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The paper is a case study, part of a larger and older research project on the reception of modernist American literature in the cultural press of communist Romania in the 1960s. If the 1950s were the toughest years, in terms of censorship and physical atrocities, the 1960s could be considered the milder ones, while also anticipating the enlightened 1970s. We have been analyzing the Romanian cultural press as going beyond the role of an interface between an ecriture terminal and a network of readers: firstly, via translations, more or less accurate, secondly, through interviews and memories from journalists, fellowwriters, friends, family members, as reproduced from publications belonging mainly to the Eastern / Communist Bloc (Cuba included). Our research is also based on investigations run in the archives of the former secret police, the infamous Securitate. The relation between censorship and ideology, between institutionalized and self-censorship is underlined, as well as their effect in the act of literary translation. Our paper focuses on Hemingway as a result of him being the most popular representative of the Lost Generation at the time, in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. The main text we had in view was How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen? by Lilian Ross.

The article aims at retrieving, based on novel documents and on our own individual research, a defining moment in the history of the Romanian PEN Club, i.e. its foundation in the years right after WWI. The episode is integrated within the enlarged historical, political, social and cultural context of the time. The figure of Marcu Beza, the Romanian Anglicist and diplomat in London in the 1920s, draws our attention due to his determination in engaging Romanian writers in the emergent circuit of democratic values specific to western societies.

My paper aims at identifying the images and episodes – in the texts Hemingway dedicated to Scott Fitzgerald in A Moveable Feast – that reveal the interplay between memories and forgiving oneself, and therefore underlining the therapeutic value of those particular texts for the author. While tracing back the events in the Paris of the 1920s, he exposes the vulnerability not only of his individual self, but of Fitzgerald’s as well. Less obvious because of Hemingway’s compulsion to dominate, but even striking due to Fitzgerald’s “complementary need to be dominated”, (their) vulnerability hints at various degrees of self-destructive behavior. Hemingway’s late awareness of all these and his attempts at protecting Fitzgerald, both physically and textually, raise the issue of who speaks, who listens and who responds, or of the critical trust in individual testimony, of a “hermeneutics of suspicion”, as Ricoeur once formulated when referring to psychoanalysis. Is the goal of Hemingway’s narrative, in this respect, one of a pacified, happy memory? Or not? The Rabelaisian chronotope of growth, as designed by Bakhtin, is also employed when analyzing Hemingway and Fitzgerald’s whereabouts across the playground provided by Paris in the 1920s. Does everything that is “good” – food, drink, sex, beauty, the craft of writing, etc – really grow in those sections of A Moveable Feast? And does “the bad” thin out and perish as the writer moves on with his stories of remembering? And do his readers move along with the flow? The Rabelaisian series at work in the stories – of the human body, food series, drink and drunkenness, sexual series, death series, etc – intersect one another and speak forth of the complexity of a text that is far from being a light touch on some youth existential experiences.

The paper aims at identifying, through topoi like food and dining, cultural and identity codes in 1930s Romania, as reflected in a famous travelogue. The British poet and art critic Sacheverell Sitwell produced this very interesting book on Romania one year after his four-week travel in 1937. Some episodes and aspects will be approached in relation to the writings of another British traveller in the 1930s, Patrick Leigh Fermor, with whom Sacheverell Sitwell shared a deep intellectual friendship.

This paper reviews and analyzes the effects that external (or exogenous) factors, defined as economic factors that cannot be controlled or influenced by the central bank, have on monetary policy and the monetary policy transmission mechanism. Adopting a theoretical research position, we aim at identifying the main external factors to monetary policy and discuss the ways in which these factors alter the economic environment and implicitly the monetary policy transmission mechanism. This is done by changing the way in which monetary transmission channels work and deliver monetary policy decisions throughout the economy, with the final goal of producing central bank desired outcomes with regard to economic variables like inflation, employment, or the production level. We will begin this article with a brief introduction on the topic of monetary policy, the monetary policy transmission mechanism and the potential external factors that may influence the monetary policy and the functioning of its transmission mechanism. The main external factors are identified as linked to fiscal policy, commodity prices, financial market volatility or other globalization related processes. After this introduction, we will proceed with the analysis of the nature and influences of each of the above mentioned external factors on monetary policy and its transmission, indentifying the potential ways in which they can change the structure and internal processes of the transmission channels. As we will see in the study and highlight in our conclusion, the external factors cause decisive changes in the way monetary policy is transmitted, and thus will strongly influence the decisions that central banks take in order to alter key economic variables. The profound understanding of how these non-central bank controlled factors influence the monetary policy transmission mechanism is a key requirement for central banks, as only by being able to predict, recognize and evaluate the effects of current or future external factors can they succeed in reaching their monetary policy objectives.

his paper addresses the subject of the monetary policy transmission mechanism by focusing on the asset price channel, which is the monetary transmission channel responsible for the propagation of the effects induced by the monetary policy decisions made by the central bank that affect the price of assets. We will analyze the asset price channel by taking a close look at its structure, internal processes and the way it delivers monetary policy throughout the economy, ultimately influencing key variables such as the unemployment rate and the levels of consumption and production. After an introduction dealing with the entire monetary transmission mechanism, its role and purposes, we will focus on the particularities of the asset price channel and the two main ways in which it delivers monetary policy decision effects: through changes in Tobin’s q value, which is the ratio between the market value of a given company and its replacement cost of capital, and through the effect of wealth, both of financial and housing nature, on consumption. In our study, we will consider theoretical aspects and observations, but also empirical evidence that highlights that the exact way in which the asset price channel functions may differ from one economy to another due to differences in the structures of the respective economies and differences in psychology and cultural values of consumers. The deep understanding of the asset price transmission channel is very important for any central bank, as this is the channel that governs key aspects of monetary policy transmission linked to the market value of assets and individual wealth. These values have, as we will see in more detail throughout the paper, an important impact on both consumption and investment, two economic actions that can help the economy, but can also prove to be a crucial element in starting and perpetuating an economic crisis.