Search

A "quasi-mystical" understanding ofour rural economy (which has always favored propagandist uses) is disseminated through a great number of literary works and political texts, which, before World War I, depict the Romanian village as a place of poverty, misery, abuse and crime. The peasants' habits oflabor and leisure get through to the readers as an architecture of infernal circles, while "rural" phsychologies are the epitome of unconscious pulsations, of extreme, seif-consuming and undetermined passions. In a nutshell, this literature enhances the view that the Romanian peasant can never be reasonable. A bulk of passions and a brutal body (so, a perfect subject ofphysical and spiritual toils), this type ofman is quite unable to cooperate, to rationalize his labor efforts, thus to integrate his household economy within a higher and more complex economical mechanism, as the doctrinarians of the National Peasants'Party claim. Invariably, we are introduced to an incessant and wearisome process oflabor, whose aims - highly predeterm ined by an Orthodox mindset - are not to be found or expressed here on Earth, but in the afterlife. Yet, in the context of war dynamics, which btings about demographic mobility, technical input and mentality changes, the Romanian rural economy is substantially changed by the new distribution oftând ownership. Observing pernicious phenomena such as property fragmentation and overcrowding of rural areas, economist Virgil Madgearu warns about issues such as labor efficiency and intensive exploitation of agr icul tur al fields. Extremely sensitive to the labor's ethic (which organizes both his biography and his characters' fictional biographies) and to the small household's economy, Ion Agârbiceanu is a writer who records, in a behaviorist fashion, the changes occurring in Transylvanian rural society after the great Union of 1918. His literature is extremely valuable for the way it catches the traits of Romania's rural areas, especially in Transylvanian villages that are now permeated not only by new habits developed after the war (leisure activities, new types of speculations), but also by a way of conceiving andpracticingpolitics that is coming from the new capital, Bucharest. As Ion Agârbiceanu attests, peasants have to understand not only the social function of land but also the importance of the new owners' mentality in an emerging rural market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the present paper we endeavored to prove that Lovinescu's artistic creation is generally looked down on as a sort of 'specimen' failure; in spite of its quantitative importance, his literature did not meet with the public's general enthusiasm; on the contrary, putting aside the author's fame, the scholars kept themselves at bay, being reserved in giving any verdicts. The Genesis of Form... seeks to undo the laboratory experiments of an enigmatic writer who, but for writing it, used to know everything about literature. Thus, the book does not represent, in a restrictive way, an instance of genetic criticism, prone to locate and restore only the pre-publication variants. On the contrary, it aims to inquest - in a complex and subtle manner, at the same time - the issue of subjective taste, which should have determined the evolution and aesthetics of literary forms along the prose writer's biographic course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper illustrates several significant moments from the history of Eminescu's critical interpretation. It focuses mainly on the first stages when the Romantic writer's myth crystallized, namely E Lovinescu's "reading" of the poet's eroticism through the lens of Freud's theories. We endeavored to prove that Lovinescu's interpretation was just one among others (Ibrăileanu, Călinescu, Vianu, Caracostea), as the whole context favored a psychological understanding of Eminescu's personality. In order to sketch a still more convincing picture we brought into discussion the most recent studies dealing with different aspects of Eminescu's life and work and our conclusion shows clearly that, notwithstanding its limits, Lovinescu's understanding was a revolutionary and crucial one for the later developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Always focused on the dialogue between pleasure and ideology, with an echo in the present reality, melodrama played the part of an open aesthetical form, encouraging the public to acknowledge and self-perceive its identity with a sort of enthusiasm which foregoes the mass culture phenomenon. Contrary to the views expressed by Lovinescu and other theorists which assert the eternity of melodramatic structures (Eric Bentley, among others), Peter Brooks harbours the melodramatic category to the strict boundaries of modern culture - and, particularly, to the purist aesthetics of modernity - by neglecting its socio-cultural side. Aesthetically speaking, the outstanding originality of melodrama does not lie in the psychological insight on fictional characters which are now moulded according to an "existential" way of being. It is the intrigue the element which keeps a tensioned atmosphere of suspense and, more precisely, the explicit scenic disposition which astonishes the public by displaying pompous paraphernalia and theatrical effects and draws the spectator to recognize the eternal pattern of good-evil fight. After its stage settings and awesome effects, melodrama actually comes nearer to the experimental genres. It releases the strong feeling that, bearing the ability to reshape itself on various contexts and conditions, melodrama resembles very much to the model of avant-garde literature. Lovinescu's point in pinning up the actuality of melodrama is nevertheless meritorious as, engrained by melodramatic techniques, his novels break open the ways to other perspectives on modernism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper goes forth from several observations phrased by E. Lovinescu in his early serial criticism. The Romanian modernist leader used to emphasize on the idea that the perennial elements in literature, namely those that are able to raise the strongest emotions, carrying their resonances deep down to the very marrow of the human being, are purely and thoroughly melodramatic. Actually, when giving a close reading to Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Lovinescu was prone to relieve mainly the psychological meaning as he considered that it was the emotion-procurement which secured a certain time endurance of the dramatic work, and not its sheer aesthetic value. Thereby the modernist critic came to an overt distinction between the psychological and the aesthetic features of the artistic works and hence this brought him to the conclusion that actually the melodrama is not only closer to life than any other literary genre, but also the farthest from art. In exchange, the closest to art's sophistication seems to be only the tragedy, a canonical species resurrected with gusto by the neo-classicists from the Ancient Greek culture and yet resented by their descendants as awfully artificial. Parting from this, at the Romantic turn-point, the tragedy begins to melt undiscernibly into melodrama. Moreover, the melodramatic, as a proper aesthetic category, grows into the inner structure of modern art, being rendered in various artistic genres such as movies and novels: practically they are being transferred both the theatrical techniques and vision specific to melodrama. This paper endeavours to follow the metamorphoses of this process, underlining altogether Lovinescu's personal contribution. It in this precise area of critical thought that the Romanian critic set himself up as a predecessor of the nowadays trends to rehabilitate the melodrama. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study delineates the specific means of trafficking Proust's innovative method within the boundaries of the Romanian literature. Consequently, we referred to the theoretical displays of the most prominent modernist critics and writers (namely, E. Lovinescu and Camil Petrescu), so as to illustrate the way in which the Romanian personalities most "wired up" to the Western movement of ideas managed to give a personal interpretation for the concept of "involuntary memory". Although Proust appeared to advantage the involuntary memory as a fertile means of creation revolving unconscious movements after been moved forward by a sensory stimulus, yet exclusively a musical stimulus (not also a visual one, because the image as such cannot trigger re-minding), the French writer did not dismiss the voluntary memory. In fact, he considered that only the volitive process employs the consciousness to frame a spatial image of time (as image). Unfortunately, equally Lovinescu and Camil Petrescu translated Proust's notes on the two types of memory into a Manicheist vision that privileges either sensibility and involuntary memory (Camil Petrescu), or reason and voluntary memory (Lovinescu). However Proust's mind on mind is quite integrative and states the necessity of translating time into image, that is, spatial representations, which altogether have drawn the hypothesis of a novel "architecture". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]