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This paper comparatively analyses the feminist problematic in the texts of four poets, two of them belonging to Romanian contemporary literature and the other two to Russian literature: Miruna Vlada - Elena Vlădăreanu and Oksiana Vasiakina - Anastasia Vekșina. The analysis starts from the ideas of the theorist Julia Kristeva, who studies female identity from the point of view of semiotics, anthropology and psychology. I will follow the predominant theme in the works of the aforementioned poets, feminist poets by self-definition and through their writings: the feminine outlook in the context of war, marriage, motherhood, the manifestation and survival of this perspective, observing the ideational and stylistic similarities and differences in the creations of the aforementioned poets. The aim of the paper is to uncover the universality of the female experience in contexts that may undermine it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from Asbjørn Grønstad’s concepts of bio visuality and the responsibility of forms, the paper analyzes the issues that arise when adapting self-fiction into film. It maps out how the concepts can be applied especially well to self-fiction and New Romanian Cinema, then applies them in a comparative analysis of Cezar Paul-Bădescu’s book, Luminița, mon amour, and Călin Peter Netzer’s movie adaptation, Ana, mon amour. The paper argues that whereas the book’s ambiguity succeeds in transmitting its central themes, the movie fails to faithfully adapt the central ideas due to an inadequate choice in form. Finally, the paper argues that the formal issues cause ethical faults which hinder the transnational effort and negatively influence the worlding process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a case for analyzing the way in which the novel of Communism is approached by Mihai Iovănel in his History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020. This is a topic that was intensely discussed by Romanian literary criticism in Post-communism and represents the weakness of Romanian literature, either by it not being able to give a sufficiently convincing novel, or by not being able to agree upon how this novel should look. Accordingly, the critics had difficulties in labeling any novel that had been published after ‘89s as “the novel of communism.” The first part of the article is a panning of recent discussions about this term in relation to the analysis made by Iovănel in his History. The second part aims to trace out a network of this type of novel in the literatures of Central and Eastern Europe and to try to identify its particularities through a comparative analysis. The last part consists of a study case of the novels Acasă, pe câmpia Armaghedonului [At home, on the Field of Armageddon] by Marta Petreu and Bureți de Fag [Oyster Mushrooms] by Mihai Duțescu. The latter has been published after the History and both novels are analyzed from the perspective of the novel of communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

act: This paper aims at analyzing the connection between the contemporary Romanian literature and world literature through the emergence of maximalist novel embodied in Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu’s novel, Abraxas. The author belongs to the 2000 generation, a generation which has neglected the postmodern maximalist approach. Therefore, I intend to analyze the emergence of maximalism in Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu’s novel by indicating the tension it generated in regards with the previous minimalist formula and by observing the connection of literature with the socio-economic context of the 2000’s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate that two previously unknown manuscript folios from Mircea Eliade’s youth, which emerged in 2022, are the drafted summaries of his unfinished editorial project Valkyries in the Library. The two folios are, in fact, two lists of article titles Eliade published in Cuvântul (22), Gândirea (2), and Sinteza (1), in 1926-1928. Arranged differently, the feuilletons address topics such the Romanian intellectual, the dependance towards French culture and literature, philology and synthesis, the lack of heroism in Romanian literature, Beatrice and Don Quixote, young writers, literary criticism, philosophy. The tone is polemical and radical, condemning the current state of Romanian literature, advancing the author's views, and urging his contemporaries to take action in order to create fundamental and authentic works. Just as Eliade recalls in his diary, the articles from Cuvântul mentioned in the two folios were a whirlwind, a cavalcade meant to take local culture and erudition by surprise and to change it forever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My study aims to address the phenomenon of literary multilingualism in the nineteenth-century Romanian novel. Based on Johan Heilbron’s approach on “translations as a cultural world-system” and his classification into hyper-central, central, semi-peripheral and peripheral languages, my analysis discusses the nineteenth-century Romanian language at an early stage of its consolidation and thus in self-colonial and anti-colonial relations to the “hegemony” of the French language. Taking advantage of this framework, I consider that the majority of literary code-switching examples faithfully render these linguistic relations, so my study proposes a classification of literary multilingualism into the following possible categories: a livresque multilingualism, which satisfies the self-colonial tendencies of the nineteenth-century language, a latent multilingualism, which can also be associated with an attempt at linguistic bovarisation, but also with the search for authenticity in novels through suggestion and “explicit attribution” (Meir Sternberg), a thesistic multilingualism, in such cases where the novel didactically presents foreign language insertions, and a functional multilingualism. Finally, my paper also launches a discussion of another type of multilingualism, that as a source for “defamiliarization”, which I expect to find in the Romanian novel of the twentieth century, when the Romanian language is no longer in danger of self-colonization and passes by the incipient stage, the phenomenon of code-switching serving Viktor Shklovsky’s technique of “defamiliarization”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era in which literary histories are written by collective of academics trying to transcend the national paradigm in which these works were once wrote, The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 by Mihai Iovănel is an intellectual effort that may seem obsolete. Nevertheless, Mihai Iovănel’s book proposes new ways of understanding the contemporary Romanian literary field that were not taken into consideration by previous similar critical endeavours. This paper aims to investigate how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature constructs an overview of the Romanian fiction wrote in the last three decades and the critical approaches deployed for this purpose. The main interest of this article will be how does Mihai Iovănel discusses Romanian contemporary fiction and how does he instrumentalizes the concept of realism. We will look more closely at the third part of the book, “The Evolution of Fiction,” but the discussion will not omit the relation of this chapter with others. The paper will concentrate on the concepts put forward by Mihai Iovănel to systematize the complex subfield of contemporary Romanian fiction, like capitalist realism, the famous term coined by Mark Fisher. Also, we will try to see how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature relate to previous literary histories or books of literary criticism that resembles Mihai Iovănel’s work in some respects or that have similar goals but different methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employed in the study of national or transnational literatures, the relevance of digital humanities, computational analyses, and quantitative sociology can no longer be ignored. In this paper, we aim to argue that, in spite of it still being seen as a niche endeavor, the digital or quantitative study of literature generates paradigmatic shifts in literary scholarship, both in literary criticism and comparative studies. In order to demonstrate this statement, the following study will illustrate how three core principles of digital humanities are actively shaping humanities as we know it. These principles – openness, replicability, and collaboration – challenge the way we understand the role of the literary historian and their „traditional” tasks. To consolidate this argumentation further, we will briefly present an example of how digital humanities start changing the dominant narrative in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to offer a proper re-evaluation of Cella Serghi’s literary debut and overall importance when it comes to Romanian literature. Her debut novel was extremely well-received by the Romanian readership; however, many of the critics dismissed her prose as being a reflection, or at least the result of Camil Petrescu’s guidance and influence. After examining the marginalisation and the unjust simplification that her prose suffered, the paper introduces some considerations on feminism in Romania, for a more accurate depiction of her significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to provide an overview of the evolution of the Romanian novel from the publication perspective between 1965-1989. Through the employed methodology, the quantitative analysis, it will be observed in which measure the events and the regulations from the political system influence the dynamic of the Romanian novel production. In addition to this, it will be observing the geographical distribution of the publishing houses and the modifications which appears about their editorial hierarchy as a consequence of the newly implemented rules of the political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memory of the Holocaust in Romania (i.e. the Romanian authorities’ involvement in the atrocious crime of the Holocaust) was ideologically distorted and occulted during the communist dictatorship. This led not only to the impossibility of recovering the historical truth, but also to it acting as a deterrent when it comes to the depiction of the living memory (i.e. journals, memoirs), as well as of the artistic and cultural representations of this tragic moment in our recent history. It was only in the last two decades, more precisely after the discussions initiated by the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, and especially after the publication of the Final Report (2004), that the Romanian authorities’ accountability for the Holocaust timidly penetrated the public discourse. This paper looks into the history of memorial occultation of the Holocaust in Romania by seeking to explore and explain the difficulties that the Romanian public discourse has had (and continues to have) when integrating this event into its cultural memory. Through a comparative analysis of how the memory of the Holocaust was embedded in the Western and the Romanian public discourse, we could notice that in Romania, in the last decades, these complications may be explained primarily through an absence in the manifestations of a prosthetic memory encompassing cultural representations of the Holocaust. Besides identifying the postmemorial artifact (i.e. the act of cultural and artistic reconstruction of the trauma of the Holocaust) as the main element of the prosthetic memory, this paper also describes a possible corpus of such postmemorial artifacts (film, literature), steadily growing in the Romanian culture in recent years, to be minutely analyzed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A post-anthropocentric epistemological assemblage becomes indispensable in the investigation of the ecology of the Romanian novel. We examine the interactive relationship of various dynamic systems, such as 1) the evolution of the Romanian novel, 2) the modes of representation of the environment, and 3) the social-political history of the autochthonous space. Using a wide range of methodological perspectives, this paper also examines the relationship between literature and the Earth sciences, thus envisioning a new type of literary history where the Romanian novel should be thought as existing within hyper-objects, such as the climate, agriculture, wilderness, pollution, biosphere, cultural politics, capitalism, or geology. The article finally addresses the issue of zoopoetics both as an object of study in the MDRR digital archive (1845-1947) and as a reading strategy, thus, favoring the relationship between animality and narrativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper disscusses the literary-historiographical enterprise of Mihai Iovănel’s History of the Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2000 as a turning point in respect with the twofold aesthetic and ethnocentric dominant of this genre in Romania, whose tradition that is traceable back to the pos-Thaw period prolongs into postcommunism. Iovănel’s self-claimed ”postmarxist” approach puts under a deconstructive lens the ideological embededness of the Romanian literary space, whose postcommunist avatar still owes largely to its communist heritage by its indebtment to dominantly conservative and right ideologies. It also switches the analytical focus of the literary history towards the material (i.e. social, institutional, and so forth) conditions of the literary production per se. My essays develops two basic critical points derived from the above-mentioned premises. One concerns the topicality of the literary historian’s leftist vantage point in the view of deciphering long-engrained myths of the national literature and of its criticism, thus providing a clearer, more realist picture of its concrete phenomena. The other debates the utility and eventual drawbacks of the retrospective analysis the historian is forced to assume in order to achieve his deconstructive task, a retrospection that pushes his investigation way behind the confines of ”contemporaneity”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the strategies enacted by Mihai Iovănelʼs History in order to map the transnational interactions of contemporary Romanian literature. Since Iovănel emphasizes that, starting with the 2000s, the Romanian writers define themselves mainly through the global networks in which they try to integrate, this article aims to analyse: a) the canonical function acquired by the local references to World Literature; b) their explanatory role compared to the one played by the closed circuit of the so-called “intra-national” comparisons; c) the theoretical legitimacy of the “transnational canon” projected by Iovănel in the epilogue of his History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary history is still the most successful strategy of systematizing knowledge in Romanian academe and, although the theoretical revolution that took place in literary studies between 1960-1990 did not leave it unscathed, it remains the methodological anchor of every attempt at trying to make sense of the entirety of a specific culture. In this paper I analyze Mihai Iovănel’s new History of Contemporary Romanian Literature and whether it succeeds in revolutionizing (methodologically or in terms of cultural analysis) an old and robust genre of explanation, in an intellectual culture that is otherwise enamored with dictionaries, encyclopedias and all-encompassing narratives of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premised on the pervasiveness of generic categories within literary historiography, the present analysis attempts to delineate the generic idioms present within three histories of Romanian literature (authored by G. Călinescu, Nicolae Manolescu and Mihai Iovănel, respectively). Engaging a descriptively historical, rather than theoretical, approach to genre and its metadiscourses, the paper begins with an abridged version of the cardinal disputes of genre criticism. Subsequently, it comparatively addresses the presence of genre within the three volumes, aiming to locate them within recognizable frameworks of genericity and to establish the overlapping territories of their generic landscapes. Thus, it distinguishes G. Călinescu as a practitioner of post-Romantic genre theory, further showcasing how some of his central aestheticist positions survive in Nicolae Manolescu’s moderately formalist account of the issue. Against the backdrop of their more conservative, teleological historiographical projects, Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 Istoria Literaturii Române Contemporane 1990-2020 [The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature 1990-2020] displays a distinct methodological apparatus, predicated on the author’s rejection of the paradigmatic autonomy of the aesthetic. His employment of materialist theories of art is corelative to a conception of genre as a contingent, empirically determined instrument of analysis, which, far from being a rhetorically stable, abstract category, actively mediates the relationship between social and aesthetic history. This shift engenders substantial amendments to the physiognomy of literary history as genre, enabling it to encompass extra-literary (and noncanonical) phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing partially on Ovid S. Crohmălniceanu’s suggestion that the interwar Romanian novel depicts mental illness, this paper aims to analyze the representations of such psychological ailments in Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu’s A Concert of Music by Bach. However, the thesis that I put forward is that the novel is more than a mere inventory of disabled characters, as this difference is charged with ideological meaning, which is revealed when the reader takes into account the metaphors of disability that abound in the novel. In several cases, the character’s difference is doubled by a theriomorphic figure, associating thus mental illness with monstrosity, animality, savagery, and angelism. As a result, the aforementioned characters are represented as alterity, as humas that have lost their human characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to investigate if and how the theoretical assumptions and the ideological discourse of the Romanian literary historian and cultural figure E. Lovinescu can still be read and interpreted within contemporary, transnational frames and with new methodological tools. I propose for this study to discuss a couple of volumes, each one engaging in a different kind of approach to E. Lovinescu's impact on the Romanian cultural field, in order to test the viability of his theories, especially from a sociological and political point of view. The goal of my paper shall be to open a discussion on the ongoing role that canonical literary historians such as E. Lovinescu have on how we study, to date, Romanian literature, while also framing the rather unknown faces of socio-political discourse that this particular cultural figure has proposed over the time, aiming to present how they shaped the circulation of foreign ideologies and literary formulas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to outline the historical contingencies shaping Romanian literature written by women during the interwar and especially the postwar periods. In this pursuit, certain theoretical foundations are provided by the theories of authorship and subjectivity associated with Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser and Judith Butler. Finally, a series of quantitative analyses are presented as material support for the varying degrees and aims of marginalization of literature written by women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following study employs a quantitative analysis of the Romanian novelistic production from the period 1901- 1932. By using the literary corpus developed by the research project ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932, implemented by ASTRA National Museum Complex, this paper focuses on the secondary canonical writers (with their "b-sides and rarities"), the novelists'origins, the abundance and the geographical nodes of production, in order to investigate the dynamic relation between national cultural centers and their respective editorial networks, as well as the mechanisms of canonization within the Romanian novel of the period [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to provide an overview of the Romanian social novel between 1965 and 1989, a period subordinate to the communist regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu, that witnessed the evolution of this particulare subgenre, one determined by two factors: the effect of the political changes during this stage and the publication of the established, canonical, post-war Romanian novels. The methodology employed for this article is a quantitative analysis based on the theories of Franco Moretti's and Matthew L. Jockers's theoretical studies. Thus, the article investigates the literary critics'views concerning the Romanian social novel and its possible definitions. Therefore, the results consist in a couple of graphs, which represent the course of this subgenre, involving an applicable definition for his representations in the period of Ceauşescu's political regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from the distinction between national and international writers Pascale Casanova puts forward in The World Republic of Letters, the present paper investigates the case of the 'Tîrgovişte group' in the post-war literary field. The writers Radu Petrescu, Mircea Horia Simionescu, and Costache Olăreanu, but also the other writers known as being part of this group, have contributed to the so-called internationalization of the literature in the Liberalization period, not only through their novels which mostly follow the European and South American models, but also through their essays, journals and translations, fighting to the limits of the literature written for a particular national public. The thesis this research is based on claims that the fact that the group is created in Tîrgovişte in the '40s - thus far from the ideological centre - gives them more freedom in studying new international tendencies or inter-war Romanian writers. I will focus on how the 'Tîrgovişte group' promotes the universal literature and how they adopt the models of the European modernist literature, but also how they eventually fail becoming what Pascale Casanova fully names 'international writers' or iconic writers for Romanian post-war literature across the borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper is focused on Andrei Grigor's book, published by Lucian Chișu after the author's passing away 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 in the use of the critical discourse mirroring the post-1989 Romanian literature and its torments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper tries to approach a not so well researched part of M. Blecher's literary creation, mainly his poetry. Given the high level of appreciation and popularity that his prose works have achieved for the past few years (not only in Romania), it is only fair to come up with an exploration of his poetry. But in order to understand or analyze Becher's poetry, we need to clearly mark the cultural coordinates of the time when it appeared, as well as the production process of the only poetry book he published (Transparent Body). These coordinates and on the three classic parts of the production process are the subject of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On the one hand, the period after 1989 is characterized in Romanian literature by the apparition of the so-called "drawer texts". As most intimate types of writing, memoirs and diaries are easiest to relocate within the public consciousness in this regard. Nevertheless, they are also the subject of censorship because of the strong ideological implications. On the other hand, in a Romanian society which seeks in this period for its truths and sets up its writers for public sentence givers, prose writers remain a credible social category in the public consciousness. Thus, the new literature is based on the desire to put into fiction a world "such as it is" - therefore, between the recovery of the memoirs from communism and the writing of the prose of a decaying Romania, the literature of the first five post-communist years did not have time for poetry. Starting from these premises, this paper aims at investigating more than fragmentary contexts of post-communist literature, as previous researches have simply done, creating thus a fragmentary picture of the period. In the same time, the paper tries to develop a taxonomy of the literary phenomena of the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore the situation and prospects of literary geography in the Romanian culture, especially its recent manifestations with reference to Western academia. Therefore many projects of transnational literary historiography emerged in the early XXI century are based on a geographic component, reflected by concepts such as "topographic nodes" (Marcel Cornis-Pope), "archipelago" (Hervé Thery) "(pen)insular" (César Dominguez) by recourse to atlases (Franco Moretti) or even GIS maps. In these circumstances, the question arises to what extent the literary geography works published in Romania (like Geography of Romanian Literature, today signed by Cornel Ungureanu) managed to synchronize with the western direction, represented by the research mentioned above. The originality of this paper lies in questioning Cornel Ungureanu volumes in relation to the similar synthesis from West and also in self-reflection on the ways in which ethnicity, historical evolution and cultural patterns determine the profile of a literature and culture of a predefined geographic area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article seeks to present succinctly the current state of literary studies in the Romanian cultural and academic space. Following the different paradigm shifts in Western literary theory, be it "the transnational turn", "the spatial turn" or recent developments in the field of World Literature studies, the paper tries to explain not only today's developments in critical trends, but also the conditions of the reception of these methodological turns in Romania. In what follows, I will provide a concise exposition of the most recent collective research projects developed in Romania, analysing their premises and anticipating their potential fulfilments for the evolution of critical theory in the autochthonous space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elementa linguae daco romanae sive valachicae (1780) and the fur ther grammar books. The paper aims to reveal a comparison between two grammar books from the eighteenth century (Elementa linguae daco romanae sive valachicae written by Samuil Micu and Gh. Sincai and Romanian Grammar (1797) of Radu Tempea). The analysis is based on some aspects concerning the importance of the two papers for that epoch, their structures, the terminology used and even examples that are common for both of them. It has started from the fact that Romanian Grammar of Tempea and other similar speciality papers have been influenced by Elementa. Thus, the comparison has in view the significance of these ancient grammar books for the Romanian development in literary history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper goes forth from several observations phrased by E. Lovinescu in his early serial criticism. The Romanian modernist leader used to emphasize on the idea that the perennial elements in literature, namely those that are able to raise the strongest emotions, carrying their resonances deep down to the very marrow of the human being, are purely and thoroughly melodramatic. Actually, when giving a close reading to Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Lovinescu was prone to relieve mainly the psychological meaning as he considered that it was the emotion-procurement which secured a certain time endurance of the dramatic work, and not its sheer aesthetic value. Thereby the modernist critic came to an overt distinction between the psychological and the aesthetic features of the artistic works and hence this brought him to the conclusion that actually the melodrama is not only closer to life than any other literary genre, but also the farthest from art. In exchange, the closest to art's sophistication seems to be only the tragedy, a canonical species resurrected with gusto by the neo-classicists from the Ancient Greek culture and yet resented by their descendants as awfully artificial. Parting from this, at the Romantic turn-point, the tragedy begins to melt undiscernibly into melodrama. Moreover, the melodramatic, as a proper aesthetic category, grows into the inner structure of modern art, being rendered in various artistic genres such as movies and novels: practically they are being transferred both the theatrical techniques and vision specific to melodrama. This paper endeavours to follow the metamorphoses of this process, underlining altogether Lovinescu's personal contribution. It in this precise area of critical thought that the Romanian critic set himself up as a predecessor of the nowadays trends to rehabilitate the melodrama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an interpretation of Mircea Cărtărescu's short story REM through the perspective of the post-modern palimpsest derived from Julio Cortázar's End of the Game. The dialogue to which Cărtărescu co-opts Cortázar is read not as an inter-textual post-modern quotation, but as a self-legitimating attempt of Cărtărescu to build an intrinsic, self-sufficient textual coherence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Paul Zarifopol (1874-1934) could be described as a notable case of misreading in the field of Romanian literary history. Although allotted generous space in most histories of Romanian literature (from E. Lovinescu to G. Călinescu and Nicolae Manolescu), Zarifopol is often presented as an „anticlassical“ literary critic, with no particular method and no systemic thinking, an impetuous and subjective writer of feuilletons. Collating critical opinions of his contemporaries, as well as fragments from private letters, this paper analyses the way in which Zarifopol deals with his own work and aims to prove that he deliberately chose to be an essayist, and not a literary critic. Zarifopol's criticism stems from a generalized skepticism, as the only expression of intellectual freedom which is possible in a postwar world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My study is a plea for what might be called "export criticism", i.e. that critical discourse which retains some relevance beyond the strictly local, regional or national context where it has arisen. In this respect, I carry out an inventory of both external and internal obstacles impeding the promotion of Romanian literary criticism abroad. As regards external obstacles, the most important are the few translations of Romanian literary works into languages of international circulation (especially English and French), the absence of a recent history of Romanian literature written in a foreign language, the difficulties of assigning Romanian literature in a disciplinary niche (as an object of analysis, it seems to be at the periphery of both Romance and East-European studies), and the poor communication between Romanian and foreign researchers. Regarding internal obstacles, mention should be made of the methodological belatedness of Romanian literary criticism, its essayistic tradition and a certain dogmatism which renders it incompatible with the dominant pluralism on the international market. However, the thesis I attempt to underscore in the present paper is that Romanian literature and criticism not only can be, but they already are areas of international relevance and academic interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reintegration of Bessarabia in the Romanian political system generated the return of the intellectuals living outside the country's borders, on the left bank of the Prut River to the national spiritual sources. Released from external constraints, the provincial Romanian thinkers, scientists, literates and artists were able to fully manifest themselves on the national and European cultural arena. The cultural associations represented at the time an effective tool for disseminating the innovative ideas of the political and intellectual elite. They promoted and preserved national cultural values, spread modernizing ideas and democratic principles of social organization. This article discusses the evolution of the Bessarabian Regional Committee within the Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People ("Astra") in the interwar period. The paper presents the contribution of Transylvanian and Bessarabian intellectuals to the spiritual growth of the Romanians living in the area between the Prut and Nistru Rivers, the methods they applied and the challenges they faced in the process of attaining their set goals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Monday Literary Club had a very important role in creating, educating, and shaping what the History of the Romanian Literature calls "Generation '80". In a recent interview, Florin Iaru, one of the first and the most important members of this generation, tells us how he sees the activity and the role of the club within the age, but also the Romanian literature. Based on his opinion, on the one hand, the Monday Literary Club brought together very valuable people and tried to make the most of them, and on the other hand, the communist regime played a very important role in the poets' life and poetry. I consider the Monday Literary Club very important for the Romanian history, not only from a literary point of view, but also because of its implications at the time, its strength in defending human rights, the freedom of speaking, the mere daily existence of a citizen who wants to express his opinions freely. This paper starts from my Research within the National Security Archives (CNSAS), which regards the communist implication in this literary club's existence: collaboration notes and very interesting so called "informational" reports regarding the members of this club. It tries to argue how important was, and still is, the activity of the Monday Literary Club during the communist period, but also its literary, historical, and political implications for the time before it was forbidden and after its closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the question of literature represented as a system made of institutions such as writers, critics, literary generations, canonical battles and so on, functioning as a self-regulating mechanism. To put this question into perspective, two literary works are used which both have a metaliterary dimension and both borrow (for fiction) the form of a "serious" scholarly work: the bibliography and the monograph. In Mircea Horia Simionescu's "General Bibliography", the seemingly anarchistic representation of an infinite productivity of literature meets its boundaries when confronted with the actual writers making up the Romanian (Cantemir, Caragiale, Odobescu, Urmuz and especially G. Călinescu) or the European literary canon (Goethe, Ariosto, Dostoievski). Simionescu describes therefore not the apocalyptic disappearance of values and criteria for judging literature, but a necessary regeneration of stale old literary formulas by means of an ingenious and highly competent readership. In the Chilean Roberto Bolano's "Nazi Literature in the Americas", the idea of a "Nazi literature" serves as a metaphor for literature itself as a form of spiritual investigation of the darker inner regions of the human being. Bolano's representation of literature is also that of a "closed" literary system, not because of its alleged secrecy or "danger", but because it defines itself as an activity of thought, resorting to similar patterns in its search for originality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with some theoretical aspects of the meaning and tries to exemplify them with the names of animals in some religious texts of the Romanian Biblical tradition. The present research relates the literal and the figurative meanings of the 12 Biblical zoonyms (donkey, asp, horse, camel, deer, whale, lion, wholf, lamb, sheep, pigeon, snake, with its synonyms dragon and leviathan), using contexts from XVIth to XXth centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aaron Florian is one of the important personalities of Romanian culture who became known before the 1848 Romanian Revolution. He imposed himself mainly in the field of education and he published many didactical works which were greatly used in Wallachian schools in the mid 19th century. The first part of this paper tries to outline an overall glimpse of Florian`s didactical works which single out through the variety of disciplines and the directions followed. The second part contains some considerations regarding the degree of circulation which his books had both inside and outside schools` environment. Thus, Aaron Florian became one of the most outstanding Transylvanian scholars who moved to Wallachia and worked there and whose works had a great impact on that period and became known during it, greatly contributing to the materialization of the ideologies which supported the mid 19th Romanian national movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present research is focused on a document often left aside by the Romanian historiography - the 1887 memorandum project elaborated by Ioan Slavici. The paper can be considered a forerunner of the 1892 memorandum and represents the result of a deep compromise between the real political ideas of its author and the Romanian National Party's official agenda. Thus, shortly after its elaboration, Slavici resigned from the leadership of the national movement and never again made mention of the project's ideas. Alongside the description and analysis of the document's content, the conclusions of our article explore the possibility of alternative explanations for the strong pro-Habsburg position of the writer, presenting the opportunity of relating his political imaginary with some recurrent psychological behavior identified by one of his recent biographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A problem which our literary history has usually ignored was the influence of the English and American Culture on the Romanian interwar Young Generation, especially on the writers from the Criterion group-inspired by the American debates-and mainly on some novelistic patterns inspired by the Anglo-Saxon sources. Some of the young essayists of the 30s were also particularly interested in the American or English literature and cultural mentality. In fact, it was the first time when Romanian modern culture really met that pattern, which was to became global after a few decades. Which were the consequences of those cultural influences-that is the question which this paper tries to answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Romanian culture in Transylvania at the end of the 19 century and the beginning of the 20 was mostly influenced by the German culture. Sibiu was a place of a multicultural tradition due to its Romanian, German or Hungarian inhabitants. The relatively high number of theatre performances and symphonic concerts announced in the local papers (Telegraful Român, Tribuna, Transilvania) proves that the German theatre and music were favorably received by the public in spite of its heterogenic structure. The most representative German playwrights and composers were known in Sibiu through their works that contributed to the spiritual enlightenment of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is focused on some of J. L. Borges' short stories as starting points for historiographical metafiction. The article also analyses the influence of Borges' work on novels written by Salman Rushdie as well as Borges' influence on Romanian postmodernism and upon authors like Ştefan Agopian and Mircea Cărtărescu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]