Al. Ciorănescu wrote his work on the Renaissance during a very long period of his studies and holidays in France using material he had read while preparing his thesis on L’Arioste en France, published in 1939, and while putting together the first part of the famous Bibliographie de la littérature française. Most likely unhappy with its mostly documentary character, he abandoned this work as a typewritten manuscript, with very few handwritten corrections, bound in two volumes with continuing page numbers. The fragment I have chosen contains the the first half of introduction to this work and part of chapter VI, devoted to the five „furors” that Ciorănescu identifies in Renaissance authors: the four generally recognized („la poétique, la mystique, la prophétique et l’amoureuse”), to which Pontus de Thyard adds a fifth, by „direct contact with divinity”.
Keywords: Renaissance poetics, Poetic Inspiration, the Four (Five) Furors
In this article, we present some pragmatic aspects concerning the function of the figures of speech in conversation; we also consider the influence of the communicative situation on the actualisation of these forms of expression. The comparison between the status of figures of speech in literary texts and their status in everyday language is followed by a short semantic description of the figures identified in our corpus. Figures of speech are in a close relationship with the communicative setting. There are various roles for the rhetorical figures: evaluative, argumentative, descriptive, definitional, metacommunicative, and ludic, according to the locutor's aims.
Keywords: Figures of Speech, Conversation, Strategy, Function.
This paper examines the cultural exchanges that took place between the directors and several leading contributors of a few literary journals that were active within three innovative European art movements in the early decades of the twentieth century: the Constructivist and “Integralist” circle founded in Bucharest around the literary reviews The Contemporary, 75 HP, Point and Integral, the Expressionists supported in Berlin by the magazine Der Sturm and the Hungarian movement, represented by Ma. Before a distinctly avant-garde group was formally constituted in Romania, the artists Max Hermann Maxy and Hans Mattis-Teutsch had managed to establish close relations with Der Sturm circle, while the latter had also joined the group Ma. The first two parts of this paper will shed light on the most important aspects of the initial phase of this triple collaboration. The birth proper of the Romanian avant-garde, in 1924, announced by the publication of the “Activist Manifesto for Youth” in Contimporanul, occasioned subsequent cultural exchanges between the editors and the representatives of the movements mentioned above. It is particularly interesting that these cultural connections were possible thanks to the fact that all the three artistic circles included in their own aesthetic program Constructivist affinities, which they adapted according to their own ideological needs, combining it with other more or less iconoclastic elements and trends. Therefore, the third part of the paper will analyse several occasions on which these artistic groups communicated successfully between 1924 and 1927, in order to cultivate the belief of a new art.
Keywords: Romanian Avant-garde, Constructivism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dadaism.
This essay focuses on the study of water metaphors in the poem Le Mal des fantômes by Benjamin Fondane, which corresponds to the second section of the homonymous collection, published for the first time in 1980. The aquatic imagery underlies the passages illustrating most clearly the pain of these phantoms, which the writer evokes through the use of a continuously reworked writing. The present analysis shows how the analogy contributes in particular to the release of this « courant » which, according to Fondane, represents the final goal of the creative process as the realisation of a different « aesthetic » but also and above all as the reproduction of a « movement of the soul ».
Keywords: Poetry, Metaphor, Image, Water, Time, Migrant Literature.
In the present article, we set to prove that the experimental prose written by Urmuz/Dem. Demetrescu-Buzău (1883-1923) illustrates a particular version of Romanian inter-war æsthetic modernism, similar at a certain extent to the iconoclastic fervour of the avant-garde movement, but in effect dissociating itself from any recognizable contemporary paradigm. In this regard, I analysed the particular modalities in which the writer succeeds in constructing bizarre, (im)possible worlds, that entail various strategies of defamiliarization, including violations of current logic and ontological expectations.
Keywords: (Imp)ossible Worlds, Urmuz, Nonsense, Paradox, Defamiliarization.
Stephen Ullmann’s theory about synaesthesia represents a milestone in the analysis of the intersensory rhetorical configuration in literature, offering some interesting criteria to identify and to record the synaesthetic occurrences into a specific schedule that was used by several researchers during the second half of the 19th century. We investigate the advances of Ullmann’s analytic model in the Romanian and the Italian linguistic field of research, initially focusing our attention on Mihaela Mancaş and Luigi Rosiello’s studies and subsequently trying to show the limits of this scientific approach. In terms of syntax, we go beyond the adjectival structure, taking into account the complexity of other syntactic possibilities. We also look at the semantic incompatibility factor (Dombi), in order to recognize the literary creative synaesthesia. Thirdly, we consider the metonymic and the metaphoric processes as interpretative solutions for literary synaesthesia (Paissa), suggesting our three-factorial analytic model, including the process (the intersensorial combination), the interpretative proceeding (metaphoric or metonymic solutions) and the complexity of syntactic structure.
Keywords: Synaesthesia, Romanian, Italian, Rhetoric, Semantic Incompatibility.
Although no personal or intellectual contact between Lucian Blaga and the Italian poet Arturo Onofri is proved, they both create an ultimate poetry, which may look for the mystery dwelling in the utmost core of cosmic harmony. The present comparative essay aims to illustrate, through the tools of inquiry of archetypology, the ideal complementarity between an early poem by Blaga, Linişte (1919), and a late sonnet by Onofri, Ogni notte, nel sonno, mi riporti (1930). The first part of the essay investigates the lunar and nocturnal symbolic constellation evoked in both poems: the former reveals the eternal return, while the latter is grounded in the maternal archetype. The second part of the essay focuses on how the perpetuation of the ancestors’ melancholic song portrayed in Linişte undergoes an inversion of perspective in Ogni notte, nel sonno, mi riporti – whose main character, in the « eternal instant » of the Cosmic Night, is reborn as a child. Thus, Linişte’s central event proves to be a case of reincarnation, while in Ogni notte, nel sonno, mi riporti a renovatio occurs, resulting in an ascent to a superior level of being.
Keywords: Comparative Literature, Archetypology, Symbol, Soul, Rebirth.
« Un beau matin, Kosef J. fut libéré… » (“One morning, Kosef J. has been released..”). This is how Monsieur K. libéré (The Release of Mr. K.) begins. This book by Matei Vişniec tells the story of his hero, « Mister K. » or « Kosef J. », a model prisoner detained in a prison located in a middle of nowhere, in a never named country, who, one day, finds out that he is released and who, from now on, learns how to give up of his freedom. The story is unique. The title, The Release of Mister K., is connected to various literary and pictorial references: the Franz Kafka’s writings, an Austro-Hungarian author: The Process (Der Proceß), from 1925, and The Castle (Das Schloß), from 1926, as well as Victor Brauner’s paintings, a painter of Romanian origin, naturalized as French: The Strange Case of Mister K. (L’étrange cas de Monsieur K.), from 1933, and The M.-K.’s Force of Concentration (Force de concentration de M.K.) and Ubu M.K., from 1934. The last work, Ubu M.K., is also connected to Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu, a French theatre play from 1888, concerning the most grotesque forms of the abuse of power. The word “nausée” (“nausea”), used from the very first pages of the Matei Vişniec’s book, reveals another corresponding net with three major writings belonging to the French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre: his novel, Nausea, published in 1938, Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, and Existentialism is a humanism, another essay published in 1945. Nevertheless, the text of The Release of Mr. K. takes an opposite stance to the Sartre’s ideas on liberty, free-will and free-choice. This approach aims at pointing out to which extent the totalitarianism, the total oppression of individuals, deny any form of liberty and humanism. Which is, thus, the light shed on this radical form of totalitarian alienation by this bias, by this inversion of the initial postulates, by the multiplication of the tests that Kosef J. needs to deal with and by the detailed description of their unexpected consequences?
Keywords:: Vişniec, Novel, Totalitarianism, Freedom.