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Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Renaissance genre of utopia has its forerunners in the extraordinary voyages of the Roman Empire's literature. Two of these adventure novels, Wonders beyond Thulé by Antonius Diogenes and True Histories by Lucian, from the 2nd century CE, stage different places with utopian characteristics (Hyperborea, Pythagora's and Zamolxis' communities, the Island of the Blessed, the Island of Dreams) or early SF traits (the Moon, the Sun, several aerial cities). Nourished by the rich imaginary of the ancient paradoxographia (historical, geographical and literary texts about the mirabilia of the East), these texts display a tremendous freedom of invention. Intended to copy or parody previous writings, in order to entertain and please their readership, they ignore all Aristotelian precepts of structure or the need for a global unified meaning, and develop random narrative scenarios, which I would characterize as "anarchetypal". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which editor discusses various articles within the issue on topics including role played by slogans and catchwords in the construction of utopian-in-theory; development of utopia as a genre and dystopian aspects of James Joyce's book "Ulysses."

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]

The poetic principles defined by Aristotle in his Poetics gave birth to an aesthetic tradition which dominated Western culture and literature up until the twentieth century. All his successors believed that, in order to achieve literary value and public acclaim, a text should comply with criteria such as unity of the subject (mythos), harmony of the parts (taxis), clear inclusive meaning (dianoia), etc. - in other words, structure. However, many authors departed from this ideal and gave free rein to their fantasy, conceiving plethoric, multi-layered, anarchic works, which tended to be, most often than not, excluded from the literary canon. During the twentieth century, with the modern and then the postmodern turn, not only the practical creative Aristotelian rules, but also the very idea of structure was contested. In this paper I make a survey of some of the main critical thinkers who opposed Aristotle’s model of closed works: M. Bakhtin, C.-L. Strauss, J. Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, U. Eco, F. Moretti, etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western culture and literature have been moulded, in their main aesthetic conceptions and creative practices, by Aristotle’s principles. Starting from his seminal text Poetics, ancient, medieval, and modern (from Renaissance to the twentieth century) aesthetics, poetics, rhetorical and grammatical theories have reiterated, amplified, adapted and reshaped the concepts of imitation (mimesis), subject (mythos), meaning (dianoia), order (taxis), unity of the whole and harmony of the parts, etc. On this basis, they demanded that literary works should have - as a prerequisite of aesthetic value and artistic success - a structure, a unitary composition, a centred form, a logos, a cogito, a synopsis or any other formal pattern. This brought about the exclusion from the canon of the works failing to complain with these criteria. In this paper I retrace the Aristotelian tradition, from Horace, Cicero and Quintilian to Beda and Dante, from Minturno and Scaliger to du Bellay and Boileau, from Sydney, Dryden and Pope to Mathew Arnold, the Chicago School and Northrop Frye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a geographically small continent, Europe has fostered, over the past millennia, the emergence of an impressive number of languages, cultures and civilizations. This constitutes its richness and also its challenge: how should all these local, regional and national cultural identities be harmonized and integrated, without destroying, but rather conserving and enhancing them? A seminal concept in the investigation of the cultural, literary and artistic representations is "the imaginary" (the equivalent of the French term l'imaginaire), as opposed to the traditional concepts of "imagination" and "fantasy". Cultural imaginaries express the relations between individuals and groups, their representations of the self and the others, of the geographical and historical milieus, of the planet and the universe. The images of Europe, positive or negative, global or fragmented, define the conscious and unconscious attitudes and comportments, hopes and fears concerning the individual and common destiny of European peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From Antiquity to Modernity, the topic of the Amazons questioned the relationships between men and women, triggering a series of anthropological, social and cultural issues. In the wake of the second-wave feminism of the '60, resonating with the Women's Liberation Movement, several authors revisited this topos: Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères (1969), Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Joan Slonczewski, A Door into Ocean (1986). In this paper I focus on Joanna Russ's "polytopia", and Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, the only utopia (to my knowledge) in which the ideal society is situated not in a different space or time, but in the (delusional) mind of the protagonist. My thesis is that, in these texts, the Amazones' utopia is a "thought experience", a demonstration by the absurd warning against the dangers of perpetuating a society that discriminates women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most controversial and hotly debated concepts in contemporary literary theory is that of "crisis." Philosophers and theorists speak about the "death of the author," the "death of literature," post-humanism and trans-humanism (which also imply, in a way, the "death of man"), and so on. However, these "alarmist" claims seem to point to internal changes and evolutions of paradigms and models rather than to the actual ends of domains and concepts. Moreover, they are also successful devices for drawing public attention and critical acclaim, for conferring prestige to their proponents. Engaging with Theodor Adorno's dictum that "to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric," my point is that the latest global calamities of the pandemic and of the war in Ukraine demand a more moral use of the term "death." The metaphorical and abstract grand-narrative of the "end of man" fades away when we are confronted with the tragic and concrete realities of people suffering and dying in horrible conditions. Without ignoring the failures of anthropocentrism and the valid criticisms concerning the attitude and position of the human species within the planetary ecosystem, this paper engages with the possibility of ideologically-driven ethics giving way to a "humanism" tout court (not new-, not after-, not non-humanism), predicated on the imperative of caring about actual individuals in pain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents how The Encyclopaedia of Romanian Imaginaries. Historical Patrimony and Cultural-Linguistic Identities (Polirom Editing House, 2020) reflects the Romanian cultural identity. The five volumes provide a synoptic perspective on the cultural inheritance and spiritual identities of Romania. Guided by the powerful and innovative concept of social and cultural imaginaries, it uses multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary methodologies in order to highlight the main domains of Romanian collective representations. The scientific key concepts, which ensure the originality of the approach, are imagination studies (“recherches sur l’imaginaire”), semantic basins, linguistic fields, image constellations, and fractal identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Comparative religions and literamre in general, and French imagination studies (rechcrchcs sur I'imaginairc) in special, have explained the existence of thematic invariants through two theories, that of influences and that of epigenesis. Starting from neo-Kantian assumptions about the presence of a priori schemata or innate "symbolic forms" of the human psyche, C. G. Jung, Gaston Bachelard, Northrop Frye, Gilbert Durand, Mircea Eliade or Joseph Campbell among others devised genuine archetypal maps of the collective imaginary. Nonetheless, contemporary research based on analytical philosophy, cognitivism, semiotics or discourse theory has criticized such assumptions as being speculative and indemonstrable. My study aims to present new arguments relating to the existence of inherited "primitives," of image schemas and mental maps, according to the latest research in evolutionary psychology (Joseph Carroll), neurosciences (George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner), and cognitivism (Leonard Talmy, P. N. Johnson-Laird, Teun A. van Dijk). This would give anthropological, religious and imagination studies an up-to-date psychological and neurological frame of explanation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzes the works that Vintilă Ivănceanu (1940-2008) wrote in Romanian. A member of the oneiric movement of the 1960-70s, Ivănceanu adhered to the principles of "aesthetic oneirism" defined by Leonid Dimov and Dumitru Ţepeneag. His first book, the micro-novel entitled Până la dispariie (To the Point of Disappearance), presents the detention of a political protester from the hallucinating perspective of a ceaseless delirium generated by the tortures to which the protagonist is subjected. The second, Nemaipomenitele păţanii ale lui Milorad de Bouteille (The Extraordinary Misadventures of Milorad de Bouteille), uses the same technique of oneiric collages, but is imbued with humor, satire and a Gothic that is reminiscent of the Middle Ages. Finally, the fanciful poem Vulcaloborgul i frumoasa Beleponjă (The Vulcaloborg and the Beautiful Beleponja) resumes the medieval theme of human teratology through a surge of playful imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Second World War and after the discovery of the atomic bomb, apocalyptic fears have intensified in modern literature, giving rise to a series of antiutopian writings, in which human civilization as we know it comes to an end in the wake of various catastrophes. Authors of antiutopias often populate their post-apocalyptic worlds with characters or groups of survivors that suffer anthropological, moral, or spiritual mutations. Technological and genetic manipulations engender robotic (Karel čapek) or mechanized individuals (David Bunch) and decerebrated (T. J. Bass) or post-human mutants (Margaret Atwood). In these antiutopias, post-humanity is usually not only the heir but also a witness to the extinction of the human race, providing a testimony for the "last man on earth". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper starts from the observation that Thomas More's seminal work Utopia stands between two modal categories of fictional worlds, the possible and the impossible. On the textual level, the author is careful to comply with a convention of truthfulness in order to place Hythloday's journey within the history and geography of the time. On the metatextual level, Thomas More uses names (toponyms and ethnonyms) as means of denying the empirical reality of Hythloday's journey and emphasizing its satirical, self-critical nature, on the one hand, and its theoretical and intertextual dimension (the scholarly, witty dialogue with Plato, Erasmus and the whole humanist tradition), on the other hand. Thus while at the literal level, Utopia has a fictional ontological consistency that makes it a pragmatic utopia or, in other words, a eutopia, its truthfulness is undermined at the metadiscursive level by a witticism that is typical of the age of Early Modernity, to the extent that it changes from a suggestion of social reform into a chimera, namely an outopia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Classical utopias often paired with the literary genre of extraordinary and marvelous voyages. With the progress of geographical explorations, as the "blank spaces" on the map were gradually filled in, utopian writers began to seek complementary, new, unknown places, where they could situate their ideal cities and kingdoms. The cosmological discoveries of the Renaissance and the first representations of the universe offered extraterrestrial space as a possible location for utopian or dystopian fictions. In the works of Francis Godwin and Johannes Kepler, the Moon became an inhabited world, while Cyrano de Bergerac imagined kingdoms of the Moon and the Sun, Voltaire envisaged Sirius, etc. From the 19th century onwards, with the rise of the science-fiction genre, various authors ranging from Camille Flammarion to Doris Lessing and Ursula Le Guin found in other solar systems the landscape for utopian or dystopian parables of our world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When put into political and social practice, utopian projects often gave birth to totalitarian societies. Modern dystopias try to prevent such evolutions by a kind of literary "thought experiments", which show that the constructive principles of utopian societies lead not to the eudemonic issues promised by their authors but to nightmarish results. The main procedure for the making of such terrifying fictional worlds is the reductio ad absurdum (argument to absurdity). Writers such as Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, Levin, Atwood and many others start from the core assumption that societies organized on the abstract principle of general good inevitably destroy the free will and the human nature of individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While classical utopias were situated in a hétérotopie space, many of modern utopias are situated in a heterotopic time, in an alternative future. Anticipation utopists no longer see ideal societies as achievements of peoples or races different from ours, but as projects to be carried out by our civilization itself. Starting with Louis Sébastien Mercier's L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante (1772), future utopias and uchronias melted, during the 20th century, widt the literary genre of science-fiction. Using SF devices, time utopists tried to imagine the future of our race, from mutating individuals to global cosmic beings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We start from the idea that Utopia is a Renaissance alternative to the Medieval Garden of Eden and, consequently, that dystopia, as a failed utopia, continues the theme of Paradise Lost. Inheriting such a rich tradition, the word "utopia" designates a semantic hybrid that encompasses several fields and disciplines. In this paper, we propose a reorganisation of the species of the utopian genre by reusing, with a minimum of violence, the already existing, albeit rather lax terms of (o)utopia, eutopia, dystopia and antiutopia (or counterutopia). The main criteria for distinguishing these species are the moral value, the degree of verisimilitude, the constructing procedures ("electrolysis" of the positive and negative elements, utopian extrapolation, proof by contradiction, etc.) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary series of books and movies for teenagers and young adults, such as The Giver by Lois Lowry, The City of Ember by Jeanne duPrau, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, The Maze Runner by James Dashner, Divergent by Veronica Roth or Aeon Flux, imagine a dystopian future in which small communities of survivors from a global (artificial) catastrophe are subject to monstrous genetic, social and mental experiments. Conceived on the pattern of the ancient myth of the Minotaur in Crete, they present the trials that young heroes have to pass in order to survive. The labyrinth is a metaphor for the future dystopian societies; survival from its ordeal, as well as the destruction of the occlusive system, offer a new hope for these "critical dystopias." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The Counter-Reformation treated classical utopias as Pelagian heresies, that is, fictions that questioned the original sin and the role of the Church in redemption. The religious censorship applied to utopian thinking provoked, in some authors, a radical disbelief in the possibility of achieving ideal societies or earthly paradises. While authors like Gilles Bernard Raguet questioned the models offered by Francis Bacon and other utopists, other authors like Tiphaigne de la Roche, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre or Samuel Johnson demonstrated, through a counter-utopian procedure of "reductio ab absurdum", that utopias could simply not endure on earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To the Europeans, throughout the Middle Ages, India represented a fabulous country, a realm of wonders, an "oneiric horizon" (Jacques Le Goff). By using varied traditions inherited from Antiquity, the Fathers of the Church, the encyclopedists (from Isidore of Seville to Brunetto Latini or Vincent of Beauvais) or the authors of extraordinary travellogues peopled this imaginary land with a marvellous flora and a monstrous fauna, as well as strange human races. A (psycho) analysis of these fantastic figures (dog-headed men, one-legged ones, men with eyes, nose and mouth on their chest, hermaphrodites, pygmies, giants, Amazons, cannibals, etc.) would uncover the fantasies, scare, frustrations, unconscious complexes, prejudices and stereotypes that the Europeans projected on the figures of some "others", whom they situated at the antipodes of Europe - not so much geographical, as cognitive, moral, cultural and spiritual, antipodes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai, Philologia is the property of Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

While during the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th century many utopists imagined better societies based on emergent technology and socialist principles, with the putting in place of the totalitarian regimes (communist and fascist) of the 20th century utopian optimism faded away and gave place to dystopian and apocalyptical visions. The utopian interest shifted towards topics which have been lately brought together under the name of cultural studies: feminism, post-colonialism, ecology, etc. This paper tackles some seminal "ecotopias" of the period, such as Walden Two by B. F. Skinner and Ecotopia by Ernst Callenbach, showing how these texts upgrade the classical physiocratic and Arcadian utopias and romantic utopias such as Thoreau's Walden. Then it moves on to science-fiction utopias, such as Pennterra by Judith Moffett, seen as an enactment of the deep-ecology Gaia hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a fictional world, Utopia is a chronotope with its own landscape and history. Following Plato's contraposition of Athens and Atlantis, Thomas More has set the bases for the polar structure of modern utopias: to the here and now he opposes an elsewhere and a wishful future. Between this two poles he operates a sort of "electrolysis", which distributes to our world the negative features and to the other world the positive features of a general neutral image of the world. (Antiutopias will proceed to the reverse distribution). The consequence is that the imaginary landscapes of Europe and Utopia are built in the mirror: the first is the negative of the second and the second the positive of the first. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utopias are fictional worlds which use "worldmaking" procedures such as the selection and extrapolation of the positive (or negative) features of a primary world. Resorting to the modal operators of analytical philosophy (the necessary, the possible and the impossible), we make a distinction between mundus (the real historical world), eutopias (good places, possible and feasible societies described in a realistic reading code) and outopias (no places, impossible social projects, described in a fantastic or supernatural reading code). This essay shows that Renaissance utopias (Morus, Patrizi, Agostini, Zuccolo, Campanella, Stiblin, Antangil, Emeric de La Croix, Bisselius) are largely eutopias, constructed through the extraction of positive characteristics from the image of various European countries of that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is an enquiry into the theory of fictional worlds and the top three contemporary literary genres likely to configure imaginary realms: utopia, science-fiction and "fantasy" fiction. Modal logic, linguistics (speech acts theory in particular), analytical philosophy, "philosophical irrealism", and, finally, current cosmological models, provide the source for the theoretical framework underpinning the notion of possible worlds. The possible universes of general relativity, quantum physics and the strings theory find their correspondents in the fictional chronotopes dramatized by utopian discourses, science fiction and "fantasy" fiction, the distinctive traits of which we hereby seek to reveal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The heliocentric revolution has been one of the most important turns of early modem science. With the dismissal of Earth from the central position of the universe, the other planets became possible habitable worlds and the stars other suns. The Moon, for example, became a mirror for earth, a reversed world in which writers such Kepler, Cyrano de Bergerac or Daniel Defoe displayed a satirical image of our European societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]