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This article concerns fragmentary writing of Emil Cioran. The author tries to show that the fragment is a specific type of artistic creativity that is situated between literature and philosophy. The initial part of the article deals with the problem of modern fragmentarism that was born in the times of German romanticism. Then, the author investigates the causes of Cioran’s fragmentary writing, which are: the opposition to systematic philosophy, the opposition to modern idea of a literary „work” and the intellectual honesty which shows heterogeneity of life. All this makes the fragment very difficult to interpret: we wish to adopt the whole sense of it, but we cannot do this. Also, the title issue turns out to be unsolvable. Cioran escapes fixed categories. And fragment, as an unsuccessful, fractured discourse, can be both literature and philosophy, or none of them. That makes it similar to Jacques Derrida’s ideas of farmakon, aporia or différance.
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The author takes into consideration themes that are common in the work of two Central European writers: Bruno Schulz and Max Blecher. The list of related topics includes the mythology of illness and death, a strong emphasis on the body/flesh, similar idiom, comparable concepts of “ecstatic identity,” the philosophy of representation based upon the artificiality of existence, masochism, irony, oneirism, common “spaces of myth” and geopoetics. The main aim of the article is to place the writing of Schulz and Blecherin the context of Central European modernism and describe the work of these writers in terms of the so-called “critical modernity” (a term coined by Michał Paweł Markowski).
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By insightfully analyzing the Romanian society’s problematique of his time, Eminescu developed an original conception about the inner contradictions and barriers a society lagging behind in its transition to modernity must overcome. The present-day exegetes, who have the privilege of having before them the entire corpus of Eminescu’s writings, have underpinned the variety of theoretical references and the complexity of his economic and social thinking, as well as his explanatory model he uses in analyzing society and in his critical radiographs of the Romanian realities. Starting from Maiorescu’s assessments on the poet’s philosophical vocation and his cultural horizons, I tried to show that this dimension of Eminescu’s personality became, over time, an important component of his image as a whole. Thus, Eminescu-the thinker is now glued to Eminescu-the poet. To decipher how Eminescu sees the equation of social life, I think the best way is to analyze the relationship between the political and the economic, a relationship which often in Eminescu’s texts the relationships between the forms and content, concepts known from Maiorescu’s theory.
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In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of literature on student engagement with school. There is a large agreement on the predictive role that individual differences in student engagement with school plays in relation to a wide range of educational outcomes and to general adjustment. Numerous empirical studies have attempted to explain how individual characteristics of students (e.g., gender, academic motivation, school-related self- efficacy etc.), family environment (e.g., parent social support, aspirations of parents concerning the adolescents’ school trajectory or quality of adolescent-parents relationship), and the school/classroom climate (e.g., social support from teachers and peers, autonomy granted to students, quality of instructional practices etc.) impact student engagement with school and the academic achievement/performance. This paper summarizes the existing literature on antecedents and positive outcomes of student engagement with school. The implications for educational practice and policy makers are discussed.
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This paper aims to identify the recurrent image of the clown and the references to the carnivalesque universe in Max Blecher’s fiction, distinctive elements of his writing, placed under the sign of the tragic. From the perspective of C.G. Jung’s abyssal psychology, focus is laid on the image of the clown, ascated with that of the trickster, an archetype of the authorial shadow transiting through the two worlds, reality/ immediate unreality, conscious/ unconscious. The hermeneutical undertaking attempts to decipher the contextual symbols which point to the duplicitous nature of the character, in the sense of a schizoid identity on the Ego/ Self axis. The conclusions underline the author’s tendency of substituting himself to this fantastic projection, by dissimulating a mask of absurd happiness as an imaginative exercise against biography.
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This study investigates the projections of Iasi and of its people as they are reflected in Alecu Russo’s, Mihail Kogalniceanu’s, Alecsandri’s and Costache Negruzzi’s 1848 prose in an attempt to devise literary (self) imagology. It is revealed as a patriarchal space split up between the orientalist logic and the semi-European mentality, giving birth to a game of images and counter- images, which are maintained by a continuous oxymoronic relation. The writers seek to reveal the effects of such representations on the collective imaginary, on a certain social, cultural or communication context, by highlighting national cultural stereotypes. They do it in different ways: playfully, objectively, good-naturedly, seriously, acidly, comically, ironically, or by means of parody or banter.
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The cultural European dimension of a country is a resource that needs to be capitalized upon and demonstrated to others. Some values of Voivodina’s Romanian culture are certainly European and have circulated as such beyond Serbia’s borders, however emphasizing the values of a people’s literature is the proper role of criticism. In order to promote through translations in a major European language the cultural works of Romanians from Serbia we need first to select the Romanian literary tendencies which resonate with European ones. Here we reach the linguistic barrier of the Banat dialect spoken by Romanians in Serbia but also the issue of a work’s intrinsic quality, entitling it to be translated in another European language. The European integration process tends to level or to create hierarchies of values, and in our case it is only very seldom that a work written in Voivodina comes to be translated into a world circulation language. It is rather translated into the country’s language (Serbian or another of ex-Yugoslavia’s languages) or into the languages of the national minorities living here.
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This study looks into how Ioan Petru Culianu illustrated some of his ideas, as a historian of religions and as a philosopher of culture, in one of his literary works, The Emeralds Game. This novel is more than mere detective fiction, it is also a magic and esoteric novel, and to understand it we need to refer to magic, astrologic or geomantic practices. This means the considerations the author expressed in his other essential scientific works are “logically” extended, continued in this literary writing. The contemporaneity of the work is suggested by the significant fictional world it proposes, a world where the political blends with the religious, where reality blends with the psychological, science with adventure; all these aspects bring this novel to the same level with other similar novels, like Umberto Eco’s Name of the Rose or Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code.
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This scientific paper focuses on theoretical and practical aspects of the translation of culturemes. Our interest in this field is generated by those cultural references that appear in literary texts and by the difficulty in finding them an appropriate equivalent in the target language. The objective of the study is to define the concept, to identify and to analyze the cultural expressions of the source language that can be transposed into the target language. We focus on one element, the cultureme. The theoretical part of the study is based on the theory of translation, the theory of translating cultural references and the definition of the concept of the cultureme, while the practical part provides us with the analysis of some examples from Romanian literary texts. We have chosen examples from the novel Moromeții by Marin Preda. We analyze also the translation strategies used by the translator Maria Ivanescu. We agree that the translation of culturemes from the source language into the target language is a difficult process caused by the nature of these cultural expressions. Therefore, the role of the translation process is to harmonize the socio-cultural contexts of the two languages that interact.
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In 2003 was published the first complete translation of Țiganiada - The Gypsy camp in french. The poem tells the story of the union of all groups of Gypsy in Romanian land, in fifteenth century, under the comand of Vlad the Impaler. They fight along with the Romanians against the Turks. Written at the end of the eighteenth century, the poem has been published almost one hundred years later and the first critical edition appeared in 1925. Belonging to the enlightment current, Tiganiada is the subject of many studies in the last period, and its translation makes her accessible to french speakers now. In the process of translation there are still some losts. Certain meanings and stylistic expressions of the author are difficult or almost impossible to be reproduced in another language. The controversy of this extraordinary translation is presented in this article, in the form of a pleading for the comparative study of this Romanian writer, so long stuck in the shadows of time.
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Drawing on scholarship on transnationalism, this paper resorts to concepts such as “trans-ethnic identity” and “multiple social identities” for making sense of two autobiographical writings authored by scholars who articulated a leftist counter-memory in telling their life stories spanning before, during, and after Romanian socialism. The study compares and contrasts the memoirs of Andrei Roth and Ion Ianoși, arguing that their retrospective writings document the articulation of a different strand of memorialistic literature that challenges the hegemonic anti-communist politics of memory. By never recanting their leftist beliefs, their writings give voice to a Marxian counter-memorialistic account of the past that enriches the post-communist memoryscape shaped by what we suggest calling the carceral paradigm of Romanian communism.
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Having as a theoretical premise the idea that “essential personal identities” do not always synchronise with the essential identity of the group they are supposed to belong to, and that this de-synchronisation can have an ethical opposition at its core, the paper focuses on the way in which Mircea Nedelciu’s typical protagonists – nomads, socially marginal individuals with confusing, “unaccomplished identities” – attempt to (culturally and morally) reconstruct their damaged personal identities by disengaging from their social and spatial appurtenance to the national macrogroup (dominated by the moral values, identity models and cultural stereotypes imposed by Ceauşescu’s regime) and phantasmatically “relocating” their identities in the Western Counterculture of “the Sixties”. This implicit refusal to belong can ultimately be read as an “ethics of reconnaissance”, an anti-totalitarian counter-politics or negative politics of identity led by persons or small groups that thus become a (fictionally) “significant minority”.
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In this paper I try to highlight the ambiguous voice of the writer Dumitru Țepenag, passing from author to auctor, in his exile through a Europe where characters are as “flags” on the map, moved from time to time, having no destiny or a clear direction. In his almost oneiric way, the writer tries to put together lives balanced between two worlds: on one hand, there is the world where meanings are so worn-out that they cannot convey anything any longer, and, on the other hand, there is the world of abstruse symbols that also fail to make sense. Hotel Europa is this passage where the two worlds collide, opening up a space that resembles the twilight zone. In this Hotel, as in any other, the most legible elements are the labels, the clichés, the points identified on a map (the cities where the characters are wondering: Budapest, Paris, München). Romanians (along with other East European figures) are walking through the “good” Western world bearing the clichés that Europe has fabricated about them: disabled beggars, cheaters, pimps, Gypsies. The “conclusions” appear rather quickly: for the writer, who is also a character in the novel, Romania is this “pathetic country full of misbehaving” and “the genius of the Romanian people” lies in “humour and transhumance. We're all nomad comedians.” Only a myth can make sense in this collage. The text becomes a way of surrendering to the impossibility to make a “realistic story” about Hotel Europe and the way people live in it.
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Pesnik nemačkog jezika, a jevrejskog porekla Paul Celan uobičajeno se shvata kao hermetičan pesnik. Ta hermetičnost izvire, sa jedne strane, iz veoma složene simbolike koju Celan aktivira u svojim pesmama, i koja ima duboke korene u nemačkoj i svetskoj književnosti, mitologiji, jevrejskoj religijskoj i teološkoj misli, specijalnim znanjima, kao i pesniku i njegovom čitaocu vremenski bliskim istorijskim događajima.
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This study pursues the goal of signalizing the meaning of culinary experiences in the process of identity construction. The spiritual stomach is the metaphorical expression of that perception organ, which helps the writer to integrate the personal past from the communistic Rumania into the new Berlin environment. Berlin in the Novel Berlin ist mein Paris of Carmen Francesca Banciu constitutes both a real geographical space as well as an imaginary geography. Experiencing time and space by means of culinary acts is the way Carmen Francesca Banciu describe the difficulties of integration and identity definition in a foreign land.
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The paper traces back the origins of the Argentine Tango to the barrios of Buenos Aires discussing the alterations that have transformed it into a selling product, enlarging upon the essential differences between the traditional tango and the “domestic” versions of it. The controversial myth of “Zaraza” is linked to the rise and fall of “the last troubadour”, Cristian Vasile, and paralleled by the glory and decay of the aristocratic, opulent interwar Bucharest, buried under the ruins of the Second World War bombings.
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Using Hans Robert Jauss’ grid, the present paper goes through the three levels of reading (reading, re-reading, post-reading) in order to understand the meanings of the literary work and to discover the metatextual and the hypertextual significances of the novel Adventures in Immediate Unreality by Max Blecher.
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An impressive number of articles, (monographic) studies, edited volumes and doctoral theses have already been written about the other/otherness/alterity, as concepts shared not only by literary criticism but also by numerous social sciences. This approach brings forward representations of the other as they appear in a Romanian novel also translated into English which was famous ever since its publication, namely Duiliu Zamfirescu’s Viaţa la ţară. The whole text was scoured with the purpose of identifying the elements of alterity to create a corpus recording all the instances where heroes and heroines discuss with or about the other, interrelate with the other or even misbehave in relation to the other. The 34 excerpts were collected into a corpus which was further submitted to analysis and revealing seven sets of such representations scattered throughout the novel, but not all of them were discussed herein because of their repetitive character. In general terms, irrespective of his/her identity, the other is described directly or indirectly. In the case of the former category, the characters pertaining to the category of the self give details about their friends or, maybe, the narrator himself intervenes with details. In the case of the latter category, the other presents himself/herself through personal deeds, opinions and more or less harmful gestures. The attitudes of the self towards the other seem to depend on the other’s ethnical group and they encompass a rather limited repertoire of opposite manifestations which include both respect and disrespect, friendliness and distance, neutrality or even an absolute lack of interest.
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Knowledge of the world is disclosed under various shapes, among which language is the best representative. Specific to humans, it renders feelings and thoughts concerning different communication contexts where words become dynamic primitives endowed with meanings, which recreate themes and reconfigure space and time as universal coordinates. The main objective of the paper is to provide a tentative analysis of the way in which translation universals are manifest in translating proverbs and sayings in the short novels Popa Tanda (Pope Tanda) and Moara cu Noroc (The Lucky Mill) by Ioan Slavici.
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