This article aims to investigate on Tristan Taza’s famous statement: “Thought is made in mouth”, through the analysis of some of his Romanian first poems. In order to justify Dada linguistic deconstruction, Tristan Tzara mystically invokes in his works a joy, which causes distruction and revolutionizes the fundamental laws of logic and language itself. By replacing the old style of writing poetry with a new language, which is able to deprive itself of communication problems, he gives to the word its freedom, opening a revolutionary path to dream and desire and, at the same time, he meaningfully contributes to the emancipation of poetic expressions from ancient poetry prosody, logic and syntax.
Keywords: Tristan Tzara; poetry; language; Romania; deconstruction; Dada.
The present paper is questioning the concept of hyperphotography starting from the experiments in the field made by two photographers: the French Jean-François Rauzier and the Italian with Romanian origins, Ileana Florescu. We would try to prove that, in the case of hyperphotography, we can talk about a new kind of radicality of the image. As Baudrillard puts forth, punctum – the ‘symbolic void that makes the power’ of photography – is currently disappearing. Punctum, a concept introduced by Roland Barthes in Camera lucida, refers to the pure absence that resides in the heart of the image. Hyperphotography suspends this inner absence. Punctum is replaced by a redundant image, the picture’s reflection, its double. This excess of the image, as well as the trompe-l'oeil, leads to the deconstruction of the photographic object. Like pharmakon in the theory of Jacques Derrida, hyperphotography generates an utopia, the utopia of a reference that is, at the same time and to the same extent, representation and non-representation, negation and assertion.
Keywords: Hyperimage / hyperphotography; trompe-l’oei; deconstruction; representation
This article aims at exploring some of the means of expressing subjectivity in Laurent de Premierfait’s translation of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium. The notion of author, very different in medieval culture from our modern understanding, is altered primarily by the translator’s own comments, but also by a series of miniatures representing a powerful Fortuna that sometimes replaces the author. My analysis takes as a starting point the similarities between those miniatures and the representation of Fortuna in Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy and uses concepts meant to evaluate the compatibility between premodern and recent authorial avatars.
Keywords: subjectivity; author; Boccaccio; Laurent de Premierfait; medieval literature
A writer of the body and its myriad pains, Max Blecher is also an emblematic author that vividly reveals, in a tragic, authentic manner, the intersection of medicine and literature. His visionary, oneiric novels are singular and unusual pathographies, writings about disease that document Blecher’s exhausting and hopeless decade-long battle with bone tuberculosis. I intend to explore the novels Scarred Hearts (1937) and The Lightened Burrow (1938; 1971) in order to confirm the centrality of medical intervention in his modern vision of the body, sickness and pain.
Keywords: medicine and literature; medical intervention; Romanian interwar modernism; illness; pain.
The paper takes into consideration the concept of identity, trying to explore the relationship between self-representation (or personal identity) and public representation (or social identity) in everyday dialogue, as illustrated by Aldous Huxley in Point Counter Point. Literary criticism has largely emphasized the satirical dimension of this novel, which depicts English high society and intelligentsia in the 1920s. The main objective of our paper is to demonstrate that the essential source of the comical and satirical dimension of Huxley’s novel consists in the discrepancy between the culturally mediated image that characters want to project in social life and the representation that the others have of them. The theoretical framework used refers mainly to Goffman’s sociology, which described the individual within social ritualistic interaction, and the sociolinguistic theories of politeness, including Brown and Levinson’s (1978/1987) seminal theory, and especially Spencer-Oatey’s (2007) point of view regarding the concepts of face and identity.
Keywords: self-representation; public representation; identity; face; fictional dialogues; Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point
In the present article we’ll focus on several novels that attempt at rewriting the recent past of ex-communist countries by bringing into foreground the political police, an institution that embodied in totalitarian regimes the notion of the absolute Evil. What distinguishes such writings as Dumnezeiţele din Moravia [The Goddesses of Žítková] by Katerina Tučková, György Dragoman’s Rugul [The Bone Fire], and Răzvan Rădulescu’s Viaţa şi faptele lui Ilie Cazane [The Life and Deeds of Elijah Cazane] appears to be the manner in which their authors succeed in conveying a complex, polyphonal representation of the communist past by using fantastic or grotesque elements, instruments that prove their efficiency anytime an irrational reality shatters our values and beliefs.
Keywords: communism; fantastic; grotesque; East-European literature
Starting from a comparison between the Parmenides and Elegia I, this article aims to investigate the Being in Nichita Stănescu’s work during the time of nihilism, in order to define the singularity of the poetic subject’s discourse, through a psychoanalytic approach. In the experience of writing this Elegia I – which is a highly poetic and mournful subjective experience – it is actually produced another kind of knowledge that digs into the Real. It is not an imaginary fiction, but a retreat of the metaphor itself, it is a sort of symbolic self-revelation of Being, which is never complete or exhaustive, because the truth, as a manque-à-être, is the reproduction of the immemorial place of an original difference in language.
Keywords: cultures of protest; rites of passages; emotional crowd; heroic leadership; Velvet Revolution; Armenia
The present article, which uses the hermeneutical strategies promoted by Pierre Brunel’s mythocritique, aims to investigate the Germanic eschatological myth of the “Fate of the Gods” in the poetry of Charles Leconte de Lisle and Lucian Blaga. After a historical-religious introduction on the “Fate of the Gods”, the article outlines its peculiar symbolic constellation. Subsequently, the article turns the archetypical approach into the mythocritical application to poetic texts. The poem La Légende des Nornes (The Legend of Norns, 1862) by Leconte de Lisle is a case of flexibilité of the “Fate of the Gods” myth in a literary text: the French poet reproduces the mythologeme of great winter and combines the outcomes of the deluge and those of conflagration into the original image of a smoking ocean. The poems Peisaj transcendent (Transcendental Landscape, 1929), Satul minunilor (The Village of Miracles, 1938) and Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods, 1970) by Blaga are instead a case of irradiation of the “Fate of the Gods” myth in a literary text: although never mentioning the Germanic eschatological event, the Romanian poet depicts its dying god and the world renewal that follows it.
Keywords: comparative literature; mythocritique; archétypologie; eschatology; poetry.