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The aim of this paper is to underline the specificities of Theodor Fontane's work Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg as a place of remembrance – and subsequently of the places of remembrance it contains – as well as the importance that this very comprehensive text has until today for the cultural space of Berlin-Brandenburg. The paper highlights a dynamic of cultural memory that ranges from overlaying places of remembrance to the emergence of new ones. The project has been completed and illustrated with some walks undertaken by the author of the article in the footsteps of Fontane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Sociologists in Communism. The beginnings of a profession without status” is a collective volume coordinated by Sorin Mitulescu and contains the stories of some sociology graduates in 1975 and of some of their teachers at that time. The book is both an essay in sociology and a collection of oral history papers. We understand from reading the book that sociology was at that time the victim of the oscillations in Romanian politics between the desire for modernization (especially technological) and the fearful and dogmatic conservatism that had penetrated all social levels. Sociologists in communism want to be a starting point in a broader debate on the role of sociology and the sociologist, both in the past and in the present. He discusses several topics such as the relationship between sociology and power, the professional mobility of sociologists, the relationship between personal life and the career of a practicing sociologist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romanian criticism has tended to use generational framing to delineate the boundaries of local poetic paradigms, which has also been the case for the Generation 2000 and Generation post-2000. If in the 1980’s a discussion about a Romanian postmodernism was put into debate, in 2018 the question regarding the emergence of a Romanian poetry metamodernism arises. In this context, I intend to trace in this paper the nuances of generational debates in order to outline to what extent this methodology succeeds in describing the mutations and the characteristics of recent poetry. With the posthuman turn and the possibilities for the emergence of metamodernism being debated, my paper addresses, on the one hand, the viability of metamodernism in recent poetry, and, on the other, possible points of conjunctions of posthumanism and metamodernism. The posthuman turn encompasses the post-2000 generation, while local discussions have also proposed metamodernism as a label for the post-2000 generation. The question I start from is to what extent, theoretically, is our local poetry metamodernist in its sensibility and specificity, and to what extent does posthumanism fit into a metamodernist heuristic label. Although the debate remains open insofar as the Romanian theoretical field seems rather refractory to transnational theoretical fictions, what I observe in this article is that metamodernism, as theoretically proposed, can be a viable alternative to the crisis of critical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The paper proposes an analysis of literature’s role in the current Romanian cinematographic context, starting from two case studies: After the Hills (2012) by Cristian Mungiu, based on the novel Spovedanie la Tanacu by Tatiana Niculescu Bran and Moromeții 2 (2018) by Stere Gulea, based on the novels Moromeții vol. II and Viața ca o pradă... by Marin Preda. The approach aims to carry out a comparative analysis regarding both the role played by the literary work in the cinematographic production as well as the valorization of the literary work through the film. In the current socio-cultural context, the artistic impact of a film creates the cultural premises for the propagation of a literary work to several types of audiences. Artistic products derived from literary works develop a series of issues regarding adaptation methods, aesthetic interpretation, and even artistic interference regarding the assimilation of a literary piece in relation to the cinematographic production. The paper presents two case studies to analyze how the literary work appears either as an adjunct to the cinematographic production or as a central element of the filmographic artistic exposition. These case studies are used to determine the role that the film industry has in the processes of internationalization, propagation, and even popularization of a literary work in a Romanian consumer society, which is dangerously far removed from the book industry. Thus, the scientific approach proposes an exploration of literary valorization through cinematographic artistic products in order to popularize and mediate literature in today's society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the ideological mutations that occur by turning the written text into an adaptation, using the protagonists that play the role of the marginal, both in the novel and in the movie, facilitating the breakthrough in the peripheral universe. Transmedia reveals the construction of the same fictional word, but the shift lies in the swinging between ideological isms: progressivism and conservatism, capitalism and anti-capitalism. This study is focused on recent literature and its adaptations. Characters have got the same name, they live in similar universes, but the main aim of this paper is to identify the shifts that result from turning the written message into a visual one. The same “story” can take a different ideological turn, therefore, both creations must be taken into consideration, in order to comprehend the global message. The ”double-creations” chosen to illustrate this point are: Love Sick by Cecilia Ștefănescu, motivating this choice by the progressivism of the adaptation in contrast to the conservatism of the novel, concentrating on the queer component; I am an old communist hag! by Dan Lungu where the focus falls on the anti-capitalist view, whereas the novel concentrates on an anti-communism ideology; Soldiers by Adrian Schiop, a case where the movie diminishes the focus on the progressivism, shifting the prespective on the universal love story between Adi and Alberto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

his paper aims to explore what might be the limits of what we call today Biographical Novel, framed as Biographical Fiction or Life Writing, research that has as its central objective to find an answer to questions such as: what might be the features of the genre and what purpose do they serve today? How do we relate to past personalities in the present context and what can we extract from their lives – can we talk about censorship/ attributing an unrealistic context to a public personality? But more importantly, what is the relationship between fact and fiction constructed, given that the boundary between these is very vulnerable? All these questions are meant to guide the readers throughout the study. Even if the genre is not so much in demand among writers today, probably for reasons related to the economy of time, such writing can become interesting to study how the author chooses to present someone’s life, a choice that must first be well documented, and then fully assumed, with full responsibility for the facts shown. The points on which the paper will focus are related to the novel of Moni Stănilă Brâncuși sau cum a învățat țestoasa să zboare, the biography Constantin Brancusi by Sanda Miller and the „On Constantin Brancusi” study written by Dore Ashton, where the construction of Constantin Brâncuși’s personality, as it appears in their works, will be contextualized in World Literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper aims to reveal an inventory, an interpretation and a statistical analysis of Romanian names of plants which implicates the term „iarbă” (herb, grass), spread through the botanical terminology, a phenomenon which, as considered by E. Coşeriu is not enough highlighted (given that the individual speaker became creator of language / poetry whenever he named a flower. Botanical popular terminology has primarily a practical value, designating, distinguishing and categorizing elements of the plant kingdom within the given natural reign, but also has a high theoretical significance, especially for linguists, both by the ethimons to which they send back and by the metaphorical meanings the phytonims mostly have. Phytonys could be an important starting point in any kind of research, as they constitute a true linguistic and cultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper presents a series of theoretical reflections generated by the task of conducting anthropological research on food traditions and practices in a network of villages in Romania, in the context of restrictions on movement and social interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research was carried out as part of the Digital collection of Romanian food heritage and transfer to society - FOODie project. The pressure to respect both contractual deadlines in relation to the funder and health safety rules led us to the solution of online interviews. Due to the specific nature of our research, the people targeted by the interviews were aged and had minimal digital skills, which led us to call on a second member of the interviewed community, a PC user, who was ready to moderate the relationship with the informant and provide technical assistance. Based on these research experiences, we will discuss (a) the advantages and disadvantages of remote fieldwork; (b) the dynamics of the relation between the researcher and the respondent in this new methodological context; (c) the collaborative nature of the ethnological document, which is the result of the intersection of the researcher's thematic interests, her/his availability and skills and, in this case, the flair, intuition and persuasiveness of the actor mediating the meeting between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes some of Anne Bradstreet’s “marriage” poems, in an attempt to show that the shift in her poetic voice, namely the turn to a more secular approach to poetry, makes her relevant today as the first published poet in America and the first American writer who struggled to establish a new literary paradigm in the New World. The poems “Before the Birth of One of Her Children,” “To My Dear and Loving Husband,” “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment”, “Another” I and "Another" II represent a shift from the “nostalgia” of English literature and the establishment of a new, feminine poetic voice, preoccupied with the condition of the woman writer and the fate of poetry in the patriarchal seventeenth-century American society [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poetic principles defined by Aristotle in his Poetics gave birth to an aesthetic tradition which dominated Western culture and literature up until the twentieth century. All his successors believed that, in order to achieve literary value and public acclaim, a text should comply with criteria such as unity of the subject (mythos), harmony of the parts (taxis), clear inclusive meaning (dianoia), etc. - in other words, structure. However, many authors departed from this ideal and gave free rein to their fantasy, conceiving plethoric, multi-layered, anarchic works, which tended to be, most often than not, excluded from the literary canon. During the twentieth century, with the modern and then the postmodern turn, not only the practical creative Aristotelian rules, but also the very idea of structure was contested. In this paper I make a survey of some of the main critical thinkers who opposed Aristotle’s model of closed works: M. Bakhtin, C.-L. Strauss, J. Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, U. Eco, F. Moretti, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the functions and multiple meanings of parenthetical constructions such as the incident constructions in I.L. Caragiale’s moments and sketches. As parts of the discourse, parentheticals are those expressions that are independent of the host sentence, which function as modifiers, additions to, or comments on the current talk. Even though they are often seen as linguistic ornaments, they play a crucial role in conveying additional information, clarifying ideas, or providing commentary within a sentence. Through a quantitative analysis, we aim to shed light on these linguistic categories to emphasize their importance in the construction of Caragiale’s texts and characters in what concerns the reported speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tradition-brands are cultural constructs launched in Romania around the year 2000, which bring into play a repertoire of conventions and “myths” shared nationwide and proposed to the market, increasingly and more intensely in the late years, by large-scale industrial operators, who in this manner simulate and menace small-scale producers (those actually in the right to claim this tradition as their own). Previous work in the anthropology of consumption has theorized that commercial communication associated with tradition-brands represents a space of negotiation between the Big Industry and traditionalist consumers. The present paper resumes, after more than a decade, the previous thesis, with Mark Fisher's conflict theory tools. In this perspective, traditional brands are forms of Big Industry colonization and naturalization of artisan culture. The case analysis of the Matache Măcelaruʼ charcuterie brand reveals multiple levels of realist-capitalist processing of the commercial message. The key understanding of Fisher's theory of consumerism as a sensitive interface between the capitalist system and the public leads to sharp conclusions about the alienation and disintegration of social actors (consumers, small artisans and merchants) and about the removal of small businesses from the current economic landscape. The possibility of a breach in capitalist totalitarianism lies, hypothetically, in the Romanian public's inertia towards globalization. A conscious reaction is also needed, which arises from civic initiatives regarding the realization of a short producer-consumer chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western culture and literature have been moulded, in their main aesthetic conceptions and creative practices, by Aristotle’s principles. Starting from his seminal text Poetics, ancient, medieval, and modern (from Renaissance to the twentieth century) aesthetics, poetics, rhetorical and grammatical theories have reiterated, amplified, adapted and reshaped the concepts of imitation (mimesis), subject (mythos), meaning (dianoia), order (taxis), unity of the whole and harmony of the parts, etc. On this basis, they demanded that literary works should have - as a prerequisite of aesthetic value and artistic success - a structure, a unitary composition, a centred form, a logos, a cogito, a synopsis or any other formal pattern. This brought about the exclusion from the canon of the works failing to complain with these criteria. In this paper I retrace the Aristotelian tradition, from Horace, Cicero and Quintilian to Beda and Dante, from Minturno and Scaliger to du Bellay and Boileau, from Sydney, Dryden and Pope to Mathew Arnold, the Chicago School and Northrop Frye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Especially after the fall of communism in Romania, Romanian theatre artists were referring nostalgicallyvindictively to what they considered to be a recognition of the importance of their own activity: the inclusion of actors/performers in the categories of hard or harmful labor, just like miners, in the 1950s and generally before 1977. The legend of the similitude between actors and miners is, in fact, part of the symbolic competition with the industrial working class, in which intellectuals felt engaged especially in the 1980s and which played an important role then and in the following decade (a subject which I elaborate in a larger research). This paper investigates the factual basis of this narrative of State legitimation of cultural labor, starting from the legal codification of the miners' central position in the ideology and public discourse of the communist regime and exploring the wage and retirement conditions of (theatre) actors from 1948 until 1989, including through the lenses of their non-public positions, as reflected in the archives of the secret police. Part of a larger framework of the intelligentsia’s antagonism and lack of solidarity with the working class, which has been analyzed at length in post-communism but which tends to not include the specifics of the performing arts in the general cultural framework, it examines the foundations of the persistent discourse placing theatre artists (alongside writers, filmmakers, etc.) as the righteous beneficiaries of the post-1989 transition, aiming to replace miners at the center of the new, capitalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the general problematics of reformulating the concepts of “discourse” and “narrative” and treating cinematic products as textual objects, with incursions into the 21st century cinema as a realist-expositional medium of the social problems of the Other, the present paper aims, by contextualizing the film Aferim! (2015) by Radu Jude, to analyze the relationship between language, language and race, racialization, and representation. In short, it aims to analyze the position of linguistic racism in the admitted “realistic” and artistic presentation of the process of marginalization. Such academic analyses have become present internationally, especially with the development of the linguistic dimension of postcolonial studies and the emergence and expansion of the concept of political correctness and/or cultural sensitivity in the contemporary socio-cultural discourse, especially in direct relation to language, language, and visual media of artistic transposition. We must be remembered, however, that Roma people occupy a marginal place even in postcolonial analysis of otherness. In the Romanian space, with a strong intertextual character, Aferim! occupies a privileged place precisely because of the primacy given to the theme: the Roma slavery in the 19th century Wallachia, during the year 1853, which is a key-year, considering that the formal abolition of slavery took place only three years later, in 1856, in Wallachia. Intentionally subversive, Jude takes the historical form of the popular films from the communist period and turns it against itself, while also adding the American-inspired aesthetic of Westerns. The multiplicity of perspectives is present, but the „intimacy” belongs to the white, oppressive characters, putting the viewer in an uncomfortable position that belongs to them historically. Following the results of the quantitative study of the present work, where the most often used word is „cocoane” [lord] in all its declined versions, Aferim! is thus a film about power dynamics, a dynamic in which the Roma are the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to discuss the configuration of the queer-feminist phenomenon, with its derivatives in intersectionalism, ecofeminism and posthumanism in postmillennial Romanian poetry. The premises of this approach are, on the one hand, the left-wing ideological radicalization of the poetic discourse, and, on the other hand, the shaping of a distinguishing ethos, through which the postmillennial poets create a self-legitimizing international network comprising feminist and/or queer writers and theorists like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Virginia Woolf, Ocean Vuong, Natalia Ginzburg, Maryse Condé, Bruno Latour, etc. Therefore, the article focuses on theoretical import through poetic creation, since, less common in Romanian literary filed, it claims the urgency for theoretical and ethical debates on militant cultural currents and directions against patriarchy, exploitation of nature and animals by humans, and against the classical centre-periphery dichotomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper proposes the analysis of the dramatic work of Matei Vișniec – a Romanian poet and prose writer, built and validated by the French center as an internationally exportable playwriter, by following the aesthetic-political relationship. I question, above all, the reasons why the parabolic formula is the favorite in the author's dramaturgy – its causes and effects, in relation to the ideological level and the thematization of the trauma of the communist (/totalitarian) regime. The thesis of my article is that, behind the parable (which implies a form of mediation) and the discursive metaphorism, respectively an apparent aesthetic gratuity, there is a political thesis that can be reinterpreted, reframed by both target audiences: Eastern and Western. Thus, the playwright built at the center and imported by the Romanian periphery accumulates symbolic capital from both territories, defined as a successful as a transnational author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a tradition of economic, political, and institutional settings built on a dynamic based on dominance, animals have been systematically assigned the role of an inferior form of „otherness”, essential, nevertheless, in shaping the anthropocentric mentality and validating the narrative of human exceptionalism. The longevity of such speciesist practices throughout the humanist discourses obliges the post humanist project of creating a post anthropocentric concept of subjectivity to pay special attention to the issues regarding the animals, their representations, and their interactions with ‘us’. This paper stems from Rosi Braidotti’s project of a posthuman subject understood as a hybrid entity integrated through a system of material and informational connections with all forms of existence in the nature culture continuum and follows the implications it has on redesigning our interactions with the non-human beings in a post-anthropocentric context. My purpose is to study how contemporary Romanian poetry reflects this new vision of subjectivity and its impact on reimagining the relations between the human and non-human beings. The analysis on volumes such as val chimic’s umilirea animalelor (the humiliation of animals), Mihók Tamás’s biocharia. ritual ecolatru, Adelina Pascale’s maki for 2, Gabi Eftimie’s Sputnik în grădină (Sputnik in the garden), or Diana Cornea’s Setări avansate de lumină (Advanced lighting settings) confirms the increasing interest of Romanian post millenary poetry in reshaping the depictions of animals and human-animal interactions according to a post anthropocentric perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to do a close reading analysis of the tridimensional narrative experiment found in Sașa Zare’s debut novel Dezrădăcinare [Rootlessness] (2022). The alternation between character, narrator, and author seen at the narrative level of the novel starts a discussion about the autofictional prose written by Romanian contemporary writers, achieving at the same time to go beyond both national and gender boundaries. Frontier experiences, the theme of otherness, the awareness of what separates us and the damaging effects of a homophobic thinking are portrayed in Dezrădăcinare through multiple perspectives that are firstly analyzed by the narrator. Regarding transnational and World Literature, Zare’s discourse overpasses the limits of a debut novel and brings forward an important question How can we define ourselves in relation to the society we live in? If in the beginning the author-character is unsure of what she is doing, until the end of the novel Sașa is going to address problems regarding literature and criticism, misconceptions, patriarchy, and she will outline her idea about what does writing really mean for a contemporary woman writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore how multilingualism is explored in Bessarabian literature and the way in which these phenomena can create cultural and identity crisis in the collective imaginary of The Republic of Moldova. Thus, it can be observed that in the Soviet period, but also after the fall of the empire, speakers of “Moldavian” language, afterwards named Romanian, are treated as inferior to Russian speakers, Moldavians becoming a periphery. Approaching multilingualism the way it is presented in Multilingual Literature as World Literature edited by Jane Hiddleston and Wen-chin Ouyang, a second objective of this paper is to investigate the identity crisis of the teenagers of Perestroika and the fall of the URSS, but also of the young adults that were brought up in the unsteady world that followed after these events. In doing so, the way in which the Bessarabian people were peripheral. According to the fact that this type of literature is insufficiently discussed, there will be analyzed three such novels, in order to offer a wider image of Chisinau between the 80’s and the 2000 and its transition: Grădina de sticlă (The Glass Garden) by Tatiana Țîbuleac, Sălbaticii copii dingo (The Savage Dingo Kids) by Vasile Ernu and Perestroika boys by Dinu Guțu. The other aspect that will be explored is the image of Romania and its literature in the Soviet Bessarabia, two neighbour countries that did not have an intercultural dialogue until 1991. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper is the analysis of how the multi-peripheral position in Ileana Negrea’s poetry is recontextualized in the geotemporality of contemporary Romanian culture, acknowledging her formation in a different language and through the reception and the application of feminist theories and praxis from other spaces, especially from the South American one, that are stratified and inserted in her texts. The analysis focuses on how the inflection point of her marginal identity, gender-queerness-madness, is recomposed in the actual Romanian cultural and geopolitical circumstances and how her texts are perceived accordingly with these. At the same time, it will be explored how Negrea’s texts enroll in the world literature system via her registering in the worldly queer-feminist literary scheme. [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]

In order to achieve their functional purpose – that of organizing the urban landscape and helping locating people and geographical objectives through an efficient addressing system – street names are bound to remain stable spatial landmarks. On the other hand, street names are also semiotic devices of signifying space with the political and commemorative agenda of the ruling power. This latter characteristic renders them vulnerable to successive renaming following important power-shifts and especially regime changes. What happens when the ideological imperative of politicizing the street nomenclature undermines its functional requirement of providing spatial orientation through extensive renaming? Such a tensional situation is examined in the case of postwar Sibiu between 1945 and 1948, when the city endured a thorough redefinition of its toponymy under the political regime of communist “popular democracy” in Romania. The paper quantifies the scope of toponymic revision and then evaluates the content of these street name changes in terms of three major concepts: class, ethnicity, and gender. Grounded on the results of this analysis, the paper advances the notion of “mercurial street names”. It concludes by arguing that such a concept should complement the existing metaphoricity underpinning the scholarship in place-name studies, which draw on “text”, “discourse”, and “palimpsest” to conceive of the processes of street (re)naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper operates with the archive of digitized texts (about 150 novels published between 1845 and 1900) offered by the project ASTRA Data Mining: The Digital Museum of the 19th Century Romanian Novel. By identifying the occurrences for the term “străin” (“foreign/er”; “strange/r”) and its entire lexical family, the study intends to prove that there is a strong correlation between linguistic signs and literary concepts. More precisely, my survey finds its starting point in the methodology developed by Ryan Heuser and Long Le-Khac. The two researchers use the pair of notions “signal/concept,” where “signal” means “any number of things that are readily tracked computationally” and “concept” represents “the phenomenon that we take a signal to stand for, or the phenomenon we take the signal to reveal,” in order to explain their working method. This precisely is the main reason why I have chosen to classify the occurrences of my key-word based on their semantic valence and to discuss semantic variation as an important indicator in trying to delineate different types of literary discourse and the novelistic subgenres. Lastly, my paper intends to provide a complete ad litteram image of “foreignness” as it occurs in the nineteenth-century Romanian novel. This image will be formed based on the meanings (“implicit” and “explicit” meaning, according to Teun A. van Dijk’s delineation) of the terms that comprise the lexical family for my key-word and on the context (the “micro-” and “macro-context”) in which these words occur as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at the tension between ruralism and urbanism and between foreign models and autochthonous engagement in Marin Predaʼs literary evolution. Although Preda is seen as the most representative rural novelist of the post-war Romanian literature, the aim of the paper is to demonstrate that, starting with the 1962 Risipitorii, his career can be described as a systematic attempt to de-emphasize this framing. The study also tries to pinpoint some of the ideological or cultural aspects responsible for the writerʼs growing internalization of the skepticism toward rural literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Set within the frame of World Literature, and dwelling on the multifaceted concept of networking, this paper aims to provide a temporal pattern concerning the transfer/import of postwar North American poetic trends within the Romanian poetry of the 1980s. By relating the aestheticized model of Romanian (neo)modernism to the more direct, biographical discourse of the Beat poetry, the influence of which emerged upfront in Romanian poetry starting from the late 1970s, as well to the Confessional model the paper explores overlapping temporalities within the two literary systems, whereby the paradigms of (neo)modernism and postmodernism, respectively, clashed, due to the homogenizing effect of the communist context. Along these lines, I outline the notion of diachrony in synchrony of the Romanian poetry of the early 1980s, when several poetic patterns pertaining to different stages of North American poetry exerted a simultaneous influence during a very short time interval. The attempts made by Romanian poets to synchronize with, or borrow from Anglo-American literature, also involved relaying certain attitudes, views, and values – both aesthetic and largely ideological – that were specific to the source culture. Set within the frame of World Literature, and dwelling on the multifaceted concept of networking, this paper aims to provide a temporal pattern concerning the transfer/import of postwar North American poetic trends within the Romanian poetry of the 1980s. By relating the aestheticized model of Romanian (neo)modernism to the more direct, biographical discourse of the Beat poetry, the influence of which emerged upfront in Romanian poetry starting from the late 1970s, as well to the Confessional model the paper explores overlapping temporalities within the two literary systems, whereby the paradigms of (neo)modernism and postmodernism, respectively, clashed, due to the homogenizing effect of the communist context. Along these lines, I outline the notion of diachrony in synchrony of the Romanian poetry of the early 1980s, when several poetic patterns pertaining to different stages of North American poetry exerted a simultaneous influence during a very short time interval. The attempts made by Romanian poets to synchronize with, or borrow from Anglo-American literature, also involved relaying certain attitudes, views, and values – both aesthetic and largely ideological – that were specific to the source culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper parses the major existing literature, in English and Romanian, on the New Romanian Cinema (also called the Romanian New Wave) which became an international film-festival sensation in the mid-2000s. It maps the main lines of disagreement among the various scholars who have attempted to define this phenomenon. The paper argues that the Romanian cinema that had made its dazzling debut on the international scene some 15 years ago has gradually turned into something else – something harder to pin down to an aesthetic paradigm, to a core generational group of ten or so filmmakers, or to a limited set of ideological coordinates. Finally, the paper proposes that the evolving body of work of director Radu Jude (who has established himself in recent years as a major innovator) provides a good lens through which to take the measure of those aesthetic and political changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we explore the exploitation and the discrimination of the feminine other portrayed in contemporary literature as figure of subalternity in the current neocolonial context. Taking into consideration the logic of modernity and that of coloniality as intrisincally interlinked, and the problematics of speaking and acting as a racialized and, at the same time, sexualized woman in the sex industry, we intend to analyse Michel Houellebecq’s Platform from the vantage point of Subaltern Studies in order to showcase how the feminine condition becomes a problem of consciousness and visibility, and how the exploitation of the feminine other is being deepened in a neocolonialist narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long and rich dialogue between the ancient therapeutic practices of the Stoics and contemporary psychotherapeutic fields such as CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy). Nevertheless, little attention is being given to the pragmatic premises that link the curative operations and the operated world-view of these schools of thought. In this sense, my paper represents and attempt at shedding light on the methodology that grounds this very dialogue in the first place – that being an purely instrumentalist methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents a review article of Paul B Preciado’s major work, Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era, recently translated by Daniel Clinci at frACTalia. I will proceed to do so by offering a short contextualization of Preciado’s academic formation and activity, followed by a tackling of the main concepts he borrows from post-structuralist thought. Given Preciado’s fragmented manner of writing this text, which brings together theory and auto-biographical fiction, I will also engage in a type of media analysis that the reader might find atypical for a review, whose main focus is to draw on some cinematic parallels, in order to extract an account for the new emerging kind of subjectivity that the pharmacopornographic regime creates. I will present Preciado’s analysis of the pharmacopornographic regime by following three main concepts that consolidate his body of work: the deconstruction of sex, the economic analysis of potentia gaudendi (orgasmic force) and the political construction of categories. At the same time, I will evaluate Preciado’s materialist turn by offering a critique of consistency. Lastly, I will emphasize the importance of this book in intersectional analysis while criticizing some points that Preciado either fails to consider, or whose dangers he minimizes while proposing a praxis for political dissidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SNational theatre was at the forefront of nation-building efforts in Europe at the end of the 19th century. New nations instrumentalized traditional motifs such as legends, myths of origin, and fairytales for their alleged part in shaping “national character.” In this paper I analyze how Lucian Blaga, an iconic playwright and philosopher of romantic-nationalist inspiration, used folklore in Zamolxis, Pagan Mystery (1921) in Romania to mythify the national self-image. Employing a deconstructionist, postcolonial reading of the play, I analyze the use of myth and its role in the construction of the national imaginary. I also situate this process in the geopolitical context of the late 19th and early 20th century Eastern Europe, a place in which several newly created nation-states instrumentalized culture to compete with one another for the legitimization of both territorial claims and political supremacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the theories about the author's posture, my paper aims both to reconstruct the path of Mariana Marin's mythologization and to deconstruct it by establishing two main postures: the tragic posture, congealed mainly post-mortem, and the ethical one, originating in a specific ethos, identifiable in the poet's biographical-artistic trajectory. Having become a mythologised figure of the 1980s generation, due to the fatalistic correspondences between poems and biography or to the legitimisation of her value by comparison with poets of the same framework, but from the mainstream of world literature (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Else Lasker-Schüler), Madi – the famous nickname – tends to penetrate abusively, sometimes unjustifiably, into the reception of Mariana Marin's texts, hence the empirical persona which becomes strongly than the poetic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manuscript I talk about in this paper – Mihail Sebastianʼs diary from 1930 to 1931 – has been “hidden” in sight for nearly 40 years, in a public library from the cultural center of the country. I insist upon the unpublished content of this notebook, which I show and contextualize. I also discuss the importance of the manuscript, giving some significant details about the appearance of the notebook that housed the novel diary of the The Town with Acacia Trees, a diary kept by Sebastian during his time in Paris (1930-1931). The discovery of this unpublished notebook is per se a turning point for Sebastian’s exegetes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of identifying sources and representations of melancholy in cinema implies exploring character typologies that present aspects or even clear symptoms of what is currently termed as melancholic depression or major depression disorder. David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), an adaptation of Noël Coward’s short play Still Life (1936), presents female melancholy as an inherent symptom of the bovaryc character. This paper analyzes aspects of melancholy studying the case of Lean’s main character, Laura, and relating it to the features of bovarysm, as theorized and exhaustively explored by French philosopher Jules de Gaultier in the essay Le Bovarysme (1892). To what extent is melancholy an inherent symptom of the bovaric character? While exploring the ongoing psychological research on melancholy and depression, we find it difficult to determine whether the character suffers from major depression disorder, as it is impossible to ascertain the specific cause of their symptoms, especially if they relate to internal, neurobiological systems. The apparent cause of their unhappiness seems to be the result of their perception of romantic relationships and their surrounding reality that does not reflect this distortion. Consequently, the analysis mainly focuses on the detectable elements and activators of the protagonist’s melancholic disposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study undertakes an analysis of the dichotomy mind over matter, culture and civilization, a plea for art – with special focus on literature – and raising awareness of the increasing role of humanities and the liberal arts in a society driven and increasingly dominated by scientific advancement and aiming towards solely technological purposes. The paper stems from previous research interest in the field of cultural studies and relies on recent scholarly studies raising awareness about a revival of the word and language akin to the call “make it new” and calling attention to the impact of the image versus the power of the word highly valued by literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper aims to reveal an inventory, an interpretation and a statistical analysis of Romanian names of plants which implicates the term „iarbă” (herb, grass), spread through the botanical terminology, a phenomenon which, as considered by E. Coşeriu is not enough highlighted (given that the individual speaker became creator of language / poetry whenever he named a flower. Botanical popular terminology has primarily a practical value, designating, distinguishing and categorizing elements of the plant kingdom within the given natural reign, but also has a high theoretical significance, especially for linguists, both by the ethimons to which they send back and by the metaphorical meanings the phytonims mostly have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine the discourse on banditry (haiducie) articulated by the romantic elite of 19th century Romania. By relying on the various literary productions of the era, from short stories to memoirs and travel literature, I posit that the image of the noble bandit is rather manufactured by the elite to fit their political agenda, if not actually imported from ready-made west-European bandit models. The reason behind the cosmetic treatment of robbers and highwaymen that the Romanian elites perform in their writings, is the same as that of their western counterparts: noble bandits are easily integrated in the emerging nation-state narrative of the era and are useful as precursors of the political claims of the elite. [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]

This paper is an analysis of Jack Kerouac’s 1954-letter to Robert Lax and it emphasizes that the American author’s (temporary) conversion to Buddhism was not a mere reaction against his Christian belief and tradition, but the result of a natural, informed realization of the possibility to accept, to celebrate distinction, to bridge the differences through compassion. The analysis partly mirrors Jack Kerouac’s own etymological method and highlights the differences between his own and the traditional interpretation of the terms karuna and agape. The conclusion is that, even though Kerouac’s understanding of certain religious concepts might sound subjective, it provides the reader with a valuable perspective on the two spiritual traditions which enabled the American author to naturally turn to Buddhism, albeit temporarily; it also facilitates the analysis of his writing. [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]

On the background of recent syntheses on the concept of authenticity in Romanian literature and in the light of gender studies in relation to the postcanonical perspective, this paper aims to question a possible alternative of authenticity in two interwar novels written by women: Anișoara Odeanu’s 1934 Într-un cămin de domnișoare [In a Young Ladies’ Home] and Lucia Demetrius’ 1936 Tinerețe [Youth]. While interwar literature outlines a masculine, misogynist and machismo authenticity, based on vitalism and obsession with the experience of the male subject, the alternative of prose written by women proposes an authenticity that is neither doctrinaire nor merely a form. While not configured as an alternative to the ism of male writing’s authenticity, the two novels propose a demonopolisation of authenticity and underline the signs of a counter discourse of women writings within and against a misogynistic society and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is rethought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015). [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]

This paper discusses Manuela Boatcă and Anca Parvulescu’s recent volume, Creolizing the Modern, in relation to the debates surrounding the adequacy of the postcolonial framework for the analysis of East European and, more specifically, Romanian literature. It argues that the authors manage to signal, introduce and put into practice some of the most important methodological updates in the fields of postcolonialism, dependency studies and World Literature. Through a discussion of each of these milestones, Boatcă and Parvulescu’s inter-imperial reading method is shown to provide a highly rigorous and productive world-systemic perspective on modern canonical literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive wave of economic migration of Transylvanians to America in the early 20th century had a considerable impact on the lives of both those who decided to temporarily leave their homeland and those who stayed home. The Transylvanian pattern of emigration, similar to the neighbouring Central and Eastern European countries can be sum up as follows: young male peasants, poorly educated, but with high hopes and determination left for America, for highly demanding physical work, but well enough remunerated in order to allow them to return home relatively soon. This paper seeks to contribute to the rich literature on emigration, by focusing on how this phenomenon influenced the villagers of Șona, a small community in the former Făgăraș County. By analysing photos, artefacts and documents that belonged to the emigrants, the Ellis Island Passenger Search Database, and by conducting interviews with their living descendants, I focus on the personal experience of migration – individual stories of migrants, their relations with their family and the community. Thus, I try to partially recreate some biographies directly connected to the experience of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper briefly presents the evolution of terminology related to heritage (natural, cultural, and digital), reviewing the key moments which led to their institutionalization at the global level, as well as to the practices of valorization of heritage and patrimony elements, focusing especially on the appearance of their third type, the digital cultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]