Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i1.25928
Mădălina Elena Mandici
‟The Séance of Reading: Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing” (2023), a book arising out of Thomas J. Cousineau’s long and fruitful teaching experience and his extensive engagements in Romanian academia as a Fulbright scholar, entices readers to appreciate key canonical works spanning American and European literature through the lens of the Romanian ballad ‟The Legend of Master Manole” and Mircea Eliade’s view of mythical creation by sacrifice. The aesthetic myth of master-builder Manole lends magnitude and resonance to nine modernist texts set in harmonious juxtaposition for the purpose of revealing and restoring the sacrificed textual elements within. Most valuably, the author makes the reader register the intricate relationship between the sacrificed protagonist and the architectural body of the literary monuments discussed throughout his book, which successfully brings together different literary genres, capitalizing on the scenario of death and ontological rebirth.
阅读的降神会:托马斯-J.-库西诺(Thomas J. Cousineau)长期从事教学工作,成果丰硕,他还曾作为富布赖特学者在罗马尼亚学术界进行过广泛的交流,他的这本著作通过罗马尼亚民谣《马诺尔大师的传说》和米尔恰-埃利亚德(Mircea Eliade)关于牺牲创造神话的观点,吸引读者欣赏横跨欧美文学的重要经典作品。建筑大师马诺勒的美学神话为九部现代主义文本增添了气势和共鸣,这些文本和谐并置,旨在揭示和还原其中被牺牲的文本元素。最有价值的是,作者让读者认识到牺牲的主人公与全书所讨论的文学古迹的建筑主体之间错综复杂的关系,成功地将不同的文学流派融合在一起,利用了死亡与本体重生的情节。
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Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26124
Gabriela Chiciudean
The novella Cînd Nu mai ai pe Cine să Îmbrățișezi [When you have no one to hug], by Răzvan Brudiu, offers a wild and isolated image of a hamlet in the Apuseni Mountains, where old Joseph lives in solitude, strengthened by the power of faith, waiting for the last road to eternity. In the volume we can identify a dialogical construction on the waiting theme, under the sign of silence. If Joseph speaks, it is to banish loneliness, as rarely does anyone cross his threshold, so that in the narrative ego his words and gestures provoke deep meditations on existence. The profile of the central hero is gradually built up through simplicity, modesty, and natural gestures, contrasting with the erudition of the theologian who constantly feels the need to refer to various passages in the Bible, to church events and services, to quotations from the writings of saints or famous writers, etc. Two different worlds emerge from the dialogue between the two protagonists, that of the city, where life is full of daily hassles and worries, where people judge things with a ‘correct’ mind, and the world of old Joseph, for whom time has already become ‘eternity’. These worlds, symbolically confronted, generate meaningful images. The 90-year-old man serenely looks towards death, aware that he does not have much more to expect from life and wishing to be reunited with his wife. He leads a simple life, but his prayer, uttered without worrying about tomorrow, generates in his heart love and longing for the Creator. For him, the end of the world is, in fact, the meeting with God, and everything he does since his wife’s death is a preparation for reaching the final goal, thus becoming an example for everyone who believes in eternal life.
拉兹万-布鲁迪乌(Răzvan Brudiu)的长篇小说《当你无人拥抱时》(Cînd Nu mai ai pe Cine să Îmbrățișezi [When you have no one to hug])描绘了阿普塞尼山脉中一个荒凉偏僻的小村庄的景象,在那里,老约瑟夫孤独地生活着,在信仰的力量下,他等待着通往永恒的最后一条路。在这本书中,我们可以看到以沉默为标志的关于等待主题的对话结构。如果约瑟夫说话,那也是为了驱散孤独,因为很少有人跨过他的门槛,因此在自我叙述中,他的言语和姿态引发了对存在的深思。中心主人公的形象是通过朴实、谦逊和自然的姿态逐渐建立起来的,与之形成鲜明对比的是神学家的博学,他总是觉得有必要提及《圣经》中的各种经文、教会活动和仪式、圣人或著名作家的著作中的引文等。两位主人公之间的对话产生了两个不同的世界,一个是城市的世界,那里的生活每天都充满了烦恼和忧虑,人们以 "正确 "的心态来判断事物;另一个是老约瑟夫的世界,对他来说,时间已经成为了 "永恒"。这两个世界象征性地对峙在一起,产生了意味深长的画面。90 岁的老人安详地走向死亡,他意识到自己对生命已没有太多期待,希望能与妻子团聚。他过着简单的生活,但他不为明天担忧的祈祷,在他心中产生了对造物主的爱和渴望。对他来说,世界的尽头其实就是与上帝的相会,自从妻子去世后,他所做的一切都是为达到最终目标做准备,从而成为每个相信永生的人的榜样。
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Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i1.26119
Felix Nicolau
The present research aims at understanding some of Emil Cioran's spiritual positions in several of his writings. The tools of analysis are the philosophical and cultural approaches, but also elements of positivist determinism, such as climate, disease, etc. The oeuvres studied belong to different periods of creation. The working hypothesis is that the essayist remained a lifelong thinker oscillating between the extreme right and the extreme left, as well as a stubborn and metaphysically rejected progressive thinker, but always obsessed with metaphysics and the transcendent. Among the commonplaces of Cioran's artistic and geopolitical critique of reality and the real are narcissism, humor, victimhood and diatribe. His work is underpinned by intuition and Utopian projection and much less by logic. Cioran becomes dangerous if treated as a programmatic philosopher, but otherwise he is a spectacular source of artistic and literary-philosophical insights; an experimental essayist, dangerous as an influencer. The fate of his thinking has been heavily marked by the ideologies of his interpreters.
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Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i1.26035
Monica Manolachi
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.
在过去的一个世纪中,罗马尼亚文学史一直以民族主义为主导,这对于巩固稳定的文化身份是必不可少的。然而,文化身份的概念也包含变化和迁移的成分,其中许多与其他文化身份的联系有关,每种身份都有自己的文学作品。由 Adriana Babeți 协调、Oana Fotache 编辑的 Dicționarul romanului central-european din secolul XX [The Dictionary of Central European Novel in the 20th Century](《20 世纪中欧小说辞典》)被理解为一个描绘跨国文学现象的项目,这篇书评深入探讨了该辞典的学术意义。该研究因其独特性、特定语言的多样性和多元文化的范围而受到关注:250 个条目涉及最初以该地区 14 种语言之一出版的作品,包括作为国际语言的法语和英语,这些语言有的属于正统语言,有的则较为边缘化,鲜为人知。其他原因还包括:该书充分结合了分析与综述;三十年来开展了广泛的团队研究;以及该书在当今社会政治方面的现实意义。回顾重点介绍了词典出版的历史、文化和学术背景,中欧概念的代表人物,中欧小说的几个特点,以及词典结构、章节和特点的细节。介绍中提到了一些限制因素,如以该地区语言提供的书目和公认的性别不平衡,并指出了一些可能对在全球化背景下以其他方式处理小说感兴趣的研究对象。
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Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i1.25789
Annemarie Sorescu-Marinković, Ewa Nowicka
This study focuses on a comparison of two sets of in-depth, face-to-face interviews among Romanians living in Poland about their perceptions of the country and society, and their migrant experiences. The interviews were conducted five years apart, using the same guide, but carried out by Polish interviewers in the first case, and by a Romanian interviewer in the second. Comparative analysis of the material gained in this process reveals that, despite similar content in interviewee responses, the standing of the interviewer was by no means neutral. Crucial for the volume, type, and nature of the collected data – as well as for its interpretation – is the interviewer’s identity. In this regard, the study draws on Michael’s Herzfeld’s concept of ‘cultural intimacy’ to explain the mutual reproduction of different levels of identity and to develop a framework for analyzing the interaction between the social scientists and their interlocutors.
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Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25957
Mircea A. Diaconu
The present text aims to problematise the work of I.L. Caragiale through the lens of reception theories, hermeneutics, and textuality while at the same time questioning some of the structuring themes of his writing, such as truth, the quest and the reader. Using texts such as ‘O conferență’, ‘Două loturi’, ‘Inspecțiune’, ‘Năpasta’, ‘D’ale carnavalului’, ‘Abu Hassan’, ‘1 Aprilie’ and others, the author aims to highlight elements of substance, attitude and style that converge in Caragiale’s writing, which, beyond the social, it associates the metaphysical comic or the idea of empty transcendence with the concern for truth, meta-textuality or the social. In this context, the proximity of I.L. Caragiale to Alphonse Allais or Henry James, in the interpretations of Umberto Eco and Wolfgang Iser, is supported beyond the similarities that legitimise the reading of I.L. Caragiale from the perspective of reception theories, by the fact that their relevant texts were written at the height of the Belle Époque. Therefore, Caragiale’s world appears as a luminous, complicit, seductive irony.
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Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i1.25930
Attila Carol Varga
This study highlights one of the oldest and most beautiful bridges between the Kingdom of Sweden and the Romanian Lands in the 18th century. The analysis concerns Count Lars of Engeström, freemason, rector of the University of Lund, diplomat, and envoy of the Kingdom of Sweden in Vienna within the Habsburg Empire. In this capacity, he was able to obtain valuable information about the uprising led by Horea, Cloșca and Crișan in Transylvania in 1784. It was a rebellion that shook the reign of Emperor Joseph II. For this reason, its retaliation was commensurate. Thus, recounting a dramatic episode from the pre-modern history of the Romanians, Lars von Engeström left to posterity a beautiful fresco of Transylvania. He spoke about ethnic and confessional diversity, about the Romanian Roma, about the people living here and their problems. There is no definitive information confirming that he actually visited Transylvania. Nevertheless, the famous Swedish diplomat remains the greatest Northern European scholar to write about this 18th century Transylvanian uprising which was unique in its intercontinental resonance and had significant repercussions in the Swedish press of that era.
本研究强调了 18 世纪瑞典王国与罗马尼亚之间最古老、最美丽的桥梁之一。分析涉及拉尔斯-恩格斯特罗姆伯爵(Count Lars of Engeström),他是自由共济会会员、隆德大学校长、外交官和哈布斯堡帝国瑞典王国驻维也纳特使。他以此身份获得了有关 1784 年特兰西瓦尼亚霍雷亚、克洛西卡和克里桑领导的起义的宝贵信息。这次起义震撼了约瑟夫二世皇帝的统治。因此,它的报复也是相应的。因此,拉尔斯-冯-恩格斯特罗姆讲述了罗马尼亚人近代以前历史上的一段戏剧性插曲,为后人留下了一幅美丽的特兰西瓦尼亚壁画。他谈到了民族和教派的多样性,谈到了罗马尼亚罗姆人,谈到了生活在这里的人们及其问题。没有确切的信息证实他确实访问过特兰西瓦尼亚。然而,这位著名的瑞典外交官仍然是撰写 18 世纪特兰西瓦尼亚起义的最伟大的北欧学者。
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Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26127
Antonio Patraș, Roxana Patraș
N. Steinhardt, the author of Jurnalul fericirii [The Diary of Happiness], was not only an exquisite intellectual colporteur, but also an erudite essayist of astonishing spontaneity, who gave his intellectual discourse a remarkable cultural breadth, which places him in the same spiritual family as Alexandru Odobescu, Paul Zarifopol, Mihail Ralea, Alexandru Paleologu or Andrei Pleșu. In spite of the diversity of the themes addressed, the essays of the later monk of Rohia preserve a basic unity, revealed in a coherent modus cogitandi and a defensive ethos, intended to protect individual freedom through recourse to modesty and to what Paleologu called common sense as paradox. Reading Steinhardt’s essays is also a powerful antidote to laziness of thought, offering the reader the chance to escape from the narrow horizon of commonplaces. Leaving aside the prison memorial and the texts on religious subjects, which are permeated by the same essayistic vein, we highlighted the fact that Steinhardt understood literary criticism as an ingenious creative activity, polemically anti-positivist, susceptible to new and surprising cultural analogies, incessantly pleading for the rehabilitation of subjectivity, emotion and feeling as essential factors in the process of knowledge, from the perspective of a fundamental humanism drawing from Montaigne’s tradition.
{"title":"For a noble and sentimental literature: N. Steinhardt and the essay as a form of freedom","authors":"Antonio Patraș, Roxana Patraș","doi":"10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26127","url":null,"abstract":"N. Steinhardt, the author of Jurnalul fericirii [The Diary of Happiness], was not only an exquisite intellectual colporteur, but also an erudite essayist of astonishing spontaneity, who gave his intellectual discourse a remarkable cultural breadth, which places him in the same spiritual family as Alexandru Odobescu, Paul Zarifopol, Mihail Ralea, Alexandru Paleologu or Andrei Pleșu. In spite of the diversity of the themes addressed, the essays of the later monk of Rohia preserve a basic unity, revealed in a coherent modus cogitandi and a defensive ethos, intended to protect individual freedom through recourse to modesty and to what Paleologu called common sense as paradox. Reading Steinhardt’s essays is also a powerful antidote to laziness of thought, offering the reader the chance to escape from the narrow horizon of commonplaces. Leaving aside the prison memorial and the texts on religious subjects, which are permeated by the same essayistic vein, we highlighted the fact that Steinhardt understood literary criticism as an ingenious creative activity, polemically anti-positivist, susceptible to new and surprising cultural analogies, incessantly pleading for the rehabilitation of subjectivity, emotion and feeling as essential factors in the process of knowledge, from the perspective of a fundamental humanism drawing from Montaigne’s tradition.\u0000 ","PeriodicalId":36723,"journal":{"name":"Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies","volume":"48 5","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140976495","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i1.25859
Alexandru Foitoș
The present paper proposes a theoretical approach related to the critical reception of the Romanian literary avant-garde after 2000, a literary phenomenon in‑between marginalization and recovery tendencies. Starting from interwar critical studies from Romania (E. Lovinescu, G. Călinescu, etc.), with predominantly negative perspectives regarding the critical reception of the avant-garde, we will observe how certain clichés of the reception of the phenomenon, seen as “extremist”, as marginal, were perpetuated, with the “barrier” of the apparently impossible literary canonization. After 2000, however, literary studies discuss the historicization of the avant-garde phenomenon, which therefore became canonical in Romanian literary history. However, several elements of the “niche” avant-garde remained in the subsidiary, in the “shadow”. This is what we call the marginal(ized), the secondary avant-garde, which includes a series of less known and researched avant-garde writers, but who contributed to the complex shaping of the avant-garde imaginary. We will analyse several types of works published after 2000, in order to highlight the complexity of the avant-garde, under constant recovery: literary anthologies (Ion Pop, Nicolae Bârna), avant-garde dictionaries (Lucian Pricop, Dan Grigorescu), several critical studies after 2000 (Ion Bogdan Lefter, Ovidiu Morar, Emilia Drogoreanu, Paul Cernat, Dan Gulea, Emanuel Modoc, Delia Ungureanu, Daniel Clinci, Petre Răileanu, Gabriela Glăvan, Ion Pop, etc.). Many of them focus on the recovery trends of some forgotten writers, with the possibility of their inclusion in the central, canonical avant-garde, while other studies pursue new research methodologies, such as the avant-garde seen in a transnational context, in world literature context, etc. An issue that we develop in the context of this extended future research, which is also highlighted upon in the present work, is that of post-Urmuz epigonism within Romanian literary avant-garde, a fact that explains the placement of many writers in the sphere of critical marginalization. Thus, many texts by less researched writers are forgotten, being always associated with the central avant-garde models, especially Urmuz, but also Tristan Tzara or other influential writers within the central avant‑garde groups. It is precisely this problem that made us analyse the way in which the writers who are part of the marginal dimension of the avant-garde are recovered through contemporary literary studies from Romania.
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Pub Date : 2024-05-15DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i1.25984
Diana Mihuț, Otilia Hedeșan
The article raises questions related to field research methodology in a specific context. The authors take into consideration mainly the context of uncertainty, generated by Covid-19 pandemics which forced them to reshape the field research methodology as previously known and commonly used by Romanian ethnologists. The authors provide a brief presentation and analysis of the first steps done as part of what later would become a larger field experience in terms of investigating Romanian food heritage. It relies on five examples represented by five interviews conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic. The interviews that compose the case study have a special value. The negotiation to set up the meetings, the arguments of each of the parties, the conditions in which the discussions were organized are all angles that deserve to be discussed as source of what we might call ethnological motivation. What can determine the people, members of a specific culture, to share their knowledge and their life experience about a certain topic, when the very act of speaking might be a dangerous one? In each of these examples, the informant was responsive when informed that we were conducting research related to local traditions, specific family cuisine, without producing television shows, and without overexposing themselves. We notice the existence of a need to tell, a real duty to tell relevant information about one’s own culture, a vector that characterizes communities just as, for the researcher, there is a work ethic which implies his obligation to make all necessary efforts to find out information.
{"title":"Rethinking fieldwork: researching food in the aftermath of lockdown","authors":"Diana Mihuț, Otilia Hedeșan","doi":"10.35824/sjrs.v7i1.25984","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.35824/sjrs.v7i1.25984","url":null,"abstract":"The article raises questions related to field research methodology in a specific context. The authors take into consideration mainly the context of uncertainty, generated by Covid-19 pandemics which forced them to reshape the field research methodology as previously known and commonly used by Romanian ethnologists. The authors provide a brief presentation and analysis of the first steps done as part of what later would become a larger field experience in terms of investigating Romanian food heritage. It relies on five examples represented by five interviews conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic. The interviews that compose the case study have a special value. The negotiation to set up the meetings, the arguments of each of the parties, the conditions in which the discussions were organized are all angles that deserve to be discussed as source of what we might call ethnological motivation. What can determine the people, members of a specific culture, to share their knowledge and their life experience about a certain topic, when the very act of speaking might be a dangerous one? In each of these examples, the informant was responsive when informed that we were conducting research related to local traditions, specific family cuisine, without producing television shows, and without overexposing themselves. We notice the existence of a need to tell, a real duty to tell relevant information about one’s own culture, a vector that characterizes communities just as, for the researcher, there is a work ethic which implies his obligation to make all necessary efforts to find out information.\u0000 ","PeriodicalId":36723,"journal":{"name":"Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies","volume":"83 9","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140976005","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}