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How is it possible that the most important decisions of the Trojan War be taken in the throws of extreme rage? What is the relationship between the Homeric heroes and the chants that describe their life journey? Why does Ulysses refuse the immortality promised by Calypso? This article sets out to analyze the role of emotions in the workings of the rapport between reality and fiction, as manifested in several episodes of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
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On July 12th 2023, Elon Musk announced the creation of the xAi corporation, the aim of which is, according to the program put forth by its author, “understanding the true nature of the Universe”. 507 years after the publication of Thomas Morus' Utopia, the trailblazing text of a concept which has moulded the post-Medieval European imaginary, the questions related to the morphology of the territories which we occupy or which we invent for ourselves are being reformulated. The present essay sets out to analyse several elements of a technoscientific flow of ideas which, throughout half a millennium, have been competing, beyond the cover of fiction, against the model of Christian monotheism.
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The article marks the anniversary, in 2024, of thirty years since the publication of the Romanian translation of the famous Danube (Milan, Garzanti, 1986) by Claudio Magris, which had immediately earned him the Bagutta Prize 1987, consecrating him among the highest contemporary Italian writers. The Romanian version was released in 1994 at the Univers publishing house in Bucharest in the “Spectrum” series, with the translation of the historian Adrian Niculescu, who was exiled to Italy in the 1980s. The proposed analysis is based on the presentation of the material concerning Romania within the literary work, as a premise of the speech on the Mitteleuropa versus the Europe of the South-East. Among the four historic Romanian regions, three can be identified as the main topics of the volume: Banat, Transylvania and Wallachia (Moldova is missing, as it does not concern the Danubian journey), with the mention that Banat and Transylvania are treated in a distinct chapter entitled Nonna Anka, while the other part of the Romanian territory, Wallachia, appears in the Matoas chapter. Claudio Magris’ literary image of Bucharest manages to configure the urban identity in its peculiarities deriving from the overlap of three different layers with paradigmatic value, corresponding to the main stages of its historical development.
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Over the past century, the history of Romanian literature has been dominated by nationalist approaches, necessary for the consolidation of a stable cultural identity. However, the concept of cultural identity involves changing and migratory components as well, many related to its links with other cultural identities, each of them with its own literature. This book review provides insights into the scholarly significance of Dicționarul romanului central-european din secolul XX [The Dictionary of Central European Novel in the 20th Century] coordinated by Adriana Babeți and edited by Oana Fotache, understood as a project that maps a transnational literary phenomenon. The study is examined for its uniqueness, specific linguistic diversity and multicultural scope: 250 entries about works initially published in one of the fourteen languages spoken in the region, including French and English as international languages, either part of the canon or more marginal and less known. Other reasons include its adequate combination of analysis and synthesis; the extensive team research carried out over three decades; and its socio-political relevance nowadays. The review highlights the historical, cultural, and academic contexts in which the dictionary was published, the avatars of the concept of Central Europe, several characteristics of the Central-European novel, and details about its structure, sections and features. The presentation mentions a few limitations about the availability of the titles in the languages of the region and the admitted gender imbalance and indicates several research audiences possibly interested in alternative ways of approaching novels in the context of globalization.
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Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. 1. The Archetypal Initiation Pattern. In this paper I apply a concept I have coined and defined – the anarchetype – to the ancient Greek and Latin novel, more specifically to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. The text suffers, in my view, from the tension between two contrary formal tendencies, one which is archetypal, another which is anarchetypal. The first structural constraint is the archetypal one. In contrast to the popular narrative Onos, that Apuleius takes as his epic source, The Golden Ass receives a strong organizing pattern, that of an initiation journey. Transformed by mistake, within a sorcery ritual, into an ass, Lucius suffers a series of adventures and encounters with different mystery and philosophical cults (Dea Syria, Dionysos, Isis, Medio-platonism) which bring him back to the human, and then divine condition. This rite of passage offers an archetypal structure to the novel.
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The Secret Memory. How the Goncourt 2021, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, Rewrites the Story of the “Black Rimbaud”. In a mixture of “savage detective story” à la Bolaño, of diary, journalism, interviews and discussions on “plagiarism,” the revolutionary book of Mohamed Mbougar Sarr rewrites the history of Western relations to Africa, to its cultures and its storytelling, but also to different forms of marginality, since its main character, Elimane Madag, is also travelling to South America, being part of its most interesting intellectual circles – through, for instance, Sábato, Gombrowicz, Silvina and Victoria Ocampo. Through voices of Senegalese, Haitian, Argentinian writers and poets, through an apocryphal rewriting of the literary history of the twentieth century, through subverting the theory of plagiarism (since African myths are reinterpreted and melted in the Western culture, similar to African artefacts after the expedition Dakar-Djibouti), as well as through detective journalism (since many characters are interrogating the relation facts-fiction), the marginal and the minor are presented as an alternative, disruptive literary history of the twentieth and of the beginning of the twenty-first century.
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Listening and Legibility: Urban Surfaces Against “Overarching Meanings” in Lispector’s The Besieged City. This paper looks into the literary dismantlement of projections of totality and objectified knowledge in women’s modern writing, focusing on Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector’s novel The Besieged City. My central claim is that her writing opposes “geographies of reason,” indirectly arguing for an untranslatability of the self inside modernity’s model of legibility and communication. In this novel, Lispector’s alternative to the discoursing, male-dominant, rational public realm is not the introspective inner space of subjectivity, but an innovative world-making poiesis founded on the substitution of the individual self with “the wider life of the world” that remains always a-centric and anti-textual. I investigate the ways in which Lispector opposes opaqueness to legibility, seeking the uncharted territory outside the logic of historical time or the colonial gaze. Reading Lispector’s novel through the notion of “writing by ear” (bearing multiple meanings, mostly in relation to the re-negotiation of the voice-dominant Western perception about writing) will prove useful in understanding the intricate and tangled relation between Euro-American literature and the Global South in terms of complex forms of heritage hybridization and designs of global memory.
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Global Threads, Unveiling Unevenness: Contemporary Maximalist Projects Interrogating Cultural Hybridisation and Marginality. Within a frame that emphasizes the tension between the global and the local, this paper aims to investigate the ways in which complex narratives that incorporate the tropes of migration, periphery, and marginality, amongst others, can bring to light aspects of unevenness and cultural and formal hybridisation. Works like Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, or Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other employ distinct maximalist modes of inquiry (Nick Levey) to question topics related to inequality, cultural relevance, or representational biases, in a type of novel about which James Wood claimed that it “suffered from an excess of storytelling and an almost paranoid preoccupation with linking up their many subplots in a web of forced meaning.” What stands at the core of this article is precisely this impulse to force a meaning which seems most frequently disrupted by an anarchetypal propensity to renegotiate a “rhetoric of inclusivity” (Franco Moretti) through which the maximalist author tries to exhaustively encompass the whole world (Levey). By selecting a corpus of maximalist novels to illustrate their evolution from the second half of the 20th century until more recent works, such as Evaristo’s, this paper investigates the shift through which these narratives have started to factor margins in, differently and more frequently than in the beginnings of this literary form.
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Avatars of the Storyteller in Le Petit Chaperon Uf by Jean-Claude Grumberg. Since the 17th century, when the story became part of the written literature thanks to Charles Perrault, the fairy-tale Le Petit Chaperon rouge represents an inexhaustible source of inspiration for all art creators. Over time, the renewal stakes of this canonical history changed and, during the 21st century, the heroine of the marvelous universe enters the theatre stage and inscribes the recreative approach of the tale in a contemporary art that puts together aesthetics and ethics. One of the authors who successfully managed to reconcile ancient and contemporary culture by transforming the canonical scheme of this tale is Jean-Claude Grumberg. Being a contemporary writer who finds the creative substance of his work in his childhood memories and in the painful experience of the deportation of the Jews, Grumberg wrote in 2005 the play Le Petit Chaperon Uf in order to tell the Shoah differently and to propose alternatives to a possible recurrence of evil. In his process of cultural and generic adaptation of the tale, the storyteller has an essential role. Our study aims to answer to two questions: ''why the storyteller is metamorphosing?'' and ''who is his avatar?'' in the play Le Petit Chaperon Uf. Playing an essential role in the process of transmitting the tale over time, nowadays, he becomes part of the performance and his voice merges with the voice of other participants in the action. The wolf-storyteller and the heroine-storyteller try, each in turn, to tell the tale in order to impose their own version of the great [His]Story of humanity: the terrifying and monstrous, for the Nazi-wolf, and that of peace, for the little girl forced to wear the yellow hood.
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A(n) (Anarche)Typical Journey through New York: Don Delillo’s Cosmopolis as an American Postmodern Odyssey. Journeys made across the North American territories were often made in search of something: a better life, a further frontier space or the lifestyle and the bigger opportunities from the other coast. Other times, mostly towards the second half of the 20th century, these journeys were made out of the sheer pleasure of travelling, having no pre-established routes and allowing themselves to drift endlessly and leave rhizomatic traces on America’s map. In the case of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, these two types of geographical narratives overlap in Eric Packer’s chaotic limousine ride across New York, through which he tries to reach his hairdresser but is forever delayed by various things happening on the streets. Through an in-depth geocritical analysis of why the quintessence of the 21st century’s American space proves to be unnavigable in straightforward and ordered ways anymore, this paper will use Corin Braga’s “anarchetype” to define this type of movement and also to link it to the multiple and decentred identity of the postmodern subject. In addition, the protagonist’s journey through Manhattan will be seen as a postmodern odyssey where the destination eludes the traveller to the point in which the journey’s meaning does not even depend on it anymore.
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Andreï Makine – From Anonymity to Literary Fame. The aim of this article is to analyse the strategies that enabled Andreï Makine to go from being a penniless Russian immigrant living in a Parisian cemetery to becoming a celebrity in the French literary world. The first aspect to be considered is the use of pseudo-translation. Unlike another Russian writer in exile, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who always believed that his works would be read by his compatriots and have an impact on the Russian cultural space, Makine, who settled in France in 1987, decided to write in French, mainly for a French readership. However, his first two novels were rejected by the Parisian publishers who did not believe that a Russian could write so well in French, so Makine had to create fictitious translators in order to get his texts published. Another significant factor is the way in which he exploited his biographical aspects to create a personal mythology. The third, and perhaps most important, factor that has contributed to Makine’s consecration in the French cultural space is the way he describes his country of origin (he has been accused of creating an image of Russia that would be pleasing to Western eyes) and his host country, praising both the French language and, as the title of one of his books puts it, “this France that we forget to love".
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Language as a Tool of Influence: Discourse Analysis of Daenerys Targaryen’s Speeches in Dothraki and High Valyrian in Game of Thrones. This article delves into the examination of the multilingual discourse and diplomatic strategies employed by Daenerys Targaryen, a central character in the “Game of Thrones” television series. The investigation centers on her utilization of the Dothraki and High Valyrian languages, both meticulously crafted by linguist David Peterson expressly for the show. Employing critical discourse analysis, this study seeks to unravel the linguistic influence wielded by Daenerys in her pursuit of power and influence within the fictional realm of Westeros. Through an analysis of her multilingual abilities, the article explores how Daenerys navigates and negotiates linguistic and cultural barriers to build alliances, forge connections, and assert her authority. Through an examination of the linguistic dimensions inherent in her diplomatic endeavors, the article illuminates the role of language as a potent tool for persuasion, negotiation, and cultural mediation within complex sociolinguistic contexts. The findings of this study significantly enhance our comprehension of multilingual diplomacy and its portrayal in popular culture, emphasizing the pivotal role of language in shaping political discourse and interpersonal relationships.
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Pandemic Biopolitics in Romanian Literature. The biopolitics of the COVID pandemic years has had a powerful impact on all areas of activity, including literature and the arts. Contagion and isolation quickly became the governing terms of social interaction, and writers promptly echoed their impact in works that tried to capture the spirit of the time as it was unfolding. Romanian writers were particularly prompt in responding to the challenges of this unprecedented crisis in modern decades, therefore the first pandemic writings were published in the later months of 2020. Florina Ilis’ Pandemia veselă și tristă (The Happy and Sad Pandemic, Polirom, 2020), Teodor Hossu-Longin’s Măștile din spatele măștii (The Masks behind the Mask, Hyperliteratura, 2022) and collective volumes such as Izolare (Isolation, Nemira 2020) and Jurnal din vremea pandemiei. Proză de grup (Journal from the Times of the Pandemic, Brumar, 2021), edited by Marius Cosmeanu, are just the most visible examples that could be explored in this context. Drawing from theories concerning posthumanism, medical humanities, ethics and contagion, this paper aims to explore the manner in which the pandemic segment of Romanian literature could be integrated into a global literary framework that highlights a diversity of genres and a plurality of voices galvanizing the relationship between the massive effects of the pandemic and narrative art. My paper aims at mapping an emerging literary dialect that gives shape, voice and coherence to a collective experience that has left an indelible imprint on the present and will significantly shape the cultural climate of the near future.
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Romanian and Hungarian Otherness. A World-System Perspective on the Event Novel. The article aims to investigate how the combined and unequal world-system is reflected in two peripheral novels in the modern literary system that focus on the Romanian-Hungarian 1919 military conflict, as part of the First World War. The Death of a Red Republic [Moartea unei Republici Roșii] by Felix Aderca and Anna Édes by Dezső Kosztolányi are comparatively discussed in order to see how regional and (semi-)peripheral literatures articulate the dynamics of world-systems and geographies of uneven development. The event novel, both recipient and generator of tensions and socio-economic, political, and cultural change, is representative of the articulation of imaginary patterns regarding otherness. In this sense, the article investigates how “frontier Orientalism” is activated in the narrative of the war and how this imaginary reflects the inequalities within the world system.
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Ionescu-Ionesco, Voice of an Exile? Proposal for a Theoretical Rereading. In this paper, we propose a different reading of Eugène Ionesco’s exile by drawing from a selection of texts from the 1930s and afterwards. As our purpose is to challenge the prevailing discourse surrounding the topic, we have opted to focus on critical and theoretical elements rather than biographical details. We keep in mind that the author’s contributions and the research on his work are two intertwined discourses. In post-1989 Romania, Ionesco is widely regarded as one of the leading literary figures of the Romanian exile. It is our opinion that his exiled status has not been sufficiently investigated, and our aim is to demonstrate that prudence and close reading could uncover some striking nuances that could lead scholars to the solution of a central question: Should Ionescu-Ionesco be regarded as an exile or rather as an expatriate?
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The Post-Communist Novel of Transition as Realism of Transition. Thematic Precedents in Romanian and East-Central European Literature. The present study aims to analyze how certain narrative formulas circulate within the world literary system – one but unequal (Moretti 2004, WReC 2015) – starting from the case of the novel of post-communist transition, specific to many Eastern European literatures. The Romanian literature abounds in such novels, which take various forms according to the different literary paradigms from which they have emerged. Thus, we consider that post-communist Romanian literature, or at least its social-political regime of relevance, is a symptomatic case of what the authors of Combined and uneven development: Towards a new theory of world-literature (WReC) call “(semi-)peripheral irrealism”. According to this study, the literature produced in peripheries and semi-peripheries is often formally dominated by a series of practices identified as specific to modernism, which arise, determined by the condition of the semi-periphery, in the unique and uneven system of world-literature, in which fiction becomes the narration that mediates lived experience in the “palimpsestic, combinatory and contradictory ‘order’ of peripheral experience.” (WReC). Nevertheless, a new direction of contemporary prose is being traced recently in order to rethink/ reproblematize the past and the way it can be reflected in literature. A series of recent novels such as Bogdan Coșa’s How Close the Cold Rains Are (2020) and Mihai Duțescu’s Beech Sponges (2021), as well as others, give rise to a new aesthetic formula of the post-communist novel of transition through the ways in which they operate with realism. We therefore propose to investigate the recent history of the phenomenon of fictional representation of the Romanian transition in relation to similar phenomena in East-Central Europe, while also analyzing the specifics of “the realism of transition” (as we will call this new literary category, in the footsteps of Mihnea Bâlici).
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Voices of Rudari women from Filiaşi (Romania) in the Context of Conversion to Pentecostalism. The present article examines conversion to Pentecostalism among Rudari women in post-socialist Eastern Europe. The case study focuses on a Rudari ethnic community located in a small town in southern Romania and shows that Rudari women assume a dual role: one involves preserving the interplay between Pentecostalism and local culture, while the other entails initiating conversion among men. Women facilitate conversion through visions, dreams, or manifestations of illness, which position them as gatekeepers who translate Pentecostalism into the local cultural context. Furthermore, women serve as guides for men undergoing conversion, playing a vital role in bridging the gap between Rudari traditions and the Pentecostal culture. They demonstrate proficiency in interpreting Pentecostal ecstatic phenomena within their predominantly male community, with their voices serving as mediators throughout the conversion process (Brusco, 2010). Similarly, women act as “therapists,” facilitating men’s conversion and addressing issues related to the transformation of traditional notions of masculinity.
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Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. 2. Anarchetypal Freedom of the Novel. In this paper I apply a concept I have coined and defined—the anarchetype—to the ancient Greek and Latin novel, more specifically to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. The text suffers, in my view, from the tension between two contrary formal tendencies, one which is archetypal, another which is anarchetypal. In a paper published in the previous issue of this journal, I have analyzed the first structural constraint, the archetypal one. In the present paper I focus on the anarchetypal tendency of the novel. Apuleius’ assumed intention of writing an entertaining text, in the wake of the “Milesian tales”, offers him the opportunity to treat freely the epic material, with no regards to Aristotle’s principles and to the canon of high literature. The haphazard fragmentation of the linear narrative and the plethora of additional stories give the text the aspect of an anarchetypal rhizome-like domino game.
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