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On September 29, 1918, a commemorative monument was inaugurated on the Guşteriţa Hill, celebrating two years since the defeat of the troops of the Kingdom of Romania who had attacked Transylvania in late August 1916. After only two and a half months since the celebratory event, the Romanian troops permanently occupied Sibiu, and Transylvania was united with Romania. Everything happened so quickly that the whole public eye was taken by surprise. An empire led by a 600-year-old dynasty dissolved in a matter of just a few weeks. During these events, the Romanians were totally unprepared at the beginning, unlike the Czechs and the Yugoslav peoples, who started organizing their independence much sooner, i.e. during the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to underline the specificities of Theodor Fontane's work Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg as a place of remembrance – and subsequently of the places of remembrance it contains – as well as the importance that this very comprehensive text has until today for the cultural space of Berlin-Brandenburg. The paper highlights a dynamic of cultural memory that ranges from overlaying places of remembrance to the emergence of new ones. The project has been completed and illustrated with some walks undertaken by the author of the article in the footsteps of Fontane. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comparatively analyses the feminist problematic in the texts of four poets, two of them belonging to Romanian contemporary literature and the other two to Russian literature: Miruna Vlada - Elena Vlădăreanu and Oksiana Vasiakina - Anastasia Vekșina. The analysis starts from the ideas of the theorist Julia Kristeva, who studies female identity from the point of view of semiotics, anthropology and psychology. I will follow the predominant theme in the works of the aforementioned poets, feminist poets by self-definition and through their writings: the feminine outlook in the context of war, marriage, motherhood, the manifestation and survival of this perspective, observing the ideational and stylistic similarities and differences in the creations of the aforementioned poets. The aim of the paper is to uncover the universality of the female experience in contexts that may undermine it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Romanian criticism has tended to use generational framing to delineate the boundaries of local poetic paradigms, which has also been the case for the Generation 2000 and Generation post-2000. If in the 1980’s a discussion about a Romanian postmodernism was put into debate, in 2018 the question regarding the emergence of a Romanian poetry metamodernism arises. In this context, I intend to trace in this paper the nuances of generational debates in order to outline to what extent this methodology succeeds in describing the mutations and the characteristics of recent poetry. With the posthuman turn and the possibilities for the emergence of metamodernism being debated, my paper addresses, on the one hand, the viability of metamodernism in recent poetry, and, on the other, possible points of conjunctions of posthumanism and metamodernism. The posthuman turn encompasses the post-2000 generation, while local discussions have also proposed metamodernism as a label for the post-2000 generation. The question I start from is to what extent, theoretically, is our local poetry metamodernist in its sensibility and specificity, and to what extent does posthumanism fit into a metamodernist heuristic label. Although the debate remains open insofar as the Romanian theoretical field seems rather refractory to transnational theoretical fictions, what I observe in this article is that metamodernism, as theoretically proposed, can be a viable alternative to the crisis of critical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Starting from Asbjørn Grønstad’s concepts of bio visuality and the responsibility of forms, the paper analyzes the issues that arise when adapting self-fiction into film. It maps out how the concepts can be applied especially well to self-fiction and New Romanian Cinema, then applies them in a comparative analysis of Cezar Paul-Bădescu’s book, Luminița, mon amour, and Călin Peter Netzer’s movie adaptation, Ana, mon amour. The paper argues that whereas the book’s ambiguity succeeds in transmitting its central themes, the movie fails to faithfully adapt the central ideas due to an inadequate choice in form. Finally, the paper argues that the formal issues cause ethical faults which hinder the transnational effort and negatively influence the worlding process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper proposes an analysis of literature’s role in the current Romanian cinematographic context, starting from two case studies: After the Hills (2012) by Cristian Mungiu, based on the novel Spovedanie la Tanacu by Tatiana Niculescu Bran and Moromeții 2 (2018) by Stere Gulea, based on the novels Moromeții vol. II and Viața ca o pradă... by Marin Preda. The approach aims to carry out a comparative analysis regarding both the role played by the literary work in the cinematographic production as well as the valorization of the literary work through the film. In the current socio-cultural context, the artistic impact of a film creates the cultural premises for the propagation of a literary work to several types of audiences. Artistic products derived from literary works develop a series of issues regarding adaptation methods, aesthetic interpretation, and even artistic interference regarding the assimilation of a literary piece in relation to the cinematographic production. The paper presents two case studies to analyze how the literary work appears either as an adjunct to the cinematographic production or as a central element of the filmographic artistic exposition. These case studies are used to determine the role that the film industry has in the processes of internationalization, propagation, and even popularization of a literary work in a Romanian consumer society, which is dangerously far removed from the book industry. Thus, the scientific approach proposes an exploration of literary valorization through cinematographic artistic products in order to popularize and mediate literature in today's society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to investigate the ideological mutations that occur by turning the written text into an adaptation, using the protagonists that play the role of the marginal, both in the novel and in the movie, facilitating the breakthrough in the peripheral universe. Transmedia reveals the construction of the same fictional word, but the shift lies in the swinging between ideological isms: progressivism and conservatism, capitalism and anti-capitalism. This study is focused on recent literature and its adaptations. Characters have got the same name, they live in similar universes, but the main aim of this paper is to identify the shifts that result from turning the written message into a visual one. The same “story” can take a different ideological turn, therefore, both creations must be taken into consideration, in order to comprehend the global message. The ”double-creations” chosen to illustrate this point are: Love Sick by Cecilia Ștefănescu, motivating this choice by the progressivism of the adaptation in contrast to the conservatism of the novel, concentrating on the queer component; I am an old communist hag! by Dan Lungu where the focus falls on the anti-capitalist view, whereas the novel concentrates on an anti-communism ideology; Soldiers by Adrian Schiop, a case where the movie diminishes the focus on the progressivism, shifting the prespective on the universal love story between Adi and Alberto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

his paper aims to explore what might be the limits of what we call today Biographical Novel, framed as Biographical Fiction or Life Writing, research that has as its central objective to find an answer to questions such as: what might be the features of the genre and what purpose do they serve today? How do we relate to past personalities in the present context and what can we extract from their lives – can we talk about censorship/ attributing an unrealistic context to a public personality? But more importantly, what is the relationship between fact and fiction constructed, given that the boundary between these is very vulnerable? All these questions are meant to guide the readers throughout the study. Even if the genre is not so much in demand among writers today, probably for reasons related to the economy of time, such writing can become interesting to study how the author chooses to present someone’s life, a choice that must first be well documented, and then fully assumed, with full responsibility for the facts shown. The points on which the paper will focus are related to the novel of Moni Stănilă Brâncuși sau cum a învățat țestoasa să zboare, the biography Constantin Brancusi by Sanda Miller and the „On Constantin Brancusi” study written by Dore Ashton, where the construction of Constantin Brâncuși’s personality, as it appears in their works, will be contextualized in World Literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper aims to reveal an inventory, an interpretation and a statistical analysis of Romanian names of plants which implicates the term „iarbă” (herb, grass), spread through the botanical terminology, a phenomenon which, as considered by E. Coşeriu is not enough highlighted (given that the individual speaker became creator of language / poetry whenever he named a flower. Botanical popular terminology has primarily a practical value, designating, distinguishing and categorizing elements of the plant kingdom within the given natural reign, but also has a high theoretical significance, especially for linguists, both by the ethimons to which they send back and by the metaphorical meanings the phytonims mostly have. Phytonys could be an important starting point in any kind of research, as they constitute a true linguistic and cultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper presents a series of theoretical reflections generated by the task of conducting anthropological research on food traditions and practices in a network of villages in Romania, in the context of restrictions on movement and social interaction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The research was carried out as part of the Digital collection of Romanian food heritage and transfer to society - FOODie project. The pressure to respect both contractual deadlines in relation to the funder and health safety rules led us to the solution of online interviews. Due to the specific nature of our research, the people targeted by the interviews were aged and had minimal digital skills, which led us to call on a second member of the interviewed community, a PC user, who was ready to moderate the relationship with the informant and provide technical assistance. Based on these research experiences, we will discuss (a) the advantages and disadvantages of remote fieldwork; (b) the dynamics of the relation between the researcher and the respondent in this new methodological context; (c) the collaborative nature of the ethnological document, which is the result of the intersection of the researcher's thematic interests, her/his availability and skills and, in this case, the flair, intuition and persuasiveness of the actor mediating the meeting between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the functions and multiple meanings of parenthetical constructions such as the incident constructions in I.L. Caragiale’s moments and sketches. As parts of the discourse, parentheticals are those expressions that are independent of the host sentence, which function as modifiers, additions to, or comments on the current talk. Even though they are often seen as linguistic ornaments, they play a crucial role in conveying additional information, clarifying ideas, or providing commentary within a sentence. Through a quantitative analysis, we aim to shed light on these linguistic categories to emphasize their importance in the construction of Caragiale’s texts and characters in what concerns the reported speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tradition-brands are cultural constructs launched in Romania around the year 2000, which bring into play a repertoire of conventions and “myths” shared nationwide and proposed to the market, increasingly and more intensely in the late years, by large-scale industrial operators, who in this manner simulate and menace small-scale producers (those actually in the right to claim this tradition as their own). Previous work in the anthropology of consumption has theorized that commercial communication associated with tradition-brands represents a space of negotiation between the Big Industry and traditionalist consumers. The present paper resumes, after more than a decade, the previous thesis, with Mark Fisher's conflict theory tools. In this perspective, traditional brands are forms of Big Industry colonization and naturalization of artisan culture. The case analysis of the Matache Măcelaruʼ charcuterie brand reveals multiple levels of realist-capitalist processing of the commercial message. The key understanding of Fisher's theory of consumerism as a sensitive interface between the capitalist system and the public leads to sharp conclusions about the alienation and disintegration of social actors (consumers, small artisans and merchants) and about the removal of small businesses from the current economic landscape. The possibility of a breach in capitalist totalitarianism lies, hypothetically, in the Romanian public's inertia towards globalization. A conscious reaction is also needed, which arises from civic initiatives regarding the realization of a short producer-consumer chain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Especially after the fall of communism in Romania, Romanian theatre artists were referring nostalgicallyvindictively to what they considered to be a recognition of the importance of their own activity: the inclusion of actors/performers in the categories of hard or harmful labor, just like miners, in the 1950s and generally before 1977. The legend of the similitude between actors and miners is, in fact, part of the symbolic competition with the industrial working class, in which intellectuals felt engaged especially in the 1980s and which played an important role then and in the following decade (a subject which I elaborate in a larger research). This paper investigates the factual basis of this narrative of State legitimation of cultural labor, starting from the legal codification of the miners' central position in the ideology and public discourse of the communist regime and exploring the wage and retirement conditions of (theatre) actors from 1948 until 1989, including through the lenses of their non-public positions, as reflected in the archives of the secret police. Part of a larger framework of the intelligentsia’s antagonism and lack of solidarity with the working class, which has been analyzed at length in post-communism but which tends to not include the specifics of the performing arts in the general cultural framework, it examines the foundations of the persistent discourse placing theatre artists (alongside writers, filmmakers, etc.) as the righteous beneficiaries of the post-1989 transition, aiming to replace miners at the center of the new, capitalist society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the general problematics of reformulating the concepts of “discourse” and “narrative” and treating cinematic products as textual objects, with incursions into the 21st century cinema as a realist-expositional medium of the social problems of the Other, the present paper aims, by contextualizing the film Aferim! (2015) by Radu Jude, to analyze the relationship between language, language and race, racialization, and representation. In short, it aims to analyze the position of linguistic racism in the admitted “realistic” and artistic presentation of the process of marginalization. Such academic analyses have become present internationally, especially with the development of the linguistic dimension of postcolonial studies and the emergence and expansion of the concept of political correctness and/or cultural sensitivity in the contemporary socio-cultural discourse, especially in direct relation to language, language, and visual media of artistic transposition. We must be remembered, however, that Roma people occupy a marginal place even in postcolonial analysis of otherness. In the Romanian space, with a strong intertextual character, Aferim! occupies a privileged place precisely because of the primacy given to the theme: the Roma slavery in the 19th century Wallachia, during the year 1853, which is a key-year, considering that the formal abolition of slavery took place only three years later, in 1856, in Wallachia. Intentionally subversive, Jude takes the historical form of the popular films from the communist period and turns it against itself, while also adding the American-inspired aesthetic of Westerns. The multiplicity of perspectives is present, but the „intimacy” belongs to the white, oppressive characters, putting the viewer in an uncomfortable position that belongs to them historically. Following the results of the quantitative study of the present work, where the most often used word is „cocoane” [lord] in all its declined versions, Aferim! is thus a film about power dynamics, a dynamic in which the Roma are the Other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to discuss the configuration of the queer-feminist phenomenon, with its derivatives in intersectionalism, ecofeminism and posthumanism in postmillennial Romanian poetry. The premises of this approach are, on the one hand, the left-wing ideological radicalization of the poetic discourse, and, on the other hand, the shaping of a distinguishing ethos, through which the postmillennial poets create a self-legitimizing international network comprising feminist and/or queer writers and theorists like Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Virginia Woolf, Ocean Vuong, Natalia Ginzburg, Maryse Condé, Bruno Latour, etc. Therefore, the article focuses on theoretical import through poetic creation, since, less common in Romanian literary filed, it claims the urgency for theoretical and ethical debates on militant cultural currents and directions against patriarchy, exploitation of nature and animals by humans, and against the classical centre-periphery dichotomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to achieve their functional purpose – that of organizing the urban landscape and helping locating people and geographical objectives through an efficient addressing system – street names are bound to remain stable spatial landmarks. On the other hand, street names are also semiotic devices of signifying space with the political and commemorative agenda of the ruling power. This latter characteristic renders them vulnerable to successive renaming following important power-shifts and especially regime changes. What happens when the ideological imperative of politicizing the street nomenclature undermines its functional requirement of providing spatial orientation through extensive renaming? Such a tensional situation is examined in the case of postwar Sibiu between 1945 and 1948, when the city endured a thorough redefinition of its toponymy under the political regime of communist “popular democracy” in Romania. The paper quantifies the scope of toponymic revision and then evaluates the content of these street name changes in terms of three major concepts: class, ethnicity, and gender. Grounded on the results of this analysis, the paper advances the notion of “mercurial street names”. It concludes by arguing that such a concept should complement the existing metaphoricity underpinning the scholarship in place-name studies, which draw on “text”, “discourse”, and “palimpsest” to conceive of the processes of street (re)naming. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper proposes the analysis of the dramatic work of Matei Vișniec – a Romanian poet and prose writer, built and validated by the French center as an internationally exportable playwriter, by following the aesthetic-political relationship. I question, above all, the reasons why the parabolic formula is the favorite in the author's dramaturgy – its causes and effects, in relation to the ideological level and the thematization of the trauma of the communist (/totalitarian) regime. The thesis of my article is that, behind the parable (which implies a form of mediation) and the discursive metaphorism, respectively an apparent aesthetic gratuity, there is a political thesis that can be reinterpreted, reframed by both target audiences: Eastern and Western. Thus, the playwright built at the center and imported by the Romanian periphery accumulates symbolic capital from both territories, defined as a successful as a transnational author. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With a tradition of economic, political, and institutional settings built on a dynamic based on dominance, animals have been systematically assigned the role of an inferior form of „otherness”, essential, nevertheless, in shaping the anthropocentric mentality and validating the narrative of human exceptionalism. The longevity of such speciesist practices throughout the humanist discourses obliges the post humanist project of creating a post anthropocentric concept of subjectivity to pay special attention to the issues regarding the animals, their representations, and their interactions with ‘us’. This paper stems from Rosi Braidotti’s project of a posthuman subject understood as a hybrid entity integrated through a system of material and informational connections with all forms of existence in the nature culture continuum and follows the implications it has on redesigning our interactions with the non-human beings in a post-anthropocentric context. My purpose is to study how contemporary Romanian poetry reflects this new vision of subjectivity and its impact on reimagining the relations between the human and non-human beings. The analysis on volumes such as val chimic’s umilirea animalelor (the humiliation of animals), Mihók Tamás’s biocharia. ritual ecolatru, Adelina Pascale’s maki for 2, Gabi Eftimie’s Sputnik în grădină (Sputnik in the garden), or Diana Cornea’s Setări avansate de lumină (Advanced lighting settings) confirms the increasing interest of Romanian post millenary poetry in reshaping the depictions of animals and human-animal interactions according to a post anthropocentric perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to do a close reading analysis of the tridimensional narrative experiment found in Sașa Zare’s debut novel Dezrădăcinare [Rootlessness] (2022). The alternation between character, narrator, and author seen at the narrative level of the novel starts a discussion about the autofictional prose written by Romanian contemporary writers, achieving at the same time to go beyond both national and gender boundaries. Frontier experiences, the theme of otherness, the awareness of what separates us and the damaging effects of a homophobic thinking are portrayed in Dezrădăcinare through multiple perspectives that are firstly analyzed by the narrator. Regarding transnational and World Literature, Zare’s discourse overpasses the limits of a debut novel and brings forward an important question How can we define ourselves in relation to the society we live in? If in the beginning the author-character is unsure of what she is doing, until the end of the novel Sașa is going to address problems regarding literature and criticism, misconceptions, patriarchy, and she will outline her idea about what does writing really mean for a contemporary woman writer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to explore how multilingualism is explored in Bessarabian literature and the way in which these phenomena can create cultural and identity crisis in the collective imaginary of The Republic of Moldova. Thus, it can be observed that in the Soviet period, but also after the fall of the empire, speakers of “Moldavian” language, afterwards named Romanian, are treated as inferior to Russian speakers, Moldavians becoming a periphery. Approaching multilingualism the way it is presented in Multilingual Literature as World Literature edited by Jane Hiddleston and Wen-chin Ouyang, a second objective of this paper is to investigate the identity crisis of the teenagers of Perestroika and the fall of the URSS, but also of the young adults that were brought up in the unsteady world that followed after these events. In doing so, the way in which the Bessarabian people were peripheral. According to the fact that this type of literature is insufficiently discussed, there will be analyzed three such novels, in order to offer a wider image of Chisinau between the 80’s and the 2000 and its transition: Grădina de sticlă (The Glass Garden) by Tatiana Țîbuleac, Sălbaticii copii dingo (The Savage Dingo Kids) by Vasile Ernu and Perestroika boys by Dinu Guțu. The other aspect that will be explored is the image of Romania and its literature in the Soviet Bessarabia, two neighbour countries that did not have an intercultural dialogue until 1991. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this paper is the analysis of how the multi-peripheral position in Ileana Negrea’s poetry is recontextualized in the geotemporality of contemporary Romanian culture, acknowledging her formation in a different language and through the reception and the application of feminist theories and praxis from other spaces, especially from the South American one, that are stratified and inserted in her texts. The analysis focuses on how the inflection point of her marginal identity, gender-queerness-madness, is recomposed in the actual Romanian cultural and geopolitical circumstances and how her texts are perceived accordingly with these. At the same time, it will be explored how Negrea’s texts enroll in the world literature system via her registering in the worldly queer-feminist literary scheme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a case for analyzing the way in which the novel of Communism is approached by Mihai Iovănel in his History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020. This is a topic that was intensely discussed by Romanian literary criticism in Post-communism and represents the weakness of Romanian literature, either by it not being able to give a sufficiently convincing novel, or by not being able to agree upon how this novel should look. Accordingly, the critics had difficulties in labeling any novel that had been published after ‘89s as “the novel of communism.” The first part of the article is a panning of recent discussions about this term in relation to the analysis made by Iovănel in his History. The second part aims to trace out a network of this type of novel in the literatures of Central and Eastern Europe and to try to identify its particularities through a comparative analysis. The last part consists of a study case of the novels Acasă, pe câmpia Armaghedonului [At home, on the Field of Armageddon] by Marta Petreu and Bureți de Fag [Oyster Mushrooms] by Mihai Duțescu. The latter has been published after the History and both novels are analyzed from the perspective of the novel of communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

act: This paper aims at analyzing the connection between the contemporary Romanian literature and world literature through the emergence of maximalist novel embodied in Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu’s novel, Abraxas. The author belongs to the 2000 generation, a generation which has neglected the postmodern maximalist approach. Therefore, I intend to analyze the emergence of maximalism in Bogdan-Alexandru Stănescu’s novel by indicating the tension it generated in regards with the previous minimalist formula and by observing the connection of literature with the socio-economic context of the 2000’s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a long and rich dialogue between the ancient therapeutic practices of the Stoics and contemporary psychotherapeutic fields such as CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) and DBT (Dialectical Behavior Therapy). Nevertheless, little attention is being given to the pragmatic premises that link the curative operations and the operated world-view of these schools of thought. In this sense, my paper represents and attempt at shedding light on the methodology that grounds this very dialogue in the first place – that being an purely instrumentalist methodology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The aim of this paper is to present some results of my research regarding the representation of holy women in the Moldavian churches during the reign of Stephen the Great. Most frequently, these images are found in the narthex of the church, a space of lesser spiritual intensity. A general explanation for the depiction of holy women in the narthex is related to the actual presence of women in this space during the mass and to their role in the funerary ritual and the commemoration of the dead which take place here. My study focuses on the cases of Saints Mary of Egypt and Marina the Great Martyr, the two most depicted saints in the Moldavian churches. Firstly, they have a specific way of representation, in a narrative scene. Saint Mary of Egypt is depicted as an ascetic figure together with Saint Zosimas from whom she receives the Holy Eucharist, while Saint Marina wears a red maphorion and is depicted hammering a demon. Secondly, they both have a well-defined place on the church walls, as a result of the hagiography, playing a symbolic role in the economy of space and in the iconographic program. Saint Mary of Egypt has a place in the passageway areas, in interaction with the architecture. Her representation offers an example of repentance for the believers, reassuring them of the mercifulness of God. Saint Marina is placed close to the entrances of the church, may they be doors or windows, for her role in protecting the sacred places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Transilvania, most of the publications mirrored the fight for political unity. The majority of the editors and the collaborators were interested in the unity and unification of the language and suggested concrete ways of accomplishing it by pointing out the common nature of the language, reconsidering its Latin origin, organizing a scientific leadership in the field able to fulfilling the unity of the language at all its levels: vocabulary, phonetics and grammar. A special attention is given to the development of the national- patriotic feeling, the result of a close connection between language and nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era in which literary histories are written by collective of academics trying to transcend the national paradigm in which these works were once wrote, The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 by Mihai Iovănel is an intellectual effort that may seem obsolete. Nevertheless, Mihai Iovănel’s book proposes new ways of understanding the contemporary Romanian literary field that were not taken into consideration by previous similar critical endeavours. This paper aims to investigate how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature constructs an overview of the Romanian fiction wrote in the last three decades and the critical approaches deployed for this purpose. The main interest of this article will be how does Mihai Iovănel discusses Romanian contemporary fiction and how does he instrumentalizes the concept of realism. We will look more closely at the third part of the book, “The Evolution of Fiction,” but the discussion will not omit the relation of this chapter with others. The paper will concentrate on the concepts put forward by Mihai Iovănel to systematize the complex subfield of contemporary Romanian fiction, like capitalist realism, the famous term coined by Mark Fisher. Also, we will try to see how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature relate to previous literary histories or books of literary criticism that resembles Mihai Iovănel’s work in some respects or that have similar goals but different methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the theories about the author's posture, my paper aims both to reconstruct the path of Mariana Marin's mythologization and to deconstruct it by establishing two main postures: the tragic posture, congealed mainly post-mortem, and the ethical one, originating in a specific ethos, identifiable in the poet's biographical-artistic trajectory. Having become a mythologised figure of the 1980s generation, due to the fatalistic correspondences between poems and biography or to the legitimisation of her value by comparison with poets of the same framework, but from the mainstream of world literature (Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Else Lasker-Schüler), Madi – the famous nickname – tends to penetrate abusively, sometimes unjustifiably, into the reception of Mariana Marin's texts, hence the empirical persona which becomes strongly than the poetic work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manuscript I talk about in this paper – Mihail Sebastianʼs diary from 1930 to 1931 – has been “hidden” in sight for nearly 40 years, in a public library from the cultural center of the country. I insist upon the unpublished content of this notebook, which I show and contextualize. I also discuss the importance of the manuscript, giving some significant details about the appearance of the notebook that housed the novel diary of the The Town with Acacia Trees, a diary kept by Sebastian during his time in Paris (1930-1931). The discovery of this unpublished notebook is per se a turning point for Sebastian’s exegetes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of identifying sources and representations of melancholy in cinema implies exploring character typologies that present aspects or even clear symptoms of what is currently termed as melancholic depression or major depression disorder. David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), an adaptation of Noël Coward’s short play Still Life (1936), presents female melancholy as an inherent symptom of the bovaryc character. This paper analyzes aspects of melancholy studying the case of Lean’s main character, Laura, and relating it to the features of bovarysm, as theorized and exhaustively explored by French philosopher Jules de Gaultier in the essay Le Bovarysme (1892). To what extent is melancholy an inherent symptom of the bovaric character? While exploring the ongoing psychological research on melancholy and depression, we find it difficult to determine whether the character suffers from major depression disorder, as it is impossible to ascertain the specific cause of their symptoms, especially if they relate to internal, neurobiological systems. The apparent cause of their unhappiness seems to be the result of their perception of romantic relationships and their surrounding reality that does not reflect this distortion. Consequently, the analysis mainly focuses on the detectable elements and activators of the protagonist’s melancholic disposition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper elaborates on feminine images of the sacred. It aims to show the manner in which feminine specificities are connected to the realm of the sacred within the Eastern Christianity, the ancient Greek religion and in some forms of Hinduism. The emphasis will be placed on the commonalities, as well as the contextual dissimilarities between the different cultural and religious spaces under consideration. The aim of the present paper is to elicit a better understanding of the feminine, along with its creative manifestations, and of the unparalleled complexity of the sacred, as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to gather and provide information about a less known historical text from the beginning of the 19th century. Alexander I, Keiser von Russland. Ein Regierungs- und Karaktergemälde written by Johann Daniel Friedrich Rumpf is the less known booklet printed in Buda, in 1815. With an anonymous translator, the text represents an important analytical base to understand the cultural, political and social landscape in the Romanian time-frame of Enlightenment. The paper focuses on some important translation issues as: loans or adaptation, in a period of time when the translators had to adapt to a different context in order to use a specialized language for the economic, geographic and legal realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My study aims to address the phenomenon of literary multilingualism in the nineteenth-century Romanian novel. Based on Johan Heilbron’s approach on “translations as a cultural world-system” and his classification into hyper-central, central, semi-peripheral and peripheral languages, my analysis discusses the nineteenth-century Romanian language at an early stage of its consolidation and thus in self-colonial and anti-colonial relations to the “hegemony” of the French language. Taking advantage of this framework, I consider that the majority of literary code-switching examples faithfully render these linguistic relations, so my study proposes a classification of literary multilingualism into the following possible categories: a livresque multilingualism, which satisfies the self-colonial tendencies of the nineteenth-century language, a latent multilingualism, which can also be associated with an attempt at linguistic bovarisation, but also with the search for authenticity in novels through suggestion and “explicit attribution” (Meir Sternberg), a thesistic multilingualism, in such cases where the novel didactically presents foreign language insertions, and a functional multilingualism. Finally, my paper also launches a discussion of another type of multilingualism, that as a source for “defamiliarization”, which I expect to find in the Romanian novel of the twentieth century, when the Romanian language is no longer in danger of self-colonization and passes by the incipient stage, the phenomenon of code-switching serving Viktor Shklovsky’s technique of “defamiliarization”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our paper aims to reveal an inventory, an interpretation and a statistical analysis of Romanian names of plants which implicates the term „iarbă” (herb, grass), spread through the botanical terminology, a phenomenon which, as considered by E. Coşeriu is not enough highlighted (given that the individual speaker became creator of language / poetry whenever he named a flower. Botanical popular terminology has primarily a practical value, designating, distinguishing and categorizing elements of the plant kingdom within the given natural reign, but also has a high theoretical significance, especially for linguists, both by the ethimons to which they send back and by the metaphorical meanings the phytonims mostly have. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate that two previously unknown manuscript folios from Mircea Eliade’s youth, which emerged in 2022, are the drafted summaries of his unfinished editorial project Valkyries in the Library. The two folios are, in fact, two lists of article titles Eliade published in Cuvântul (22), Gândirea (2), and Sinteza (1), in 1926-1928. Arranged differently, the feuilletons address topics such the Romanian intellectual, the dependance towards French culture and literature, philology and synthesis, the lack of heroism in Romanian literature, Beatrice and Don Quixote, young writers, literary criticism, philosophy. The tone is polemical and radical, condemning the current state of Romanian literature, advancing the author's views, and urging his contemporaries to take action in order to create fundamental and authentic works. Just as Eliade recalls in his diary, the articles from Cuvântul mentioned in the two folios were a whirlwind, a cavalcade meant to take local culture and erudition by surprise and to change it forever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employed in the study of national or transnational literatures, the relevance of digital humanities, computational analyses, and quantitative sociology can no longer be ignored. In this paper, we aim to argue that, in spite of it still being seen as a niche endeavor, the digital or quantitative study of literature generates paradigmatic shifts in literary scholarship, both in literary criticism and comparative studies. In order to demonstrate this statement, the following study will illustrate how three core principles of digital humanities are actively shaping humanities as we know it. These principles – openness, replicability, and collaboration – challenge the way we understand the role of the literary historian and their „traditional” tasks. To consolidate this argumentation further, we will briefly present an example of how digital humanities start changing the dominant narrative in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an overview of the historiography that describes and investigates the components which compose the sacred spaces of Sibiu in the Middle Ages. It is well known that Sibiu had a preeminent position in the urban hierarchy of medieval Transylvania and of the south-eastern Europe. The city was attested for the first time in 1191 as an ecclesiastical center of the Transylvanian Saxons and was home to numerous places of worship and sacred sites (churches, monasteries, chapels, cemeteries, hospitals etc.). However, with the advent of the Reformation in the 16th century and the noticeable changes that occurred during the industrial age and the communist dictatorship (the 19th and 20th centuries), the medieval sacred building and their neighborhoods have been deeply transformed and medieval ecclesiastical topography became unrecognizable in modern day Sibiu. The recreation of the ecclesiastical topography and even more of the sacred spaces could be recreated through analyses and research of different type of sources from charters and town chronicles of the 16th-18th centuries to the most recent archaeological studies or papers on medieval art, architecture, or historical urban evolution. With this in mind, the study aims to provide references on the topic and establishes the main periods of the historiography and their relevant ideological and theoretical changes during over 400 hundred years of debates or research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to offer a proper re-evaluation of Cella Serghi’s literary debut and overall importance when it comes to Romanian literature. Her debut novel was extremely well-received by the Romanian readership; however, many of the critics dismissed her prose as being a reflection, or at least the result of Camil Petrescu’s guidance and influence. After examining the marginalisation and the unjust simplification that her prose suffered, the paper introduces some considerations on feminism in Romania, for a more accurate depiction of her significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper represents an analysis of gender studies regarding mass-media, mainly advertising. The study observes issues related to the way in which gender equality was identified in advertising, both in publications with individual authors and in collective specialised works, or in peer-reviewed scientific articles. We have subsequently observed and presented three essential directions in Romanian studies on gender stereotypes / inequality in advertising. Thus, we discussed the linguistic and semantic direction (terms such as stereotype, male-female distinction, patriarchy), then the typological direction (classifications of stereotypes, their characteristic and frequency) and last but not least the direction of consumer perception in advertising. In conclusion, the paper shows the research trends in the field of gender stereotypes regarding advertising, highlighting the opinion of recognized specialists on the influence such representations have on individuals and in society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The massive wave of economic migration of Transylvanians to America in the early 20th century had a considerable impact on the lives of both those who decided to temporarily leave their homeland and those who stayed home. The Transylvanian pattern of emigration, similar to the neighbouring Central and Eastern European countries can be sum up as follows: young male peasants, poorly educated, but with high hopes and determination left for America, for highly demanding physical work, but well enough remunerated in order to allow them to return home relatively soon. This paper seeks to contribute to the rich literature on emigration, by focusing on how this phenomenon influenced the villagers of Șona, a small community in the former Făgăraș County. By analysing photos, artefacts and documents that belonged to the emigrants, the Ellis Island Passenger Search Database, and by conducting interviews with their living descendants, I focus on the personal experience of migration – individual stories of migrants, their relations with their family and the community. Thus, I try to partially recreate some biographies directly connected to the experience of migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper briefly presents the evolution of terminology related to heritage (natural, cultural, and digital), reviewing the key moments which led to their institutionalization at the global level, as well as to the practices of valorization of heritage and patrimony elements, focusing especially on the appearance of their third type, the digital cultural heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The orientation of phraseological nomination towards the human allows the reflection of everyday collective observations, experiences and evaluations of a certain (norm-deviating) behaviour or action. The paper explores the role of the linguistic image in the metaphorisation of the concept ‘Wahnsinn’/‘Verrücktheit’ in German and Romanian, in order to ask about the productive initial domains for the conceptualisation of this term, since conceptual spheres allow conclusions to be drawn about the models of thought and values anchored in the language. The interlingual analysis of this particular excerpt from the German and Romanian lexicon of phrases makes it clear that one cannot speak of serious differences in the phraseological realisation or of differing valuations and that universal and productive metaphorical patterns can be discerned in the conceptualisation of ‘Wahnsinn’/‘Verrücktheit’ in German and in Romanian. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationships between journalism and sustainability are seen as interdependent and mutually beneficial. On the one hand, sustainable development also includes a free, autonomous and strong press that can support itself economically, and on the other hand, responsible journalism brings the problems of the current world to the public and it can also involve experts to talk about the solutions possible to these issues, which generates a media discourse about sustainability and resilience now and in the future. The present paper examines the conceptualization of constructive journalism, interrogating, at the same time, its normative and societal role, as well as the resistance of this alternative direction, in the current context, marked by political instability and post-pandemic economic crisis. In Romania, the DoR experience, its course, but also the announced end of this journalistic project, shows the difficulties that constructive journalism encounters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The memory of the Holocaust in Romania (i.e. the Romanian authorities’ involvement in the atrocious crime of the Holocaust) was ideologically distorted and occulted during the communist dictatorship. This led not only to the impossibility of recovering the historical truth, but also to it acting as a deterrent when it comes to the depiction of the living memory (i.e. journals, memoirs), as well as of the artistic and cultural representations of this tragic moment in our recent history. It was only in the last two decades, more precisely after the discussions initiated by the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, and especially after the publication of the Final Report (2004), that the Romanian authorities’ accountability for the Holocaust timidly penetrated the public discourse. This paper looks into the history of memorial occultation of the Holocaust in Romania by seeking to explore and explain the difficulties that the Romanian public discourse has had (and continues to have) when integrating this event into its cultural memory. Through a comparative analysis of how the memory of the Holocaust was embedded in the Western and the Romanian public discourse, we could notice that in Romania, in the last decades, these complications may be explained primarily through an absence in the manifestations of a prosthetic memory encompassing cultural representations of the Holocaust. Besides identifying the postmemorial artifact (i.e. the act of cultural and artistic reconstruction of the trauma of the Holocaust) as the main element of the prosthetic memory, this paper also describes a possible corpus of such postmemorial artifacts (film, literature), steadily growing in the Romanian culture in recent years, to be minutely analyzed in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gustian School aimed to study the society to better understand it, in order to improve it. Knowledge and social intervention go hand in hand when it comes to the monographs. In order to achieve what Gusti would call a ”militant sociology”, the interwar researchers would often employ interdisciplinary methods that range from ethnology to history or economy. This papers aims to prove that, although the Romanian monographs did not explicitly conduct their research according to the social history's precepts, however, we can retrace many elements that are specific to the field of social history. Many monographic studies employ implicitly methods and concepts that belong to the field of social history such as the comparative method, the qualitative approach or the social microscope method, oral history interviews, everyday life studies, all used around concepts such as family, social roles, kinship etc, from an anthropological and historical perspective. Furthermore, this paper argues that the Gustian School's production can be used as invaluable sources for a social historical approach to the Romanian interwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering degradation and sexuality in its quest of reviving the readers need for representation, this paper challenges the possibilities of textual regeneration, problematizing the narrative practice as a way of voicing the multiple interfaces of the human body. Namely, through motifs like: the masturbating child, incest, sexual freedom of the mentally ill and the manipulator, this study explores the overlappings entailed in some of Ian McEwan's novels, such as: Cement Garden, Amsterdam, On Chesil Beach, The Confort of Strangers and Atonement. Furthermore, the paper will talk about sexuality and degradation using a series of concepts as the image that encrypts the directions of limit. Lastly, this paper will present the process of limit including the evolution of the author's narrative style and the way he treats schizoid universes through solutions such as degradation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present paper aims to highlight the concept of authenticity as a core and first objective of the 80`s literary generation with an emphasis on the prosaic sector of the time. In a hermeneutic approach, the paper relies on the presentation of a "new authenticity" differently marked from the modernist approaches and which is reflected in the concrete plan of writing, whose ontological investment or interaction with the (i)mmediated reality is attributed to the experimental context, but especially to the textualist paradigm of the generation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the current context of globalization, the use of a widely known linguistic code becomes a requirement for maintaining the economic, political and trading relations between different nations around the world. Considering the phenomenal spread of the English language that contributed to its qualification as a “global language”, the aim of this paper is to establish what makes a language to be international. To this purpose, I discuss different sets of criteria elaborated by various researchers and I argue that the main test for classifying a language as “international” is not the mere number of its speakers, but the number of users who learn to speak it in an unconditional manner, i.e., the extension of what linguists call its “area of influence”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspecțiune is one of Caragiale’s most discussed texts. In this paper, I explore some possible sources of the enigma surrounding Anghelache's suicide. Suicide and its causes became a genuine subject of research in the second half of the 19th century. A new field of inquiry emerged then: moral statistics. Central to my discussion is one of Titu Maiorescu's articles, published in Convorbiri literare, in which he addresses that new way of investigating suicide, starting from Enrico Morselli’s book, An Essay on Comparative Moral Statistics. It is plausible to believe that Caragiale had read Maiorescu's article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]