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The present paper is committed to the topic of time and narrative. We will firstly draw a contextualizing outline, emphasizing the conditions which brought about the postmodern shift, followed by a cursory survey concerning the cultural aspects of postmodernism. In the second part of the paper, we will review some of the major works in the field of time and narrative. In the last part, we will finally investigate a postmodern British novel (Ian McEwan's Atonement) by using structuralist and phenomenological instruments of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is a narratological analysis of the manner in which a historical fact (the deportation of ethnic Germans from Romania) gains its equally epic and poetic value in Herta Müller's novel Atemschaukel, constituting a unique geometric place where the three genres, the lyric, epic and dramatic, converge. This intersection of genres, as well as the ability to maintain a stable balance between them, means for Herta Müller the real success in a poetic, artistic conversion of a dramatic event in the history of ethnic Germans in Romania. The paper describes the pattern of this specific type of writing, the meeting place of a lyric subject (the confession of the protagonist, Leo Auberg), an epic subject matter of the narration (deportation), and the tension of a metaphysical conflict, albeit desacralized, between destiny and freedom. This paper proposes a reading of Herta Müller's text starting from historical contextualization, it analyzes the nature and function of history in a community and in individual destiny, in order to finally arrive at a poetic decontextualization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper dwells upon the crisis of literary sociology in Romanian criticism in the decade(s) after the demise of Socialist Realism. Viewing it as a paradox within the research commandments of a communist regime, the study relates this crisis both to the decline of the Marxist-Leninist frame in post-Stalinist, Soviet-emancipated Romania, and to the rising fame of French Structuralism. Some relevant case studies are chosen to highlight the development of Romanian sociological criticism, its difficulty to make amends with the dogmatic past and to swiftly move on to the next level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]