SKEPTICISM BETWEEN RATIONALITY AND DISILLUSIONMENT.
BERTRAND RUSSELL AND EMIL CIORAN
This study offers a comparative analysis of the scepticism of Bertrand Russell and Emil Cioran, highlighting two distinct traditions of philosophical scepticism: Academic and Pyrrhonian. While scepticism has long been debated in philosophy, this paper focuses on the complementary epistemological and existential implications of these views in a modern context. Russell represents methodological scepticism, using doubt as a critical tool to pursue more reliable knowledge without falling into absolute relativism. Conversely, Cioran adopts doubt as an existential stance, suspending judgment in line with Pyrrhonian scepticism and questioning the possibility of absolute truth, expressing deep disenchantment with reality and knowledge. In an age dominated by positivism and trust in scientific and media certainties, balancing Russell’s rational scepticism with Cioran’s scepticism of disenchantment offers valuable insight. This tension helps distance us from both dogmatic rationalism and extreme nihilism, providing a fresh perspective on scepticism’s role in contemporary thought.
Keywords: Bertrand Russell, Emil Cioran, scepticism, rationality, disenchantment
This paper examines personal narratives of survivors of the wreck of the Empire Patrol, a British ship that was returning 497 inhabitants of Castellorizo, a Greek island in the southeastern Aegean, to their homeland in September 1945, after they had spent two years in a refugee camp in Nuseirat, Gaza. Led by a survivor who was a child at the time of the shipwreck, several survivors memorialized the event by creating a community website, www.empirepatrol.com, in Australia, where their compatriots had already established migrant communities prewar. In this paper, I focus on the survivors’ website-based traumatic narratives and compare them to oral narratives regarding the shipwreck which I recorded while conducting multi-sited, longitudinal and collaborative ethnographic research among the Castellorizians in Australia and in Greece. I explore “orality” in the case of website narratives by examining the new context and symbolism and the performative elements involved, and the community bonds forged among contributors and visitors to the website. I also examine the impact of these digital survivors’ narratives on redefining the sense of belonging and communal identity among Australian-born Castellorizians and on rendering the World War II history of the Castellorizians part of wider public history in Australia.
Keywords: personal narratives of traumatic experience, community websites, digital orality, Castellorizo, Empire Patrol shipwreck, lieux de mémoire, diaspora
SHIFTING THRESHOLDS: CHANGED TITLES AND PUBLISHING STRATEGIES IN THE ROMANIAN NOVEL UNDER THE COMMUNIST REGIME
The article analyses title changes in Romanian novels written between 1948 and 1989, a period defined by the establishment and consolidation of the communist regime. Using data from Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc de la origini până la 2000 (DCRR), the study examines how title changes indicate the evolving dynamics of the literary field under ideological control. Rather than examining the relationship between titles and their designated texts, the focus is on the process that led to these modifications, revealing the constant negotiation between authorial intent, ideological constraints, and editorial strategies. Title modifications are classified into two main categories: those introduced in later editions or reprints, and those made before the first publication of a novel. These paratextual interventions, which are often influenced by changing political and cultural contexts, demonstrate the adaptability of the paratext, as theorized by Gérard Genette, as a transitional space that mediates between the ‘ideal identity’ of the work and the socio-historical reality of its audience.
Keywords: Romanian novel, paratexts, titles, communism, censorship
This paper proposes a comparative study of the libretto of Le Duc d’Albe, planned by Donizetti in 1839-1840 but never created during his lifetime, and that of Verdi’s Les Vêpres siciliennes, created in Paris in 1855 (by Eugène Scribe and Charles Duveyrier). This article examines: the correspondence – or not – between the characters and their evolution; the progression of the structure and the plot from one work to the other – where Verdi intervenes, while also keeping in mind the intermediate plot envisaged by Scribe and focusing on three aspects that stand out more (the scene of the recognition of the son, the question of marriage, and the insurrectional denouement); the scores and the place of versification in their arrangement.
Keywords: Opera, Donizetti, Verdi, Sources, 19th Century
ON THE HISTORY OF AN ANCIENT WORD: ROM. BUZĂ
The long history of debates on the topic provides a wealth of information on the first attestations, the semantics, the lexical productivity, the dialectal spread, the onomastic transfer, and the origin of the Romanian term buză (Engl. ‘lip’; ‘edge’; ‘river bank’), information which is unfortunately scattered in various journal articles that are not easy to access. The aim of the paper is to give an overview of the existing studies on the Romanian lexeme buză, to highlight the most relevant conclusions, and to make brief comments wherever we consider it necessary.
The long history of debates on the topic provides a wealth of information on the first attestations, the semantics, the lexical productivity, the dialectal spread, the onomastic transfer, and the origin of the Romanian term buză (Engl. ‘lip’; ‘edge’; ‘river bank’), information which is unfortunately scattered in various journal articles that are not easy to access. The aim of the paper is to give an overview of the existing studies on the Romanian lexeme buză, to highlight the most relevant conclusions, and to make brief comments wherever we consider it necessary.
Keywords: Romanian buză, lexical meaning, word family, dialectal spread, etymology
REFILTERING THE PAST THROUGH A ROMANTICIST LENS
IN THE CONTEMPORARY ROMANIAN FICTION
The present article aims at deciphering some of the functions and meanings of the so-called historical turn in Romanian contemporary fiction. In this attempt, we analyse two recently published novels, Mircea Cărtărescu’s Theodoros (2022), respectively Simona Antonescu’s Chiajna din Casa Muşatinilor (2023), that can be read not only as “exoticized” representations of the past, but also as parables that reflect upon the consequences entailed by the obsession with exercising absolute power.
Keywords: memory, history, re-writing the past, romantic historicism, neo-historical fiction, contemporary Romanian novel
THE ETHICS OF DISILLUSIONMENT:
THE LESSON OF THE MORALISTS IN CIORAN
Emil Cioran’s work is marked by a tension between classical moralism and a radical questioning of subjective identity. This article explores the relationship between Cioran and the tradition of French moralists, from La Rochefoucauld and Chamfort to Joubert, highlighting their decisive role in shaping his writing and intellectual transformation. The transition from Romanian to French was not merely a stylistic exercise for Cioran but a true form of exile—a self-effacement that enabled him to develop a new ethical framework. Through an analysis of his statements and critical reception, this study demonstrates how Cioran, while adopting the formal rigor and psychological acuity of the moralists, ultimately forged an ethics of disillusionment that sets him apart from the tradition he inherited. Central to this reflection is his encounter with Benjamin Fondane, a tragic and pivotal figure in his intellectual journey, marking the final renunciation of ideological remnants and the embrace of a writing practice grounded in uprootedness and the suspension of judgment.
Keywords: Romanian literature, Psychoanalysis, Emil Cioran, French Moralists, Exile and Identity, Ethics of Disillusionment, Benjamin Fondane
THE BODY’S RULE – THE TALE OF A LIFE.
A BELATED DEBUT NOVEL
The Body’s Rule – The Tale of a Life, the first novel written by Agârbiceanu (in 1911), only appeared in book form in 1926. The novel – which held significant potential for the chronology of the Romanian novel at the time of its serialized publication (1912) – was initially "forgotten", due to the political instability preceding World War I, and further delayed by the Great Union of 1918 and its author's subsequent turn toward politics and journalism. By the time of its book publication in 1926, the literary landscape had changed so dramatically that the novel quickly became obsolete. However, when restored to its historical place, it reveals itself as a relevant work for the early stages of Realism and a worthy representative of the 20th century Central European fiction.
Keywords: Agârbiceanu, Legea trupului, debut novel, realism, Central European fiction
The paper investigates a special use of diminutive affixes in Romanian. In this use, when attached to mass nouns of the type unt ‘butter’, carne ‘meat’, pască ‘Easter cake’, diminutives yield countable nouns of the type untulețe (‘packets of butter’), cărnițe (‘steaks’), păscuțe (‘pieces of Easter cake’). These countable nouns unambiguously refer to units of stuff, as opposed to kinds of stuff. Following in essence De Belder (2008, 2011), the paper proposes that, in contexts where the count-unit reading arises as a result of diminutive affixation, the respective affixes head their own projection SizeP. In all other cases of diminutive affixation, diminutive affixes are specifiers of a ClassP projection (Fábregas 2013).
Keywords: diminutives, augmentatives, Size, Romanian
IS CANTEMIR’S SYNTAX AN UNIQUE CASE IN ROMANIAN?
The present paper identifies various types of dislocation in Dimitrie Cantemir’s Divanul. Dislocation occurs in both noun phrases and verb phrases and can be either simple (involving the inversion of syntactically linked elements) or complex (involving forms of anteposition that entail morphosyntactic or syntactic dislocations). As an erudite scholar, Cantemir’s writing style was influenced by Latin, Greek, and probably Turkish syntax. Given that similar dislocations can also be found in Dosoftei’s work, we may assume that the high frequency of syntactic dislocations indicates that word order was not yet fixed in Old Romanian and that linguistic contact played a role in shaping the language of the period under study.
Keywords: syntactic dislocation, morphological dislocation, hyperbat, linguistic contact, semantic intensification
BOUGRIE, THE MEDIEVAL BULGARIA, A LAND OF HERESIES
The word Bogrie in the Occitan language, Bougrie in the Oïl language, Bulgaria in Latin, entered French literature between 1198 and 1213, when Pope Innocent III called for the Fourth Crusade in the East, from August 15, 1198, and against the Albigensians in the West, in 1207–1208. The term is used in French by Robert de Clari and Geoffroy de Villehardouin in their accounts of the conquest of Constantinople in 1204; then in Occitan by William of Tuledo and his anonymous successor in the Canso de la Crosada, the Song of the Albigensian Crusade (1208–1219); and finally in Latin, in their chronicles, by Pierre des Vaux de Cernay and William of Puylaurens. The expression reappears in literature, in France and in Central and Eastern Europe, from 1965. How was “Bougrie”, medieval Bulgaria, evoked in these writings by historians and writers as a land of heresies, dissidences, different beliefs, and abrupt amalgams?
Keywords: Medieval Bulgaria, Fourth Crusade, Albigensian Crusade, Heresy