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The present paper discusses art as an environment for communicating meanings, as shared by the members of a community or culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries; for this purpose, the paper focuses on the changes taking place in cultural production as well as the consumption practices of the digital age: more specifically, on the shift from a goods-centred economy to a service-centred economy, on the experience as a commodity, on interactive art and relational aesthetics, as well as on the emergence of a new way of production and consumption. The paper also discusses a possible modernity and the cultural differences that appear in the works of Eastern European artists (and Romanian artists in particular), works which reflect the transition from communism to post-communism and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses an important aspect of André Scrima's writings: the way he uses history from the perspective of the theory of revelation. The paper presents some examples (communism, the situation of Jerusalem seen from the perspective of the conflicts in the Middle East), then analyses the main lines of the interpretive methods used by Scrima in describing and understanding these. The historical sense which observes in time, and through transient institutions, the forms of manifestation of transcendence works from this perspective as a critical and hermeneutic agenda related to events and historical figures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The communist regime in Romania created a centralized media, characterized by the interlocking of censorship and propaganda, as well as an extensive economic control. After the regime change in Romania, free publicity displaced guided socialist publicity with no transition period. However, neither the new actors of political life, nor the media possessed the basic knowledge, rules, and norms for operating a democratic press. The assertion is based on the analysis of the issues of the Hungarian daily paper Romániai Magyar Szó (Hungarian Word of Romania) in the first half of 1990. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study contains unpublished archival information on the history of teaching journalism in Romania. It describes the attempts to institutionalize some forms of instruction, then the appearance of the journalism school in Bucharest, initially within the public academic education, later in the institution training the cadres of the Romanian Communist Party, the Ştefan Gheorghiu Academy. The paper presents enrolment numbers, admission modalities, and curricula in the different stages of the school's evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ellenpontok was the only Romanian samizdat periodical. The author was one of the initiators and collaborators. This paper recalls the stages of creating this newspaper and then its cessation in the 1980s. The basic idea of this Hungarian publication was that in the circumstances of the party system it was impossible to ensure the rights of a greater minority in the long run. Besides the conception of the periodical the paper presents the story of the articles, the publication of issues, the persecution of collaborators and the fading memories in the history of this periodical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper analyses the evolution of Romanian theories concerning the concept of postmodernism, from the first (enthusiastic) contributions of the 1980s to the recent sceptical views. The case of Gheorghe Crăciun is very relevant in this respect, given the fact that he is considered one of the most important Romanian theorists of postmodernism and his articles (mainly those dating from 2006) describe multiple "vitiated" aspects regarding this cultural paradigm. My aim is to give a critical analysis of these texts and also to place them in the larger context of Romanian theories on postmodernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a first case study researching the Formatiunea 0830 Periprava labour camp in the Danube Delta (1957-1964). The analysis focuses, pertinently and objectively, on the situation of political prisoners sent to this unit of forced labour in the first two decades of communism. The work is based on a wide range of historical sources (published and unpublished archival documents), the legislation of the age, and sources of oral history (testimonies and interviews). This study is the result of a two-year research, including the examination of files connected to the subject from the archives of the Consiliului National de Studiere a Arhivelor Securitatii (National Council for the Study of Security Archives) and field research in the village of Periprava conducted on two occasions. The analysis failed to identify any published materials approaching the subject from the same perspective as the present research. From this point of view, the study can be regarded as an original contribution to the subject discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Zielona Góra possesses many traces and places of commemoration that are related to its communist past. The question of why these still exist is more difficult to answer. One factor is almost certainly its special status as a formerly German city in the territories “regained” from the Nazi regime after the Second World War. The Polish Communist Party was in power until 1989. The majority of Poles have tended to remain left-wing. Thus, despite popular resentment over Soviet domination and the relative impoverishment of the communist period, this period is not viewed entirely negatively. The persistence of traces of the communist past may also simply result from political inertia in the region. A third possibility is that Poland has never had an effective policy of decommunization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study is based on a field research developed in a few Romanian villages and is focused primarily on what peasants have to say about their relation with the sanitary system during the communist period. One preliminary conclusion of research is that people living in rural communities have a prevalently negative image about the modern sanitary system imposed by the state, consequently resorting to a parallel sanitary system that we may call traditional where all kinds of empirical or magical characters come into action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study is to outline how the cultural model of the hero-traitor functioned in the second half of the 20th century. The investigation focuses on the case study of the communist martyr hero, Lazăr of Rusca's figure, heroized in the context of the political show trial of Timişoara held in the summer of 1949 and diffused by the propaganda machinery of the communist regime from Bucharest (party press, literature, monuments, denominations); on another level, we take into consideration the two modalities of representing Lazăr of Rusca in the rural community he came from: a) the way in which he was depicted by the anticommunist partisans and b) the image outlined by the narrative of the family members, which applies strategies for preserving the social prestige of the family in the post-socialist period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The text publishes the correspondence of two significant Romanian intellectuals. The texts stand as evidence for the narrowing of intellectual life and possibilities in Romania in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as for the efforts and struggles of intellectual self-preservation and integrity. The letters are included into the Special Collections of the Lucian Blaga Central University Library in Cluj. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the decades of his activity of a literary historian, or rather a historian of literary ideas, Prof. Marino has turned, after the 1989 Revolution, to the history of political ideas and ideology, a subject of his concern long before, but which he was hindered to freely pursue by the communist regime. His new research bears the title Freedom and Censorship in Romania, the first volume of which discusses the beginnings of the tradition of liberal thinking in Romania in the 18th century. The present article puts forward the initial phases of this work, outlining the theoretical framework of political thinking and freedom in the historical background of 18th century Romanian culture. The article was first published in Romanian in the periodical Observatorul cultural (The Cultural Observer) 134 (17.09.-23.09.2002). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study draws a typology of the representatives of repression in Romanian communist jails and camps. This is not an external typology but it is based on the memories of convicts. Starting from this classification and drawing on the experiences of international memoir literature and historiography, the study offers an "anthropologic" understanding of the Romanian communist jails and camps until the end of the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the sake of readers who are not familiar with the "system" of publications under the communist regime of Ceauşescu, a manuscript had to pass through many unexpected obstacles. Sometimes already published volumes were withdrawn in the last minute. The "file" presented here throws light on the fight against the absurdity of cultural policy, containing the "addresses" and "applications" of some intellectuals who were responsible for their literature and culture and who struggled in vain until the disappearance of communism to publish their Dictionary. The documents are a real "guide" to the functioning of this system in the field of culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]