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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]

This paper is an attempt to present the main Western theories regarding the novel – the artistic novel to be more precise – that were also translated into Romanian and fecundated the national literary field. We focus on the evolution of the thought about the novel, starting with Georg Lucaks’ seminal work, dedicated to what was the literary species, and up to Franco Moretti’s paradigm of shifting studies. This could prove to be an opportunity to observe the manner in which the genre was conceptualized and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to tell the story of the novel's long process of legitimation. Perceived for a long time by the poeticians of old as a genre that was not worth mentioning, because of its vulgar origins, the novel, in its modern form, has undergone a radical transformation that saw it, at the cross of the 19th and 20th centuries, at the top of the genre system. That is why I will try to point to the processes that made the novel what it is today: the dominating species, modernity's offspring, at the same time a menace and an assetto the literary field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to discuss the concept of kitsch and the subsequent relativization to which it was subjected, in a succession imposed by an internal dynamic of the evolution of the phenomenon. Therefore, different critical approaches will be presented by providing numerous examples, many of which are innovative, considering that the discussed notion has generated some of the most nuanced perspectives which have gone from assimilation of many contexts to challenging and reformulating them, thus emphasizing the extremes of the later conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses Maria Racu’s exegetical volume - The Thanatotic Imaginary in the Lyric of George Bacovia and Ion Minulescu. The theme addressed by the author, perhaps more topical than ever, illustrates the symbolic representations of the imaginary of death/Thanatos in the poetry of our two poets: George Bacovia and Ion Minulescu. This article follows Maria Racu’s research approach, identifying the reading grids and the aspects of novelty in the space of the literary imaginary. The directions of analysis will include images of temporality, Bacovian space and hypostases of the erotic in Minulescu’s poems, as well as catamorphic symbols in symbolist poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]