The concepts of selfidentification or self-problematization become central in the postcolonial axiology. On the other hand, French theorists openly state the conjunction of aesthetics with other disciplines like sociology or cognitive psychology (Jean-Marie Schaeffer, Yves Citton). The paper holds that the extension of the notion of „aesthetic experience" (Marielle Macé) over domains of experience unacknowledged by the tradition of literary studies („democratic experience" or „cognitive experience") is part of the same attempt to redefine literary value on new theoretical grounds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze a recent translation into French of some of the poems written by the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu: Poeme/Poèmes, published in 2018 by Muzeul Literaturii Române Publishing House. The translation is signed by Liliana Cora Foşalău. In the first part of the study we examine some critical opinions concerning previous translations into French of Eminescu's poetry. In the second part we discuss the translator's note included in this new edition. The third and last part of the paper is represented by the critical assessment of the translation that represents the main item of the corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents Sanda Golopenția's professional paths in relation to the main theoretical and methodological perspectives explored by the Brown University professor during her remarkable career. Attracted early on to foreign languages both within her family and at school, Golopenția became a linguist and a folklorist and navigated easily between the two disciplines. During the 1960s and 1970s, fieldwork undertaken in various rural Romanian regions aroused an interest in language dynamics, conversational memory, and the nature of speaker creativity in linguistics innovation. The village of Breb in Maramureș becomes the locus amoenus of her anthropological fieldwork, where Golopenția discovers and conceptualizes the speech acts of a close-knit community. In the field of linguistics, the professor of French Studies is drawn to the theory of structural linguistics, generative grammar, and pragmatics, while also analysing folklore texts and literary works with the help of linguistic tools. Within folkloristics, she is mostly interested in the study of charms and charming from a general anthropological and pragmatic point of view, highlighting the special type of intelligence that folk magic reveals. One of the main concepts that she proposes, intermemory – grounded in the conversational histories of the people of Breb – accurately defines many of her intellectual interests and also the deep structure of the content of her edited works. In Romanian sociology, Golopenția is appreciated for publishing the books of her parents, Anton Golopenția and Ștefania Cristescu – two principal members of the Sociological School that was led by D. Gusti, thereby recovering a lost connection with interwar sociology. Finally, the author describes her encounter with the works of Sanda Golopenția, as well as a personal meeting with the esteemed professor. Given the occasion of this paper – the celebration of Golopenția's 80th birthday – the text is a general appreciation of her many contributions to Romanian culture, which could be defined appropriately in terms of what Claude Levi-Strauss called a "humanist anthropology". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent works on spatiality have proven that space is not a fixed and unchangeable but rather a fluid and mobile reality. This relativity of space has taken out space from the auspices of Kantian apriorism and the philosophy of positivism and signalled that it is a controversial juxtaposition of the real and the fictional, of perception and representation, of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. Michel de Certeau assertes that space has to be understood as a "spatial practice", meaning that it is modulated by the spatial representations of the dweller. That points to the utility and practicability of space as opposed to a dominant supersaturated space that speaks in local laws. The "spatial practice" dilutes the frontiers and communicates to other spaces, from which results the transgressive quality of space. Having this spatial theory as a starter point, this paper points out the significance of storytelling as a marker for space. As de Certeau states out, storytelling invents space, because it has no hermeneutical encoding and only may be understood as a "making-do" process which says what it says without additional meaning. The focus of this paper is to analyze the stories of two Moldavian authors, Mihail Sadoveanu and Al. O. Teodoreanu. Storytelling becomes for the two writers a way to relocate the periphery into the center as Moldova has lost its political and cultural importance towards the capital Bucharest. Storytelling becomes marginality, a genius loci that carves a local specificity. The territory is mapped in fictional stories in which memory works as a catalyzer. De Certeau thinks that memory is the connection between storytelling and space because it modifies and constructs space according to the laws of the narrative. Memory is indeed an important issue in the stories picked up for analysis: Moldova becomes a fictional space for Sadoveanu and Al. O. Teodoreanu, the territory of passed glorious rulers, decadent boyars and archaic myths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to pay homage at the aniversary of Sanda Golopenția- Eretescu, Professor Emeritus at the Department of French Studies, Brown University of Providence USA, a writer, linguist, semiotician, ethnologist and translator. We focus on her professional activity, especially on papers that were published in translation into the Hungarian language in Romania and Hungary. In the present article I discuss translations of her work that were published in Hungarian as well as reviews published in Hungarian volumes and journals that appeared at the height of Romanian structuralism, a period when Hungarian philologists showed a special interest towards the research carried by Sanda Golopenția in the 1960's and 1970's, i.e. the period before she left communist Romania. I searched for proof and results of the Hungarian – Romanian co-operation and of the attention paid by Hungarian critics, whether they knew Romanian or not, towards the Romanian theoretical and critical literary phenomenon from that period. I revealed especially the cooperation between Sanda Golopenția-Eretescu and the Hungarian ethno-semiotician Vilmos Voigt and the prestigious Hungarian journal "Etnographia", as well as that between her and outstanding personalities of Hungarian philology in Romania: Gáspár Miklós Tamás, Zoltán Szabó, Olga Murvai. After Sanda Golopenția-Eretescu left Romania in 1980, neither the Hungarian publications, nor the Romanian journals showed any interest in her activity. However, the notes, reviews, translations she wrote during the two decades in which she focused on structuralism and semiotics, either in relation with literature and linguistics, or with the research of folklore were known in the Hungarian cultural environment. Adding to the hundreds of references from her professional bibliography previous to her exile from her native country; they offer a perspective on the intellectual collaboration between Romanian and Hungarian specialists in the field from a period of – apparent – political detente during the communist era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of how and how much of the Romanian folk traditions related to New Year's Eve celebration have been transmitted from the last century to the present days in some Moldavian villages from the Eastern part of the country. It brings into discussion the specific alterations induced by communist cultural politics during the second half of the twentieth century, among which the most relevant for the ethnographic field seems to be the establishment of official festivals such as Cântarea României, comprising bits and pieces of popular rituals, reshaped by the former political regime according to its ideological criteria. In order to evaluate the present situation, in 2015 I conducted a field research in Țibănești and the surrounding villages in Iași county. There are two basic approaches in ethnographic research: studying the literature previously written on a particular topic, and backing it with specific fieldwork. This paper reflects the sequential use of both methods, which enables the results of one approach to respond in a better understanding of the other. Masque carolling and offering symbolic, as well as proper gifts on New Year's Eve – a custom most germane to traditional life in small communities – represent the main focus of the first part of my paper. Romanian ethnology has identified five traditional ways of carolling, of which masque carolling seems to be the most ancient. Romanian term colinda means both the custom of wandering through the village on festive occasions such as Easter, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve or individual celebrations, in order to offer gifts and propitious wishes, and the songs sung on Christmas Eve by children or/and adults who go from one house to another bringing the good news of Nativity or awakening various mythological elements in the memory of the community. On the one hand, the continuity of such practices is guaranteed by the long-term mechanisms of tradition. On the other hand, communist authorities have interfered by trying to recreate the folklore and the popular culture according to their ideological criteria. Thus, a new series of (official) celebration emerged, aimed at replacing the old, untamed, and seemingly "irrational" popular ones. Official festivals turned peasants into stage performers. Could those peasants have regained their ancient heritage by now, after decades of ideological forced compliance? Applying this conceptual framework, I expected to find on the ethnographic field the results of merging the two sets of practices. Indeed, the celebration of New Year's Eve started in 2015 at Țibănești as an official contest among peasant companies delivering a stage performance. Then, once the winners had been declared and rewarded by the local authorities, the "performers" got off the stage and gathered at the local pub, which proved to be a real centre of community festive life. The atmosphere changed into that of an authentic popular feast, with people carousing and getting ready for the next part of the celebration, which was masque carolling through the village. The masque troupe is locally called Capra (The Goat). It is an assembly of dancers and instrument players who perform folk dances and drama, with the aim of symbolically putting an end to the ancient year and starting over a new one, which is meant to be perfect in every aspect of community and individual life. The troupes go from one house to another, wearing the Capra (Goat) mascoide, along with some heavy, furry masques such as the ones called Moșnegii (Old Men), ritual attires such as Ursarul (the Bear Master), grotesque ones, such as Țiganca (The Gipsy Woman, always performed by a man) or frightening ones, such as Lupul (the Wolf) and Moartea (Death). This paper contains the first part of the description of the present ritual New Year's Eve masque carolling in Țibănești (Iași county) and some hypotheses on the dynamics of the phenomenon. The topic will be continued in a future article, where the second part of the description and the conclusions will be delivered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering the aesthetic canon as a cultural construct or process that involves the whole cultural field, the concept is revisited nowadays in the spirit of World Literature theories. In this sense, there could be seen a rehabilitation of noncanonical genres or the circulation of values in the transnational space in order to cartography the (inter)national canon(s). The aim of this paper is to analyse a specific scene from the well-known Lewis Carroll novel Alice in Wonderland (translated into Romanian) from this premises: the instable place in the frames of noncanonical genres or categories and the relationships between literary prizes and the mechanism of canonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2018, a small Akathistos book was presented to me in Paris, printed in Arabic, with Arabic type, with no title page. The owner, a Western antiquary, had no information on the date and place of its printing. Having surveyed the volume for one hour and, later, having at my disposal a few photographed pages, I drew some conclusions from my initial research of this unique book. They led to some potential answers to the many questions connected to its origin and open new paths for the research of the unsolved mysteries that surround it. The book illustration, most of all, offers some clues on the place of printing and the persons who could have been involved in this endeavor. All these elements suggest a direct connection with a press of the Romanian lands, either the one at the Three Hierarchs Monastery in Jassy, or the emerging press at the Monastery of Saint Spyridon in Bucharest. To properly understand the historical background of Arabic printing in the East, several relevant figures and their printing achievements are briefly discussed: Antim the Iberian, Athanasios Dabbās, and Patriarch Sylvester of Antioch. This paper presents the information collected so far in connection with this Arabic Akathistos, and the unknown elements that the on-going research will survey as part of the tasks within the TYPARABIC project that I am coordinating at the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artistic testament and opus magnum of the visionary genius Isaac Leib Peretz (1852– 1915), the Yiddish dramatic masterpiece A Night in the Old Marketplace (“Bay nakht afn altn mark”, 1907, Warsaw) subtly inserts a praiseworthy innovation in the polychrome fabric of European culture: Mitzvah Tantz Makaber or the Danse Macabre of the Commandment. Reinvented as the secondary hypostasis of the Hasidic Danse Macabre, it symbolises a joyfully animated interval of symbiotic sequences (Life–Death–Wisdom). Despite its lugubrious atmosphere, this ephemeral interstice of reviviscency opportunely enlivens the story cleverly constructed by the author. Lauded as the ‘Polish Pan’ of Yiddish literature, Peretz ingeniously interweaves hilarious dialogue, grotesque details, and traditional Jewish spirituality to convey a nuanced message, the final composition ostensibly outlining an elaborate interplay of ludic allegory and profound wisdom. Opting for a holistic approach, my analysis will cover the following essential coordinates: the emergence of the sinister Danse Macabre in the European cultural climate (a medieval allegory preceded by the poematic monologue Vado Mori and The Tale of the Three Living and the Three Dead), superseded by its gradual enrooting into a Jewish context (via the composite cultural medium of ecstatic dance, the archetypal ensemble of the Trickster, and the medieval Speculum tradition), being ultimately reinvented as the Mitzvah Tantz Makaber by the visionary Peretz (his eminently Jewish choreography employs traditional Ashkenazi motifs and extolls Hasidic values). The actual examination of the Danse Macabre of the Commandment, reimagined as the main subcategory of the Hasidic Danse Macabre, will focus on a set of three fundamental phases: the unique way in which Peretz textually illustrates this innovation, the symbolism behind its literary form, and the powerful message conveyed by the parable. In current international academia, the Mitzvah Tantz Makaber allegory needs proper identification and examination. Further lacking an autochthonous translation, the Peretzian dramaturgy remains virtually unknown to the public in Romania. Performed exclusively in Yiddish, the superlative play A Night in the Old Marketplace underwent only two productions on the Bucharest theatre stage (in 1930 and 1970). Consequently, the present paper endeavours to remedy a noteworthy hiatus by examining the outstanding literary innovation of the Danse Macabre of the Commandment as an auxiliary hypostasis of the Hasidic Danse Macabre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No other phenomenon has affected the natural course of life of the entire planet since World War II until the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to implementing the rules generated by the state of emergency or by the state of alert, the citizens are seeking parallel solutions, that function as a refuge, where they can withdraw from fear. Being out of control, this feeling can irreparably paralyse rational thinking. Natively endowed with a very well-developed sense of humour, our compatriots found an opportunity to turn it to account by using their ingenuity. They created a rich inventory of comic texts, which would sweeten the fear of the unfriendly profile of this coronavirus. In this paper we refer to a special type of urban folk literature, generated, as previously stated, by physical isolation at home, but which occurred simultaneously with the exit from latency of a spirit which is thirsty for figment. To be more specific, we analyzed some of the jokes that have circulated on various communication channels (especially electronic ones) and whose invariant theme is the human existence during the epidemic, captured in all its fundamental aspects. A condition for the successful communication of a joke is placing the interlocutors in a familiar context of immediate conceptions, interests and aspirations, which means that both the speaker and the recipient benefit from a common background. On the one hand, we tried to identify the semantic meaning of the texts we took into consideration, and on the other hand, we studied how we are led, "activated" to the pragmatic meaning of the statement through latent, implicit content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies in Romanian language are getting more and more appealing to students all over the globe. The learning and training opportunities in equally varied, and exciting fields, both undergraduate and postgraduate levels in our country, have led in the recent years to a significant and steady increase of the number of students enrolled in the groups of Preparatory year of the Romanian language for foreign citizens. Therefore, students from the European continent (UK, Greece, North Macedonia) along with students from other parts of the world (Cuba, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Algeria, Jordan, Afghanistan, Syria, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, Congo, Kenya etc.) showed their interest in the program offered by the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. The present paper intends to tackle, in a non-exhaustive manner, some grammatical notions of Romanian language as foreign language found at A1-A2 levels, from the program's first semester, and more than that some grammar difficulties encountered during the process of teaching and learning all these. We wish to refer mostly to noun (articulated or not), verb and personal pronoun, insisting on those aspects which are unclear or more complicated owing to the irregular inflectional character identifiable in more inflective lexical-grammatical classes, irregularities that are at times quite difficult to understand by foreigners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To set out with the aim of performing an exercise of reflection on the topic of the contemporary rural human implies a double deconstruction. The first is triggered by the assumption of the rural human's existence as an identifiable and analysable character in the field of thinking and representation. Ranging from symbolic valorisation to the simple deictic gesture, the existence of the rural human cannot be subjected to understanding unless it undergoes a deconstruction exercise. On the other side, a second deconstruction is generated by a positioning issue in the critical field: to what extent are we still contemporary with the idea of rural human in the peasant sense of country life? Further, which are the update conditions of rurality in terms of roles and profiles that may set a so-called common place of the rural human? Once these two deconstructions have been operated, other two interrogative lines emerge as the result of our interpretative effort for reconfiguring a possible discourse on the contemporary rural human. First, it is necessary to understand if reconfiguring the contemporary rural human makes the subject of an update matter of a rural anthropology. And, particularly here, we need to walk very carefully since such a project oscillates between a recovery mission (especially of the rural tradition) and a reinvesting activity (modernizing the rural life in the context of globalization). Secondly, we should avoid placing this type of reconstruction in the urban centrist discourse within the urban-rural relationship. The rural-urban symbolic and spatial continuum is not defined by the antinomic accents of the urban-rural relationship, and, under no circumstances, involves a hierarchy. We need a different approach and understanding of the rurality, rural fact, and rural human in this urban-rural continuum. Which are our speculative resources necessary for such an endeavour? First, we need to identify the mental frameworks we use for representing the rural human. The limits ideologically drawn for understanding and perceiving the rural human. Six of these limits, the most relevant ones, are being discussed in this paper. Their relevance is given by their symbolic and ideological effects and their power of structuring the representations and discourses about the contemporary rural human. It concerns the rural-urban relationship, the rural categories (peri urban, medium, and deep rural), the difference between community and association, the rural human's bond with the agricultural activities, new ruralism, and the relationship between peasant and rural human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning from the starting point that trauma - a phenomenon with many possible implications, which permitted interdisciplinary approaches - is defined through its nonsymbolized character (Julian Wolfreys), this paper proposes a critical analysis of Ștefan Baștovoi's novel, Rabbits Don't Die, with the premise that language is an expression of trauma in this piece of literature which reconstitutes a totalitarian world. In this way, this study investigates the traumatic experience of childhood in communism, identifiable in the novel on three distinct levels in this epic discourse. The first level shapes the external reality and is centered around the idea of school, an institution responsible for the formation of the new man, while the second level deals with the interior drama of the formative years of the child, who loses the fight with the system, as well as himself, missing his destiny of the 'hero-pioneer' and, without the possibility of undoing the ideology, cannot assimilate it, which proves to be a traumatic experience. Consequently, the third level acts a way of exorcism of this permanently painful experience, writing being a way of sublimating the trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the “Greek” (videlicet Aromanian) trading houses' archives as a paradigmatic sample, this paper advocates for the proper physical organisation of the archival material specific to old microeconomic entities, and for exorcising the traps set by collections. In order to dismantle the resistances that dictate maintaining these archives in a deficient statu quo, from the perspective of both scientific valorisation (constrained by the graeca non leguntur palaeographic obstacle) and archival treatment (marked by the antagonistic pairs: trading houses versus personal/family archival fonds, accounting books versus manuscripts, archival fonds versus collections), the paper presents the current state of the art and the archival research methodologies (which are not spared, in their turn, from vicious touches), along with successfully employed or failed archival steps, objectives, methods, principles, and remedies. The virtual documentary reassembly ‒ a solution that is useful for research, albeit a compromise one ‒ is displayed in the “Annexes”, by relocating the accounting books into their matrix-fonds and coalescing the series of archives of the Euro-Balkan trading houses that operated in the Romanian territories during the XVIIth ‒ XIXth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the question of how and how much of the Romanian folk traditions related to New Yearʼs Eve celebration have been transmitted from the last century to the present days in some Moldavian villages from the Eastern part of the country. It brings into discussion the specific alterations induced by communist cultural politics during the second half of the twentieth century, among which the most relevant for the ethnographic field seems to be the establishment of official festivals such as Cântarea României, comprising bits and pieces of popular rituals, reshaped by the former political regime according to its ideological criteria. In order to evaluate the present situation, in 2015 I conducted a field research in Țibănești and the surrounding villages in Iași county. There are two basic approaches in ethnographic research: studying the literature previously written on a particular topic, and backing it with specific fieldwork. This paper reflects the sequential use of both methods, which enables the results of one approach to respond in a better understanding of the other. Masque carolling and offering symbolic, as well as proper gifts on New Yearʼs Eve – a custom most germane to traditional life in small communities – represent the main focus of the first part of my paper. Romanian ethnology has identified five traditional ways of carolling, of which masque carolling seems to be the most ancient. Romanian term colinda means both the custom of wandering through the village on festive occasions such as Easter, Christmas Eve, New Yearʼs Eve or individual celebrations, in order to offer gifts and propitious wishes, and the songs sung on Christmas Eve by children or/and adults who go from one house to another bringing the good news of Nativity or awakening various mythological elements in the memory of the community. On the one hand, the continuity of such practices is guaranteed by the long-term mechanisms of tradition. On the other hand, communist authorities have interfered by trying to recreate the folklore and the popular culture according to their ideological criteria. Thus, a new series of (official) celebration emerged, aimed at replacing the old, untamed, and seemingly “irrational” popular ones. Official festivals turned peasants into stage performers. Could those peasants have regained their ancient heritage by now, after decades of ideological forced compliance? Applying this conceptual framework, I expected to find on the ethnographic field the results of merging the two sets of practices. Indeed, the celebration of New Yearʼs Eve started in 2015 at Țibănești as an official contest among peasant companies delivering a stage performance. Then, once the winners had been declared and rewarded by the local authorities, the “performers” got off the stage and gathered at the local pub, which proved to be a real centre of community festive life. The atmosphere changed into that of an authentic popular feast, with people carousing and getting ready for the next part of the celebration, which was masque carolling through the village. The masque troupe is locally called Capra (The Goat). It is an assembly of dancers and instrument players who perform folk dances and drama, with the aim of symbolically putting an end to the ancient year and starting over a new one, which is meant to be perfect in every aspect of community and individual life. The troupes go from one house to another, wearing the Capra (Goat) mascoide, along with some heavy, furry masques such as the ones called Moșnegii (Old Men), ritual attires such as Ursarul (the Bear Master), grotesque ones, such as Țiganca (The Gipsy Woman, always performed by a man) or frightening ones, such as Lupul (the Wolf) and Moartea (Death). This paper contains the first part of the description of the present ritual New Yearʼs Eve masque carolling in Țibănești (Iași county) and some hypotheses on the dynamics of the phenomenon. The topic will be continued in a future article, where the second part of the description and the conclusions will be delivered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the "Greek" (videlicet Aromanian) trading houses' archives as a paradigmatic sample, this paper advocates for the proper physical organisation of the archival material specific to old microeconomic entities, and for exorcising the traps set by collections. In order to dismantle the resistances that dictate maintaining these archives in a deficient statu quo, from the perspective of both scientific valorisation (constrained by the graeca non leguntur palaeographic obstacle) and archival treatment (marked by the antagonistic pairs: trading houses versus personal/family archival fonds, accounting books versus manuscripts, archival fonds versus collections), the paper presents the current state of the art and the archival research methodologies (which are not spared, in their turn, from vicious touches), along with successfully employed or failed archival steps, objectives, methods, principles, and remedies. The virtual documentary reassembly? a solution that is useful for research, albeit a compromise one - is displayed in the "Annexes", by relocating the accounting books into their matrix-fonds and coalescing the series of archives of the Euro-Balkan trading houses that operated in the Romanian territories during the XVIIth - XIXth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to portray the “Greek” merchant by elucidating the confidential aspects of his affairs (basically related to money and merchandise), starting the investigation from the virtues and emotions previously resulted, while exploiting, as storage media for any such information, the Greek documentary sources (the accounting books and acts and the commercial correspondence within the remaining archival fonds), as well as data from medieval juridical literature (mostly drawn up in Latin), this paper analyzes the dimensions of the secretiveness that pervades the practical and scriptural usages specific to the old medieval mercantile humanity in the Euro-Balkan region (XVth – mid-XIXth century). Generously illustrated with inedited fragments from documents (also including fifteen photoreproductions), the study aims at unifying the coordinates – communication, scriptural act, archivology – that clarify the extent to which the commercial archives testify to the secretive obsessions and compulsions of the merchants, especially the “Greek" ones, and of those who have inspired their customs. The Greek documents within the fonds of Aromanian trading houses and companies attest encoding reflexes for messages, contexts and names belonging to the entrepreneurs involved in the Euro-Balkan trade. The analysis of such communication methods has been structured on an array of mercantile risks that impose precautionary measures: economic and political espionage, Arcana Artis, great businesses, money, travelling, characterizations and recommendations, loan, trials, the “economy of secrets”. Cryptic writings, forged words and the use of pseudonyms and nicknames ‒ beyond being major palaeographic hindrances ‒ represent scriptural practices that conceal commercial realia (prohibited goods, forbidden currencies, hidden fees and profits, loans, favors, etc.). The regulatory instruments of medieval bookkeeping disclose the theoretical vision of the epoch (the one that has generated the historiographic concept of the “economy of secrets”) regarding the range of merchants’ mystical consuetudes ‒ starting from protecting the correspondence, keeping secret records, concealing the archives ‒, in the interest of debating mainly the excessive prudence displayed towards the juridical requesting of these private archives. A certain discretion reveals itself as one of the defining features of the bookkeepers; in the spirit of the professional secrecy, so sacredly guarded by the medieval guilds (Arcana Artis) and even more so by the merchants’ branch, this discretion occults the methodology of the accounting books and, consequently, the very “art” of counting and justifying the flow of money. In conclusion, after outlining these levels of mercantile secretiveness, by means of stepping, then, further into the family secretiveness (the trade house and firm correspond to the founding social entity), the research leads will be possible to be followed in order to disclose the personal categories of informations that prove to be sensitive inside the “Greek” merchants network and to create echoes in their social norms and emotions: blood ties, affinities or dissolutions, psychomental medical history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as a starting point some of my previous researches (Preda Bodoc 2015 and Preda Bodoc, Ardeleanu Gomoescu 2016), the present paper represents a small contribution to the current diachronic research by analyzing all the complex sentences in which cum was involved either as a simple connector, or as an element of a compound. So, based on a corpus of Old Romanian texts, covering the period 1500-1640, the primary objective of the article is to bring evidence for the multifunctional status of the simple sentence connective cum ‘that/as’ (used as a complementizer, a relative, a relative-interrogative, or as a subordinator), and also for the heterogeneity of the structures constructed with this element (complex complementizers: cum că ‘that’, cum să ‘so that’, and prepositional structures: de cum ‘about how’, pe cum/precum ‘that/as’, pănă în atîta cum ‘so that’ etc.). Most of these complex connectors have been replaced or disappeared from the Present-day Romanian, and this is why we need to go back in time, and to follow the grammaticalization process of these adverbs (cum and oricum), as they become complementizers, subordinators, and, finally, expletives or discourse markers. Some of the formal observations have been confronted and confirmed by the quantitative analyses of the corpus. In the end, I believe that, by clarifying the use and the evolution of this element, it’s frequency and variability, the present study may provide valuable insights into the proper characterization of the inventory of sentence connectors, but also into the historical development of the Romanian language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As reflected by its title, the present paper aims to present some key aspects that can be found in the Japanese literary translation of Mircea Eliade's novel The Forbidden Forest. The method of analysis is based upon two core concepts extracted from the theoretical work of Lawrence Venuti, an emblematic figure of modern translation studies. Thus, by offering a few detailed examples of how the Japanese translator Haruya Sumiya conducted his translation work for this novel, I am going to try to identify whether his approach is more prone to fall into the domestication or the foreignization category. Before proceeding with the analysis, both domestication and foreignization terms are comprehensively explained in the introductory part. Because I do not believe the analysis should be restricted only to the main text of the novel, the first point of discussion deals with the title, the postface, and the explanatory notes, as they all represent an integral part of the translation process and are meant to ease the reader's experience while following the contents of a text that has its origin in a completely different culture. The second point of discussion is dedicated to the analysis of cultural references through the means of a few words extracted from the main text of the novel. Two of these words, which have their roots deeply embedded in the Romanian folklore, are thoroughly explained and the whole thought process behind their translation is revealed. The other two words, derived from the Christian terminology, are briefly taken into discussion in order to determine why the translator opted to render them into Japanese by employing Buddhist terms, thus letting the domestication method prevail in such cases. The Conclusions represent the last section of this article, and comprise the results of the previous analysis while establishing whether the target text is closer to the Romanian or the Japanese culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to portray the "Greek" merchant by elucidating the confidential aspects of his affairs (basically related to money and merchandise), starting the investigation from the virtues and emotions previously resulted, while exploiting, as storage media for any such information, the Greek documentary sources (the accounting books and acts and the commercial correspondence within the remaining archival fonds), as well as data from medieval juridical literature (mostly drawn up in Latin), this paper analyzes the dimensions of the secretiveness that pervades the practical and scriptural usages specific to the old medieval mercantile humanity in the Euro-Balkan region (XVth - mid-XIXth century). Generously illustrated with inedited fragments from documents (also including fifteen photoreproductions), the study aims at unifying the coordinates - communication, scriptural act, archivology - that clarify the extent to which the commercial archives testify to the secretive obsessions and compulsions of the merchants, especially the "Greek" ones, and of those who have inspired their customs. The Greek documents within the fonds of Aromanian trading houses and companies attest encoding reflexes for messages, contexts and names belonging to the entrepreneurs involved in the Euro-Balkan trade. The analysis of such communication methods has been structured on an array of mercantile risks that impose precautionary measures: economic and political espionage, Arcana Artis, great businesses, money, travelling, characterizations and recommendations, loan, trials, the "economy of secrets". Cryptic writings, forged words and the use of pseudonyms and nicknames - beyond being major palaeographic hindrances - represent scriptural practices that conceal commercial realia (prohibited goods, forbidden currencies, hidden fees and profits, loans, favors, etc.). The regulatory instruments of medieval bookkeeping disclose the theoretical vision of the epoch (the one that has generated the historiographic concept of the "economy of secrets") regarding the range of merchants' mystical consuetudes - starting from protecting the correspondence, keeping secret records, concealing the archives -, in the interest of debating mainly the excessive prudence displayed towards the juridical requesting of these private archives. A certain discretion reveals itself as one of the defining features of the bookkeepers; in the spirit of the professional secrecy, so sacredly guarded by the medieval guilds (Arcana Artis) and even more so by the merchants' branch, this discretion occults the methodology of the accounting books and, consequently, the very "art" of counting and justifying the flow of money. In conclusion, after outlining these levels of mercantile secretiveness, by means of stepping, then, further into the family secretiveness (the trade house and firm correspond to the founding social entity), the research leads will be possible to be followed in order to disclose the personal categories of informations that prove to be sensitive inside the "Greek" merchants network and to create echoes in their social norms and emotions: blood ties, affinities or dissolutions, psychomental medical history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No other phenomenon has affected the natural course of life of the entire planet since World War II until the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to implementing the rules generated by the state of emergency or by the state of alert, the citizens are seeking parallel solutions, that function as a refuge, where they can withdraw from fear. Being out of control, this feeling can irreparably paralyse rational thinking. Natively endowed with a very well-developed sense of humour, our compatriots found an opportunity to turn it to account by using their ingenuity. They created a rich inventory of comic texts, which would sweeten the fear of the unfriendly profile of this coronavirus. In this paper we refer to a special type of urban folk literature, generated, as previously stated, by physical isolation at home, but which occurred simultaneously with the exit from latency of a spirit which is thirsty for figment. To be more specific, we analyzed some of the jokes that have circulated on various communication channels (especially electronic ones) and whose invariant theme is the human existence during the epidemic, captured in all its fundamental aspects. A condition for the successful communication of a joke is placing the interlocutors in a familiar context of immediate conceptions, interests and aspirations, which means that both the speaker and the recipient benefit from a common background. On the one hand, we tried to identify the semantic meaning of the texts we took into consideration, and on the other hand, we studied how we are led, "activated" to the pragmatic meaning of the statement through latent, implicit content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the author's experience of teaching Romanian language and culture to the A2 foreign students, who study Romanian on an optional basis in a technical university in Romania, this essay focuses on the advantages of using the communicative and the visual method of teaching, offering examples of course activities which motivate the students to learn Romanian and to understand a series of cultural aspects specific to the Romanian people and civilization. The essay evinces the significant role of the visual factor in motivating the foreign students of a Romanian technical university to learn Romanian, facilitating their understanding of the Romanian culture and civilization based on the optional courses of Romanian language. As the foreign engineering students would rather use an international language of communication such as English or French than Romanian for academic purposes and for a future career in a multinational, we argue that by focusing on images and symbols in teaching the Romanian language, culture and civilization, we activate the students' visual and cultural memory and we motivate and enable them to learn Romanian. The visual factor enables the students to learn the Romanian vocabulary and grammar structures easier in an interactive manner. Presenting the foreign students the Romanian cultural material values by means of images depicting the Romanian houses specific to Transilvania, Moldova, Oltenia, Muntenia and Dobrogea, the churches, monuments and castles from these geographical areas, the specific landscape of these areas, and introducing the students to the specific Romanian customs and traditions and to some Romanian works of art, literary works and music, we will encourage them to learn Romanian, arousing their interest and curiosity. By improving the students' capacity to describe images using a varied vocabulary and accurate grammar structures, we will help them to develop their critical thinking and their ability to speak Romanian fluently, arousing their interest in reading fragments from famous Romanian literary works included in the course bibliography. This paper shows that by approaching themes such as the Romanian Village, the Romanian City, Romanian Customs, Traditions and Religious Holidays, and teaching grammar and vocabulary based on these themes using well-selected images and symbols, we awaken the foreign students' cultural conscience, helping them to learn Romanian in an interactive manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contains a description of the Bistriţa toponymic field: a set of names formed from the Bistriţa hydronym through structural processes called by Dragoş Moldovanu polarization and differentiation. In order to identify the core - the main element of the field from which the other toponyms have been formed-, it was necessary to clarify the etymology of the word Bistrita. At the origin of this place name is the Ukrainian bystrica, a derivative of the adjective bystr-"fast; crystal clear". The meaning of this adjective must therefore be associated with a watercourse, so the geographical object that it initially designated is the river. This river, attested since the beginning of the fifteenth century, is the largest Romanian river, crossing areas, villages and towns of historical, social and economic importance. That is why an important toponymic field has been developed around its name. This field, characterized by the diversity of place-names, contains toponyms which designate different geographical objects (springs, watercourses and parts thereof, mountains, a gorge, a depression, abridge, a meadow, communication ways, and large administrative units) or localities in the vicinity of this river. Only one name (Bistricioara) is obtained from the Bistriţa name by derivation with the diminutive suffix -ioara; the rest of the toponymic field is represented by syntagms formed of the term Bistriţa and various constituents (nouns, adjectives or prepositions). We can see a presence of homonymy cases and a variety of forms attested by documents. The diachronic depiction of the toponymic fields is an important step for the lexicographical approach of place names because it reflects the dynamic reality discovered on the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The diaries kept by children and young people during the Holocaust are one of the most intriguing phenomenon. To the young people caught in the concentration inferno, the diary is more than a personal tool of self-reflection but their only chance to fight totalitarian power. During the atrocities of World War II (persecution, deportations, relocations, ghettoization and, in particular, mass executions), the diary is their opportunity to leave a testimony of the suffering caused by the arbitrary and irrational violence of a criminal ideology. In fact, the diary is the only way to preserve the real experiences and emotions they lived in a violent universe that threatened their very existence. Unfortunately, many of them did not survive, but only their pages did, filled with the tension of an uneven struggle. In their pages survived something of their spirit and the authentic story of how the once thriving European Jewry was almost completely destroyed. Unlike the Holocaust written memories, which are stories of survival, the diary is the survival itself. This paper aims to give a general description of this phenomenon to be further explored in an analysis of a number of similar diaries from the Romanian space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We intended to demonstrate in this paper the hypertext character of erotic magic, starting from the suggestion of Sanda Golopenția that she formulated in the book "Desire Machines". Starting from the analysis of two magical practices described, contextualized and accompanied by poetic texts, we identified the connections with social and ritual manifestations occasioned by the entry of girls and boys in the nubile stage. For this, we chose as an example magical complexes designed to beautify, attract love and increase prestige, desired by the girls who went out to dance for the first time. We consider that an inter-textual approach to erotic magic would be useful in the indepth analysis of the traditional Romanian mentality and society, of its mechanisms for maintaining order, and also in studies on symbolic thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper explores the semantic evolution of the Romanian term academie (academy), considering the denominative processes involving it since its first documentary and lexicographic attestations to the present. Our approach expands from the identification and classification of the semantic areas to which the term belongs, to the investigation of the potential causes (e.g. cultural contamination) for the changes in the original meaning, under the influence of linguistic and extralinguistic factors. In a sociolinguistic perspective, this denominative unit both fulfils the function of identifying and classifying particular referents and represents an index to the social dynamics specific to a community. Thus, current social practices indicate that, in addition to the usage of the term Academie in the title of the highest cultural and scientific "forum" in Romania (Romanian Academy), in the designation of some higher education institutions and specialised colleges, we witness its proliferative usage as an identification label for some associations and organisations in charge with maintaining and improving professional standards. Moreover, a whole of range of company names employ the term for marketing purposes, as a guarantee to outstanding quality and scientific rigour of varied products and services. Another aspect of social practices involving the term under discussion refers to the ironic usage and deprecating value attributed to it in media headlines to the purpose of drawing public attention to the negative image of some so-called "academies", whose ownership or corporate image is associated with some Romanian public figures of doubtful reputation. Nevertheless, we trust that these onomastic fashions are not liable to prejudice the social validity of the positive connotations of the term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last two decades (after the 2000s), Sanda Golopenția dedicated herself to editing and publishing the papers and articles of her father, Anton Golopenția. A very important personality of the Romanian intellectual world between the two world wars, Anton Golopenția was one of the most famous representatives of the teams of the Sociological School in Bucharest (coordinated by Dimitrie Gusti), a researcher at the National Institute of Statistics, but also a victim of the communist regime in Romania (he died in 1951, at only 42 years old, in Văcărești prison as a political prisoner). Sanda Golopenția's activities include, first, a sharp restitution of Anton Golopenția's scientific work, whose articles and reports are published as complete works (Opere complete) in several massive volumes, depending on the fields to which they belong: sociology, demography, aesthetics and literature. At the same time, in addition to this scientific and cultural text editing activity, Sanda Golopenția has opened, in the last two decades, a real construction site meant to reconstruct the activity of Anton Golopenția in the context of the socio-cultural and intellectual environment in which he worked, but also in the political circumstances of his time. In this direction, she identified, transcribed, commented and published a series of documents from various archives, such as family archives, archives of family friends, archives of the National Institute of Statistics, and the former archives of the Securitate. Thus, Ultima carte ("The Last Book", 2001) contains the transcripts of Anton Golopenția's declarations in the case of investigations during the months of political imprisonment, Rapsodia epistolară ("Epistolary Rhapsody", 2002–2014) contains both the letters sent by Anton Golopenția between 1923 and 1950 and the letters he received, while Românii de la est de Bug ("Romanians at the East of the Bug River", 2008) includes field notes and reports, personal letters, disparate attempts to interpret the facts, short articles never published before, but also the answers to the Security inquiry about this research (from the East of the Bug). Sanda Golopenția thus passed from the simple memorial text to what she calls the polyphonic specificity writing, inserting, together with Anton Golopenția's texts, speeches from the context of the production of the texts, as well as immediate or remote reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Belief in animal protectors from around the home managed to reach present times almost unchanged in Romania. In this respect, the paper publishes for the first time information gathered in The Folklore Archive of Moldavia and Bucovina, founded in 1970. The two sub-sections are based both on a bibliographic and field information perspective on swallows, storks, and on the snake of the house respectively. The close relationship with these animals is on one hand created by the conviction that birds bring good fortune to the house they nest in, and on the other hand by the belief that each house has a protecting serpent. None of these can be killed or even disturbed by people since great misfortune will follow. The swallows and the storks will set the house on fire if their nests are destroyed and the death of the snake will also end the life of the inhabitants, because they are presented as double egos. This later perspective can be supported both by personal stories and folk ballads on the lad who grew together with the serpent beneath the house. There are also many legends on swallows and storks backing up the mythological image of these migratory birds. The active beliefs also influenced architecture and crafts, since people felt the need to decorate their houses, gates and house objects mainly with the image of the snake, but also with representations of the swallow. The conviction is so strong that even animals who harm the birds are believed to suffer from their revenge. The portraits are obviously drawn in an humanizing manner in order to support the idea of special creatures coming to help the entire household. While the birds have a solar projection, since they come in Romania with the spring and leave when the day is getting shorter, the serpent keeps his sepulchral auro that has been documented ever since Roman Antiquity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper sets out to identify the main characteristics of Marin Mincu's criticism and to restore theories that he never put together systematically in independent volumes, but scattered throughout his work. Numerous articles, literary studies and interviews are reviewed. The bigger part of the paper is dedicated to Mincu's conception of the novel. There are taken into discussion concepts like textualism, the writing's authenticity, semiotic pluriverse and the recovering of the subject's corporality. Besides revealing a poetics of the novel expressed in theory papers, this work synthetically presents an implicit poetics of the genre, as it is laid out in Mincu's novel Intermezzo. The writing's corporal agony - which is at the same time born from its reflection on itself - came better out from Intermezzo, a novelistic experiment which contains its own hermeneutics. The recovering work in progress of the human subject's corporality has as a main effect the literalization of the novel's theory. The being's transfer into the text's letter leads inevitably to the intensification of the vital processes that offers writing an agonic corporality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper is focused on Andrei Grigor’s book published by Lucian Chisu after A.Grigor’s death and its mirror-like strategies by means of which the double-faceted identity is depicted: the ‘ego-graphical identity’ and the ‘ideo-graphic’ one – both of them used in a critical discourse mirroring post-communist Romanian literature and its torments. The study analyzes the book collecting Grigor’s editorials written in the years after the fall of the communist regime, a single-authored mirror-like writing in which the biographical course and scriptural identity engage in a clear, sharp dialogue. The aim is to define a double reading effect embedded into a Self-oriented narrative: a collective history of Romanian literature portrayed in its journey from a communist totalitarian culture towards a “free” one, with literary, cultural and political insertions; then, the legitimation of an implicit “identity pilgrimage” of the writer in dialogue with his Time, with peculiarities stemming from his own existential and ideological path, in permanent relation to contemporary literature. Aside from the latent literary question, which subtextually directs the existential and cultural choices of the writer, the dialogue with his own Self and with Romanian literature also marks the becoming of a problematic identity projected onto the inside of his own critical texts. Andrei Grigor also tackles the complex issue of the relation between the aesthetic criterion of establishing value and the ethical value, all being related to the political status that writers should (or not) assume. Thus, in Grigor’s view, the writer’s status brings an ethic value specific to literature and art, in his quest for the exemplary power of the literary text itself. Andrei Grigorʼs editorials are constructed on two levels, as questions and answers, and they turn into a Self-speaking discourse, where the bio-graphemes are embedded into this fascinating mixture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Belief in animal protectors from around the home managed to reach present times almost unchanged in Romania. In this respect, the paper publishes for the first time information gathered in The Folklore Archive of Moldavia and Bucovina, founded in 1970. The two sub-sections are based both on a bibliographic and field information perspective on swallows, storks, and on the snake of the house respectively. The close relationship with these animals is on one hand created by the conviction that birds bring good fortune to the house they nest in, and on the other hand by the belief that each house has a protecting serpent. None of these can be killed or even disturbed by people since great misfortune will follow. The swallows and the storks will set the house on fire if their nests are destroyed and the death of the snake will also end the life of the inhabitants, because they are presented as double egos. This later perspective can be supported both by personal stories and folk ballads on the lad who grew together with the serpent beneath the house. There are also many legends on swallows and storks backing up the mythological image of these migratory birds. The active beliefs also influenced architecture and crafts, since people felt the need to decorate their houses, gates and house objects mainly with the image of the snake, but also with representations of the swallow. The conviction is so strong that even animals who harm the birds are believed to suffer from their revenge. The portraits are obviously drawn in a humanizing manner in order to support the idea of special creatures coming to help the entire household. While the birds have a solar projection, since they come in Romania with the spring and leave when the day is getting shorter, the serpent keeps his sepulchral aura that has been documented ever since Roman Antiquity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the Romanian literature in the postcommunist period, in the context of cultural memory studies, as developed in the past two decades. Given that the connection between literature and cultural memory is now being widely discussed, I shall focus on the relation between literary fiction and the many-sided process of remembering communism in today's Romania. The first part of the paper briefly presents literature as a medium of cultural memory, following the ideas of Aleida Assmann and Astrid Erll. The second part of the paper deals with the hardships of remembering in a postcommunist society, with a very strenuous relation toward the past, and in its literature. My thesis is that Romanian literature in the years 2000 participates in the construction of a unitary, although not univocal, memory of communism. In the novels of Dan Lungu (I'm an Old Communist Hag!, 2007), Filip Florian (Little Fingers, 2005), Doru Pop (A Socialist Soap Opera, 2013), individual and collective memories are put to trial and, in the process, reveal to the reader how the complicated works of memory are embodied in literary texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The famous German writer Ernst Jünger received a lot attention in Romania, even before the Revolution in 89/90. This is more than remarkably, as his novels, essays and diaries were never translated in other countries beyond the Iron Curtain. Jünger was in his younger years member of several extremist right winged political circles and was famous for his eye-wittness-account on the First World War. This paper tries to find out why especially Romanian Intellectuals - with some of whom he has been friends - were attracted by Jünger's prose and how it was possible, that books by such a controversial author could be printed in communist times. The post-revolutionary peroid is also analyzed in this paper, as much of Jünger's mots important books are translated into Romanian and were published in disinguished publishing houses, like Polirom and Humanitas. It seems that the opaque style of Jünger, his preference for mythical allusions, his creation of a magico-religious univers in his books a.s.o., attracted a lot of Romanian Intellectuals, like for ex. the esoteric circle of Vasile Lovinescu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present aspects of some problems and solutions adopted in the drawing of the complex article vânt "wind" in the Dictionary of the Atmospheric Phenomena (Rom. logo DFA). The issues discussed are: defining the term, setting determinations and phrases, recovering the first attestations and etymologies. The definitions of the popular and scientific meanings of the term are made after analyzing several definitions of general and meteorological reference dictionaries. Observations regarding the syntagmatic behavior are extracted mainly from the thesaurus dictionary of the Romanian language and from the basic meteorological bibliography. The structures with vânt [wind] accompanied by determinations predominate at the popular level, while at the scientific level phrases that are well defined are dominant. The diachronic perspective of the project is evident in attempts to set etymology and the first attestations. În this paper are discussed the main issues that give complexity to the article vânt [wind] in DFA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Eminescu's work and personality is still holding an important place on the Romanian academic agenda, our paper aims at showing what sort of continuity lines have formed around "Luceafărul" and its exegesis. As main topic of our research, we endeavour to foreground a specific critical reaction toward the self-implied hermeneutic difficulty of Eminescu's masterpiece as well as toward the precise identification of that origin kernel, which is the creative activity's primummovens. Thus, we introduce as hypothesis the idea that "Luceafărul" undergoes two types of de-codification. On the one hand, we find the seekers of Absolute (a critical concept already coined in Eminescu or on the Absolute), a group formed of researchers such as Rosa del Conte and Dumitru Irimia, who decode the literary text through the categories of reason. On the other, there are the seekers of Diaphanous, such as Petru Creţia and Gisèle Vanhese, both of them witnessing the endlessness and the incompleteness of what has been commonly regarded as the Absolute standard of art. Occasioned by the publication, in Romanian, of Gisèle Vanhese's book „Luceafărul" de Mihai Eminescu. Portretul unei zeităţi întunecate, the present paper's goal is to underline the importance of theCalabrese scholar's work. After noticing - at the first reading of the original version and, then, at the several readings entreated by our own translation process- the integrative and essential feature of Gisèle Vanhese's book,we felt that our own paper should turn into a plea for a diaphanous reading of Eminescu's masterpiece. More than the broadening and the deepening of previous research (wherefore we find how much Eminescu's Luceafărul is inserted into the mass of the Romantic literature), this book comes with very exciting approaches; Gisèle Vanhese chases after Hyperion's beauty within Veronica Micle's poetry, within Mircea Eliade's novel The Snake and, then, within Ingeborg Bachmann's autobiographic work Malina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis, by no means exhaustive, of the specific verbal markers making up the preacher's self-image or discursive ethos, considering the special background against which the sermon is given, which specialized orthodox literature calls parenetic (or occasional) sermon. Considering this particular homiletic genre as an argumentatively oriented speech, we think that, despite the fact that the preacher's selfimage or his discursive ethos originates less in what is explicitly uttered (dit) and more in the argumentative process taken as a whole (like dire). Nevertheless, particular punctual items, which are expressly marked in the speech, make up what Dominique Maingueneau defines as "uttered ethos": those forms of subjectivity by which the preacher actually and explicitly becomes part of his speech and refers to his self. Our analysis relies on empirical data, materialized in the text of the corpus enclosed in the paper. The paraneses that I have chosen are recorded by me in an audio-video format and transcribed observing the specific requirements set in the book Non-dialectal Current Spoken Romanian Corpus, coordinated by Luminiţa Hoarţă Cărăuşu (Cermi Publishing, Iaşi, 2005, 11-13). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider a transdisciplinary approach to imaginary from a psychological-physical-mathematical perspective. More precisely, we envisage the imaginary, the imagination, and the reality of the mental life in general, from a broad interdisciplinary point of view, where the artistic and the religious perspectives find their place along with the philosophical vision, and with the information that the science has brought up in the last decades, especially from the physics and mathematics theories. Moreover, we support the idea that the imaginary space is not just a metaphor, but a physical space, in the holospace or n-dimensional space, which could be described by concepts and scientific theories and thus it could be illustrated by a physical-mathematical model. Our paper integrates into a recent trend in the field of epistemology, namely, the need for interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary approaches. Both the complexity theory and the complex systems theory involve new concepts related to fractal geometry, chaos, topology, nonlinear dynamics and non-differentiability. An integration of these theories to the ancient visions of religion, philosophy and even to those of philology leads to new, interesting, and daring hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to change the place of Eminescu's up-to-dateness from the arena of publicistic debate to a more proper field for academic analysis. My meeting, as a cultural person, with an old writer's work doesn't have anything to do with the literature museum, but it takes place on the way. As a receiver, I'm on the way of my formation, with accumulations, with prejudices already fixed in the "geological" layers of my inner self. In a special manner, the creator is on the way, having a short or long history of his immortality. Here is the concept of immortality (philosophical, metaliterary), of Platonic essence, refreshed in the Romantic Age, then retrieved in the speech of the literary historiography - even if with metaphorical load - in order to signify that author's posterity, the story of this reception in diacrony. It is an old observation of the literary sociology that a creator gets appearances by which each generation identifies him and makes him their contemporany. However, not many writers (who are meant to have a posterity) undergo extreme metamorphoses. What has happened with Eminescu's posterity in the last decades? Diverse interrogative nuances and diverse attempts to answer these questions will form the contents of the present paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]