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The first classifications of the novel date back to the early 18th century. Then, the novel was still a new genre and was defined in relation to ancient Latin or Hellenistic models and to their narrative variations from the 17th century. By analyzing the first works that try to trace a history of the new genre and a taxonomy of the various types of novels, penned by authors such as Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy, James Beattie and Clara Reeve, this paper argues that the works seen as peripheral in relation to a canonical, archetypal narration, which is typical of the novel, are in themselves illustrative of a wider phenomenon - the marginalization of those narratives which do not fit a current and implicit definition of a genre. Using Corin Braga's concept of "anarchetypal narrative", this paper discusses the works to be found at the peripheries of the novel in the 18th century and the explicit and implicit reasons for their theoretical dismissal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at analyzing utopias and dystopias in Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon. Taking into consideration that this narrative was already defined as a scientific romance and an anatomy with allegorical status, as well as McCarthy's observation that Stapledon’s writing resists simple categorization and that its classification as science fiction or utopian literature is inadequate, this paper suggests several definitions for Stapledon’s work. The author also takes into account the ongoing dispute between utopian studies and science fiction scholars about the strong interaction between utopia and science fiction in the twentieth century. The possibilities of applying the conceptual integration theory to such a complex work of fiction as Last and First Men is explored.

In the wake of the 20th century French School of imagination studies, my paper wants to highlight the significant differences between two visions about humanity: a traditional transcendentalist vision of immortality, created by a long historical and cultural process of self-poiesis, and an immanentist scientific ideological vision, represented by the humanism of the modern era. In postmodern times, this positivist view prolongs itself in the "transhumanist revolution", a by-product of the ideological myth of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first classifications of the novel date back to the early 18th century. Then, the novel was still a new genre and was defined in relation to ancient Latin or Hellenistic models and to their narrative variations from the 17th century. By analyzing the first works that try to trace a history of the new genre and a taxonomy of the various types of novels, penned by authors such as Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy, James Beattie and Clara Reeve, this paper argues that the works seen as peripheral in relation to a canonical, archetypal narration, which is typical of the novel, are in themselves illustrative of a wider phenomenon – the marginalization of those narratives which do not fit a current and implicit definition of a genre. Using Corin Braga’s concept of “anarchetypal narrative”, this paper discusses the works to be found at the peripheries of the novel in the 18th century and the explicit and implicit reasons for their theoretical dismissal.

While poststructuralist attacks against structured forms freed literature from the dominance of Aristotle's canon, twentieth-century evolutions in physics and cosmology brought about a new world vision which also deeply influenced modern authors. If the universe was no longer Newtonian, linear and predictable, and if literature was to "imitate" this new reality, world-texts were also supposed to explore anarchical and complex landscapes. To be able to investigate these antistructure texts, literary and art critics adapted analytical tools from mathematical and physical theories - modern literature was associated mainly with the theory of quanta, and postmodern literature with chaos theory. In this paper, I engage with some of the main mathematical and physical concepts used as instruments in literary analysis, such as non-Euclidian geometries, the field concept, relativity, entropy, uncertainty principles, fractals, chaos, strange attractors, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking its cue from Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker’s rethinking of noir affect as a descriptor of detective fiction, this paper contributes to the discussion of South African writer Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City as a narrative that both harnesses and fluidifies the generic conventions of the crime thriller. Pondering Beukes’s claim that her story may become the site for the transmutation or transmission of ethically adjusted emotion, the paper resorts to Lauren Berlant’s thoughts on detective fiction as a genre condensing the “cruel optimism” of the ordinary, rather than the evental, present to explore the clues of affectional attunement in Lauren Beukes’s postapartheid novel.

In my paper I point out that the study of literary utopias has been and still is a constant focus on my scientific research. It has accompanied me in different historical and political contexts, helping in analysing and interpreting their complexity. The metaphor I use is that of Utopia as a tree with deep roots from which many branches spread out. In my first book on this topic, I suggested that Utopia could be considered on the whole as a literary genre, characterized by a continuous metamorphosis over time and space. Within such a theoretical framework, I addressed how a variety of utopian main themes, i.e. the journey, the island, and the dream, have been treated in pillars of utopian English literature. Eventually, what fascinated me is that Utopia allowed and still allows me to look at major problems and questions of my contemporary time taking a “lateral” perspective and envisaging new, usually unexpected, political horizons.

The paper offers a preliminary study of a phenomenon that could be termed nebulous utopia, an attempt to project an image of the ideal state based on the use of catchwords and slogans. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their extensive use, originally limited mainly to totalitarian states and war propaganda, has become the dominant rhetorical device employed by a wide range of both left-wing and right-wing populist movements aimed at winning popular support by appealing to a set of vaguely defined general values and objectives.

In the wake of the 20th century French School of imagination studies, my paper wants to highlight the significant differences between two visions about humanity: a traditional transcendentalist vision of immortality, created by a long historical and cultural process of self-poiesis, and an immanentist scientific ideological vision, represented by the humanism of the modern era. In postmodern times, this positivist view prolongs itself in the “transhumanist revolution”, a by-product of the ideological myth of progress.

In the wake of the Occupy movement, a group of dystopian films were released that, despite many differences, share a unique series of characteristics. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Elysium and Snowpiercer, class war emerges as the main theme. The 99% are physically shut out from the world of the 1% by impressive barriers which must be destroyed through bloody struggle. The paper uses a critical approach, mainly Jamesonian, to examine historical, political, psychological and interpretative issues in this constellation of occupy-era films, and how they testify to the huge impact on the American psyche of the 2007 financial crisis and ensuing long depression, and the feeling of frustration that fostered Occupy. Of particular interest is the way in which these critical dystopias deal with the ideologeme of “ressentiment” while depicting the breaching of the residences of the elite by the pleb.

In this paper I explore the conceptual relatability of Hegel’s description of the Comic Consciousness found in the chapter on “Religion” in his Phenomenology of Spirit to Skinner’s portrayal of a behavioral scientist being tantamount to God, particularly in the fictional behavioral scientist’s ability to create freedom and value in Walden Two. I examine how the Self-Consciousness of the fictional behavioral scientist and the self-consciousness of the Comic Consciousness appear to embody a form of freedom that is able to transcend and create the values of their respective communities. I suggest similarities between these two shapes of selfconsciousness and forms of freedom, as well as the disparities between them, express difficulties for understanding freedom and value in the conceptual context of both the idea of utopia and the “death of God.”

The paper explores J. G. Ballard’s visionary 1962 novel The Drowned World as an example of a nonhuman utopia. Although written well before the conceptualization of the notion of the nonhuman turn, the novel embodies the philosophical ideas of such a turn as it challenges anthropocentric hierarchy and represents humans as disempowered and reactive, rather than proactive beings. The Drowned World imagines a world regressing into a prehistoric, pre-human state due to the Sun’s extreme activity and radical warming in a process of entropy, as all human scientific and architectural achievements collapse in the face of the merciless sun and the advancing ocean. The urban space is turned into lagoons that resemble heterotopias, a space that accommodates the transitional phase in the process of imminent human extinction, which, paradoxically, is met with relief and embraced as utopian by the novel’s protagonist.

This paper interrogates some of the utopian and dystopian characteristics found in three key modernist texts by Joyce, Zamyatin and Pessoa, the literary effects of which have been strongly influenced by the crisis of narrative selfrepresentation and the allegorical demythification of totalitarian social and political experiments. Two distinct perspectives are deployed in order to achieve this: Paul Valéry’s dystopian culturalphilosophical reflections on the intellectual crisis of Western civilisation as presented in his 1919 essay “The Crisis of the Mind”; and Frank Kermode’s essay on the contradictory nature of modernism, “The Modern”, published in 1965–1966.

Cormac McCarthy is well-known within the literary world for his rather bleak writing, and The Road (2006) is without doubt one of the novels that exemplifies this characteristic the most. In an attempt to join the already extensive critical literature on McCarthy from an original perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine The Road by combining the analysis of the post-apocalyptic narrative’s elements with a focus on the characters’ journey itself. To this end, my approach would bring into discussion Corin Braga’s concept of the “anarchetype”, the opposite term for the archetype understood in a cultural sense, namely as a recurring model or an artistic constant. I argue that this concept, representative for the vision of the decentred postmodern subject, structures McCarthy’s novel through the way in which it builds the plot out of episodes that succeed one another in an unpredictable way.

The media today is full of violence and death, in films, world news, and in comic books. Not many citizens want their countries to go to war, but leaders and politicians spend vast amounts of money to increase the militarization of their country. The argument being to “prevent war”. The separation of women and children from the men in their families. Deaths and destruction. How can we understand “the reality surrounding us, the way we interact with it, and transform it.” This paper will discuss the relationship between women and war, based on various utopian and dystopian fictions, from Ruskin to today.

The essay explores the rising popularity of feminist dystopian fiction in literary studies, focusing on Leni Zumas' novel Red Clocks. It investigates how political anxieties are depicted through the interior monologues of four main female characters, highlighting the colonization of the female body as they grapple with unwanted pregnancies and resort to illegal means for abortions. The study suggests that feminist dystopian fiction, exemplified by Red Clocks, can be prophetic, anticipating issues such as abortion rights restrictions in the United States. The paper underscores the genre's role in raising awareness among women, depicting a world where men dictate how women should manage their bodies.

This paper strives to illuminate the forebodings of AI and automatization’s impact on society in two neglected Czech treasures unavailable in English, Čestmír Vejdělek’s Návrat z ráje [Return from Paradise] (1961) and Jiří Marek’s Blažený Věk [The Blessed Age] (1967). The study aims to illustrate science fiction’s prescience and part of Czech SF’s path after Čapek, while challenging the notion that “the utopian society is a subject, perhaps even the only subject that is inaccessible to literature” (Hans Magnus Enzensberger). For these dystopian texts engage readers to imagine the positive alternative to the portrayed societies, rather than explicitly evoking eutopia.

Strongly influenced by European Romanticism, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the German unification movement and German idealist philosophers, the Pan-Slavic movement (which took shape between 1830 and 1840) had an idealistic, utopian character from the very beginning. The aim of this paper is to analyse the utopian imaginary of the main Pan-Slavic projects, starting with the precursor of the Slavic idea, Juraj Križanić, then moving on to Herder's image of the archetypal Slav, Ján Kollár's plea for Slavic cultural reciprocity, Mikhail Bakunin's proposal to transform the Slavic cause into a revolutionary, anarchic force, Mikhail Pogodin's active campaign for the realisation of Russia's full potential through union with the Balkan and Austrian Slavs, the Russian Pan-Slavism advocated by the Slovak Ľudovít Štúr, and ending with the pseudo-scientific perspective on Slavism of Nikolay Danilevsky.

The paper starts from the deconstructionists' attack on the notion of structural center and of architecturally structured literary texts. However, it does not indulge in the opposition between structuralism and post-structuralism, archetypal essentialism and relativistic nihilism, but it goes forward to a more serene position, in which the center and the margin, the archetypes and what Corin Braga calls anarchetypes, are no longer exclusive, but complementary. Its main focus is on the identification of centered literary structures with aesthetical value and literary canon. In George Poulet's, Roman Ingarden's or Rudolf Arnheim's theories, a literary work reaches aesthetical significance only when it can make emerge a cogito, a ratio, a synopsis. The paper questions the solidity of this judgment and argues for the parting of aesthetical value from structural cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After being considered a kind of weakness for a long time, femininity seems to have reversed. its stigma and has become a positive value in the political discourse due to the stereotypes usually related to it, which allow to define the female political ethos in terms of empathy, affectivity and non-aggressive behaviour. However, the women of the emerging right-wing party in Spain, VOX, contradict this trend by assuming an extremely polarized anti-feminist discourse. Based on a fourhour corpus of public speeches, this paper aims to analyse the topics and the rhetorical strategies used in those speeches, which will show how porous the dichotomy “male-female” can be when it comes to political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The feminine imaginary has persisted throughout history as the result of a psychophysics relationship between women and landscape, specifically in different salt marshes: La Malahá (Granada), Janubio (Lanzarote) and Batz-sur-Mer (Loire-Atlantique). In this way, an “anthropological trajectory” (Gilbert Durand) has been consolidated, as the conjuncture between natural and sociocultural environments, geopoetics and symbolic representations. This paper proposes to explore the permanence of myths and a matriarchal and naturalist axiology related to the female body and a symbolic heritage nowadays forgotten, in order to determine four groups of archetypal images that claim the feminine identity in the alchemic salt landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the relation between genders in the movies Scent of Women (the original and its remake). Our approach can be considered as an exercise in Jungian-Bachelardian interpretation through the grid of a poetics of androgyny, which attests that a man and a woman speak in the solitude of our being, according to the expression of Gaston Bachelard. Beyond the different constructions of the two cinematographic productions, critics generally consider that the two films have as common themes: the crisis of modernity revealed by the tragic and blind loneliness of modern man, the initiation of a young man to the misfortunes of life and to the love of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the concept of identity and its reconfiguration after experiencing a traumatic event. Anny Duperey’s account of her shock caused by the sudden loss of her parents at the age of eight is the selfnarrative analyzed this study. After thirty years of silence, Duprey finally decides to rediscover this “lost” past and “upset” childhood, which allows her, in particular, to reconstruct her injured identity. Therefore, the question that arises is how the author / narrator manages to approach the representation of self during her narrative project, while she is suffering from identity rupture in the aftermath of such a heavy loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the narrator of Catherine Mavrikakis’ novel A Cannibal and Melancholy Mourning (2000) learns of the consecutive passings of several of her close friends, she transforms this experience into text. In this paper, we analyze Catherine Mavrikakis’s textualization of the ineffable death and loss of the other as a condition of awareness of one’s own finitude. By applying several narratological and theoretical tools to the text, we show how, using the writings but also the life of Hervé Guibert as a hypotext, the narrator articulates her own understanding of death by gathering the multitude of the dead under the banner of a single Hervé. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims, with regard to the imaginary of identity, to outline the essential lines corner poles of our hermeneutics. Against the tendency to approach contemporary identity tensions, I will focus here on identity fluctuations, above all in contexts of disengagement of identity, following the possible dissolution or deconstruction of any identity, collective and personal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The various cultures that coexist in Brazil have established a specific dialogue between them. The mythical elements present in the imaginary originate from various continents. It is possible to understand these images, their dynamics and their dialogues through a myth-criticism of the media. In this paper, we shall analyze images linked to a specific theme such as hunger, and its various artistic expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the ingroup identity which emerges through three events, the Cologne attacks in January 2016, the attacks against the Charlie Hebdo journalists in January 2015 and the Yellow Vests' demonstrations in France from November 2018 to 2019. It focuses on the images and fictions which are performed by the citizens as well as those which appear through the reactions of academics, journalists and politicians in media. It aims at revealing the accommodation of political myths and the way the representations of collective identity are built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores various meanings of the notion of identity, the individual and collective contexts in which it applies, the questions and the problems it raises. Its scope is to build a cartography of the different approaches adopted by the participants in the 4th Congress of the Centre International de Recherches sur l'Imaginaire, dedicated to self-images and self-representations. The main idea is that identity is situated between rationality and imagination, between an objective reality and an unlimited fantasy, which is the cause of its paradoxical usages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a geocritical reading of diasporic identity in the prose of Leila Aboulela, Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali. It starts by looking at the experience of women joining their husbands in the West, their integration (or lack thereof) and the characters’ strategies for maintaining their faith, humor and specific cognitive mechanisms in spite of the culture shock they are facing. My hypothesis is that, instead of conforming to consecrated patterns of cultural interaction – such as assimilation into Western modernity, isolationist rebellion against it or voluntary uprootal – these characters manage to find another way of defining themselves against a new background: namely, they create mental spaces to inhabit, bringing their original homes and their adoptive ones into constant dialogue and subjecting both worlds to a combination of irony and empathy.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the interconnections between diasporic discourse, spatiality, and Jewish literature within an analysis of a certain movement from Interwar Jewish-Romanian literature, the so-called literature of the ghetto, represented by authors such as I. Peltz, Ury Benador and Ion Călugăru. Depicting the lives of Romanian Jews in shtetls or marginal neighbourhoods, this literary discourse features a close relationship between spatiality and identity at its core. Alongside the space of the ghetto, multiple topoi (such as America, Palestine, or Russia) appear in these writings. I call these projective spaces as they are included in the novels through the longing of the narrators, for which different political affinities play a key role, or by means of fragmented stories that, often altered, echo through the ghettos.

This paper aims to analyze the influence of the 19th-century Slavophile ideas like samobytnost (originality, uniqueness, distinctiveness) or sobornost (a common spiritual bond uniting members of a community) on Andreï Makine’s novels The Life of an Unknown Man and The Woman Who Waited. Although he has lived in France since 1987 and writes exclusively in French, mainly for a French readership, Russia remains one of his great obsessions, which he poetically transfigures, in a Dostoyevskyan manner, into a world of both ugliness and beauty. Beyond the sordid and unbearable social reality, Makine suggests that there is a profound, authentic Russia, not in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but in the secluded and forgotten villages, where people like Vera and Volski, the main characters of the two novels, live organically in peaceful communities, keeping intact traditional Russian spiritual values.

Ever since Christopher Columbus set foot in America, the leitmotif of the travel narratives written by those visiting it has been that of shaping the unknown territories according to prefabricated ideas. The importance held by the myth of never- ending expansion in American culture has also created a fascination for everything situated beyond the culturally constructed borders of the country. Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy tackles both these matters, as it is centred around the frontier between Mexico and the southwestern part of the United States. This paper will analyse the patterns of movement taken up by these characters in crossing the borders, while also using Corin Braga’s concept of the “anarchetype” to characterize them as products of an in-between state in which the characters cannot follow a clearly structured route anymore because they belong to both and neither of the two extremes simultaneously.

Cătălin Dorian Florescu’s main tropes had been traditionally confined to the stylistic regime of the novel until 2017, when he opted for a short stories format in his volume Der Nabel der Welt. My paper will investigate the themes and dynamics of Florescu’s dialect of displacement, cultural transfer and the search for a homeland in this collection of short stories, while also paying close attention to the framework of diasporic identity as it was projected in his earlier works. Drawing on contemporary theories concerning displacement and diasporas, my contribution seeks to explore the specific manner in which these issues calibrate Florescu’s original perspective of what it means to have a coherent individual identity against the fragile background of a European one.

While poststructuralist attacks against structured forms freed literature from the dominance of Aristotle’s canon, twentieth-century evolutions in physics and cosmology brought about a new world vision which also deeply influenced modern authors. If the universe was no longer Newtonian, linear and predictable, and if literature was to “imitate” this new reality, world-texts were also supposed to explore anarchical and complex landscapes. To be able to investigate these anti- structure texts, literary and art critics adapted analytical tools from mathematical and physical theories – modern literature was associated mainly with the theory of quanta, and postmodern literature with chaos theory. In this paper, I engage with some of the main mathematical and physical concepts used as instruments in literary analysis, such as non-Euclidian geometries, the field concept, relativity, entropy, uncertainty principles, fractals, chaos, strange attractors, etc.

Romanian cinema after 1989 was mainly oriented towards creations through which directors sought to win critical acclaim and awards at international festivals, but which were not addressed to the general public, as films belonging to a cinematic genre generally do. In this paper we discuss how Romanian director George Bogdan Apetri, now living in New York, represents a distinct voice in Romanian cinema today. In his films Unidentified and Miracle, he manages to harness his dual cultural perspective (American and Romanian), combining the conventions of the crime fiction genre but also elements specific to the Romanian New Wave, making two films that are pleasing to the audience but at the same time part of the arthouse circuit.

This paper discusses the various manifestations of children as protagonists in Romanian socialist cinema, and particularly those present in the juvenile detective movies of that time. Several productions of the socialism cinema industry had children as their main heroes and the movies discussed here were deploying tropes and narrative strategies specific to the global genre of boy detectives. The analysis uses examples that range from written texts, books or cartoons, to films and television series, as these cultural products were exploring not only childhood, but also a particular behaviour of young children and teenagers. They are considered to be relevant for understanding the transformations in Romanian society, as the socialist regime was creating an educational environment for children according to the dominant ideology, the narratives were exploring the resources of a wider genre.

Over the past few decades, cultural studies have embraced concepts and methodologies set forth by the new fields of inquiry brought about by the "spatial turn". These new disciplines combine knowledge from the domains of geography and literature in an interdisciplinary way. In my paper I propose to go beyond this dialogue between disciplines to the roots of both geographical and literary representations, that is, I aim to discuss the geographical imaginary. Resorting to concepts from the theory of fictional worlds, I will make a distinction between "realistic" or "mimetic" geographies, "symbolic" geographies, "fictional geographies", and "allegorical" geographies. I am primarily interested in symbolic geographies and the non-empirical criteria which produced, especially during ancient, medieval and early modern times, cartographical and literary representations of the world that might appear to be fantastical nowadays, but that were nonetheless considered adequate in their respective epoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with hybridization technologies. Seen as a process of shifting from natural to artificial and vice versa, these technologies belong to the broader framework of biopower. They influence the ethical paradigms of contemporary civilization, especially in what regards the question of the criteria ruling the relationship between human race and nature. In this paper, we redefine the concept of the sacred in order to obtain new and coherent principles consistent with this technological worldview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aims to reflect on the symbolic conditions (Durand, Bachelard) that, in cinema, can take part of the image of success. This, considered in its requirements of consensus and collective adhesion, is defined from the premise of the Imaginary Studies on the representations of the logical principles of antithesis, analogy and complexity, pondering that the relation with difference is fundamental to understanding the symbolic condition of success. With this premise, three of the ten films considered the greatest box-office hits of all time are examined: Gone with the Wind, Avatar and Titanic. The paper concludes that in both Avatar and Titanic there is a dualistic approach to otherness, while in Gone with the Wind the approach is monistic. In either case, plurality is retracted, with the refusal of the Other's effectiveness as a third party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Candomblé rituals, in Recife, Brasil, the frontiers between interior and exterior, female and male, adult and child, mineral, vegetal and animal, the sacred and the profane, are not means of separation but places for cultural exchanges. How to speak about otherness in this context? The supernatural being Exu, a messenger between humans and gods, attend to individual prayers and, as such, make possible the expression of desires that are both universal and specific and embody different forms of alterity. Making use of interviews, mythology, ritual analysis, mythanalysis and mythcriticism (Gilbert Durand) this paper tries to classify the diverse forms of ritual living otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the publication of the well-known work by Huntington The Clash of Civilizations, the idea of a clash between civilizations has established itself at a global level, also supported by the recent bloody events that have afflicted the political scene. This brief paper intends to offer an interpretation of the concepts of civilization and conflict as forms of representation of reality and alterity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this paper is to give several answers to the fundamental question Who is the other? In other words, it seeks to explain what I mean when I say "the other". The method consists in shifting the question outwards and inwards in relation to the philosophical tradition, science and poetry. It entails adopting a bird's eye view on a broad thematic which demands various inter- and pluri-disciplinary perspectives. The logical structure is the historical breakthrough in which, at every step, new answers are given to the primary question, like in Ravel's Bolero, or in a mantra, making possible both a historical and a circular advancement. In the third part I express a proposal from my own philosophical perspective, in relation with geometry, quantum physics and art. I conclude with the design of a possible emergency exit for the present situation of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper approaches some fundamental philosophical problems, which are more or less present in the contributions. Otherness is not only a specific category of the collective imaginary, but also its "fuel". How could imagination make the difference between what is real and what is imagined? How could this difference produce such a large range of varieties that can reach the extreme of alienation from oneself or from the others? How can the varieties of the imagination give birth to the topics of alteration, altercation, alternation? And how do these relationships create a specific domain in which ethics and aesthetics intermingle? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lately, the French concept of "imaginaire", coined by philosophers such as Gaston Bachelard, Henry Corbin and Gilbert Durand, has been successfully adapted to Anglo-American Studies. Imagination studies ("recherches sur l'imaginaire") have spread from literature and arts to philosophy and social sciences, so we speak today of "collective myths and social imaginaries". In this paper, I want to present some concepts from this domain that could shed fresh light on the study of otherness, on the construction of identities and alterities, and on the comprehension of the similarities and differences between various ethnic, social, confessional, and gender groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the changes brought by the digital era and virtual reality upon theatre acting and the redefinition of the role and function of the actor as a participant within virtual theatre projects. This paper insists on the fact that the actor has not turned into a "diminished" performer, but into one whose mediatised effect on the public is amplified by the interaction of all the scenic elements. The duality of being immersed in a virtual medium and of being in interaction with it is approached by this particular performer with a very disciplined, precise acting, with heightened imagination and body training, with great willingness to accept working in unfinished performance structures. This paper also includes unpublished fragments of interviews taken in 2006 and 2007 with several creators of virtual theatre performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Gothic-Postmodernism in Dora Pavel's fiction. In the first theoretical part, it will be presented the symbiotic convergence and the genetical affinity between Gothic and Postmodernism. In the second part, it will be shown that the works of the Romanian writer, through hybridizations and grafts, incorporates Gothic features sometimes explicitly, sometimes unconsciously and in a more encrypted way. A summary analysis of the first two novels - Dying Agata (Agata murind, 2003) and The Captive (Captivul, 2006) - will be proposed, through which some Gothic traces will be reviewed. A more extended case study will be dedicated to the novel Powder (Pudră, 2010). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper grows out of a personal experience of Romanian's communist political regime during the last years of Ceausescu, including the last hours of his reign and the passage to a new political regime. This experience is above all affective and my paper aims to focus on it through some concepts: the "distribution of the sensible" (Jacques Rancière) as dimension of each political and cultural regime, and the "historical feeling" as the way to measure the transformation from a certain radical modern history, of progress and human rationalization, to a low profile history, the democratic and capitalist one, wherein the aesthetic category of sublime is no longer possible and no sacred power sticks anymore to our consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper intends to examine the controversial nature of logos. It takes a multidisciplinary approach, because this is one of the most "bewildering" questions for linguists, philosophers, anthropologists or psychologists, generating widely divergent views. The apophantik view starts from the assumption that language "blocks" the way to the essence of things. Or, as we try to argue in this present paper, this view is only a "myth", created to "hide" our ontological impossibility of a direct contact with things themselves. The pragmatik interpretation considers language only as a tool of communication. Language is, of course, a tool of communication, but, as we have tried to show, this is not its primordial nature. There is also a "magic" view, according to which language is a sort of supernatural force that can help the human being "to compel the will of gods and demons". The aim of this paper is to show that language itself, far from being a human "disease", a pragmatic tool or a magic weapon, is merely "the principle of the universe and the first principle of knowledge" (Cassirer). By its very nature and essence, language is logos semantikos: its purpose is not to create the beings, but to create the being of beings, according to Eugenio Coseriu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the topic of historical inheritance and literary discourse through a prismatic lens. It focuses on Nadine Gordimer, a wellknown white South African writer of Anglo-Jewish and Eastern European origins, who always stood up against racism and the colonialist legacy which deviously paved the way for the apartheid system in her country. In particular, light is shed on “The Amateurs”, one of her earliest short stories and a piercing portrayal of South African segregation policies during the 1940s. At the same time, Gordimer engages here in a critical dialogue with the English fin de siècle and the comedy-of-manners genre by recollecting an episode from her youth, when she happened to play Gwendolen’s role in an amateur staging of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. As we shall see, “The Amateurs” is a semantically poignant story where the threads of European literary tradition, metatheatricality and personal memory are powerfully interwoven.

In the nineties, a debate on the “impossible” hypothesis of a victory for the Third Reich in the Second World War and what would happen after it ran through German historiography. According to this interpretation, National Socialism would have been an extreme and unrepeatable phenomenon. After its definitive affirmation, a process of progressive moderation would have started. “If Hitler had won, National Socialism would be stifled in its radicalism, or it would have become bourgeois,” writes Alexander Demandt in Wenn Hitler gewonnen hätte (1995). Arne Lubos’ novel Schwiebus (1980) anticipates this debate by a decade and develops the motif of “Nazism after Nazism” in an all-historical key. It denies “normalizing” perspectives and outlines scenarios in which National Socialist hegemony has given rise to a regime in which repression and terror are not entirely evident but no less widespread and frightening. Our paper aims to explain its narrative strategies.