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“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]

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]

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]

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]

In this paper I investigate how the interpretation of the Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu’ work verifies the European transition from a rationalist conception of “genius” (according to which “genius” is a phenomenon subjected to the laws of nature/ society) to an irrationalist conception, where “genius” becomes a supernatural, transcendental, miraculous or inexplicable phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I investigate how the interpretation of the Romantic poet Mihai Eminescu’ work verifies the European transition from a rationalist conception of “genius” (according to which “genius” is a phenomenon subjected to the laws of nature/ society) to an irrationalist conception, where “genius” becomes a supernatural, miraculous or inexplicable phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the anti-communist rhetoric of the popular Ukrainian video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl which was developed by GSC Game World and released in 2007. In this paper I argue that, in order to mount a humanist critique against Soviet communism, the game borrows the anti-colonial discursive structure of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness filtered through the video game F.E.A.R. If colonialism is predicated on the juxtaposition of territorial expansion and a progressive temporality towards a civilizational ideal, then Heart of Darkness and F.E.A.R. convey a critique of colonialism by highlighting how spatial progress brings about temporal regression manifested as a dissolution of the self. To show this, they employ the doppelgänger convention. Both protagonists representing white civilization are on quest to find a character who has been ‘contaminated’ by the ‘heart of darkness.’ This latter character is eventually revealed to be a negative cultural doppelgänger of the protagonist who has assimilated otherness to the point of no return. By the same token, in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl the psychological regression of the protagonist is mapped onto spatial progress towards the heart of communism, in this case Reactor #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. reworks the doppelgänger convention by identifying the protagonist with the character ‘gone native,’ i.e. gone communist, not only symbolically, but also physically. This enables the game to put forth two scenarios, namely one where the main character overcomes communism, and one where he embraces it. By offering both endings, the game maintains two contradictory views on the communist past. One ending suggests that communism can eventually be overcome, while the other postulates the communist past is here to stay. [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]

This paper discusses the content of the cadre file of Henri H. Stahl preserved in the Archives of the University of Bucharest’s Rectorate. In the form in which it has been preserved after 1989, the personnel file of H.H. Stahl seems, from several points of view, atypical. If we compare it with the cadre files of the 1950s, it surprises by the apparent “goodwill” of the communist cadres towards H.H. Stahl. This ideological solicitude is manifested in the interpretation given to main cultural and political events in H.H. Stahl’s life. In other circumstances such political past could be labeled as unusable in a communist context. Equally curious and noteworthy is the issue of the ethnic origin attributed (and not necessarily real or assumed by the one described in the file), more precisely the issue of Stahl’s nationality ( Jewish) which was recorded in the file. Analyzing Stahl cadre file we can wonder if the integrity of this dossier has not been compromised by removing, extracting or modifying documents by the personel staff services or by someone else. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to address the written and narrated memories of Henri H. Stahl who left behind two memorial works: Memories and Thoughts from the Old School of “Sociological Monographs”, published in 1981, and the collection of interviews from 1985-1987, which appeared in 2000, under the title Monography as Utopia. Although they were conceived only a few years apart, the two forms of memoirs show some significant differences. In the following study, I will present the specifics of each of them, in order to later propose a brief comparative analysis of the two texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]