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Considering the emerging field of anti-totalitarian collective memory of communism, this article explores the interplay between the autobiographical archives and the public discourse on memory. It questions the appeal for establishing the "true" history of communism as it is reflected at the autobiographical archive level. Based on Elisabeta Rizea's relevant case study and using a comprehensive approach addressing the discourse on memory in Romania, the grounding elements of the autobiographical archive are analyzed. Its afterlife is discussed in terms of its reception and through user-generated content specific to online communication platforms. The article argues that while the entanglements between the autobiographical archive and the discourse on memory of the Romanian communist past demonstrate a prevalence of the victimization and heroism narratives, the online engagement indicates both a continuity with these narratives and a (re)working of autobiographical archive in the register of truthfulness and authenticity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a review article of Judy Gammelgaard’s Psychoanalysis After Freud: Memory, Mourning and Repetition which engages critically with the author’s main ideas and connects this book with other contemporary scholarship in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the cinematographic reworking of memory spaces associated with power relations and structural injustice. The way in which space is represented and used as a medium that reflects power relations allows to question the space itself in cultural productions from Central-Eastern Europe when associated with Romani people (space and power relations, memory of slavery and discrimination, space and freedom, territoriality, space and its inhabitants, non-belonging, segregation, etc.). The paper focuses on motion pictures produced in the last decade in Romania, a prolific period due to the increasing interest for memory activism and to the multiplication of the cultural exploration of challenging topics. It aims to identify narrative, visual, and aesthetic expressions used as deterritorialization practices to stimulate relational remembrance and engagement with ongoing social inequality and structural injustice. Two short films - Alina Șerban' s Bilet de iertare (Letter of forgiveness) and Adrian Silișteanu's Scris/Nescris (Written/Unwritten) - and a western type film - Radu Jude's Aferim!, winner of the Silver Bear for Best director at Berlinale in 2015, are analysed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exploration of the Romanian communist experiences and memories has generated several collective representations ranging from trauma of the past to everyday life images and narratives, communist memorabilia and nostalgic feelings. The role of literature and art in addressing the communist past has been increasingly more often included in the current debates. This paper argues that based on its visual constructions, comics expand the general knowledge of the past by targeting a segment of audience that may engage more deeply with visual expressions than with other memory media. Therefore, comic books can mediate the transgenerational transmission of memory and the reading of past narratives. Using as a case study a collective volume dedicated to the 1989 Romanian Revolution, this paper questions the use of graphics and narratives in (re)working past events and explores the dynamic of trauma, fear and violence in comics. Special attention is given to the way in which meaning is produced or conveyed and to the strategies used to address past events. Based on three interconnected instruments - content analysis, close reading and mise en scène - the graphics and narrative of the represented events are examined in relation with both the memory and the postmemory of the communist past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a triangular reading of a contemporary Romanian novel, namely Simona Sora's Complaisance. Ascension in the orthopaedics ward/A guest for life (2020), in the frame of epistemological pluralism. To this end, each of the three co-authors opted for different epistemological perspectives, spanning memory studies, ethics, and literary aesthetics. In the first section, Simona Mitroiu uses a "memory-work method" and applying narrative analysis she reads Sora's novel in relation to several cultural productions dealing with Romanian women's experience in relationships of power. In the same context-dependent framework, Laura Pricop embraces, in the second section, an ethical perspective and retraces the steps taken by a woman to free herself from a conscience educated in the spirit of complaisance and obedience under the communist regime. Finally, Andreea Mironescu deciphers in Sora's novel the allegorisation of two antagonic, although co-existent, ways of reading and interpreting, arguing that such antagonism between a suspicious and affective reading has a wide cultural relevance, especially on how we read the past. The three analyses make a stronger case for how epistemological pluralism works in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives of the past are created and, in some cases, recreated, through literary works by revealing fragments from past traumas, reinterpreting past events, or focusing on historical events held in the collective memory. In a text dedicated to excavation and memory, Walter Benjamin notes that when approaching one's personal past, one must proceed like a person digging in the ground, and not be afraid of returning repeatedly to the same matter. This essay argues that Herta Müller uses this method to address the personal and collective Romanian past, creating through her novels a literary remembrance of the past that deeply resonates with the memories of those affected by totalitarian regimes. Never presenting a linear or whole narrative of the past but rather the pieces of a life-narrative puzzle, Müller's literary world becomes a medium through which the victims of totalitarian regimes can regain control over the narratives of their past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the same way in which Salvador Dali painted the identity in The Birth of a Goddess, drawing a face that will take shape step by step using the personal experiences and the relations established, we can say that the identity is a concept that cannot be analyzed anymore just at the theoretical level without any references to our private experiences, because the temptation of the identity is that of the whole that must bond together the elements of life. The identity seems to be the joining point of our fears and convictions of a world thirsty for knowledge, but frighten by the rapid changes that follow the discoveries and the informational acceleration, a world that doesn't allow time for adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main idea of this paper is that memories are the key elements of our identity and in order to access these elements it is sometimes necessary to use different techniques. Music is one of them and the education of the mind represents a safe direction to define and our cultural identity regardless the various social pressures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]