Current Issue
2024 volume 47 – Integrated Modernisms
Editor: Amalia Cotoi, Francesca Caraceni, Anna Dijkstra, Anca Chiorean, Anandita Pan
Editor: Phantasma. The Center for Imagination Studies
Publisher: Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România
ISBN 1582-960X (România)
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47
Print: Megaprint, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-PCE-2021-1234
Pour commandes s’adresser à: https://edituramega.ro/
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Amalia Cotoi, Francesca Caraceni, Anna Dijkstra, Anca Chiorean, Anandita Pan
Introduction
In the introduction to The Contemporaneity of Modernism, Michael D’arcy and Mathias Nilges acknowledge the existence of two dominant trends in New Modernist Studies concerning the potential for contemporary modernist literature1. They argue that despite a critical tradition aligned with the Frankfurt School’s critical theory and New Materialism, which suggests that art and the world are in a constant dialectical relationship, New Modernist Studies tend to prioritize either art or the world separately, rather than emphasizing their interconnectedness. As such, when focusing on art, New Modernist Studies engages with trust in modernist aesthetic autonomy that manifests by employing the legacy of historical modernism in contemporary fiction. When focusing on the world, instead, it rejects the tradition of aesthetic autonomy in favor of addressing what is essential for today’s society, namely the political and ethical dimensions of art.
This effort of criticism to move beyond the proliferation of new -isms (posthumanism, metamodernism, etc.) in favor of reviving an older -ism has made literary modernism to mean both a great deal and very little at the same time. Not only that it is “an ingrained yet somehow weightless concept”2, but despite critical efforts to link it with global modernity, literary modernism retains its distinctly Anglo-American allure. Eastern, Southern, or Northern Modernism hold little significance for scholars, whether Anglo-Saxon, European, or from other continents − not to mention the case of France, which continues to resist the label of “modernism”.
Starting from the premise that modernism in both literature and art at large was never a program or a fashion of the present, but rather has always operated in hindsight, as “a retrospective rearrangement of values”3, as stated by Jean-Michel Rabaté in a recent interview, or as “an involuntary tendency that one can only attest to retrospectively”4, according to Thierry de Duve, the aim of our special issue, titled Integrated Modernisms, is to engage in a critical task undertaken from the postwar period to the present, to see whether modernism can continue to function in today’s world and literature and if it can work as “a discourse of the legitimation of change”5, as seen by Peter Osborne.
In doing so, we aimed not only to incorporate as many diverse forms of modernism as possible, from East to West, in a transnational endeavor, but also to explore how these forms of modernism are connected today, through which means and methodologies, and 8
to further investigate the relationships among them. First, we are particularly interested in the links between modernism and modernity, which we consider a central focus of our issue. Second, we examine the relationship between modernism and the avant-gardes, that, despite their distinct traditions in Europe, often become intertwined concepts for an Anglo-American audience. We are also interested in the perspective of artistic modernism, rather than just literary modernism – on how modernism is viewed, for instance, from the vantage point of visual arts, theater or film studies. Last but not least, we explore the temporal connections of modernism with other contemporary -isms and theoretical clusters, such as ecocriticism, posthumanism or object-oriented ontology, especially since these help maintain the relevance of literary modernism today and hence its afterlife.
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Jamie Stephenson poses a series of extremely relevant questions to Modernist Studies and literary studies as a whole, in their philosophical reassessment of modernity and modernism through an aesthetics lens which posits sonority at its center. Stephenson astutely reads the main aesthetic and formal divide between 19th-century realism and modernism in their different approaches to representation, arguing that the visual dominance heralded by realism in the 19th century was gradually substituted by a more sound-oriented type of hermeneutic approach. He then discusses this hermeneutic approach with the aim of disentangling criticism from its anthropocentric approach, instead encouraging a way of reading that focus on ambience as an existing pattern between entities.
Rahma Khazam undertakes a comparative analysis of two theoretical constructions that seem to have nothing in common at first: formalist modernism, as developed by Clement Greenberg (1960-1965), and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), following Graham Harman’s line of thought. In bringing these threads together, the author manages to highlight some unresolved aspects of modernism and flat ontology, addressing topics such as (aesthetic) autonomy, the subject-object divide, and high modernism.
Anna Dijkstra considers the intersection of affect and epistemology in Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities (1930), arguing for a critical attitude towards various ways of aestheticizing rationality, especially in the context of fascism. This lens allows for drawing productive parallels between the novel’s engagement with fascism and contemporary forms of neo-fascism, and reconceptualizes the famous novel as an anti-fascist text on an epistemological level.
Izabela Sobczak provides a close reading of Ewa Kuryluk’s Century 21 (1992), retrieving the features of Joseph Conrad’s afterlife in that novel as echoes of Conrad’s own Trans-/national, pre-modernist identity. The author also reads Kuryluk as an author who willingly taps into Conrad’s way of representing subjectivity through the emotional relation with visual objects: comparable to Eliot’s “objective correlative”, this way of artistically translating the emotional domain is closely tied, for Sobczak, to both authors’ disengagement from Polish culture and their quest for a trans-national, multilingual, and universal perspective.9
Ilinca Pelea’s exploration of pictorial memory is one that lifts research on memory in Proust’s Search to a new level. Starting from the novel’s engagement with various painters, she shows how Proust incorporates their styles to transform narrative modes of remembering. Approaching this matter from a temporal angle, Pelea considers the role of both Carpaccio and Vermeer’s paintings in the background of two important scenes, using their artistic styles to elaborate a model of remembering as, respectively, anachronism and a meaning-laden, temporally irreducible “patch”.
Somjyoti Mridha revisits E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924), to build a connect between the literary aesthetics of modernism and the political ideology of imperialism and the contradictions latent within. Highlighting how Forster’s political views impacted his creative journey, the article engages with two seemingly contrasting but ever-present approaches vis-à-vis colonial modernism: supremacy of the colonizer, and envisaging friendship between the colonizer and the colonized. His article succinctly highlights how Forster mediates the contradictions underlying modernism and imperialism.
Aathira Peediakaparambil Somasundaran’s article adds an important aspect to the Modernist tradition by taking it beyond the purview of Western modernism and introducing the Levant literary movement as a significant contributor in re-imagining the milieu of literary modernism in Beirut. By situating the movement in the context of migration and cross-cultural exchanges that followed, the author highlights the unique literary and cultural dynamics that emerged in the region. Somasundaran examines how migration to the West played a key role in shaping the literary culture of Beirut. The movement is presented as one that responded to the social and political pressures of the time, while also embracing the aesthetic innovations characteristic of modernism. In this context, the importance of spaces − in disseminating plural voices and creating scope for dialogues to foster − is also explored. The essay poses the Levant literary movement as an oppositional movement that promised freedom from the shackles of customs and traditions, and traces how it contributed to the broader transformation of modernist literature in ways that resonate with contemporary concerns about migration, identity, and the politics of space.
At the crossroads between New Modernist Studies and Cognitivism, Amalia Cotoi undertakes an analysis of the body in modernist literature, spanning from East to West, in the works of authors such as Constantin Fântâneru, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Sarina Cassvan, Mircea Eliade, Henriette Yvonne Stahl, Gustave Flaubert and Marcel Proust, while frequently returning to figures of High Modernism like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. She does not only bridge the gap between national and universal modernisms, but also between the body, mind, and environment. Starting from the cognitivist theory of “embodiment of mind”, her analysis focuses on the interdependent relationship between subjectivation and the body, as well as the way the body and environment merge and influence each other.
A dive in the contemporary art world is provided to us by Ioana Șerban and her rich article on Scandinavian visual artists Elmgreen&Dragset. In her contribution, Șerban productively reflects upon the legacy of the “new” in Postmodern and contemporary culture, 10
borrowing from a composite methodology involving Terry Smith, Clare Bishop, and Peter Osborne. Her work provides a through overview of the semantics of installations and how they played out through time. She provides and evaluation of Elmgreen&Dragset as emblematic of the modernist tendency to disrupt and question tradition, especially by seeking out the active involvment of the viewer in their works, and by the problematization of the cultural significance of Nordic design as both a tradition and a “dystopia of uniformity”.
Alina Gabriela Mihalache and Ștefan Firică give a detailed historical overview on the Habima theatre, the first Hebrew language theatrical company to exist, founded in 1917. The essay explores the Zionist ideological origins of the theatrical project, highlighting how it found home in Russia, the United States, and Palestine, and how the company came in contact with Stanislavsky’s Moscow Art Theatre. By a reading of Yevgeny Vakhtangov’s adaptations of ancient Jewish folklore, the article discusses how the Habima theatre sought to overcome language as the main means of signification, both to transcend language barriers and as a statement to be made in their competition with Alexis Granovsky’s Yiddish theatre. Finally, the authors highlight how these necessities led Habima to develop the foundation of what will later become the “theatrical theatre”, a style more based on non-verbal semiotics than language which has become a staple to signify the Jewish Holocaust, migration trauma, and deterritorialization.
Georgios Katsantonis’s paper provides us with a close reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s literature and cinema from an ecocritical perspective. The author investigates poems such as Il pianto della scavatrice (Weeping Excavator) (1956-1957) and Pasolini’s unfinished novel, Petrolio (published posthumously in 1992), exploring the relationships they establish with nature through the power that the Italian writer attributes to air and landscape in capturing the political changes in Italy during the 1950s and 1960s. Katsantonis also delves into movies such as Mamma Roma (1962) and Porcile (Pigsty) (1969), analyzing how Pasolini criticizes capitalist society by depicting the destruction of the environment and the animalization of humans.
Innovatively highlighting the occurrence of various Western avant-garde movements in Chinese art exhibitions, artistic publications and literary magazines, Shiyi Zhu’s article considers a frequently ignored national context for integration of modernist values. Realizing a comprehensive overview of the influences of Western ideas of modernist art on both Chinese art and intellectual discourse in the early 20th century, Zhu elaborates discussions on “global modernism” by illustrating how and why (post-) impressionist and cubist movements resonated so much in the Chinese artistic and intellectual scenes.
Radu Toderici’s essay concerning the evolution of the concepts of “modernism” and “modernity” throughout the 1960s in socialist Romania raises the question of the reception of modernism in the context of the gradual detachment from socialist realist aesthetics. Analyzing the difficulties of integrating terms for which there was no prior tradition in a specific field such as the Romanian cinema, the author attempts to highlight the strategies by which cinematic modernism has been both defined and understood in a way that has limited its innovative intentions.11
Rui Sousa provides us with a thorough overview of Portuguese Surrealism through Mario Cesariny’s (1923-2006) theoretical perspective, as expounded in A Intervenção Surrealista (1966) and Textos the Afirmação e de Combate do Movimento Surrealista Mundial (1977). By employing the Warwick’s Research Centre’s methodology on “core”, “periphery”, and “semi-periphery” to assess the circulation of cultural capital within existing power systems and structures, Sousa highlights how the peripheral/liminal space inhabited by Portuguese surrealism, both in terms of its chronology and its geography, actually allowed Cesariny to reword and rephrase the specificities of the avant-garde movement against, and in resistance to the Bretonian orthodoxy.
In this essay, Fernando de Moraes Gebra examines the avant-garde experiments in the Orpheu magazine to analyse the Portugese literary traditions, particularly through the lens of literary criticism. Through the theoretical frameworks of “intertextual and dialogic condition” propounded by Dionísio Vila Maior, the essay reads Orpheu‘s poetics through dialogic relations by placing it within the decadentist-symbolist literary tradition. These frameworks allow Gebra to interpret the avant-garde experimentation in Orpheu not as isolated or independent of literary tradition, but rather as a product of ongoing dialogues with other literary movements and texts. The magazine’s writers did not merely imitate or continue the decadent-symbolist aesthetics; instead, they engaged with them critically and dialogically. The dialogic condition propounded by the essay helps frame Orpheu as a critical site of exchange where past and present literary forms converge and create a vibrant space for the evolution of Portugese modernism.
Frederico van Erven Cabala traces the notion of the “modern” through two centuries of Brazilian theater, showing its gradual integration of various aesthetic influences. While the term’s meaning was fairly limited upon its emergence in the 19th century, it gradually evolved, picking up additional significations on the way. Van Erven Cabala considers how some of these significations are contradictory, to finally settle on an understanding of “modern Brazilian theater” that allows for the elasticity ingrained in its values.
Anca Chiorean explores two possible categories of artistic installations present in the single-issue Romanian magazine 75 HP, published in 1924. She compiled works of “languages that must be looked at” and “languages that look like languages that must be looked at”, as “not-paintings” and “not-poetry”. The author delves into the interplay between visual and verbal elements in literature, focusing on how texts operate when language is treated as something to be “looked at” rather than just “read”. The body of the text and the body of the reader are both implicated in the creation of meaning, shifting the focus from passive reception to active interaction.
Alex Ciorogar conducts an in-depth analysis of the evolution of the Romanian poetic and critical discourses in a broader post-communist environment, strongly linked to the global intellectual movements like metamodernism and posthumanism, while employing and wielding concepts like RoMePo (as in Romanian metamodernist poetry), zemiperiphery, and poetics of provision. Ciorogar discusses areas of the Romanian poetry published after 2000 that reflect the broader ideological debates present in the contemporary Romanian literature around the feminist, queer, ecological and posthuman poetic trends. 12
Bogdan Vișan provides us with a thorough overview on the theoretical nature of postmodernism in Romania, starting with the first occurence of the term in the literary field in 1974 in Andrei Brezianu’article, Post-modernii americani. O traiectorie spre viitor [American Post-Modernists. A Trajectory Towards the Future]. By employing Mieke Bal’s idea of the “travelling concept” and by adapting it to the Romanian postmodernism, Vișan highlights the political instrumentalization of local postmodernism, which renders peripheral Romania “intellectually captive” and dependent on Western epistemology for self-explanation.
Bărboiu Arina-Mihaela conducts a genealogical analysis of the most recent form of modernism in literary studies, namely metamodernism. The essay begins with the foundational text Strategies of the Metamodern, published in 2010 on the online platform Notes on Metamodernism, founded by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker, and traces the concept back to its earliest formulation in the 1970s. After examining the various and competing theoretical definitions of metamodernism, Bărboiu discusses the term’s reception and applicability in Romania in recent years.
Horațiu Tohătan’s essay centers on a reassessment of the nihilistic premises of modernism, retrieving a network expanding from Nietzsche to Musil, Milan Kundera, and Houellebecq. In their analysis of The Man Without Qualities (1930), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), and Submission (2015), the author maps a diachronic conceptualization of Nietzsche’s reception by the three authors, arguing that the characters’ nihilistic attitudes had the ultimate effect of freeing them from the shackles of societal expectations, to various degrees. Furthermore, this overview allows the author to read nihilism as the driving force behind the emergence of relativism, the loss of ontological meaning in discourse, and the postmodern simulacral approach to representation.
Iren Boyarkina’s article pulls out various threads of reference to the natural sciences from Ulysses (1920), weaving them together into two patterns of the novel’s engagements with Einstein’s theory of relativity, and with non-Euclidean geometries, respectively. By taking into account biographical elements of Joyce’s familiarity with various scientific discourses, and combining these with close readings of the novel’s scientific allusions, Boyarkina manages to give dimension to the vast landscape sketched throughout the years of Joyce’s engagement with the natural sciences.
In her essay, Gabriela Glăvan discusses the problematic iconography of Sylvia Plath as a biographical object. After addressing the theoretical issues arising from late modernist critical stances around biography as an imperfect practice, which ultimately led to discarding a significant amount of material on Plath, the author productively discusses the biographical research work put forth by scholars Rosenstein and Hinchcliffe on Plath during the Seventies. In her detailed overview of both scholars’ work, Glăvan is able to retrieve potential for actualizing and re-organizing that material.
Andrea Olah draws a parallel between Constructivism and Futurism within the context of the arts during the interwar period. By focusing on the experiences of Kassák and Marinetti, the author underlines how both artists sought to shift away from scientistic, materialistic, and positivistic approaches to build their aesthetics. Respectively 13
building their views on an absolutization of art, and on Tactilism and immersion, Kassák and Marinetti are presented by Olah as viable case studies to reassess the directions taken by contemporary conceptual art.
Smaranda Ștefanovici and Georgeta Matei present a critique of the relation between modernism and postcolonial literature. The authors point out how the postcolonial writers J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie use modernism as a tool to analyze and challenge cultural imperialism. Through specific focus on experimental narrative techniques, the essay aims to decentralize modernism as a ‘Western’ literary concept, instead emphasizing on Global nature. By expanding the scope of modernism, the essay highlights the adaptability of modernist techniques to address global issues. The essay demonstrates how modernism can be re-imagined to provide new cultural and political purposes in postcolonial literature. This re-envisioning highlights the enduring relevance of modernism in contemporary writing, particularly in its ability to confront and deconstruct the ongoing effects of colonialism and imperialism.
Notes
1. Michael D’arcy, Mathias Nilges (eds.), “Introduction”, in The Contemporaneity of Modernism. Literature. Media. Culture, New York, Routledge, 2016, p. 21.
2. Sean Latham, Gayle Rogers, Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, London and New York, Bloosmbury, p. 2.
3. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Unlocking Modernism. Theory’s Fulfilment in the 21st Century”, Philobiblon: Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities, vol. 28, no. 2, Amalia Cotoi, Alexandru Matei (eds.), “Modernism and Bruno Latour”, 2023, p. 350.
4. Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp, Cambrige, London, MIT Press, 1993, p. 376.
5. Peter Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art, London, New York, Verso, 2013, p. 83.
Reimagining Modernist Methodologies
Jamie Stephenson
University of Leeds, England
jamie.stephenson@gmx.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.01
Hermeneutics of “Auditioning”: Contemporizing Tensions Between “Modernity” and “Modernism” through a Poetics of Resonance
Abstract: Following Toma in Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism (2023), one might define relations between modernity and modernism as a series of tensions connecting “then” and “now”. What follows suggests that, by employing sound as an ontological starting place, such tensions could be productively contemporized through an aesthetics of sonority, specifically a hermeneutic methodology I term “auditioning”. Amplifying the relational themes of coexistence and correspondence inherent to sound, this framing allows for the simultaneous consonance and dissonance of “then” and “now”. This essay applies the motif of auditioning as a kind of meta-critique of recent attempts – e.g., Moraru’s Flat Aesthetics (2023) – to engage with the contemporary modern, in a manner that disrupts anthropocentrism.
Keywords: Hermeneutics; Auditioning; Modernity; Modernism; Poetics; Resonance; Sound; Aesthetics; Anthropocene.
Rahma Khazam
Institut ACTE, Université Paris 1 Panthéon- Sorbonne, France
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.02
From Essences to Flat Ontologies: Recontextualizing Modernist Thought for the Present
Abstract: In terms of connecting seemingly disparate strands of thought relating to modernism and modernity, Philobiblon’s special issue edited by Amalia Cotoi and Alexandru Matei, “Modernism and Bruno Latour. For a Resumption of Modernity” (2023), made a resounding start. Yet Latour’s relationism will always be at odds with the purity, stability and autonomy characterizing certain models of modernism, particularly the formalist modernism envisioned by Clement Greenberg. In this article, I will explore a flat ontology that resolves this problem, namely object-oriented ontology (OOO). It emphasizes the nonrelational autonomy of objects, in the same way as Greenberg’s modernism emphasizes compositional elements such as line and colour over and above context, disregarding any social or political relations or associations the work might have. As I will suggest, OOO connects with modern art and modernism on multiple levels, testifying to modernism’s ongoing relevance.
Keywords: Art; Object; Autonomy; Metaphor; Clement Greenberg; Michael Fried; Machines.
Anna Dijkstra
University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Huygens Institute, the Netherlands
annakjh@hotmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.03
Epistemological Violence between Affect and Aesthetic: Rationalist Rhetoric in the Novel of Ideas
Abstract: Robert Musil’s modernist epic The Man Without Qualities is a novel written against a background of fascist uprisings in Europe, as well as a quintessentially Viennese text written in the wake of the emergence of the Wiener Kreis and their logical positivism. These two factors make it a suitable novel for analyzing the intersection between rationality and fascism, in a way that sheds new light on how rationality is aestheticized, naturalized, and romanticized. These processes support and reinforce each other. By exploring the functioning of rationality and highlighting the novel’s implicit affectivity, this paper sheds light on the importance of extra-rational ways of knowledge-making, making it possible to consider fascist practices of self-fashioning and aestheticizing rationality through a critical affective lens.
Keywords: Self-Fashioning; Musil; Logical Positivism; Fascism; Personal Identity.
Transnational Modernisms
Izabela Sobczak
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland
izasob@amu.edu.pl
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.04
Joseph Conrad, Ewa Kuryluk and “The Places of Transition”: Transnational Modernism in Contemporary Polish Women’s Writing
From the Myth of Immortality to the Transhumanist Utopia/Dystopia
Abstract: In the wake of the 20th century French School of imagination studies, my paper wants to highlight the significant differences between two visions about humanity: a traditional transcendentalist vision of immortality, created by a long historical and cultural process of self-poiesis, and an immanentist scientific ideological vision, represented by the humanism of the modern era. In postmodern times, this positivist view prolongs itself in the “transhumanist revolution”, a by-product of the ideological myth of progress.
Keywords: Immortality; Myth; Utopia; Postmodernity; Transhumanist Revolution.
Ilinca Pelea
Bordeaux Montaigne University, France
ilincapelea@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.05
Transnational Paradigms of Modernist Pictorial Memory: Carpaccio, Vermeer and Narrative Structure in Proust’s Search
Abstract: To talk about memory in In Search of Lost Time is a tautology today. Yet, in the interpretative discussion opened by new modernist studies and following Rabaté’s transnational approach, reading Proust’s work can open new horizons and show how his literature develops innovative operational concepts – historically situated yet still relevant for our present – used by contemporary theorists. Didi-Huberman’s concepts of anachronism and of “pan” (patch), related to painting and image, both draw on modernism, and Proust anticipates them by using the pictorial techniques of the foreign painters Carpaccio and Vermeer to renew the French narrative tradition. By linking Didi-Huberman’s patch to Ricoeur’s ideas on literary temporality, this article explains and exemplifies this concept and shows how it can be applied to Proust’s literature so as to emphasize the importance of cultural experience for the construction of personal and collective memory through narrative structures.
Keywords: Modernist Anachronism; Cultural Memory; Retrospective Cosmopolitan Tradition; Pictorial Narrative; Temporality.
Somjyoti Mridha
North-Eastern Hill University, India
somjyoti.mridha@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.06
“…and the Twentieth Century Took Over from the Sixteenth”: Literary Modernism and the Colonial World in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India
Abstract: A Passage to India (1924) by E. M. Forster is a significant modernist novel and emerged as a benchmark for representing the colonial world. The novel is simultaneously embedded within the “ideologies of the Raj” and orientalist framework mediated with modernist ethos that determined the dynamics of representation. Forster challenges the certitudes of empire building and utilitarian values of Victorian and Edwardian England in crucial ways. This paper interrogates the contradictions in Forster’s literary aesthetic of modernism and political ideology of imperialism. This paper also explores the conflicted relationship between the colonial state and Indian nationalism in the context of early twentieth century India.
Keywords: Colonialism; Modernism; Nation; Nationalism; Colonial State; India.
Aathira Peedikaparambil Somasundaran
Cardiff University, United Kingdom
peedikaparambilsomasudarana@cardiff.ac.uk
aathira_menon@hotmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.07
Between Modernism and Tradition: Beirut’s Poetry and Literature in Transformation
Abstract: This paper explores how literary modernism in Lebanon was shaped by poetry’s response to socio-political changes. By examining historical events and socio-cultural contexts, the research provides insights into the origins and evolution of the Levant literary movement. The study focuses on mid-20th century Beirut, during the second phase of Levant literature, and considers how Lebanon’s lenient censorship laws attracted radical writers. The migration of these writers to Beirut significantly impacted the modernization of Levantine literature and poetry. The paper also discusses how Lebanese individuals who travelled abroad were influenced by the contrast between Western affluence and perceived stagnation in their homeland. This “gap of success” inspired many European-educated journalists, authors, and revolutionaries to adopt new, contemporary perspectives.
Keywords: Levant; Modernism; Literature; Poetry; Arabic; Beirut.
Amalia Cotoi
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
amalia.cotoi@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.08
Modernist Literature and Embodied Mind. Introspection, Body, and Environment
Abstract: Drawing on New Modernist Studies and Cognitivism, this study focuses on the representation of the body in the works of authors writing between the latter half of the 19th century and the first three decades of the 20th century, who can be categorized within the historical framework of modernism, such as: Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, Constantin Fântâneru, Hortensia-Papadat Bengescu, Sarina Cassvan, Henriette Yvonne Stahl, Mircea Eliade. Starting from the cognitivist theory of “embodiment of mind” and the premise that the development of transportation and public infrastructure, which intensified in the mid- 19th century, is reflected in literature through the movement of the body, I will examine: (1) the relationship between self-awareness, introspection, and the body, as well as (2) the interaction between the body and the environment, focusing on their mutual influence.
Keywords: Modernist Literature; “Embodiment of Mind”; Body; Mind; Introspection; Modernism.
Transmediality
Ioana Șerban
University of Bucharest, Romania
ioana.jester@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.09
The New as the Surround System of Interiority in Contemporary Art Exhibitions: Modernism and Contemporaneity in the Works of Elmgreen & Dragset
Abstract: By and large, contemporary art witnessed a shift towards installation art, nailing a genuine habitat stressing the possibilities of interactivity and immersivity of the works. My article aims to examine the modern legacy of this “new” of contemporaneity, by analyzing the works of the Scandinavian duo Elmgreen & Dragset: their pool-like vertical structures and silicone mannequins establish a temporal loop between traditional effigies of sculpture and a contemporary consideration of the virtual dimension inside the palpable realm of the exhibition. My intention is to prove that instead of interactivity with and immersivity in the outside world, the purpose of such works is to create for the viewer a surround system of interiority, where interiority is one ingredient that contemporaneity borrows from modernism.
Keywords: Remodernism; Installation Art; Contemporaneity; Postmodernism; Interiority.
Alina Gabriela Mihalache
Ștefan Firică
University of Bucharest, Romania
alina-gabriela.mihalache@litere.unibuc.ro
stefanfirica@litere.unibuc.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.10
Deterritorializing Theatre: Habima and the Making of the Modern Stage Language
Abstract: The history of the Habima theatre, the first Hebrew language company in the world, spans over at least three territories: Russia (soon to become the Soviet Union), United States, and Mandatory Palestine (on the place of the future state of Israel). Coming from Central- Eastern Europe to Russia, accepted as one of the four studios of Stanislavsky’s MAT (Moscow Art Theatre), the migrant troupe will set on a famous world tour in 1926, before reaching Jaffa. Its director Yevgeny Vakhtangov connected the troupe, involved in the project of representing the old Jewish tradition, to the avant-garde and developed a new rhetoric, forging what will be later called the “theatrical theatre”. The new poetics, apt to cross language barriers, will become a stylistic signature in the representation of Jewish Holocaust, migration trauma, and deterritorialization to a worldwide audience.
Keywords: Modern Hebrew Culture; Theatricalization; Non-Verbal Codes; Migrant Theatre; Deterritorialization; Trauma Representation.
Georgios Katsantonis
Università degli Studi di Roma “La Sapienza”, Italy
georgios.katsantonis@sns.it
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.11
From the Geographical Dimension to the Ecological Perspective in Pasolini’s Literature and Film
Abstract: The environmental aspects in Pasolini’s work go far beyond Pasolini’s famous L’articolo delle lucciole (Firefly Article) (1975). These aspects take shape, above all, in his interest in the transformation of the space, that is of the Italian environment controlled by a new, permissive fascism, a power without a face that is the worst kind of totalitarianism. The poet and writer focuses on the period of the so-called economic boom, which hit Italy after World War II. This article examines the potential contributions of Pasolini’s intellectual agenda to contemporary ecocritical thought, built on the analysis of Pasolini’s selected works between literary writing and writing for the cinema. The objectives of this contribution include the possibility of a new reading of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poetry, literature, and cinema under an ecocritical light, which presupposes an evaluation of his work that takes into account the relationship which the author determines between the individual of his own time and the surrounding environment, redefining the balance between literature and landscape.
Keywords: Pasolini; Ecology; Ecocriticism; Landscapes; Anthropocene; Petrolio.
Shiyi Zhu
University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
s.zhu2@uva.nl
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.12
Pictorial Modernism(s) in an Interdisciplinary and Cross-Cultural Context
Abstract: This paper delves into the reception and adaptation of Modernism in early 20th-century China, emphasizing the role of Chinese literary magazines and art publications in disseminating Western avant-garde art. Publications such as Eastern Miscellany and Yishu Xunkan played pivotal roles in introducing movements like Post- Impressionism, Cubism, and Futurism. The paper highlights how Chinese literary figures and art critics not only translated Western art terms but also engaged deeply with the philosophical and aesthetic principles underlying these movements. By examining key exhibitions and intellectual discourses, the paper illustrates how the vibrant exchanges within Chinese cultural circles facilitated a nuanced understanding and creative integration of Modernist principles, thereby reshaping China’s artistic landscape.
Keywords: Modernism in China; Chinese Literary Magazines; Avant-garde Art; Cross-cultural Adaptation; Post-Impressionism; Cubism; Cultural Modernization; Art and Literature Integration.
Radu Toderici
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
radu.toderici@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.13
Tactical Modernism: Romanian Cinema of the 1960s and the Disputed Modernist Aesthetics
Abstract: Throughout the 1950s, during the heyday of socialist realism, “modernism” as a concept is virtually nonexistent in Romanian literature and arts. Only in the late 1950s and in the early 1960s theories about a modernist style – in literature, but also in cinema – start to reemerge. The main issue with modernism during that era is that it is closely associated with the so-called decadent and bourgeois Western art. In order to be adapted to a socialist framework, modernism has to be refashioned. As such, a hybrid, tactical modernism – political in content, open to experimentation in matters regarding form – slowly becomes, despite its fragile coherence, one of the dominant approaches of that era. By studying the debates about modernism in the main cultural journals of that era, such as Contemporanul or Cinema, this paper shows the manner in which modernist ideas about art are strategically integrated into the Romanian cultural discourse of the 1960s.
Keywords: Historical Modernism; Modernist Aesthetics; Socialist Aesthetics; Romanian Cinema; “Contemporaneity”.
Local Modern(ism)s
Rui Sousa
University of Lisbon, School of Arts and Humanities, CLEPUL, Portugal
ruidnsousa@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.14
Mário Cesariny’s Perspective on Portuguese and International Surrealism: Dialogue and Distinction
Abstract: The present paper aims to offer an overview on the surrealist movement’s reception in Portugal, as well as the perspectives adopted by Portuguese surrealists from a peripheral position in the international panorama. In addition to approaching certain critical aspects characteristic to Surrealism in Portugal, the present paper also traces the path that leads from the marginalization and obscurity of the main authors and episodes of Portuguese Surrealism outside of national borders to the increasing international recognition of the Portuguese groups and main authors. This shift is largely attributed to the historiographical and promotional work carried out by Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos, a poet and artist who will serve as the primary reference in my overview.
Keywords: Surrealism; Periphery; Abjeccionism; Mário Cesariny; Anthologies.
Fernando de Moraes Gebra
Universidade de Évora, Portugal
fernandogebra@yahoo.fr
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.1
Orpheu From the Inside: A Historiographical Review of the Portuguese Modernism
Abstract: The present paper questions certain commonplaces in Portuguese literary criticism that establishes an irreconcilable ditch between the decadent and symbolist attitudes and the avant-garde experiments in the Orpheu magazine, which results in the canonization of some authors over others, and the oblivion of poets such as Alfredo Pedro Guisado (1891-1975). The Orpheu generation engages in a dialog with the past, where the poetic project of each member juxtaposes decadent and avant-garde discourses. That is why it is impossible to separate and classify the authors of Orpheu generation into different literary movements. As such, this paper aims to analyze memorialist discourses by Fernando Pessoa, Luís de Montalvor, Raul Leal and Alfredo Guisado in various texts about this literary generation, written across different periods from 1915 to 1965.
Keywords: Portuguese Modernism; Orpheu Magazine; Literary Criticism; Historiographical Review; Memorialist Discourses.
Frederico van Erven Cabala
Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil
fredericocabala@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.16
Figures of the Modern in Brazilian Theater
Abstract: This article investigates the different nuances of the term modern in Brazilian theater criticism, seeking to map the main variations and their implications for the analysis of the drama in Brazil. Through examination of materials from press pages and books of the 19th and 20th centuries, studies dedicated to the history of Brazilian theater, and remarks on the concept of the modern made by researchers like Hans Robert Jauss, this text seeks to present the widespread use of the term, applied to different productions in the Brazilian theatrical context. Consequently, we propose to reflect on the modern in Brazilian theater as a fruitful inquiry into the various aesthetic influences that transformed the country’s stage and dramaturgy.
Keywords: Brazilian Theater; Brazilian Dramaturgy; Modern; World Literature.
Anca Chiorean
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
anca.chiorean@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.17
Putting Bodies to Work – Bodies of Texts and Bodies of Readers Operating at a Whopping 75 Horsepower
Abstract: The present paper focuses on a targeted occurrence within the larger area of modern literature – namely the 75 HP magazine. The literary-visual occurrence under scrutiny opens two possible approaches. The bodies of text present in the magazine either employ somewhat conventional grammar that embodies the spirit of unconventionality through the typographical dimension, or language that compiles almost entirely visual compositions, that involve the body of the reader to physically follow the new means of reading.
Keywords: Romanian Avant-Garde; 75 HP; Participatory Reception; Visual Language; Visual Poetry; Textual Body; Typography.
The New Politics of -isms
Alex Ciorogar
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
alexandru.ciorogar@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.18
“The 6th Face of Modernity” – Postmillennial Romanian Poetry and Metamodernism: Supernatural Naturalism, or the Poetics of Provision
Abstract: This paper critically examines the metamodernization of Romanian poetry in the broader historical context of its post-communist culture. Metamodernism will be swiftly defined as “the 6th face of modernity” (with a nod to M. Călinescu) and as a form of “supernatural naturalism” (inverting M.H. Abrams’ famous formulation). The article then analyses the metamodern stylization of the lyrical subject (the corporeal lyric of the anonymous) in a posthuman framework. As a cultural sub-commodity chain, contemporary Romanian poetry and its “poetics of provision” can only be understood, it will be argued, within the matrix of neoliberal capitalism which produces a myriad of situated subjectivities of postmillennial consociates where the metamodern logistics of affect typically percolates.
Keywords: Romanian Metamodern Poetry; Posthumanism; The 6th Face of Modernity; Supernatural Naturalism; Corporeal Lyric; Cultural Sub-Commodity Chain; Poetics of Provision; Consociates; Parrhêsia; Aletheia; World-Systems; Ludwig Fleck.
Bogdan Vișan
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Romania
visan0bogdan@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.19
The Worldedness of Postmodernism in the Romanian Literary Field: A Traveling Concept
Abstract: In spite of its alleged outdatedness, recent enquiries in World Literature Studies have not completely neglected the concept of postmodernism. On the contrary, they emphasized its “worldedness” and transnational characteristics. Building on this perspective, I approach postmodernism through Mieke Bal’s Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, framing it as a “traveling concept” whose diffusion in East-Central European culture — precisely the Romanian context — merits closer examination. This investigation focuses on its interactions with coeval literary concepts within the world-literary system. Using this framework, the article argues that Romanian postmodernism, a category discussed by Mircea Cărtărescu among others, served as a legitimizing theorization. In this regard, it was pragmatically employed to counter the (semi-)peripheral condition, and to act as a heuristic battleground between two fields of knowledge production on literary postmodernism: French and American.
Keywords: Postmodernism; Worldedness; Transnational; Self-Colonization; Traveling Concept; Mircea Cărtărescu.
Arina-Mihaela Bărboiu
University of Bucharest, Bucharest, Romania
arinabarboiu13@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.20
Mapping Metamodernism from East to West
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to undertake a diachronic analysis of the emerging notion of “metamodernism”. Beginning with comprehensive definitions of modernism and postmodernism, it then navigates through the historical trajectory of metamodernism, tracing its etymology and pre-2010 conceptualizations. Post 2010, the voices of Alexandra Dumitrescu, Thimotheus Vermeulen, Robin van den Akker, David James and Urmila Seshagiri advance the discussion, offering divergent perspectives on outlining this new “-ism”. Moving on from the Occident, this research questions the applicability of metamodernism within the Romanian post-communist cultural sphere. Having its roots in Western, capitalist societies, where it is yet to be a fully established and assimilated theory, metamodernism’s suitability to diverse socio-cultural climates remains a point of contention.
Keywords: Metamodernism; Modernism; Cultural Paradigm; Postmodernism; Literary Theory.
Horațiu Tohătan
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
horatiu.tohatan@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.21
Nihilistic Network: Musil, Kundera and Houellebecq
Abstract: This paper aims to create a semantic network that analyzies the evolution of nihilistic thought through three epochs of literary practice: modernism, postmodernism and contemporaneity. Following this, I propose that such a network can be constructed diachronically through the works of Robert Musil, Milan Kundera and Michael Houellebecq. Tackling subjects such as imperialism, migration, dictatorship, transnationality, I argue that the roots of their epistemological ethos lie predominantly in a nihilistic philosophy, a common core for these three authors. Therefore, starting from Musil’s The Man Without Qualities, this paper will analyse how nietzschean nihilism and the ontological crisis is reflected in his novel. Consequently, through Kundera’s novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, I shall argue that his postmodern nihilistic view can be articulated through Matei Călinescu’s concept of epistemological nihilism. Finally, trying to expose the zeitgeist of contemporaneity, I shall explain how Houellebecq’s perspective towards the individual-society duality in Submission can be expressed in relation with Jean Baudrillard concept of transparent nihilism.
Keywords: Semantic Network; Nihilism; Epistemological Nihilism; Transparent Nihilism; Antimodernism.
Historical Modernist Engagements
Iren Boyarkina
University of Rome La Sapienza, Italy
iren.boyarkina@uniroma1.it
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.22
Ulysses through the Prism of Natural Sciences
Abstract: This paper aims at analysing references to the natural sciences in Ulysses (1920), by James Joyce their function in the novel and the nature of physics in it. The study also focuses on the ways that Joyce could have been influenced by Einstein’s theory of relativity while writing Ulysses. Various approaches to the role of the sciences in Ulysses will be considered, and several episodes will be analysed through the prism of the theory of relativity and non-Euclidean geometries.
Keywords: Albert Einstein; Bernhard Riemann; Theory of Relativity; Geometry; Astronomy; Physics; Mathematics.
Gabriela Glăvan
The West University, Timișoara, Romania
gabriela.glăvan@e-uvt.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.23
The Unwritten Sylvia Plath Biographies
Abstract: Sylvia Plath’s belonging to the literary modernist canon turns the issue of her biographical iconography into a problematic matter, as late modernist critical directions considered biography a flawed concept and practice with a poor reflective capacity. Moreover, the first generation of prospective Plath biographers abandoned their projects at various stages in their progress, leaving a consistent amount of archival material that needs re-exploration and reinterpretation. I propose a revisiting of the Harriet Rosenstein Sylvia Plath archive and of Elizabeth Hinchliffe’s unfinished Plath biography, preserved as a manuscript, in order to highlight the relevance and impact of these initial biographies on later perspectives on Plath’s literary art and life.
Keywords: Literary Archives; Sylvia Plath Studies; Biography; Literary Recovery; Critical Rereading.
Andrea Olah
Freelancer, Vienna, Austria
dr.andrea.olah@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.24
Reinterpretation of Art Utopias Seeking a Non-Functional Determination of the New Man and the New Art: Marinetti’s Tactilism and Kassák’s Art-Utopia
Abstract: The present article approaches the art prognoses of two influential figures of the historical avant-garde, Lajos Kassák and F. T. Marinetti, and scrutinises their art utopias seeking references to the future of human society. A novel aspect of this approach is maintained throughout of the contents of the manifestos which recur to ideas of ideologically ambiguous provenance that have not yet been thematised in contemporary art discussions. With the help of the newly revealed contents, the paper attempts to discover the motivation behind Kassák’s and Marinetti’s insights and to explore, how exactly they anticipated the trends of art and its role in future society. By linking of two influential representatives of the avant-garde, it is possible to trace important determining tendencies on several tracks that still have an impact today.
Keywords: F. T. Marinetti; Lajos Kassák; Tactilism; Constructivism; Historical Avant-garde; Immersion; Andor Tiszay; Hungary, Interwar Period.
Smaranda Ștefanovici
Georgeta Matei
George Emil Palade University of Medicine, Pharmacy, Science, and Technology, Romania
smaranda.stefanovici@umfst.ro
georgeta.movila@umfst.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.25
Modernist Engagements in Postcolonial Literature
Abstract: This article delves into the often-neglected nexus of postcolonial literature and Modernism, addressing a critical research gap in literary studies. The primary goal of this paper is to elucidate how Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee ingeniously incorporate and contest the legacy of modernism into their literary works. The findings of this research unveil the impact of modernism on postcolonial narratives, offering a nuanced understanding of how these authors utilize experimental tendencies to interrogate colonial legacies and redefine cultural identities in a transnational context. The article demonstrates that the fusion of distinct literary movements, along with the authors’ cultural hybridity, yields unique narratives that challenge conventional categorizations, enriching the discourse on postcolonial literature.
Keywords: Postcolonial Literature; Modernism; Postmodernism; Salman Rushdie; J.M. Coetzee; Colonial Legacies; Cultural Identities.
Library Survey
Luca Mătăsaru
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
luca.matasaru@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.26
FROM CORPUS POLITICUM TO CORPUS MYSTICUM: THE BODY BETWEEN STATE AND CHURCH IN THE EARLY ROMAN EMPIRE
Marius Lazurca, In corpore. De la corpul păgân la trupul creștin în Antichitatea târzie, București, Editura Litera, 2022
Maria Barbu
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
mariabarbu1998@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.27
A WORLD OF OBJECTS. THE INHERENT BEAUTY OF “BEING-THERE”
Christian Moraru, Flat Aesthetics. Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the Making of the Contemporary, New York & London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2023
Alexandra-Teodora Mândra
Nantes University, France
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
mandra.alexandra@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.47.28
AN EXHAUSTIVE STUDY ON ROMANIAN CONTEMPORARY POETRY WRITTEN BY WOMEN
Grațiela Benga, Vocile Penelopei. Tonuri și accente în poezia contemporană românească, Timișoara, Editura Universității de Vest, 2023
Book Reviews
Previous Issues
2024 volume 46 – Utopian Imaginaries
Editor: Maria Barbu
Editor: Phantasma. The Center for Imagination Studies
Publisher: Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România
ISBN 1582-960X (România)
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46
Print: Megaprint, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
Pour commandes s’adresser à: https://edituramega.ro/
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Maria Barbu, Corin Braga
Introduction
The French term imaginaire [English: imaginary], as opposed to the traditional concepts of “imagination” and “fantasy”, is a seminal concept in the investigation of the cultural, literary, and artistic representations. It was proposed in the mid-20th century by Gaston Bachelard, Henry Corbin, Gilbert Durand and many others. While “imagination” defines the human faculty of creating random mental images, with no correspondent in the outside reality, that is, false, chimerical representations, the French term imaginaire designates the imaging or the imagining function of the psyche, its capacity to produce new, creative representations. For Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, it designates the “inner creative force of the imagination”1.
Humans relate to the outside world not only through senses and ideas, but also through images and representations. Their understanding of the world and their ensuing reactions depend on these subjective images. As neuroscientists have recently shown, the simple fact of telling stories (i.e., organising our experience in narrative terms by means of brain maps) is one of the most elementary and archaic “obsessions of the brain” (António Damásio). Rather than a dimension at the margins of the material and physical order of the world (both visible and invisible), “the imaginary” is intrinsically intertwined with it, over-determining the way we feel, read and represent (through artistic, literary, scientific, historical, religious or mythical discourses) both the reality surrounding us, the way we interact with it, and transform it. In order to understand human behaviour, anthropologists have to tackle the complex system of representations that underlies mental activity.
The imaginary pervades all human practices. It applies to a vast range of domains, from sociology and religion to literature and the arts. Social imaginaries comprise narratives, mythical events, historical characters, collective symbols which serve to make sense of history, to organise cultural memory and to configure the future. Charles Taylor defines “the social imaginaries” as follows: “By social imaginary, I mean something much broader and deeper than the intellectual schemes people may entertain when they think about social reality in a disengaged mode. I am thinking, rather, of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations”2. Images of the self (autoimages) and of the other (heteroimages) – the “other” being conceived as an individual or as a collectivity, worldviews and outlooks on nature, the universe and God, representations of geography, history, society and culture, literary and fine arts fantasy, theatre and cinema, music and dance, advertising and media etc. are all products and instruments of the imagining function.
Since their creation, utopias have been designed as imaginary – in vitro – explorations of alternative worlds and societies. Utopian authors used them in order to make and unmake the current reality, to propose alternative models for the existing state of European civilization, and to investigate “les possibles latéraux”3 of the history. Utopias can be seen as successors of the medieval topic of the Terrestrial Paradise4: if, during the Christian culture of the Middle Ages, the Garden of Eden was presented as a lost paradise, closed by God after the original sin, during the Renaissance, humanistic optimism led various thinkers and writers, such as Morus, to the conclusion that the lost paradise could be replaced with a city of men. Utopias are human-made ideal places, where people governed by reasonable and moral principles achieve a perfect society.
Nevertheless, utopian optimism was soon challenged by several theoretical critiques and institutional attacks, from the standpoint of Counter-Reformation theology, Cartesian rationalism and English empiricism. These ideologies addressed a series of decisive counter-arguments to the hope that mankind could by itself establish a perfect society and a paradise on earth. Starting with Joseph Hall (Mundus alter et idem, 1605) and Artus Thomas (L’Isle des Hermaphrodites, 1605), an important number of authors took on official and public censorship and reshaped their fiction into critiques of utopian visions. Instead of imagining ideal places, they began to conceive counter-utopian societies and terrestrial infernos.
Historians of the European literature have distinguished between two main species of utopias: classical (16th-18th centuries) and modern (19th-20th centuries)5. Within this historical blueprint, it is possible to make the distinction between several corpuses and sub-genres of the utopian genre: classical religious, rationalist or empirical utopias and dystopias, as well as modern scientist, social or postmodern utopias and dystopias.
With postmodern relativism and “irrealism” (Searle, Goodman, Putnam, Maturana), not only the human capacity of constructing ideal societies and perfect cities, but the concept of reality itself has been questioned and deconstructed. Possible worlds are becoming as real as everyday reality in literature, films, and the arts. These parallel worlds are either superior to the one we are living in (which is a terrifying place, like in The Matrix, Dark City etc.), or inferior, describing a nightmarish world we are heading to. Many dystopian (science-)fiction works imagine a future in which a disaster has already affected humanity. Efraim Sicher and Natalia Skaradol, for example, investigate the impact that September 11 had upon the conscience of the American public6. In this tragic terrorist event, reality became a reiteration, an acting-out of a series of catastrophic movies made in Hollywood (the headquarters of the hyperreal, as Baudrillard put it). Literary and cinematic experiences have undergone a “pictorial turn”, to use Jacques Rancière’s term, as images are no longer qualified in terms of deficient or excessive consistency. Utopian thinking becomes a powerful instrument in exploring, exposing and modelling the challenges of our contemporary society, the concerns, fears, hopes and projects targeting topics such as climate change, natural ecosystem decline, global resource depletion, our planet’s homeostasis, new social dynamics, migration and diaspora, fluid societies, race, gender, class, religious minorities and all forms of discrimination, the IT revolution, transhumanism etc.
*
The concept of the imaginary has therefore had various uses and roles in the way people looked back at their world or tried to envision its future, and this was precisely the focus of the 23rd Utopian Studies Society/Europe’s Annual Conference, which was hosted by the Centre for Imagination Studies of the Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca in July 2023. Under the umbrella title of “Utopian Imaginaries”, the conference addressed a generous list of topics that included panels about imaginary communities, central and East-European utopias/dystopias, post-apocalyptical, racial and gender dystopic societies, feminist utopias, utopian social, political or literary imaginaries, utopias and dystopias in contemporary popular culture, transhumanist and medical dystopias, ecological dystopias or fictional, secondary worlds that again functioned as an utopic alternative to a dystopian present. This volume represents a selection of the papers presented at this conference, one that aims to offer a complex perspective on the numerous utopian or dystopian imaginaries involved in the constructs of our society.
The volume opens with an article to which its author, Vita Fortunati, chose to give the form of a confession. As one of USS 2023 conference’s keynote speakers and a researcher whose work has been dedicated to utopian studies to a great extent, she used this opportunity to describe both the development of utopia as a genre and her academic relationship with its changes, while also focusing her analysis on three of the most important utopian topoi (the journey, the island and the dream) and outlining some ways in which utopian thinking might solve some of the crises that the capitalist world is dealing with today.
Moving on towards a section dedicated to forms of utopian or dystopian social and political imaginaries, we first have Arthur Blaim’s study about the essential role played by slogans and catchwords in the construction of utopian-in-theory but (potentially) dystopian-in-practice imaginary communities. He discusses examples such as the Third Reich, the Fourth Republic of Poland, China Dream and Brexit, all of which succeeded in becoming very popular precisely because of their “nebulous utopian” slogans which attracted the public without making it aware of the exact ways in which this ideal state of their society would be attained.
Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, another key-figure in the field of imagination studies, makes the recent pandemic of COVID 19 the subject of his article. Referring to a long tradition of governments that tried to gain total control over the body, will and life of their citizens, the researcher argues that this crisis marked the peak of an age characterized by concepts such as biopolitics and biopower, leading up eventually to the formation of a global transhumanist civilization. In a slightly similar manner, Ionel Bușe’s text contrasts two visions about humanity’s relation to the afterlife: the transcendentalist idea of immortality, present in numerous myths or utopias about the Terrestrial Paradise, and today’s transhumanist biotechnological revolution, considered in both its utopian and dystopian implications as product of the (post)modern immanentist scientific and positivist view.
As elements of utopian/dystopian social and political imaginaries are often portrayed in movies too, Barbara Klonowska selects Emanuele Crialese’s Golden Door (2006) for the way in which its subject (Europeans immigrating to America at the turn of the 20th century) contrasts the diverse utopian projections of the ones searching for a better life there with the dystopian realities of the country. As it has historically been the case with the American Dream, the discrepancy between the New World’s imagined and real truth testifies for the essential role of the imaginary in the construction and functioning of a space.
In the next paper, Francisco José Martínez Mesa chooses to interpret a series of recent dystopias from an angle which emphasizes the similarity of their subject to the mythical, universal themes that have characterised social and political states of fear since the beginning of times. Nowadays the fear of the future seems to be defined by its immobilising condition which no longer encourages intervention, but it still gets problematised through timeless ideas such as the destructive intruder, the confrontation between the old and the new or the individual’s search for identity and meaning inside a labyrinth.
The following two articles bring forth examples of experimental utopian communities, real-life attempts to create spaces where the current state of things no longer clashes with the characteristics of an ideal society, but actually reflects them. The first one, the New Babylon urban utopia of the Situationists, sought to create opportunities that would reshape reality from within, its residents being also the architects of this new city-labyrinth. The New Babylon project is here presented by Hande Tunç with the purpose of revealing the diversity of new living possibilities produced by spaces which are shaped through their users’ imagination. The second text represents Michel Macedo Marques’s detailed description of the Brazilian Community of Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto’s history, endeavour and unfortunate destiny. In this case, the experimental community was mainly a peasant, agricultural one with a religious leader and cooperativism, self-sufficiency and primitive Christianity as their core values, which were eventually perceived as a communist threat by Brazil’s republican authorities and destroyed as a result.
The last study in this section follows the ways in which representative American movies from 2012-2015 portrayed and responded to its social, economic and political problems. Daniel Koechlin links the 2011 Occupy Wall Street Movement with some dystopian films made in the following few years, movies whose theme of class-war shed a new perspective on how individuals were personally affected by the recession, inequality and financial crises haunting their progressive capitalist society.
The second section marks the transition of the critical discourse towards the very rich category of utopian and dystopian literary imaginaries. With a theoretical approach that centres on Hegel’s Comic Consciousness, Andrew Bridges’s paper puts it next to B. F. Skinner’s portrayal of a fictional behavioural scientist – as it appears in Walden Two (1945). The study examines both the similarities and the differences between these two forms of self-consciousness and how they give shape to ideas such as freedom and value, as well as Skinner’s belief that a utopian community can be constructed on the basis of an effectively implemented science of behaviour.
Carmen Borbély takes us back to the 17th century by focusing on an example of early modern utopia, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666), a book that stands out among the others of its kind due to how it subverts the formal conventions of both utopia and the rest of the genres associated with the female imagination in that period. As a result, the article puts the novel in relation to the anarchetypal works’ lack of internal organisation, but it also ties it to the novelistic experiments that preceded the realist, strictly structured works of the 19th century.
Resulting from the collaboration of José Eduardo Reis and Chris Gerry, the next article investigates some utopian and dystopian aspects of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1920), Yevgeny Zamiatin’s We (1924) and the ideas of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Alberto Caeiro. The study connects all three literary examples through the conflicting nature of modernism, a movement filled with crises that affected both one’s identity or means of self-representation and the larger political and social scene, altered just as much by war and destruction.
The section then shifts its attention to postmodernity, as Maria Barbu’s text follows again the theoretical concept of the anarchetype, but this time in Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptical novel The Road (2006). Focusing on the (lack of) structure that a journey across America acquires in such conditions, her study reaches the conclusion that the narrative episodes, no longer bearing a signification that needs to be deciphered chronologically, reflect the de-centred vision of the postmodern subject and thus its anarchetypal way of travelling and of living as well.
J. M. Coetzee’s trilogy about The Childhood (2013), The Schooldays (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019) is also addressed in the present volume, despite the numerous critical perspectives which don’t consider it related to the utopian/dystopian literary genre. Georgiana Tudor’s study underlines the trilogy’s similarity to the meta-utopic characteristics of Russia’s ’70s – ’80s novels by pointing out relevant connections between Coetzee’s works, his life during apartheid censorship, his fondness of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s texts and the conditions in which Nicholas II’s reign and the Soviet regime allowed Russian literature to be produced.
The next two articles take into account fictional dystopias that focus mainly on gender issues, specifically on women’s rights and roles in the society they inhabit. On the one hand, Elizabeth Russell looks at the relationship between women and war in a number of relevant works selected from the 19th century until present day: starting from John Ruskin’s ideal definitions of man and woman, she looks at novels by Mary Shelley, Charlotte Haldane, Montserrat Julió and Christa Wolf in order to portray women’s essential yet often ignored connection to what is considered a manly activity par excellence. On the other hand, Hassan Nassour analyses Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks (2018) through a feminist discourse that emphasises the prophetic nature of such dystopias: the novel depicts an oppressive society where the female body is colonized by patriarchal laws that make abortions illegal, thus creating a medium of political anxiety in which the four main female characters try to maintain their autonomy.
Lastly, Elisabeta Di Minico enriches this section with an analysis that could be situated on the border between literary and mediatic utopias/dystopias. Her paper looks at the ways in which superhero comics reflect the prejudices, hopes and fears of their times, as their depiction of otherness – be it in the form of hypersexualized or abused women, mutants, aliens or other monstruous characters – often depicts society’s racism, injustice, discrimination and violence towards its ethnic, sexual or racial minorities.
The third section of the journal is dedicated to the utopic and dystopic imaginaries of the Central and East-European space. Firstly, Kenneth Hanshew brings into the attention of non-Czech speakers two untranslated dystopias from this cultural space, Čestmír Vejdělek’s Return from Paradise (1961) and Jiří Marek’s The Blessed Age (1967). Both of these novels foretell aspects of what we are getting closer to experience nowadays in terms of artificial intelligence’s impact on humanity, while also highlighting the thin line separating utopia and dystopia when it comes to apparently perfect futures ruled by technology.
Moving eastwards, Mariano Martín Rodríguez comments upon a very thought-provoking piece of speculative fiction written on Romanian ground, namely upon Ion Talpă’s Through the Smoke Rings (1937). With gender role reversal and the projection of a feminist future – where women rule over men – as its central themes, the book is here subject to an examination that explores the internal rules of such a world, while also highlighting how the reader’s subjectivity towards these matters becomes the element which labels the text as utopia or dystopia. Within the same literary space, but with a perspective that highlights the image of Romania’s totalitarian period in literature, Ruxandra Cesereanu discusses three dystopian novels written during and about the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, but officially published only after its fall: A. E. Baconsky’s The Black Church (1990), Bujor Nedelcovici’s The Second Messenger (1991) and Ion D. Sîrbu’s Farewell, Europe! (1992-1993). Her analysis explores how these texts depict allegorically the relation between the oppressors (the secret police) and their victims, the former being portrayed in an occult light due to the manipulation and brainwashing they enforced upon the population.
This section is concluded with the contributions of Boris Lanin and Constantin Tonu, both of whom discuss the Slavic space’s relationship with utopia and dystopia. On the one hand, the former looks at a series of Russian post-communist dystopias from both a literary and a political point of view, linking Russia’s recent state of affairs with how the concept of the “state of exception” is both foreseen in these books and present there today. On the other hand, the latter writes an extensive survey of the Pan-Slavic movements’ utopic character: he starts from the middle of the 17th century with Juraj Križanić’s desire to unite the Slavic Christian world and goes all the way to the second half of the 20th century, when Nikolay Danilevsky advanced his creed that the historical necessity will have the young and powerful Slavdom replace the European civilization, already deep into its degradation and decline.
And finally, as another sub-section of the vast category of literary imaginaries, the last part of the volume consists in contributions that highlight the various connections between utopia/dystopia and the genre of science fiction. Corin Braga’s paper about how SF and utopian extraordinary journeys are presented in two ancient Greek novels (Antonius Diogenes’ Wonders Beyond Thulé and Lucian’s True Histories) opens the section, while also making one last mention of the anarchetype concept. Here it is used to praise the innovation proposed by the books in both content and form: they bring such scenarios in literature long before the Renaissance peak of classical utopian form, but they also reflect a freedom of invention that ignores the Aristotelian principles of structure and thus creates random sequences of narrative episodes that fit the anarchetypal definition.
The subject of the next article is a science fiction classic, namely Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Mauro Pala’s critical discourse revisits the novel – as well as its adaptation in film, Blade Runner (1982) – and connects them with the way in which Roberto Esposito understands biopolitics. Consequently, the paper links the fact that power revolves nowadays around body politics with Dick’s ominous foreshadowing of society’s posthuman transformation, present in the analysed novel long before the theorization of posthumanism as a concept towards the end of the 20th century.
Furthermore, the intersections between society, utopia, science fiction and their variations (especially during the 20th century) are also explored in Iren Boyarkina’s study about Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon. The book has been historically situated at the intersection of multiple genres and has thus borrowed characteristics from all of them, a fact that gives complexity to how Stapledon fictionalizes the scientifical discoveries of his time while also revealing and satirising the vices of his contemporaries.
Yet another different perspective within the field of utopian literary imaginaries is proposed by Alexander Popov, who looks at key texts from Robert Shea, Robert Wilson, Philip K. Dick and Thomas Pynchon in order to define and delve into the two rhizomatically connected subgenres of utopian and paranoid SF to which these books belong. His punctual analysis of the selected fictional works is strengthened by a theoretical viewpoint as well, one that examines the similar conditions which determined the evolution of these SF categories in relation to concepts such as time, space and subjectivity.
Finally, a type of utopia which discusses the nonhuman well before the emergence of the nonhuman turn in humanities is considered in Ljubjica Matek’s paper, focused on J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962). With an ecological view that digs into the implications of a postapocalyptic future caused by global warming, the study actually invites us to see things from the reversed perspective as well: the characters are described as passively adapting to the circumstances of the new world instead of trying to change them, whereby this future is paradoxically perceived as a primordial utopia precisely because there will no longer be humans to inhabit it.
The 46th issue of Echinox Journal has thus gathered contributions from multiple research areas where the concept of the imaginary occupies a central place (social, political, literary and mediatic studies). As may be seen throughout the volume, each paper comes with a unique perspective upon the matter at hand, creating a network of significations which proves, time and again, the continuously developing complexity of the imagining function of the psyche.
Notes
1. Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, L’imaginaire, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 2003.
2. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham, Duke University Press, 2004, p. 23.
3. Raymond Ruyer, L’utopie et les utopies, Saint-Pierre-de-Salerne, Gérard Monfort, 1988.
4. See Corin Braga, Du Paradis perdu à l’antiutopie aux XVIe-XVIIIe siècles, Paris, Garnier, 2010.
5. See Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998.
6. Efraim Sicher, Natalia Skaradol, „A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11″, in Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 4, no. 1, January 2006, p. 151-179
University of Bologna, Italy
vita.fortunati@unibo.it
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.01
Literary Utopias: My Personal Journey
Abstract: In my paper I point out that the study of literary utopias has been and still is a constant focus on my scientific research. It has accompanied me in different historical and political contexts, helping in analysing and interpreting their complexity. The metaphor I use is that of Utopia as a tree with deep roots from which many branches spread out. In my first book on this topic, I suggested that Utopia could be considered on the whole as a literary genre, characterized by a continuous metamorphosis over time and space. Within such a theoretical framework, I addressed how a variety of utopian main themes, i.e. the journey, the island, and the dream, have been treated in pillars of utopian English literature. Eventually, what fascinated me is that Utopia allowed and still allows me to look at major problems and questions of my contemporary time taking a “lateral” perspective and envisaging new, usually unexpected, political horizons.
Keywords: Literary Utopias; Utopian Structure; Symbolic Imaginaries; Island; Voyage; Dream; Contemporary Utopian Tensions.
Utopian/Dystopian Social and Political Imaginaries
University of Gdańsk, Gdańsk, Poland
artur.blaim@ug.edu.pl
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.02
Nebulous Utopias. From “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer” to “China Dream” The Use of Catchwords and Slogans in Constructing Imaginary Utopian/Dystopian Communities
Abstract: The paper offers a preliminary study of a phenomenon that could be termed nebulous utopia, an attempt to project an image of the ideal state based on the use of catchwords and slogans. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, their extensive use, originally limited mainly to totalitarian states and war propaganda, has become the dominant rhetorical device employed by a wide range of both left-wing and right-wing populist movements aimed at winning popular support by appealing to a set of vaguely defined general values and objectives.
Keywords: Utopia; Dystopia; Totalitarian States; Political Slogans and Catchwords; The Third Reich; China Dream; Brexit.
Jean-Jacques Wunenburger
Université Jean Moulin, Lyon 3, France
jean-jacques.wunenburger@wanadoo.fr
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.03
Santé publique, biopouvoir, gestion sanitaire des populations
Public Heath, Biopower, Sanitary Care of the Population
Abstract: Since Antiquity, starting with Plato’s proposition for an ideal state, a series of philosophers, political thinkers and policy-makers have fostered a model of the State in which the government is able to control both the will and the bodies of the citizens. This project, as Michel Foucault has shown, has been endorsed and developed in modern times. Contemporary governments have sought a way of organising the complete control of life: from birth to death, throughout one’s lifetime. This is how politics have evolved into “Biopolitics” and “Biopower”. With the recent pandemic of COViD 19, this tendency has reached its peak, leading to the emergence of a global transhumanist civilization.
Keywords: Public Heath; Population Control; Biopower; Transhumanism; Covid.Ionel Bușe
Université de Craiova, Craiova, Roumanie
ionelbuse@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.04
Du mythe de l’immortalité à l’utopie/dystopie transhumaniste
From the Myth of Immortality to the Transhumanist Utopia/Dystopia
Abstract: In the wake of the 20th century French School of imagination studies, my paper wants to highlight the significant differences between two visions about humanity: a traditional transcendentalist vision of immortality, created by a long historical and cultural process of self-poiesis, and an immanentist scientific ideological vision, represented by the humanism of the modern era. In postmodern times, this positivist view prolongs itself in the “transhumanist revolution”, a by-product of the ideological myth of progress.
Keywords: Immortality; Myth; Utopia; Postmodernity; Transhumanist Revolution.
Barbara Klonowska
The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland
barbara.klonowska@kul.pl
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.05
New World, Old Hope: Utopian Imaginaries in Golden Door by Emanuele Crialese
Abstract: Golden Door (Nuovomondo), a 2006 film by Emanuele Crialese, tells the story of Europeans immigrating to America at the turn of the twentieth century. Representing various characters travelling there driven by diverse motivations, the film showcases different versions of a utopian imaginary vision of America. The article analyses the various ways in which the American ‘promised land’ is conceptualized in the film and how all of them are contrasted with and checked by the realities of the voyage and the Ellis Island reception centre. Referring to the concept of the imaginary, the analysis discusses mechanisms and functions of their production and their subsequent verification and contrast with the rather dystopian realities of the host country.
Keywords: Imaginary; Utopia; Dystopia; Heterotopias; Immigration; Promised Land.
Francisco José Martínez Mesa
Grupo HISTOPIA / Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain
frjmarti@ucm.es
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.06
The Role of Mythical Dystopias in the Age of Fear
Abstract: The general state of anxiety and anguish that currently prevails in contemporary societies is a breeding ground for all kinds of proposals – such as dystopias – that seek to unravel, question, or simply make sense of the increasingly incomprehensible and indecipherable world in which humanity feels confined. Of all of them, it is probably those who, like the ancient myths of antiquity, use novels and stories to exorcise and conjure up their ghosts, reflecting on and symbolically expressing all that shocks and frightens them as individuals and as members of a society, that contribute most to reappropriating and coming to terms with their fears. This article proposes an in-depth analysis of a type of dystopia that could be described as mythical and whose extremely overwhelming presence in the contemporary political and cultural landscape is clearly indicative of the prevailing climate of fear and mistrust in our societies.
Keywords: Dystopia; Myth; Narrative; Modernity; Fear; Late Capitalism.
Hande Tunç
Özyeğin University, İstanbul, Turkey
hhandetunc@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.07
Imaginary Possibilities of New Babylon
Abstract: One of the best examples of experimental utopianism is the New Babylon urban utopia of the Situationists, which bases its existence on the creation of opportunities to “transform reality” and “shape the urban environment”. New Babylon, which is depicted as an unlimited labyrinth with its defined new social model and the new individual (homo ludens) who will become both a resident and an architect of the new city, gains visibility with its neutral structure and interchangeable interiors with technological systems. This study tries to reveal the diversity of new living possibilities produced by the spaces designed with users’ imaginations, on the axis of the New Babylon project, through the concepts of utopia, space, and representation.
Keywords: Urban Utopia; Layers of Possibilities; Urban Environments; The Imagination of the User; New Babylon.
Michel Macedo Marques
Universidade do Porto, Portugal
Universidade Regional do Cariri, Brasil
michel.macedo@urca.br
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.08
Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto (1926-1936): Utopia in Northeast of Brazil
Abstract: José Lourenço was a religious leader who, in the interior of the State of Ceará, Brazil, organized intentional communities, formed by peasants, who practiced cooperativism based on primitive Christianity along the lines of the Jesuit missions. The Community of Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto, in particular, was home to around 2 thousand people who produced their own food, clothes, tools, among other things, and shared everything according to each person’s needs. The community was attacked and destroyed under the accusation of being communists and representing a danger to the Republic recently installed in Brazil.
Keywords: Intentional Communities; Utopia; Caldeirão da Santa Cruz do Deserto; Beato José Lourenço; Primitive Christianity; Cariri.
Daniel Koechlin
Sorbonne Université, France
Le Mans Université, France
daniel.koechlin@univ-lemans.fr
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.09
“This Time We Take the Engine!”: Class War in Dystopian Films of the Occupy Era
Abstract: In the wake of the Occupy movement, a group of dystopian films were released that, despite many differences, share a unique series of characteristics. In the Hunger Games trilogy, Elysium and Snowpiercer, class war emerges as the main theme. The 99% are physically shut out from the world of the 1% by impressive barriers which must be destroyed through bloody struggle. The paper uses a critical approach, mainly Jamesonian, to examine historical, political, psychological and interpretative issues in this constellation of occupy-era films, and how they testify to the huge impact on the American psyche of the 2007 financial crisis and ensuing long depression, and the feeling of frustration that fostered Occupy. Of particular interest is the way in which these critical dystopias deal with the ideologeme of “ressentiment” while depicting the breaching of the residences of the elite by the pleb.
Keywords: Dystopian Films; Class Conflict; Science Fiction; Hunger Games; Elysium; Snowpiercer; Karl Marx; Fredric Jameson; Occupy; Great Recession
Utopian/Dystopian Literary Imaginaries
Andrew Lee Bridges
California State University, United States
abridges@fullerton.edu
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.10
Utopian Freedom and Value Portrayed in Hegel’s Comic Consciousness and Fictional Behaviorism
Abstract: In this paper I explore the conceptual relatability of Hegel’s description of the Comic Consciousness found in the chapter on “Religion” in his Phenomenology of Spirit to Skinner’s portrayal of a behavioral scientist being tantamount to God, particularly in the fictional behavioral scientist’s ability to create freedom and value in Walden Two. I examine how the Self-Consciousness of the fictional behavioral scientist and the self-consciousness of the Comic Consciousness appear to embody a form of freedom that is able to transcend and create the values of their respective communities. I suggest similarities between these two shapes of self-consciousness and forms of freedom, as well as the disparities between them, express difficulties for understanding freedom and value in the conceptual context of both the idea of utopia and the “death of God.”
Keywords: Hegel’s Comic Consciousness; Fictional Behaviorism; Walden Two; Utopia; Freedom.
Carmen Borbély
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.11
The Extravagance of Form in Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World
Abstract: With its inquiry into the conditions and possibilities of female authorship, Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World (1666) tends to be read as a gendered variation on, or a parodic departure from, the Baconian prototype of the early modern politico-scientific utopia. At the same time, the text’s dialogism, formal heterogeneity and self-reflexivity have spurred theoretical claims surrounding utopia as one of the formal precedents sedimented into the bedrock of novelistic fiction. This study takes up some of these arguments and ponders the possibility of exploring Cavendish’s work as an early instancing of the anarchetypal decentredness of novelistic form.
Keywords: Margaret Cavendish; Utopia; Novel as Theory; Anarchetype; Form.
José Eduardo Reis
Chris Gerry
Universidade do Porto, Portugal
jereis@utad.pt
cgerry@utad.pt
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.12
The Crisis of the Mind in the Modern Age and Its Poetic Consequences.
Examples from Texts by Joyce, Zamiatin and Pessoa
Abstract: This paper interrogates some of the utopian and dystopian characteristics found in three key modernist texts by Joyce, Zamyatin and Pessoa, the literary effects of which have been strongly influenced by the crisis of narrative self-representation and the allegorical demythification of totalitarian social and political experiments. Two distinct perspectives are deployed in order to achieve this: Paul Valéry’s dystopian cultural-philosophical reflections on the intellectual crisis of Western civilisation as presented in his 1919 essay “The Crisis of the Mind”; and Frank Kermode’s essay on the contradictory nature of modernism, “The Modern”, published in 1965–1966.
Keywords: Modernism; Crisis; Paul Valéry; James Joyce; Yevgeny Zamiatin; Fernando Pessoa.
Maria Barbu
Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania
mariabarbu1998@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.13
Anarchetypal Journeys in Post-apocalyptic Narratives.
The Implacable Darkness of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
Abstract: Cormac McCarthy is well-known within the literary world for his rather bleak writing, and The Road (2006) is without doubt one of the novels that exemplifies this characteristic the most. In an attempt to join the already extensive critical literature on McCarthy from an original perspective, the purpose of this paper is to examine The Road by combining the analysis of the post-apocalyptic narrative’s elements with a focus on the characters’ journey itself. To this end, my approach would bring into discussion Corin Braga’s concept of the “anarchetype”, the opposite term for the archetype understood in a cultural sense, namely as a recurring model or an artistic constant. I argue that this concept, representative for the vision of the decentred postmodern subject, structures McCarthy’s novel through the way in which it builds the plot out of episodes that succeed one another in an unpredictable way.
Keywords: Cormac McCarthy; Anarchetypal Journey; Post-apocalyptic Narratives; Anarchetype.
Georgiana Tudor
Babeș-Bolyai University, Romania
georgianatudor.art@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.14
J.M. Coetzee’s Jesus Trilogy as Meta-Utopia
Abstract: The present article argues that J.M. Coetzee’s fictions The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016) and The Death of Jesus (2019) have a typical form of meta-utopia in the context of Coetzee’s living during apartheid censorship and his affinity for the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and for the radical conditions in which the Russian literature was written during the Soviet regime and Nicholas II’s reign. Furthermore, the article uses the morphology of the utopian genre identified by Corin Braga as a method of analysis to underline the complexity of a meta-utopian structure where eutopia, dystopia, outopia and antiutopia are present in the same narrative world.
Keywords: J.M. Coetzee; Jesus Trilogy; Morphology of the Utopian Genre; Meta-Utopia; Edith Clowes; Corin Braga.
Elizabeth Russell
Universitat Rovira I Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
Liz.russell@urv.cat
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.15
War Zones and Dystopian Imaginaries
Abstract: The media today is full of violence and death, in films, world news, and in comic books. Not many citizens want their countries to go to war, but leaders and politicians spend vast amounts of money to increase the militarization of their country. The argument being to “prevent war”. The separation of women and children from the men in their families. Deaths and destruction. How can we understand “the reality surrounding us, the way we interact with it, and transform it.” This paper will discuss the relationship between women and war, based on various utopian and dystopian fictions, from Ruskin to today.
Keywords: Imagination; Women; War; Birthrates.
Hasan Nassour
Shoolini University, Himachal Pradesh, India
hasannassour7@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.16
Abortion-Related Anxieties and Colonizing the Female Body in Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks
Abstract: The essay explores the rising popularity of feminist dystopian fiction in literary studies, focusing on Leni Zumas’ novel Red Clocks. It investigates how political anxieties are depicted through the interior monologues of four main female characters, highlighting the colonization of the female body as they grapple with unwanted pregnancies and resort to illegal means for abortions. The study suggests that feminist dystopian fiction, exemplified by Red Clocks, can be prophetic, anticipating issues such as abortion rights restrictions in the United States. The paper underscores the genre’s role in raising awareness among women, depicting a world where men dictate how women should manage their bodies.
Keywords: Feminist Dystopia; Reproductive Rights; Patriarchy; Abortion; Anxieties.
Elisabetta Di Minico
Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
elidimin@ucm.es
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.17
The Ages of Otherness: How Superhero Comics Reflect on Systemic Injustice and Racial and Gender Representation
Abstract: Presenting complex worlds where literary narrative, “visual experience”, and “esthetic perception” perfectly mix, comics, especially superhero comics, are an original, compelling, and useful medium for an analysis on otherness and intersectional feminism. Studying the Ages of Comics, the article will underline the evolution of the medium and the fictional and historical fears, prejudices, hopes, and claims of its stories, also revealing the utopian and dystopian grounds of these realities. Behind tight-fitting suits, masks, and superpowers (or super-technology), comics often hide serious, compelling, urgent themes, such as, just to name a few, identity, discrimination, violence, segregation, migration, injustice, racism, misogyny, homophobia, illness, ecology, urbanization, materialism, and many more
Keywords: Otherness; Embodiment; Comics History; Systemic Racism; Intersectional Feminism.
Central and East-European Utopias/Dystopias
Kenneth Hanshew
University of Regensburg, Germany
krhanshew@yahoo.de
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.18
The Negative and the Positive in Dystopia:
Return from Paradise and The Blessed Age
Abstract: This paper strives to illuminate the forebodings of AI and automatization’s impact on society in two neglected Czech treasures unavailable in English, Čestmír Vejdělek’s Návrat z ráje [Return from Paradise] (1961) and Jiří Marek’s Blažený Věk [The Blessed Age] (1967). The study aims to illustrate science fiction’s prescience and part of Czech SF’s path after Čapek, while challenging the notion that “the utopian society is a subject, perhaps even the only subject that is inaccessible to literature” (Hans Magnus Enzensberger). For these dystopian texts engage readers to imagine the positive alternative to the portrayed societies, rather than explicitly evoking eutopia.
Keywords: Czech literature; Dystopia; Utopia; Science Fiction.
Mariano Martín Rodríguez
Independent researcher, Brussels, Belgium
martioa@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.19
When (Lesbian) Women Will Rule Over Men:
Visions of Future Gynecocracy in a Novel from Interwar Roman
Abstract: The growing assertiveness of the ‘New Woman’ inspired a number of speculative fictions on what the future would look like if women ruled over men. Future gynecocracy was also imagined in Romania in the interwar years. For example, Ion Talpă rewrote in his 1937 novel Prin rotogoalele de fum (Through Smoke Rings) the Hebrew story of humankind’s fall in order to narrate through myth how women will prevail over brutish men. The resulting order is based on all-female sociality, including sexual matters. Women treat degraded men as animals in the all-woman society of Talpă’s ambiguously dystopian narrative, which features lesbian sexuality as a matter of course. This work is innovative for its use of Modernist metafictional devices in order to suggest how subjectivity determines the alternate eutopian or dystopian possible endings of the novel, thus undermining its apparently masculinist message.
Keywords: Gynecocracy; Role Reversal; Lesbian Fiction; Masculinism; Utopian Fiction; Ion Talpă; Prin rotogoalele de fum.
Ruxandra Cesereanu
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ruxces@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.20
Dystopias and Allegories about Communist Romania
Abstract: This study outlines a typology of dystopias and narrative allegories about Communist Romania, discussing three famous novels: The Black Church by A. E. Baconsky, The Second Messenger by Bujor Nedelcovici, and Farewell, Europe! by Ion D. Sîrbu. The three novels were prohibited from being published during the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu and became drawer manuscripts, seeing the light of print only after the fall of Communism, in 1990, 1991, and 1992-1993. Baconsky’s novel circulated in samizdat (between 1976-1977) and was made into a series by the Munich-based Radio Free Europe, which broadcast clandestinely inside Romania. Nedelcovici’s novel was translated into French in 1985, and was very successful. In Romanian literature, Ion D. Sîrbu’s novel is considered the most important “drawer” work. All three novels, as dystopias, allegories and parables, focus on three recurrent topics: the world of oppressors, the world of victims and the method of brainwashing.
Keywords: Romania; Narrative; Fiction; Dystopia; Allegory; Communism; Securitate; Victim; Brainwashing; Katabasis; A. E. Baconsky; Bujor Nedelcovici; Ion D. Sîrbu.
Boris Lanin
Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
borial2003@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.21
Some New Terms in Dystopian Studies
Abstract: This article brings two terms of political sciences, “state of exception” and “clash of civilizations” to dystopian studies. These terms help us to understand the hybrid nature of the dystopian genre. Almost in every Russian postcommunist dystopia we meet various kinds of state of exception. The concept of “clash of civilizations” convincingly describes many aspects of Slavic-Muslim dialogue in Russian dystopia. Russian military invasion of Ukraine had been predicted in dystopian novels the decades before it happened. The prophetic nature of the dystopian genre dictates the necessity of new analytical tools.
Keywords: State of Exception; Clash of Civilizations; Slavic-Muslim Dialog; Dystopia; A Torn Country; A Cleft Country; Orwellian Principles.
Constantin Tonu
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
costeaunot@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.22
The Pan-Slavic Utopian Imaginary
Abstract: Strongly influenced by European Romanticism, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the German unification movement and German idealist philosophers, the Pan-Slavic movement (which took shape between 1830 and 1840) had an idealistic, utopian character from the very beginning. The aim of this paper is to analyse the utopian imaginary of the main Pan-Slavic projects, starting with the precursor of the Slavic idea, Juraj Križanić, then moving on to Herder’s image of the archetypal Slav, Ján Kollár’s plea for Slavic cultural reciprocity, Mikhail Bakunin’s proposal to transform the Slavic cause into a revolutionary, anarchic force, Mikhail Pogodin’s active campaign for the realisation of Russia’s full potential through union with the Balkan and Austrian Slavs, the Russian Pan-Slavism advocated by the Slovak Ľudovít Štúr, and ending with the pseudo-scientific perspective on Slavism of Nikolay Danilevsky.
Keywords: Pan-Slavism; Utopian Imaginary; Pan-Slavic Projects; Slavophilia; Slavic Reciprocity; All-Slavic Union; Slavdom.
Utopia/Dystopia and Science Fiction
Corin Braga
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
corinbraga@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.23
Voyages utopiques et SF dans deux romans grecs antiques
Utopian and SF voyages in two ancient Greek novels Abstract: The Renaissance genre of utopia has its forerunners in the extraordinary voyages of the Roman Empire’s literature. Two of these adventure novels, Wonders beyond Thulé by Antonius Diogenes and True Histories by Lucian, from the 2nd century CE, stage different places with utopian characteristics (Hyperborea, Pythagora’s and Zamolxis’ communities, the Island of the Blessed, the Island of Dreams) or early SF traits (the Moon, the Sun, several aerial cities). Nourished by the rich imaginary of the ancient paradoxographia (historical, geographical and literary texts about the mirabilia of the East), these texts display a tremendous freedom of invention. Intended to copy or parody previous writings, in order to entertain and please their readership, they ignore all Aristotelian precepts of structure or the need for a global unified meaning, and develop random narrative scenarios, which I would characterize as “anarchetypal”.
Keywords: Ancient Greek Novel; Antonius Diogenes; Lucian; Extraordinary Voyage; Ancient Utopias; Voyage to the Moon; Anarchetype.
Mauro Pala
Università degli Studi di Cagliari, Italy
mauropala61@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.
Dystopia Revisited:
Biopolitics as Remedy and Response to Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Abstract: Philip K. Dick’s science fiction classic Do Androids Dream of Electrics Sheep? and its adaptation movie Blade Runner by Ridley Scott feature a devastated earth where bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalks authentic human replicants, designed for a short term highly flexible labor power. A group of these androids infiltrate to the earth of the productive apparatus which manufactured them, trying to persuade their maker to re-program their genetic makeup. Biopolitics as conceived by Roberto Esposito is apt at exploiting the reserves of sense present in Dick’s critical scenario, and managing the mixing of languages of politics and biology, which originally were kept apart in the dystopic dimension of the novel and in the political philosophy tradition. Discarding the frontal approach to the categories of politics, Esposito urges to interrogate the categories of politics obliquely, thus entering the hidden layers of their meaning, fostering an innovative coexistence of opposites.
Keywords: Philip K. Dick; Ridley Scott; Posthumanism; Biopolitics; Android; Empathy; Immunity.
Iren Boyarkina
University of Roma La Sapienza, Italy
iren.boyarkina@uniroma1.it
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.25
Utopias and Dystopias in Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon
Abstract: This paper aims at analyzing utopias and dystopias in Last and First Men (1930) by William Olaf Stapledon. Taking into consideration that this narrative was already defined as a scientific romance and an anatomy with allegorical status, as well as McCarthy’s observation that Stapledon’s writing resists simple categorization and that its classification as science fiction or utopian literature is inadequate, this paper suggests several definitions for Stapledon’s work. The author also takes into account the ongoing dispute between utopian studies and science fiction scholars about the strong interaction between utopia and science fiction in the twentieth century. The possibilities of applying the conceptual integration theory to such a complex work of fiction as Last and First Men is explored.
Keywords: Utopia; Dystopia; William Olaf Stapledon; Conceptual Integration Theory; Blending; Parable; Science Fiction.
Alexander Popov
Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria
alx.popov23@gmail.com
Paranoid Imaginaries and Megatextual Utopianism
Abstract: The article explores the hypothesis that Utopian and Paranoid SF, both of which produced some of their most influential texts in the 1970s, co-evolved under structurally similar pressures and developed analogous conceptual instruments to engage with the question of totality. It proposes a theoretical model that situates the two subgenres in a network of conceptual positions regarding fundamental categories such as space, time and subjectivity. The model is then applied in readings of key novels of Paranoid SF: Robert Shea and Robert Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy, Philip Dick’s Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and VALIS, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.
Keywords: Paranoia; Utopian Studies; Meganovel; Megatext; Philip K. Dick; Thomas Pynchon.
Ljubica Matek
University of Osijek, Croatia
lmatek@ffos.hr
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.27
J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World: A Nonhuman Utopia
Abstract: The paper explores J. G. Ballard’s visionary 1962 novel The Drowned World as an example of a nonhuman utopia. Although written well before the conceptualization of the notion of the nonhuman turn, the novel embodies the philosophical ideas of such a turn as it challenges anthropocentric hierarchy and represents humans as disempowered and reactive, rather than proactive beings. The Drowned World imagines a world regressing into a prehistoric, pre-human state due to the Sun’s extreme activity and radical warming in a process of entropy, as all human scientific and architectural achievements collapse in the face of the merciless sun and the advancing ocean. The urban space is turned into lagoons that resemble heterotopias, a space that accommodates the transitional phase in the process of imminent human extinction, which, paradoxically, is met with relief and embraced as utopian by the novel’s protagonist.
Keywords: J. G. Ballard; The Drowned World; The Nonhuman Turn; Heterotopia; Entropy.
Library Survey
Paul Mihai Paraschiv
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
paul.mihai97@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.28
NARRATING THE INFINITE: MODERNISM’S RESISTANCE TO TEMPORAL CLOSURE
Carmen Borbély, Erika Mihálycsa, Petronia Petrar (eds.), Temporalities of Modernism, Milano, Ledizioni, 2022
Georgiana Tudor
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
georgianatudor.art@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.29
UTOPIAN SUSTAINABILITY FOR CLIMATE CATASTROPHE DEPRESSION
Gregory Claeys, Utopianism for a Dying Planet. Life after Consumerism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2022
Constantin Tonu
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
costeaunot@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.31
A SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO CONTEMPORARY PAN-SLAVISM
Mikhail Suslov, Marek Čejka, Vladimir Ðorđević (eds.), Pan-Slavism and Slavophilia in Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe: Origins, Manifestations and Functions, Palgrave Macmillan, Springer International Publishing, 2023
Anca Pașca-Saturn
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
pasca.anca01@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2024.46.30
BALKANISM, FROM COLONIZING DISCOURSE TO AESTHETIC VALUE
Mircea Muthu, Balcanismul literar românesc. Panoramic sud-est european. Confluențe culturale, Cluj-Napoca, Școala Ardeleană, 2017
Book Reviews
2023 volume 45 – Diasporic Voices / Different Voices: Resonance, Silence, and Performance
Editors: Laura T. Ilea, Mohamed Baya, Isabelle Galichon
Editor: Phantasma. The Center for Imagination Studies
Publisher: Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România
ISBN 1582-960X (România)
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45
Laura T. Ilea, Mohamed Baya, Isabelle Galichon
Introduction
This volume compiles texts from two international conferences: “Diasporic Voices: Tears, Silences, Laughter” and “In a Different Voice: Resonances, Silences, Counterpoints, and Performances.” Held in Cluj-Napoca on April 14, 2022, the former was a collaboration between the Phantasma Centre for Imagination Studies, the Centre for African Studies, and the Centre for Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean Studies at the University Babeş-Bolyai, Romania. The main objective of this conference was to explore the notion of diaspora through the prism of literary studies and political science while emphasizing the intertwining of tragedy and comedy. Held in Montreal from October 5 through 7, 2022, the latter (“In a Different Voice”) was an experimental workshop between Département de littérature française, Département de littérature et langues du monde, Université de Montréal, the Phantasma Centre for Imagination Studies at the University Babeş-Bolyai, and Unité Plurielles, Université Bordeaux Montaigne.
As coordinators of this volume, we emphasize the striking connections between the two conferences since both explored deviances, experiments, suppressed words, and, above all, silences and performances.
The conference Diasporic Voices: Tears, Silences, Laughter laid the foundation for this compilation by exploring the interplay of the tragic and the comic within the diaspora, with scholars from diverse backgrounds converging to examine the subtleties of diasporic cultural production. Throughout discussions, questions of time and place, and the intersections of reception with belonging and displacement emerged as central areas of exploration, emphasizing the emotional depths found in diasporic artistic expression.
One significant insight was the uncovering of a wide range of perspectives that showed how similarities and differences, repetitions, and adaptations are intertwined, emphasizing the roles of both uniformity and diversity, as well as originality and uniqueness. Primarily concerned with an inquiry into the tragic and the comic, the conference unveiled new understandings of literary works that shed light on the diverse experiences within the diaspora, directing attention to three core aspects: the presence of tears, moments of silence, and bursts of laughter.
Through the application of a diasporic framework to recent and classic works alike, the presentations provided unexpected interpretations that challenged conventional readings. Discussions revolved around the processes of evaluating cultural production within the diasporic context, questioning identity discourses and acknowledging the intricate and ever-evolving facets, as well as the fluidity of diaspora. Covering a diverse range of human emotions, these conversations enriched and broadened the examination of diasporic cultural production and served as a reminder of the ongoing significance of diaspora studies.
By examining well-known texts through a diasporic lens and engaging with lesser-known literature, the conference encouraged a revaluation of criteria used to assess artistic production within the diasporic context. This highlighted the distinctiveness of the notions of place and nostalgia, as well as the frequently overlooked importance of the interplay between light-heartedness and gravitas.
An opportunity to explore how diasporic communities navigate issues of space, time, and memory was provided by the conference, shedding light on how the intertwining of tears, silences, and laughter functions as coping mechanisms and expressions of resilience. It also became apparent that among diasporans, creative artistic voices are emerging as responses to the challenges and opportunities within the diaspora, often integrating innovative approaches in blending the tragic and the comic.
While the presentations and discussions reflected upon audience engagement with diasporic cultural production, they also prompted questions of interpretation within the field, and delved into the intricacies of understanding and evaluating diasporic cultural artifacts. The conference fostered a reconsideration of the audience’s role in shaping the perception and interpretation of diaspora, while also underscoring the significance of both tragedy and comedy in this ongoing conversation on the aesthetic value of diasporic cultural production.
Within the following pages, the examination of diaspora features prominently throughout various artistic landscapes. Transgressions of diaspora within the world of Commedia dell’arte are highlighted, shedding light on the role of improvisation in challenging cultural boundaries. Diasporic experiences come into focus through examinations of the works of Leila Aboulela, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Monica Ali, with a particular emphasis on the connection between geography and identity. The complex discourses within Jewish-Romanian interwar literature are navigated, inviting exploration into projective spaces. Familiar texts by Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss are reevaluated through the lens of counterfactual narratives. Humour, laughter and self-critique within the Muslim diaspora are examined in narratives set in European superdiverse urban contexts. Jewish identity within Philip Roth’s The Plot against America is subjected to re-examination through counterfactual storytelling. A mapping the crossroads where Africa, jazz, politics, and revolution intersect within the diasporic context, in turn, creates pathways for exploring how diaspora develops and questions of identity arise.
Personal reflections on diasporic nostalgia are offered, encouraging a connection with the emotive aspects of displacement. The elements of tragedy in Malika Mokkedem’s work are likewise examined, encouraging a reassessment of their presence within the narrative. Hidden narratives within the literature of descendants of harkis are uncovered, urging engagement with the silenced voices in the diasporic context. Spaces of self-discovery and transformation in Lynda-Nawel Tebbani’s work are presented for exploration, with a spotlight on the role of interstitial spaces in diaspora. The literary contributions of Andrei Codrescu are reconsidered, shedding new light on his work, and creative responses to displacement and nostalgia within C.D. Florescu’s short stories are discussed.
While the conference Diasporic Voices addressed the diversity of diasporic experience, the conference “In A Different Voice” was inspired by the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Carol Gilligan’s 1982 book In a Different Voice, a groundbreaking text introducing care studies. The idea was to advance the book’s discourse and explore the different voices that could give rise to new care practices. We focused mainly on the encounters highlighting the sensitive experience of the voice viewed as the expression of attention shown towards oneself and others, briefly as the foundation of relational ethics of interdependence and vulnerability. As organizers, we underlined the apprehension of the voice as a material phenomenon, pre-language and spontaneous vocal composition, the entanglement of human and non-human voices, and the voice of affects.
Our role was also to facilitate discussions and convey knowledge non-traditionally, based on experiments with voice, intensities, affects, and rhythms and with different layers of lecture and orality of poems. The most challenging part of this workshop was the encounter between researchers in letters and philosophy and researchers in care studies.
As a keynote speaker, Carol Gilligan of New York University addressed the performative aspect in her presentation, “Resonating Voices: Toward an Embodied Care Ethics.” She expounded on the under voice notion and the idea of freeing the natural voice. Gilligan considers the voice a literal barometer of relationships. Furthermore, her presentation focused on liberation ethics, reason and emotions, suffocated voices deciphering and increasing the capacity to learn how to read the under voices through radical listening. The latter stems from the crucial question: What happens to the voice? How do we retrieve it? Under these conditions, the most important experience would be the passage from judgment to curiosity, cultivating disruptive voices through theater and writing—performative acts that express themselves against the “forces that go in the world.”
Moreover, the conference proposed rethinking the ethical implications of conceiving the voice as a physical phenomenon whose materiality resonates in our discourses without being reduced to them, thus prolonging the essential questioning concerning voices that express, manifest, and mobilize the difference.
On the background of these theoretical and practical remarks, several workshops took place, namely the sound installation “Hallway Whispers,” workshops on “Choir of Emotions,” a somatic and auditory experience that aimed at attaining the catharsis without necessarily passing through discursive language; “Give Voice to Emotions,” through which we understood that the voice (placed between human intelligence, anatomy, and verbal expression) has a vital role in the expression of emotions. The particular vocal timbers of different voice devices are all singular despite the influence of DNA, language, culture, or hierarchical and generational conventions on how we express our voice. The workshop has allowed the participants to explore different vocal colors related to emotions and recognize their muscular and physiological support, which enlarges the specter of dynamics useful to their transmission.
Another workshop explored “the animal voice,” the hybridity of the human and animal voice inspired by practices highlighting the sacred spirit of animals in the Innu world. This was followed by the workshop “Valleys” and the idea of “sympoiesis” of the ecofeminist artist Donna Haraway, creating choirs made out of human voices and land sounds, reworked in the studio. The materiality of the voice served to explore the connection of human time to other temporalities (geological or ecological) to respond to the question of how to form a non-anthropocentric choir and to learn “to stay with the trouble?” The last workshop, “The Mirror Lecture,” was articulated in two tempos, starting in a low voice and finishing aloud, allowing the participants to seize the difference between the intimate reading of a literary text, compared to a public lecture of one’s own text.
As a follow-up to these two international conferences and workshops, we aimed to investigate how new and different voices can emerge: first, on the large scale of the Diasporic Voices, and second, by scrutinizing texts that highlight other, Different Voices. These intertwined voices result in volume 45 of Echinox Journal, Diasporic Voices / Different Voices: Resonance, Silence, and Performance.
We have thus put together contributions from various disciplinary fields (performative studies, literary studies, political studies, etc.), which explore the multivocality of diasporic struggles with an emphasis on the intertwining of the tragic and the comic, “the dialectical relationship between the idea of displacement and nostalgia for a lost time and space” (Ato Quayson), voices that provide a distinctive past to the person or community, involving satire, laughter, irony, and manifesto—but also texts which underline the apprehension of the voice as a material phenomenon; pre-language and spontaneous vocal composition; the entanglement of human and non-human voices and the voice of affects.
Diasporic Traditions, Transgressions, and Identities
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.01
“Whence, then, is this change of sentiment?”: Homesteading and Restorative Nostalgia in The Woman of Colour
Abstract:Following the lead of recent inquiries into The Woman of Colour (1808) as a sensibility narrative that fleshed out the unfinished project of abolitionism at around the time when the slave trade was being outlawed in England (1807), this study explores the intermingling between what Svetlana Boym has identified as two distinctly oriented strands of nostalgia, reflective v. restorative, that innervate the title character’s sensibility of (dis)enchantment with her homesteading voyage, as she is transported from her native island into another – partly ancestral yet also foreign and emetic – insular space, from which she eventually tries to expunge herself into a yet-to-be-undertaken voyage of return.
Keywords: The Woman of Colour, homesteading, restorative/reflective nostalgia, diasporic intimacy, circumatlantic diaspora
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
gabriel.gherasim@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.02
Diasporic Transgressions of Commedia dell’arte
Abstract:Ever since its ‘birth certificate’ on February 25, 1545, Commedia dell’arte’s substantial resources of itineracy, improvisation, subversion, extraterritoriality, extemporaneity, laughter, and joy have unceasingly unveiled their essential mutability and ambiguity, prompting UNESCO’s depiction of commedia as an “invisible and intangible cultural asset”. The present study attempts to disclose the diasporic transgressions of Commedia dell’arte by considering four basic dimensions: the formal, the tropological, the topological, and the temporal, respectively. This approach further examines how and to what extent the diasporic transgressions of Commedia dell’arte can be elucidated by considering the afore-mentioned categories of explanation. Ultimately, the itinerant and improvisational character of Commedia dell’arte is explanatory for the mutations and developments within the four dimensions themselves.
Keywords:commedia dell’arte, diasporic transgressions, theatrical formalism, cultural tropes, topological and temporal transgressions
Faculty of Letters, ULBS, Romania
maria.chiorean@ulbsibiu.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.03
A Geocritical Reading of Diasporic Identity in the Prose of Leila Aboulela, Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali
Abstract:This paper proposes a geocritical reading of diasporic identity in the prose of Leila Aboulela, Jhumpa Lahiri and Monica Ali. It starts by looking at the experience of women joining their husbands in the West, their integration (or lack thereof) and the characters’ strategies for maintaining their faith, humor and specific cognitive mechanisms in spite of the culture shock they are facing. My hypothesis is that, instead of conforming to consecrated patterns of cultural interaction – such as assimilation into Western modernity, isolationist rebellion against it or voluntary uprootal – these characters manage to find another way of defining themselves against a new background: namely, they create mental spaces to inhabit, bringing their original homes and their adoptive ones into constant dialogue and subjecting both worlds to a combination of irony and empathy. Thus, I aim to use Bertrand Westphal’s geocritical framework to show that what he calls the “closing” of open space by the West can be undone by diasporic actors subverting distance and cultural polarization.
Keywords:diasporic identity, geocriticism, open/closed spaces, postmigration, humor, community
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
dragos.bucur@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.04
Ghettos, Shtetls and Projective Spaces
Diasporic Discourses in Jewish-Romanian Interwar Literature
Abstract:The aim of this paper is to investigate the interconnections between diasporic discourse, spatiality, and Jewish literature within an analysis of a certain movement from Interwar Jewish-Romanian literature, the so-called literature of the ghetto, represented by authors such as I. Peltz, Ury Benador and Ion Călugăru. Depicting the lives of Romanian Jews in shtetls or marginal neighbourhoods, this literary discourse features a close relationship between spatiality and identity at its core. Alongside the space of the ghetto, multiple topoi (such as America, Palestine, or Russia) appear in these writings. I call these projective spaces as they are included in the novels through the longing of the narrators, for which different political affinities play a key role, or by means of fragmented stories that, often altered, echo through the ghettos. Therefore, my goal is to investigate the concept of diaspora that Jewish literature intrinsically constitutes while also trying to disentangle a symbolic network of diasporic spaces articulated within the literature of the ghetto.
Keywords:Jewish literature, Interwar Romania, ghetto, shtetl, spatiality
Counterfactual Histories and Trans-Border Texts
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
laura.ilea@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.05
Counterfactual Histories: Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss
Abstract:The canon of verisimilitude is a widely discussed concept, aiming at establishing the fictional pact ever since Aristotle’s Poetics. Multiple experiences of time seem to unsettle the logic of this fictional pact. To highlight the disjunctive chrono-methodology and its implications in reformulating a well-established canon, I choose the concept of uchronia—developed and discussed theoretically and literarily by two American writers of Jewish origin, Philip Roth and Nicole Krauss. The two developed alternative legacies and counterfactual histories of Franz Kafka: He either escapes to Palestine or gets immersed into an accomplished love relationship with Dora Dymant during the last year of his life. Thus, the “u-chronic” writers unsettle Kafka’s canonical legacy left to Max Brod, the official detainer of his post-mortem history.
Keywords:uchronia, literary canon, counterfactual history, Philip Roth, Nicole Krauss, Franz Kafka, legacy
University of Western Ontario, Canada
mbaya@uwo.ca
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.06
The Muslim Diaspora Giggles Back: A Touch of Humour in Notre-Dame and the Vatican’s Shadow
Abstract:By reason of historical ties, France and Italy appear as two significant destination countries for the Maghrebi Muslim diaspora in the twentieth century. While the earlier literary production of the Moroccan, Algerian and Tunisian Muslim diaspora writing in French and Italian is characterized by its autobiographical overtones, some literary texts written in the twenty-first century have engaged in more experimental enterprises. Kiffe Kiffe demain (2004) originally written in French by French-born Algerian diasporan Faïza Guène, and Divorzio all’islamica a viale Marconi (2010) published in Italian by Algerian-born Amara Lakhous are two fictions that have achieved international success. If the two texts have been acclaimed for their humorous colorations, a comparative study of the ways in which they depict the articulations of Muslim identities in the context of two superdiverse European capital cities, Paris and Rome, remains to be completed. This article argues that the tragic and the humorous are interwoven in the two texts by investigating Guène and Lakhous’s depiction of Muslimness as both a source of torment and exhilarating humour. Through the exploration of a series of humoristic devices, this paper also aims to discuss the authors’ deployment of levity as resistance tactics to religious extremism.
Keywords:Diaspora, Muslimness, Humour, Faïza Guène, Amara Lakhous
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
raluca.moldovan@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.07
Counterfactual History and Diasporic Identity in Philip Roth’s The Plot against America
Abstract: The Plot against America, a 2004 novel by acclaimed American author Philip Roth, starts out from a counterfactual premise, i.e., that aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh defeated Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1940 election, running on an isolationist platform summarised in the slogan “America first!” The novel is a masterful exploration of trauma and the perception of history viewed through the eyes of a young boy, the author’s alter ego, Philip, who is also the narrator, and who sees his family and others around him question their place in society and their identity as American Jews in a world swiftly turning against them. The present article aims to investigate the way in which Jewish diasporic identity and strategies of resistance (or accommodation) are represented in both Roth’s novel, as well as in the 2020 HBO miniseries based on the book, which was met with widespread critical acclaim and sparked renewed interest in Roth’s work, especially in the Trump era in which the “America first!” slogan was a frequent occurrence.
Keywords:Philip Roth, The Plot against America, Jewish identity, resistance, counterfactual history
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
costeaunot@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.08
Slavophile Elements in Andreï Makine’s Prose
Abstract: This paper aims to analyze the influence of the 19th-century Slavophile ideas like samobytnost (originality, uniqueness, distinctiveness) or sobornost (a common spiritual bond uniting members of a community) on Andreï Makine’s novels The Life of an Unknown Man and The Woman Who Waited. Although he has lived in France since 1987 and writes exclusively in French, mainly for a French readership, Russia remains one of his great obsessions, which he poetically transfigures, in a Dostoyevskyan manner, into a world of both ugliness and beauty. Beyond the sordid and unbearable social reality, Makine suggests that there is a profound, authentic Russia, not in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but in the secluded and forgotten villages, where people like Vera and Volski, the main characters of the two novels, live organically in peaceful communities, keeping intact traditional Russian spiritual values.
Keywords:Slavophilia, Russia vs. the West, Russian soul, Soviet Russia, Sobornost, Samobytnost
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
maria.barbu@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.09
Voices of the “in-between”. Anarchetypal Crossings of the Frontier in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy
Abstract:Ever since Christopher Columbus set foot in America, the leitmotif of the travel narratives written by those visiting it has been that of shaping the unknown territories according to prefabricated ideas which never matched the reality of those spaces. At the same time, the importance held by the myth of never-ending expansion in American culture has also created a fascination for everything situated beyond the culturally constructed borders of the country. Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy tackles both these matters, as it is centred around the frontier between Mexico and the southwestern part of the United States, but also on the temporal border between the modernizing post World War Two world and the previous pastoral world order that still pervaded people’s minds. Starting from these coordinates, this paper will analyse the patterns of movement taken up by these characters in crossing the borders, while also using Corin Braga’s concept of the “anarchetype” to characterize them as products of an in-between state in which the characters cannot follow a clearly structured route anymore because they belong to both and neither of the two extremes simultaneously.
Keywords:Cormac McCarthy, The Border Trilogy, anarchetype, journey, frontier, North American literature
Mapping Diaspora: Politics, Memorials, and Praxis
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
hflpoe@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.10
The Curious Case of the Invention of Diasporic Identity.
A Story of Jazz, Politics, Africa and Revolution
Abstract:When Malcolm X visited Africa in 1964 and gave a lecture at the University of Ghana, he introduced himself as an exiled in his own country: “I’m from America but I’m not an American”. He was not the only one in this situation; most of the jazz performers of that age understood themselves in a similar way. As exiles in their own country, they did not simply jump to the alternative of Africa as a home to return to, but viewed it as an opportunity to be seized, more universal than any paradigm allowed before, and especially more universal than the universalism of the whites. We will investigate the possibility of such an invented and open diasporic identity. We will consider it, at least for the context defined above, as an X that provides the chance of a radical change in articulation both with the emergence of free jazz and with the independence of Africa. We will try to define this invention as a subtraction (from the Master-paradigm) and thus as a model for a paradigm shift: nothing less than a potential geography and a potential history.
Keywords: diaspora, identity, revolution, jazzUniversity of Bucharest, Romania
andradaeylul@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.11
Longing and belonging in If They Come for Us by Fatimah Asghar and Home Is Not a Country by Safia Elhillo
Abstract:In this study I shall analyse the sense of belonging in Fatimah Asghar’s debut poetry collection If They Come for Us, and in Safia Elhillo’s novel Home Is Not a Country. Both writers describe a specific experience – being Muslim in the US, and also trying to recover places that were once home. Moreover, these books discuss identity from a feminist perspective, especially from an intersectional point of view, taking into account their multiple identities. Moreover, I aim to showcase that not only by using a first-person perspective, but by addressing issues such as identity, selfhood, belonging, family and (dis)placement, being a woman or a non-confirming person with a Muslim cultural background and also living in a westernized culture, Fatimah Asghar and Safia Elhillo give a voice to a marginalized group. Furthermore, by writing from a feminist perspective they are creating an empowered voice, raising awareness on the abovementioned issues. After the 9/11 attacks, Muslims around the world and especially in the US encountered different types of aversions and discrimination, facing a personal crisis – either they fit in and denounce their religion or they continue to be oppressed and discriminated against. Safia Elhillo and Fatimah Asghar write about those experiences of trying to maintain your selfhood in a world that is against you, by describing their relationship with Islam and the westernized world and how both those worlds are intertwined. My objective is to highlight the importance of the political and social issues that influence the voices of the minorities.
Keywords: feminism, identity, intersectionality, Fatimah Asghar, Safia Elhillo
University of Bucharest, Romania
laviniatache9@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.12
Embodiments and Voices of Inseparable Identities in
The Book of My Lives and The Lazarus Project by Aleksandar Hemon
Abstract :Aleksandar Hemon’s books encapsulate a sense of ghostly, yet concrete belonging to disparate places, as he explores in various forms his own identity of an immigrant in the US. Hemon conveys the complex emotional and geographical displacement through a collage of frames and portraits depicting the relationality between past and present. This article looks into the representations of home, family, and distance in the memoir The Book of My Lives and The Lazarus Project through Ortega y Gasset’s notion of intrabody, renewed by the contemporary philosopher Emanuele Coccia in the study The Sensible Life. Coccia emphasizes the importance of a “micro-ontology” created within the space of interaction between our body, its reflections, and other presences in the world. Therefore, the intrabody represents an immaterial sphere of existence, an area of constantly changing sensations. This shift in perceiving one’s dialogue with the exterior is similar to Hemon’s process of adapting to a foreign language in an entirely different space from Sarajevo, and of being part of a diaspora. The article also takes into account the use of images in The Lazarus Project, because they seem to symbolize the unifying medium between two different temporal coordinates about the destiny of an Eastern European Jewish immigrant. These dark-hued pictures are complementary to the narration, as they suggest an intimate feeling of being lost in a world of conflicts, highlighting the voices of marginal individuals.
Keywords:Aleksandar Hemon; Memory; Space; Displacement; Memoir; Diaspora; Intrabody; Emanuele Coccia
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
georgianatudor.art@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.13
Diasporic Voices in The Messiah of Stockholmby Cynthia Ozick or ‘We agree to lie but you lie to yourself’
Abstract:This study is going to analyse the condition of the stranger of the protagonist of the novel The Messiah of Stockholm by Cynthia Ozick in relation to Jacques Derrida’s study Of hospitality, his complex relationship of care with Mrs Eklund as well as the changing of the reader’s position regarding the access to the inner life of Lars Andemining. There will be a highlight on the mixture of different cultural voices, on the condition of the immigrant, and, last but not least, on a relationship of care that is not fully sincere, even though it succeeds. Furthermore, we would argue that the novel accomplishes the function of seductively sabotage the readers into the complexity of human relationships in diaspora through different voices.
Keywords:Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm, diasporic voice, aesthetics of care, hospitality, seductively sabotage
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ra.panait18@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.14
The Western Reception of Forugh Farrokhzad:
New Orientalism and Confessional Poetry
Abstract: The following study proposes to deconstruct the mythologising of Forugh Farrokhzad, (1934/5-1967), a poet known mostly as Iran’s Sylvia Plath. This kind of analogy is based on interpretative and cultural preconceptions that connect women’s poetry with personal experience and amount the poetic voice to the empirical reality. Beyond that biographical obsession, reified through the export of confessionalism, comparing the two writers also implies appropriation of Forugh Farrokhzad to a Western cultural and literary field. By analysing a few poems, taking a close look at her interviews, and examining the historical context, I shall try to demonstrate that Farrokhzad is actually split between two worlds. Therefore, to associate her with Sylvia Plath can be read as an example of what Fatemeh Keshavarz, a researcher on Persian literature, calls the New Orientalist narrative.
Keywords: confessionalism, poetry, world literature, New Orientalism, Western reception, literary canon
Diasporic and Interstitial Spaces
Université Mohamed Lamine Debaghine-Sétif 2, Algérie
lou.achheb@yahoo.fr
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.15
Drame diasporique faussé et voix brisées dans l’écriture mokeddemienne
Abstract:The present article sheds light on the question of the distorted diasporic drama from which the broken voices of Malika Mokeddem’s writing derive. The author, in her novel Je dois tout à ton oubli, breaks her voice and that of her heroine by shaping an aborted tragedy that materializes in several forms. First, she uses various processes such as : parallelism, interbreeding and accumulation to create a tragic effect erased within the story. Then, she engenders a diasporic poetics of the in-between spaces to erase the crack and make its tragic nuance disappear. Our study is based on the foundations of narratology and stylistics.
Keywords:diasporas, drama, tragedy, broken voices, miscegenation, intertextuality
Université de l’Ouest de Timisoara, Roumanie
ioana.marcu@e-uvt.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.16
Silence(s) des patriarches : configurations et valeurs de la « parole retranchée » dans la littérature des descendants de harkis
Abstract:The engagement in the French army during the Algerian war condemned the harkis to a silent existence. Considered as traitors in their country of birth, and undesirable in their country of exile, “under house arrest” (from a spatial and linguistic point of view) in what should have been the new “home”, they strive to remain invisible and silent. In the writings of their descendants who decided one day to tell the traumatic Hi/story of their community, a character inevitably stands out: the father walled in silence, leading his life alone, for fear of disappointing or not being able to give the best explanations for a “shameful” past. To illustrate the different «configurations» and values of the «entrenched words» that the descendants of harkis inscribe in their literary works, we will base our analysis on the novels Mon père, ce harki (2003) by Dalila Kerchouche, Mohand, le harki (2003) by Hadjila Kemoum and L’Art de perdre (2017) by Alice Zeniter.
Keywords:harkis, Algerian war, silence, trauma, invisibility
Université Mustafa Ben Boulaid, Algérie
n.aitaissa@univ-batna2.dz
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.17
L’interartialité une forme de l’écriture diasporique dans L’éloge de la perte de Lynda-Nawel Tebbani
Abstract:The article discusses Lynda-Nawel Tebbani’s book “L’éloge de la perte” and her unique approach to Algerian literature in French. Tebbani uses a hybrid language and an inter-artistic approach that infuses her text with Andalusian music. The book evokes a melancholic aesthetic and a poetics of three main cities: Paris, Algiers, and Constantine. The article aims to unveil this poetic of the city, linked to Andalusian music, that imbues the book with its originality and Algerianness, and the singular voice of the diaspora. The interdisciplinary and analytical approach draws on geocriticism, psychoanalysis, and Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of space.
Keywords:poetics of the city, inter-artistic, melancholy, hybridity, diasporic voice.
Romanian Exile and Imagined Homelands
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ruxces@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.18
Andrei Codrescu – A Portrait of a Writer in Puzzle
Abstract:The present portrait dedicated to the writer Andrei Codrescu (the most impactful American author of Romanian origin in postmodern world literature) is one of synthesis, depicting the multi-facetedness of this complex and provocative author, who is continuously innovative, experimental and charming as a poet, prose writer, essayist and thinker.
Keywords:Andrei Codrescu, multicultural nomadism, Lucian Blaga, Tristan Tzara, Ted Berrigan, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Dada movement, New York School of Poetry, Exquisite Corpse
West University, Timișoara, Romania
gabriela.glavan@e-uvt.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.19
Reimagining Centrality in Cătălin Dorian Florescu’s Short Stories
Abstract: Cătălin Dorian Florescu’s main tropes had been traditionally confined to the stylistic regime of the novel until 2017, when he opted for a short stories format in his volume Der Nabel der Welt. My paper will investigate the themes and dynamics of Florescu’s dialect of displacement, cultural transfer and the search for a homeland in this collection of short stories, while also paying close attention to the framework of diasporic identity as it was projected in his earlier works. Drawing on contemporary theories concerning displacement and diasporas, my contribution seeks to explore the specific manner in which these issues calibrate Florescu’s original perspective of what it means to have a coherent individual identity against the fragile background of a European one.
Keywords: displacement, migration, postmigration, homeland, postcommunism.
University of Pisa, Italy
e.giorgi13@studenti.unipi.it
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.20
Du sexe de la femme de Matei Vișniec : l’histoire d’un carnage incarné racontée à travers une superposition de voix
Abstract:This article focuses on one of the few dramas of Matei Vișniec analysing the effects of war (in this case the Yugoslavian one) on the innocents. It is through their superposing voices that the dramatist expresses all the horror and conflict, also utilizing characters that coincide in one person and that are different to one another by intentions and by ‘sources’. The victim and protagonist assume upon herself – willingly or not – two incorporeal voices, the foetus’s and the Balkan’s men. All of this happens inside the context of the Yugoslavian diaspora happened during the war (1991-2001), that forced many to flee in other Countries to escape persecutions dictated by a profound and unbridled political hate. Another saddening event bounded with that period’s diaspora is the one of the prostitution rackets, analysed by Vișniec in another drama that take place during the same war, Le mot ‘progrès’, where a young woman who lost her husband and child to war decide to prostitute in Paris to economically help her parents. In this article I will try to analyse the causes and the effects of rape as an instrument of war by the means of anthropology, to help clarify the play’s scenic situations in a scientific way that can connect with the strong ethic of the drama.
Keywords:theatre, Yugoslavian wars, superposing voices, violence, difference’s perception, forced diaspora.
University of Bucharest, Romania
catrinel.popa@litere.unibuc.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.21
Voicing the Unspeakable in Alexandru Vona’s Fiction
Abstract:Since 1993, when Alexandru Vona’s novel Ferestre zidite [Les fenêtres murées/ Bricked-Up Windows] has finally been published, critics and scholars have repeatedly tried to find the right frame for interpreting this exceptional work. Some of them insisted on those strategies that make it, to a certain extent, similar to Surrealists’ writings; others found reasons to compare its bizarre atmosphere to that in Kafka’s or Robert Walser’s prose, while others noticed its affinities with the Gothic novel. However, most of them have acknowledged the uncommonness of Alexandru Vona’s fiction, insisting on the writer’s endeavour to reveal a strange sense of frailty, or – in Marta Petreu’s words – the voice(s) of an unsure and fragile self, moving dreamily, clumsily and full of fear in a fluid world which encompasses death. On the other hand, the exceptionality of this novel could be explained (at least partially), by its “in-between” condition. As it is well known, the text had been written in Romanian, a few years after the second world war (specifically in 1947, before the writer emigrated to France), for being printed only in 1993 and shortly after translated in French by Alain Paruit (1995). Written in the first person, Ferestrele zidite represents more than an attempt to harmonise memory and oblivion, writing and remembering, inner exile and mystery. It explores in depth one of the fundamental dimensions of human condition: its frailty in relationship with Death. For all these reasons, the novel can be analysed from the perspective of a poetics of silence (or, in Brian Richardson’s terms, of “voicing the unspeakable”), which might prove useful in mapping out an uncommon fictional universe, pervaded by the melancholic intuition of ending.
Keywords: poetics of silence; spectrality; inner exile; paramnesia; memory; spaceDifferent Voices
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
corinbraga@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.22
Littérature et théorie du chaos
Abstract: While poststructuralist attacks against structured forms freed literature from the dominance of Aristotle’s canon, twentieth-century evolutions in physics and cosmology brought about a new world vision which also deeply influenced modern authors. If the universe was no longer Newtonian, linear and predictable, and if literature was to “imitate” this new reality, world-texts were also supposed to explore anarchical and complex landscapes. To be able to investigate these anti-structure texts, literary and art critics adapted analytical tools from mathematical and physical theories. More precisely, modern literature was associated mainly with the theory of quanta, and postmodern literature with chaos theory. In this paper, I engage with some of the main mathematical and physical concepts used as instruments in literary analysis, such as non-Euclidian geometries, the field concept, relativity, entropy, uncertainty principles, fractals, chaos, strange attractors, etc.
Keywords: Anti-canon, anarchic literature, quantic literature, chaos theory, fractals, strange attractors, Katherine Hayles.
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
radu.toderici@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.23
“Romans Divers“: The Novel, Its Earliest Classifications and the Early Modern Peripheries of the Genre
Abstract:The first classifications of the novel date back to the early 18th century. Then, the novel was still a new genre and was defined in relation to ancient Latin or Hellenistic models and to their narrative variations from the 17th century. By analyzing the first works that try to trace a history of the new genre and a taxonomy of the various types of novels, penned by authors such as Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy, James Beattie and Clara Reeve, this paper argues that the works seen as peripheral in relation to a canonical, archetypal narration, typical for the novel, are in itself illustrative for a wider phenomenon – the marginalization of those narratives which do not fit a current and implicit definition of a genre. Using Corin Braga’s concept of “anarchetypal narrative”, this paper discusses the works to be found in the 18th century at the peripheries of the novel and the explicit and implicit reasons for their theoretical dismissal.
Keywords:Novel; Utopian Narrative; Anarchetypal Narrative; Periphery; Nicolas Lenglet Du Fresnoy; James Beattie; Clara Reeve.
Université de Montréal, Canada
simon.harel@ umontreal.ca
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.24
L’écriture de l’alité. Dépathologiser la dépression dans Désormais ma demeure de Nicholas Dawson
Abstract: Désormais ma demeure by Nicholas Dawson explores the aftermath of depression, which he sees as both the personal site of psychic collapse and the site of exile in his transgenerational composition.
The latter is made possible by a queer constellation whose diasporic existence makes it possible to grasp the racialized and gendered practices that are so many habitus and forms of emancipation. The writing appears, in this context, as a story that takes shape in the aftermath of the healing.
Diaspora; Narrative; Depression; Queer Revindication; Racialization; Healing; Gender; Exile.
Universidad de Granada, Spain
mhernandezgomez@ugr.es
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.25
Pour une éthique de la parole dans la « littérature-refuge » : l’écriture impliquée de Marie Cosnay
Abstract:The “refuge literature” brings together a range of literary productions in which the voices of people who live the experience of exile are heard, as well as those of actors who work on refuge from the perspective of a literature of commitment. This contemporary literature on migration is also part of a literature of intervention, which proposes a work on representations with an ethical and political purpose: a micropolitics of the sensitive far from abstract moral discourses. Instead, explores new voices and practices of care in literature. In this article, we will focus on the work of Marie Cosnay, whose writing on contemporary migration opts for intervention in the social field, with a desire to face the world, and to give an account of the voices concerned by the migration phenomenon.
Keywords:Marie Cosnay, literature, 21th century, investigation, ethics of speech, writing, voice, migration, commitment.
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
iuliaursi@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.26
Voice Modulation through Imaginative Exercises
Abstract:The present article proposes an analytical cartography of voice exercises from the perspective of the material force through which they act at the psychosomatic level. The analyzed exercises are identified in the most known and used training methods developed throughout the 20th century. The analysis of exercises follows the effect of imagination in the development of qualities such as: flow, lightness, efficiency. The maximization of vocal qualities requires awareness of the interdependencies between body-voice-imaginary stimulus through training applied constantly within the hours intended for psycho-vocal training. The types of training and their applicability will produce results to the extent of their correlation with the specific disciplines of the actor’s art that integrate processes such as body awareness and the influence of the imaginal stimulus in the creative act. The various methods of learning and assimilating vocal expression education techniques are recommended to be practiced in an individual system in order to be able to concretely and systematically follow the progress made by the practitioner under the assistance of the vocal coach.
Keywords: voice, imagination, vocal training, vocal technique, breathing.
“Lucian Blaga” University, Sibiu, Romania
andaionas @yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.27
The Author’s Voice in Genre Films. Miracle and Unidentified by Bogdan George Apetri
Abstract:Romanian cinema after 1989 was mainly oriented towards creations through which directors sought to win critical acclaim and awards at international festivals, but which were not addressed to the general public, as films belonging to a cinematic genre generally do. In this paper we discuss how Romanian director George Bogdan Apetri, now living in New York, represents a distinct voice in Romanian cinema today. In his films Unidentified and Miracle, he manages to harness his dual cultural perspective (American and Romanian), combining the conventions of the crime fiction genre but also elements specific to the Romanian New Wave, making two films that are pleasing to the audience but at the same time part of the arthouse circuit.
Keywords:genre, author’s voice, crime fiction, Romanian New Wave Cinema, narrative techniques of the detective novels
Library Survey
Luca Mătăsaru
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
luca.matasaru@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.28
Ruxandra Cesereanu, Noah’s Literary Ark for Gourmets. Studies and Essays in Comparative Literature, Milano, Edizioni AlboVersorio, 2023
Teona Farmatu
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
teonafarmatu@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.29
Thomas J. Cousineau, The Séance of Reading. Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing, Bucharest, Bucharest University Publishing, 2023
Laura T. Ilea
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
laura.ilea@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.30
Achille Mbembe, La communauté terrestre, Éditions La Découverte, Paris, 2023
Carmen Borbély
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.31
Jarlath Killeen, Christina Morin (eds.), Irish Gothic. An Edinburgh Companion, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2023
Ioana Pavel
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
indnpavell@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2023.45.32
Mihaela Ursa, Indisciplina ficțiunii. Viața de după carte a literaturii, Cluj-Napoca, Casa Cărţii de Știinţă, 2022
2022 volume 43 – Contemporary Eastern/Southeastern European Noir. Print-and-Screen Fiction, in a European and Global Perspective
Editors: CAIUS DOBRESCU, ROXANA EICHEL, SÁNDOR KÁLAI, ANNA KESZEG & NAJATE NERCI
Editor: Phantasma. The Center for Imagination Studies
Publisher: Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, România
ISBN 1582-960X (România)
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43
Caius Dobrescu
Noir, Eastern Europe, and the Global Imaginary
Originally, the idea for the present theme issue of Caietele Echinox germinated in the hotbed of the DETECt project, which reunited fourteen universities from ten European countries around a research agenda that becomes apparent in the unfolding of the above administrative (but also poetic…) acronym: Detecting Transcultural Identity in European Popular Crime Narratives. The project explored the manner in which, on the lines of the free circulation of persons, capitals, and labour, a productive European circulation of rhetoric, narrative, symbolic, and thematic structures connected to crime fiction (in its extended understanding as literature, cinema, television, and all their imaginable hybridizations) could also be identified and described. The main working hypothesis was that the spreading rate of such production across the flexible inner borders of the European Union from 1989 to the present was indicative of both their impact on collective imagination, and of a rhizomatic identity dynamics exposing not homogenization, but complex, to time problematic, even contentious, but always relevant and vibrant intrication.
DETECt exercised its European comprehension through a policy of mapping and exploring the different geo-cultural and historical areas of our continental union. The task of covering, if not actually producing “Eastern Europe” was shared by academic representatives of the University of Debrecen and the University of Bucharest. And since one of the most convergent of the theoretical premises of the project was that noir might be the concept best suited to overarch the different subgenres and tendencies of contemporary crime narratives – together with our Debrecen colleagues we set the course for discovering and displaying East-European noir, mainly in its present but also in its historical hypostases. Our collaboration resulted in a number of project deliveries and scientific articles,[1] but we all agreed on the fact that there is still a great deal of work to be done, concerning actual comparative research on all the relevant fields (i.e. production, textual articulation, distribution, reception), but also for extending the network of scholars interested and with relevant expertise in these fields. The core expectation of the original concept of the present thematic issue of Caietele Echinox was that enlarging the network of scholars interested in East-European crime/noir fiction (equally implying the printed and screened varieties) is the only way of obtaining a more accurate image of the diverse regional developments. I embarked on this exploration together with dr. Sándor Kálai, who currently teaches at the Department of Communication and Media Studies of the University of Debrecen,[2] and dr. Roxana Eichel, my colleague at the Literary Studies Department of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Bucharest.
But the project actually gained momentum when it intersected, almost providentially, the endeavours of our friends and colleagues from the Phantasma Centre for Imagination Studies. We were happy to discover on the rich research agenda of this prestigious research hub coordinated by professor Corin Braga a distinct interest in symbolic concretions that obviously and expressly intersected the sphere of the noir. From this point on, the project underwent a substantial change of design. We reframed East-European contemporary noir not only as a subject in itself, but also as opening a perspective on, or granting a way of access to larger processes of what might be called, with a bit of conceptual stamina, the global cultural imaginary.
The structure of this thematic issue is the result of the interaction of the above vectors. Its first segment, titled “East European Noir – General and Particular,” stakes out a specific, regional way toward the general problems of defining and understanding noir. Caius Dobrescu and Doru Pop approach the subject matter with the instruments of interdisciplinary area studies rooted mainly in the textual analysis of screened fiction. The former contribution attempts to substantiate, via a genetic and transformative social-cultural model, the notion of East-European noir, while the latter enticingly narrows the comparative focus to East-European cinematic and televisual detective fiction for children and adolescents. Marcela Poučová offers a very dense presentation of the development of crime fiction in the Czech literature of the 20th century, while Katre Talviste and Primož Mlačnik concentrate each on an individual contemporary author (namely Juhan Paju and Sergej Verč) in order to open the gate towards Estonian, respectively Slovenian crime fiction. The last contributor in the section, Radu Toderici, offers a reading as close as it is subtle and penetrating of two masterpieces of the Hungarian “Black Wave” of the 1990s: Béla Tarr’s Damnation and György Fehér’s Passion.
The next topic has been abundantly researched, but not necessarily from the thematic and geo-cultural perspectives illustrated by the authoresses present in the section: the intersection between gender and noir/crime. Amalia Mărășescu makes the first move with the analysis of two Romanian fictional women detectives, coming from different epochs and with astoundingly different social-cultural backgrounds (a peasant woman of the 1920s, and a mathematics professoress turned intelligence officer in the 1970s). Roxana Eichel sets fort her research on gender from the perspective of the theory of interstitiality initiated in the frames of the DETECt project by applying these finely tuned analytic tools on the Romanian crime series Umbre/Shadows. Andrada Fătu-Tutoveanu hints at another form of intersectionality, by associating women representation in the classical film noir with fragmented avatars of the religious and mythical imaginary.
The third section, “East Seen from the West,” opens up with an attentive, considerate, and theoretically engaging study of Canadian scholar Paul Bleton on a comprehensive corpus of East-European crime novels recently translated in French. With comparable minutiae, Ioana Diaconu focuses on “Romanian characters in German television thrillers beginning with the Millennium.” Sándor Kálai continues on the same lines, but changes and broadens the area of reference and, at the same time, the artistic medium, in his investigation of “the Eastern Europe of Scandinavian detective novels.”
The last section, “Noir sans frontiers: Beyond Genre and Geography” brings together salutary attempts of expanding the relevance of noir beyond conventional limits of genre, to wit of assuming a special connection between noir and genres and media hybridization. At the same time, all the contributors view noir as immersed in different forms of global, or glocal culture. Marius-Mircea Crișan and Carol Senf explore the osmosis of noir with vampire fiction against the backdrop of the East-European tensions between traditional and cosmopolitan mental frames on the basis of a post-communist Romanian novel: Alexandru Mușina’s Nepotul lui Dracula/Dracula’s nephew. Alex Văsieș equally anchors his survey of mystery and SF&F hybridization and of the mainstreaming of genre fiction in the analysis of a contemporary Romanian novel: Greva păcătoșilor/Sinners Strike by Florin Chirculescu. Maria Barbu raises the stakes of the redefinition of noir by associating it with utopian and dystopian venues of post-humanist prophesizing, in her approach of the world-famous HBO sci-fi series Westworld. Carmen Borbély, in her analysis of the novel Zoo City by South African authoress Lauren Beukes, and Ruxandra Cesereanu, in her highly empathetic reading of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, spectacularly extend the geo-cultural system of reference, while simultaneously deepening the aesthetic and philosophical implications of noir.
The final contribution to the present issue is not directly connected to the main topic. But the concepts tackled in Călina Părău’s essay “Residues and Presents in Contemporary Shrinking Temporalities” raise, taken apart as well as in all their possible connections, fertile theoretical provocations for the research of crime/noir fiction. The fact that, in different local/regional/global approaches, the latter has been almost entirely absorbed in what we use to term the “spatial turn” is an unavoidable evidence. Through its sharp rendering of new modes of problematization of temporalities, this final contribution might show the way toward a whole new world of crime fiction theory, or at least toward a possible second issue of Caietele Echinox dedicated to this intricate and intriguing topic.
[1] I would especially mention Caius Dobrescu, Roxana Eichel, Dorottya Molnár-Kovács, Sándor Kálai, Anna Keszeg, “A game of mirrors: Western/Eastern European crime series and the struggle for recognition”, Journal of European Popular Culture, no. 12(2), pp. 119-134, 2021.
[2] In order to offer a hyper-concentrated suggestion of all the personal qualities that make Sándor a great research partner and an ideal intellectual friend, I will reproduce here the ending of his presentation of the site of his department: “His motto is the same as Georges Simenon’s: To understand and not to judge.”
East European Noir – General and Particular
University of Bucharest, Romania
caius.dobrescu@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.01
P. 13 – 37
Exploring / Inventing East-European Noir. An Attempt to Modelling Historical Transformation
Abstract:The essay proposes a common spectrum of noir detective fictions emerging in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. Accordingly, it substantiates the assumption that similar political, social, cultural, economic threats and opportunities contributed to the preservation of a certain air de famille among the genre productions of the countries of the area even after the fall of Communism. The common Communist heritage of genre fiction, cinema, and television is synthesised in three main categories: Cold War “noir” and Socialist “grey”, alternative noir, and popular noir. The crime & detection dimensions of the EU phase of the evolution of East-European countries are equally organised in three clusters, called retrospective noir, introspective noir, and prospective noir.
Keywords:East-Europe; Eastern Europe; Central Europe; Central and Eastern Europe; Communist Detective Fiction; Post-Communism; Area Noir..
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
doru.pop@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.02
P. 38 – 61
The Socialist Boy Detectives and The Cold Wars of Childhood
Abstract: This paper discusses the various manifestations of children as protagonists in Romanian socialist cinema, and particularly those present in the juvenile detective movies of that time. Several productions of the socialism cinema industry had children as their main heroes and the movies discussed here were deploying tropes and narrative strategies specific to the global genre of boy detectives. The analysis uses examples that range from written texts, books or cartoons, to films and television series, as these cultural products were exploring not only childhood, but also a particular behaviour of young children and teenagers. Movies like Babușcă’s Adventures (Aventurile lui Babușcă, 1973), The Redhead (Roșcovanul, 1976), The Son of the Mountains (Fiul munților, 1981), The Knights of the Cherry Blossoms (Cireșarii TV series 1972 and the movie in 1984) or other TV series such as The Freckled (Pistruiatul, 1973), a continuation of The Redhead or The White Rocket (Racheta albă, 1984), which are part of a particular sub-genre in children’s cinema are closely analysed. They are considered to be relevant for understanding the transformations in Romanian society, as the socialist regime was creating an educational environment for children according to the dominant ideology, the narratives were exploring the resources of a wider genre. They belong to a more complex cultural phenomenon, then simply to a propaganda mechanism. By means of popular cinema and using the strategies of detective storytelling, the common elements of these films are shared with the global “youth detective” sub-genre. The impact of these movies, seen by millions of viewers of all ages in the socialist society, is undeniable and today many of these movies are broadcasted again by some Romanian television stations. Often the question that is addressed remains centred around the political use of children and childhood, which makes their aesthetic dimensions and their use of genre conventions secondary. Based on a genre analysis and using examples from a selected corpus, this interpretation focuses on the internal processes of these narratives and their functions. While the ideology behind the storytelling is explicit, we need to be questioning their inner mechanisms and their emotional appeal. These heroic children’s characters and their childhood under the socialist regime have more dimensions than simply their labelling as propaganda or their role in imposing the myth of the Father and Mother of the nation. Moving beyond the simplistic explanations, claiming that the literature and cinema created during state socialism were only mindless tools of the dominant ideology, this paper is a contribution to understanding the global cultural dialogue and the contribution of Romanian socialist cinema to the international exchange of ideas. In the absence of a complete cultural history of childhood in socialist Romania, this paper uses the child protagonists and the representation of children in several juvenile detective style movies, created during the 70s and the 80s, as an instrument to understand the cultural history of the autochthonous socialist society.
Keywords: Romanian cinema; Communism; Childhood; Detective movies; Entertainment; Cultural infantilization; Symbolic exploitation
University of Tartu, Estonia
katre.talviste@ut.ee
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.03
P. 62 – 76
The Curious Case of Juhan Paju and a Fortunate Choice of Pop Lit over Poetry
Abstract: This essay proposes a study of the poetics and local generic context of the work of Juhan Paju (1939–2003), arguably one of the very few original Estonian crime writers emerged from the twentieth century. The focus is on five of his novels centred on investigations led by Toivo Kivistik, a small-town police detective. The series is set in the last decades of the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first century. This tumultuous period in local history has provided rich material for socially relevant themes. Paju’s work is original in treating this material, but also in his experiments with generic conventions, which he progressively adapts to his own talent and to the local context.
Keywords: Estonian literature; Genre fiction ; Crime fiction; Detective fiction ; Roman à énigme; Roman noir; Juhan Paju
Centre for Humanities, University of Nova Gorica, Slovenia
Primoz.mlacnik@ung.si
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.04
P. 77 – 92
From Minor Literature to Neoliberal Noir: The Detective Novels of Sergej Verč
Abstract:In this article, we analyze the politics of representation in the detective tetralogy (1991-2009) of the late Slovenian and Triestinian writer Sergej Verč to trace the changing patterns of cultural representations in the period of Slovenian transition from socialism to capitalism. Originating from transdisciplinary perspectives, addressing several aspects of Verč’s primary literary semiotic device of schizophrenia, we trace a simultaneous literary and chronological shift from minor literature to neoliberal noir. We expose the fundamental representational ambiguity by analyzing the detective triad (murder-victim-criminal), the fetishization of detective clues, erotization of detection, and the underlying binary oppositions. Verč’s detective novels critique the Slovenian capitalist transition but also reproduce culturally conservative representations of gender, sexuality, and family.
Keywords:Slovenian Literature; Sergej Verč; Minor literature; Neoliberal noir; Trieste; de(mythologization); Schizophrenia; Politics of representation; Detective novels; Critique of capitalism; Cultural conservatism
Université Masaryk, Brno, République Tchèque
poucova@ped.muni.cz
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.05
P. 93 – 103
« Accepter et pardonner, c’est se réconcilier avec soi-même », L’Histoire tchèque du XXe siècle vue par le roman policier
Abstract:The article explains the development and specific features of the detective genre in the Czech Republic (and its predecessor Czechoslovakia) from the beginning of the 20th century. It observes that these features are just as valid in the last 30 years. The main focus is on crime fiction literature and, in particular, TV crime series that have become especially popular since 2015, both of which have been inspired by true organised crime cases between 1990-2010. However, it is noted that in its historical examination of the Communist era, the media culture is still avoiding delving into the issues connected with the problematic post-war history of the Czech Sudetenland.
Keywords:Czech Republic; Czech history; Organised crime; Detective genre; Crime fiction literature; TV crime series; Philosophy in the 20th century
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
radu.toderici@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.06
P. 104 – 113
Late Modernist Noirs: Béla Tarr’s Damnation/ Kárhozat and György Fehér’s Passion/ Szenvedély
Abstract: Since the 80s, a large number of films, manifestly indebted to the classic American noir films of the 40s and 50s, have been appropriately labeled neo-noirs. An interesting, but less well documented version of this phenomenon, mostly American in its nature, is the case of some of the films belonging to the so-called Hungarian “Black Series”. Made at the end of the 80s and during the 90s, these films are modernist, stylized versions of the classic noir films. This essay tries to give an outline of this East European reappraisal of the noir film, by insisting on the narrative and aesthetical strategies used by directors such as Béla Tarr or György Fehér in order to deconstruct the classical genre.
Keywords: “Black Series”; Modernist Noir; Hungarian Cinema; Béla Tarr; György Fehér
Gender & Noir
University of Pitești, Pitești, Romania
amalia.marasescu@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.07
P. 117 – 133
Female Detectives in Romanian Literature: Vitoria Lipan and Minerva Tutovan
Abstract: The essay draws a parallel between two female detectives in Romanian literature: Mihail Sadoveanu’s Vitoria Lipan and Rodica Ojog-Brașoveanu’s Minerva Tutovan. While Vitoria Lipan is not commonly regarded as a detective, Minerva Tutovan is a professional State Security officer and investigator. Mention will be made of their marital status, profession, pets, moral qualities and others, in an attempt to show that although they differ in many respects including education, background, social status, historical epoch and purpose, they are equally skilful in finding criminals and bringing them to justice. They will also be analysed as mentors: Vitoria for her son Gheorghiță and Minerva for her subordinate, lieutenant Vasile Dobrescu.
Keywords: Romanian literature; Mihail Sadoveanu; Rodica Ojog-Brașoveanu; Female detective; Gender roles; Investigation
University of Bucharest, Romania
roxana.eichel@litere.unibuc.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.08
P. 134 – 147
Intersecting Inequalities in Romanian Crime Series Shadows (HBO). Expressions of Identity between Authenticity, Stereotypes and ‘Eastploitation’
Abstract:The representations of gender, ethnicity and class play a particularly significant part in structuring the way in which East European crime fiction makes sense of its cultural identity. Issues of social inequality and discrimination are addressed by the European institutions through the promotion of inter- and multi-cultural values that are meant to foster awareness about social stereotypes and prejudices and promote the artistic expression of more balanced representations (i.e. the EIGE policies). Yet sometimes the gap between the inclusive aims pursued by the European policies and the realities represented in crime films, TV dramas and novels is more than noticeable. This article aims to discuss this fluctuation between disparity, stereotypization, realism and exploitation in the HBO production Shadows (Umbre, 2014-2019).
Keywords:Eastern European identities; Crime fiction series; Exploitation; Cultural stereotypes; Self-orientalization; Gender; Class; Ethnicity
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
andrada.pintilescu@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.09
P. 148 – 157
Death Becomes Her. Implicit Religion, Relics, Myth-Making and the Witch Complex in Visual Representations of Women in Film Noir. A Case Study
Abstract:While cinema and especially the Hollywood Golden Age has constructed a mythology of its own, cinematic storytelling has also recycled heavily on classic mythologies and cultural stereotypes. The female figures have represented during the Hollywood Golden Age and in film noir in particular a special category from this perspective, being both deified and demonized, depicted as goddesses, vampires, fascinating ghosts and, above all, femmes fatales. Classic feminist studies have argued (see Laura Mulvey, 1975, Ann Kaplan, 1978) that both this depiction/representation, verbal or visual, and the intended spectator, are male. Based on a comparative case-study, the current paper discusses the manner in which what I call a cinematic witch complex is constructed through either hiding or revealing in order to conclude which is more efficient in the process of gendered myth-making.
Keywords:Film Noir, myth-making, representation, gender, Alfred Hitchcock, Rebecca (1940), Laura (1944)
East Seen From the West
Université TELUQ, Montréal, Canada
paul.bleton@teluq.ca
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.10
P. 161 – 171
Lu à l’ouest, le crime de l’est a du lest
Abstract: Based on a corpus of Eastern and Western crime novels dealing with crime in the former Eastern Bloc countries, three issues are examined:
– the globalization of the crime fiction market through French translation and a few of its deterritorializing consequences for writers and readers;
– the a priori pragmatic-semantic configurations informing the act of reading (culture of fiction, culture of the author and culture of the reader);
– the symbolic displacement of the disappeared Iron Curtain towards two types of thematic border: one by excess (the perpetuated over-border) and the other by default (the checkpoint and the confines).
: Eastern Noir; Western Eastern Noir; Translation; French readership; globalization;
Transylvania University, Brașov, Romania
ioana.andrea.diaconu@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.11
P. 172 – 184
Creating and destroying prejudices. Romanian characters in German television thrillers beginning with the millennium
Abstract: The study includes over 30 German TV thrillers and series aired during a 20-year period, with the plots located in different regions, in which Romanians play parts of different degrees of importance for the story. The main interest is to identify whether or to which extent the different roles are tributary to stereotypes about Romanians and to what extent the characters might contribute to creating a perception of Romanians in the German society, respectively to changing the existent one. Thus it is important to find out the socio-cultural background of the characters, their occupational status and their regional origins, if known. Attention will be also paid on the names of the characters and cast. There is also an interest in whether there is a link between the German regions where the plots are located and the appearance of Romanians in the films, and if so, which fact is this owed to. Another question would be to which extent are the characters/roles connected to the social reality, or just filling in gaps with stereotypes to allow the plot to develop. As far as the characters are those of criminals, it is interesting to find out what place on the ranking of criminals do Romanians occupy, and, if possible, to identify the relation with other non-German felons. An important issue is the fact that the analysed films were aired on public TV stations with an explicit educational, non-commercial mission and editorial policy. It is to be identified, whether the image of Romanians is also tributary to such a policy.
Keywords: Eastern Europe; Romanians; German crime series; Imagology; Stereotyping; Migration; Discrimination; Crime Scene
Université de Debrecen, Hongrie
kalai.sandor@arts.unideb.hu
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.12
P. 185 – 197
Europa Blues (L’Europe de l’Est des romans policiers scandinaves)
Abstract: The Scandinavian detective novel (or at least some of its authors) elaborates on local materials in an increasingly global or European context. From the perspective of its social relevance, the detective novel provides some of the most influential representations of Otherness. What interests us here is the place of Eastern Europe in the novels of certain Nordic Noir authors: Inger Wolf, Arne Dahl and Jo Nesbø. The dynamics between private and public, individual and collective, as well as the rich representation of different forms of mobility make it possible to build a wide variety of character identities, and to embrace both the local and the European/global. On the one hand, for the Scandinavian West, Eastern Europe is problematic, which makes Nordic noir detective novels regularly return to its genuine exploration. But from another angle, the fictional representation of the Eastern part of Europe is largely dependent on stereotypes. The novels in the present selection only partially or intermittently problematize these stereotypes, which could be due to the fact that, on the whole, Eastern Europe plays only a minor and sometimes rather ornamental part in the plot.
Keywords: Scandinavian literature; Detective Novels; Inger Wolf; Arne Dahl; Jo Nesbø; Diversity; Globalization; Stereotypes
Noir sans frontiers: Beyond Genre and Geography
West University of Timișoara, Romania
marius.crisan@e-uvt.ro
Carol Senf
Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia
carol.senf@lmc.gatech.edu
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.13
P. 201 – 215
The Mysteries of the Post-Communist Vampire: Detective features in the novel Nepotul lui Dracula by Alexandru Mușina
Abstract:The association of the vampire with Eastern Europe has evolved in crime fictions which transform this fantastic character from a supernatural being to a means to comment on politics, many of them focusing on the imagological opposition between Eastern Europe and the Occidental world, a treatment that began with Stoker’s Dracula. Our paper analyses the transformation of this imagological vampiric stereotype, by investigating the deconstructivist novel Nepotul lui Dracula (“Dracula’s Nephew”) (2012) by the Romanian writer Alexandru Mușina. This paper focuses on the detective features of this parodic work, and analyses the elements typical to vampire crime fiction, as well as reflects on problems which the post-Communist society has to face, such as the reversal of values, the shadows of the Communist past, the remnants of the Communist secret police, and corruption in different layers of the society.
Keywords: Romanian literature; Dracula; Transylvania; Alexandru Mușina; Vampire crime fiction; Detective story; Vampire stereotypes
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
alex_vasies@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.14
P. 216 – 225
Narrative Devices in Motion: From Genre Fiction to Mainstream Fiction in Florin Chirculescu’s Prose
Abstract:This article explores the dynamics between Romanian genre fiction and mainstream fiction in the postcommunist period, trying to negotiate the instrumentalizations of narrative devices usually found in popular literature (be it fantasy, crime, or mystery fiction) in a novel that transcends normative genre boundaries. Thus, the text traces a specific way in which some Romanian writers (in this case Florin Chirculescu) have navigated the strenuous path brought by capitalism in the local literary scene.
Keywords:Romanian literature; Genre Fiction; Mainstream Fiction; Maximalist Novels; Florin Chirculescu; Anarchetype
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
maria.barbu@stud.ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.15
P. 226 – 245
Virtual dystopias: Westworld and technology’s potential to save or enslave the world
Abstract: After the two World Wars and the rise of totalitarian regimes, dystopian narratives have begun to spread within the literary and social imaginary in an attempt to warn against the grim future of such socio-political realities. Lately, considering its continuous developments, technology has also become the subject of very heated debates: will it contribute to the qualitative enhancement of human life? Or, on the contrary, will it become another factor that will threaten humanity’s existence (and maybe even its dominance) on earth? The aim of this paper is to answer these questions by closely examining Westworld (Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, HBO Entertainment, 2016 – present), one of the series that has addressed the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence in a very complex manner during the past few years. Apart from analysing how themes such as free will, conscience or power are discussed throughout the series, this research will also draw comparisons with the European colonizers’ attitude towards the native Americans they encountered during the discovery of the New World, in order to show that man’s eternal desire to subjugate “the other” (be it the race of American natives or the androids specifically created to satisfy his pleasures) can lead to a scenario just as dystopic as the one in which the supremacy would belong to the initially oppressed side.
Keywords: Westworld; Dystopia; Violence; Artificial Intelligence; Technology; Alterity; Free will; Conquest
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.16
P. 246 – 261
Noir Affect in Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City
Abstract:Taking its cue from Christopher Breu and Elizabeth A. Hatmaker’s rethinking of noir affect as a descriptor of detective fiction, this paper contributes to the discussion of South African writer Lauren Beukes’s Zoo City as a narrative that both harnesses and fluidifies the generic conventions of the crime thriller. Pondering Beukes’s claim that her story may become the site for the transmutation or transmission of ethically adjusted emotion, the paper resorts to Lauren Berlant’s thoughts on detective fiction as a genre condensing the “cruel optimism” of the ordinary, rather than the evental, present to explore the clues of affectional attunement in Lauren Beukes’s postapartheid novel.
Keywords:Noir Affect; Crime Fiction; Muti Noir; Lauren Beukes; Cruel Optimism
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
ruxces@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.17
P. 262 – 267
The Savage Detectivism of Roberto Bolaño’s Fiction
Abstract:The present study analyses Roberto Bolaño’s engagement with marginality in the novels The Savage Detectives and 2666, via the conventions of the noir genre. The aesthetics of the peripheral, the poetics of triviality, vagrancy, bohemian wanderlust, and enigmatic rituals are performed in an inimitable personal style that problematizes issues pertaining to the theory of literature and the theory of the novel. Atomised, puzzle-like novels with deliberately obscure police procedural plots, The Savage Detectives and 2666 break several authorial and narrative architectural patterns, becoming major landmarks in today’s novelistic worldscape.
Keywords: Roberto Bolaño; The Savage Detectives; 2666; Marginality; Poetics of triviality; Vagrancy; Bohemia; roman noir
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
calina.parau@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.18
P. 268 – 275
Residues and Presents in Contemporary Shrinking Temporalities
Abstract: Taking into consideration the inherent crisis in our experience and perception of time, we will have to ask ourselves what is the link between the way in which we engage with the ‘present’ and with the ‘aesthetic’ in our postmodern societies as we experience the opposing categories of the ‘resisting’ and the ‘elusive’. Zygmunt Bauman believes that our “liquid culture” is marked by discontinuity and forgetting as our social realities become more and more fragmented. Frederic Jameson also mentions the ways in which “the displacement of old-fashioned industrial labor by the newer cybernetic kind” has changed continuity-based possibilities of engaging with reality. A temporality of “passive reception” rather than ‘agency’ characterizes our possibilities of making sense of a preexisting reality made up of circuits that flow in and out of non-temporalized worlds. It is highly important to discuss about the language of an aesthetic, cultural and subjective ‘present’ as a possibility of creating meaning from inside categories of experience that oppose our culture of the fugitive and disengagement.
Keywords: Zygmunt Bauman; “Liquid Culture” ; Fragment; Time; Experience; Culture; Anarchetype; Perception
Les imaginaires du féminin/masculin dans la littérature/Feminine vs. Masculine Imaginaries in Literature
Najate NerciHassan II University of Casablanca, Morrocco
najate.nerci@gmail.com
Introduction
Ce dossier est consacré à des articles relevant des actes du colloque : « Imaginaires du féminin/masculin : Permanences et métamorphoses » organisé à l’Université de Casablanca au Maroc les 4 et 5 Mars 2020 en collaboration avec le Centre des recherches internationales sur l’imaginaire (CRI2i). Cet événement s’inscrivait dans le cadre du projet : « Genre et droits humains » financé par le programme Ibn Khaldoun d’appui à la recherche dans le domaine des sciences humaines et sociales[1]. Les articles du présent dossier se penchent sur divers aspects que revêt la dyade du féminin/masculin dans la littérature. L’apport des lettres dans l’élaboration d’un matériau riche en interrogations sur cette dualité n’est plus à prouver. En effet, la littérature depuis ses origines constitue le lieu de dépôt mais aussi de mobilisation de l’imaginaire dans l’expérience narrative de l’être et du monde. Cet objet de recherche aux multiples métamorphoses qu’est l’imaginaire du féminin/masculin trouve un lieu d’expression favorable d’investissement des mythes, des archétypes et des représentations dans la littérature. Les articles que nous présentons dans ce dossier en fournissent un exemple éloquent. Les nouvelles configurations de mythes relatifs au féminin et au féminin y trouvent une place de choix. L’un des plus marquants et fascinants est bien celui des amazones devenu topos revisité par nombre d’écrivaines de la deuxième vague féministe des années 60 (Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig (1969), The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975), Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976) and A Door into Ocean by Joan Slonczewski (1986). L’utopie des Amazones en devient une « expérience de pensée », une démonstration par l’absurde servant de mise en garde contre les dangers de perpétuer une société discriminatoire envers les femmes (C. Braga). La reprise contemporaine du mythe féminin, elle, dans deux films : L’Antichrist (2009) de Lars Von Trier et Mère! (2017) de Darren Aronofsky, présente la nature féminine comme malfaisante, irrationnelle et fragile. Au Brésil, l’imaginaire du féminin étudié par Luísa Assunção Pesché dans trois romans est constitué également par la figure féminine dangereuse. La femme fatale est l’archétype par excellence de cet imaginaire. Trois héroïnes brésiliennes : l’oblique Capitu, l’héroïne de Machado de Assis dans le roman Dom Casmurro (1900) ; Gabriela, la mulâtresse de Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958) de Jorge Amado, et Hilda Furacão, la prostituée du roman homonyme de Roberto Drummond (1991) permettent une interprétation de l’archétype féminin enfoui dans les profondeurs de l’imaginaire brésilien. Il y est synonyme de fascination et de menace pour l’ordre établi entraînant la perte de l’homme (Assunção Pesché).
Or, d’autres comme Georges Sand rêvait, d’Indiana à Nanon, de 1832 à 1872, d’une union harmonieuse entre le masculin et le féminin et tenta même de trouver le moyen de surmonter la dualité à travers l’art (G. Peylet). A une époque plus proche, Yourcenar laisse transparaître à travers son personnage impérial : Hadrien, sa perception de l’unité originaire, divine et androgyne en inscrivant l’être humain dans l’ordre naturel de l’être sacré (C.M. Zărnescu). Dans « ZABOR ou les psaumes de Kamel Daoud », la réinvention, le détournement et la transformation du personnage féminin de Schéhérazade en personnage masculin se fait à la fois par le corps et par l’usage du récit pour contrer la mort (S. Atoui-Labidi). Black Milk d’Elif Shafak décrit comment les expériences des femmes reflètent un destin tragique dans un monde post-moderne où l’individualité est marquée par la diversité et la multiplicité. La maternité s’avère être un fardeau vu les normes de la société patriarcale imposant une identité « donnée » pour les femmes et les hommes (E.-S.-A. Yunusoglu). Pour Yasmine Chami, l’exploration de la sphère de l’intime s’effectue à la manière d’une spéléologie de la conscience d’être au monde. L’auteure mobilise un imaginaire multiforme par l’usage du conte et de la mythologie permettant à la question du féminin/masculin de se déployer conjointement sur le plan intime et universel. (F.-E.Taznout)
Flaubert, dans Salammbô, octroie au roman un projet unique : l’affirmation d’une confrontation entre configurations mythologiques masculines et féminines. Le nihilisme de Flaubert cherche à détruire les plus hautes valeurs de la culture bourgeoise et culmine dans une attaque contre les rôles qu’il assigne au sexe opposé. (H. Ismail). Plus proche de nous, le nihilisme féminin au Canada francophone prend une autre ampleur. Il est analysé, ici, à travers les expériences scripturales de Nelly Arcan (Burqa de chair) et Catherine Mavrikakis (Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques et La ballade d’Ali Baba). L’analyse montre que si, chez Nelly Arcan, la pesanteur de la matérialité du corps et la certitude qu’elle n’y a aucune autre dimension qu’elle mène à un nihilisme autodestructif, chez Catherine Mavrikakis, le nomadisme réitéré, la force de la narration et le cosmopolitisme affiché éludent la solution du nihilisme. (L.T. Ilea)
Bien que distinctes les uns des autres, ces écritures littéraires de la dualité féminin/masculin sont liées par des questionnements d’une grande acuité. Ils manifestent le désir de recréer un imaginaire foisonnant qui s’adosse à un passé archétypal et font de leurs produits un lieu de déconstruction et de recréation, un lieu qui achemine l’imaginaire des sexes vers de nouveaux circuits de sens. La dyade féminin/masculin n’a de cesse d’être l’endroit idéal pour interroger le rapport de l’être humain à lui-même et au monde.
[1] La première édition du programme Ibn Khaldoun d’appui à la recherche dans le domaine des Sciences Humaines et Sociales a été mis en place par le centre national de la recherche scientifique et technique et le ministère de l’éducation nationale, de la formation professionnelle, de l’enseignement supérieur et de la recherche scientifique pour trois ans (2019-2022)
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
corinbraga@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.19
P. 281 – 290
The New Amazons: Second-Wave Feminist Dystopias
Abstract:From Antiquity to Modernity, the topic of the Amazons questioned the relationships between men and women, triggering a series of anthropological, social and cultural problems, such as the separation between the sexes, the fascination with parthenogenesis, or the reversal of the social and cultural roles of the genders. In the wake of the second-wave feminism of the ’60, resonating with the Women’s Liberation Movement, several authors revisited this topos: Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères (1969), Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975), Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Joan Slonczewski, A Door into Ocean (1986). In this paper I focus on Joanna Russ’s “polytopia”, in which four distinct personas of the narrator live in four alternative worlds differentiated by the relationship between the sexes, and Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, the only utopia (to my knowledge) in which the ideal society is situated not in a different space or time, but in the (delusional) mind of the protagonist. My thesis is that, in these texts, the Amazones’ utopia is a “thought experience”, a demonstration by the absurd warning against the dangers of perpetuating a society that discriminates women.
Keywords:Utopia; Dystopia; Feminism; Amazons; Joanna Russ; Marge Piercy
Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3
luisapesche@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.20
P. 291 – 308
Les héroïnes (fatales) brésiliennes : archétypes et métamorphoses
Abstract: This work proposes to observe the appropriation of the myth of the femme fatale, the great guiding myth of French decadence[i] and its system of symbols in the Brazilian imaginary. Three Brazilian heroines, which fall under the theme of fatality in women, constitute the main corpus of this research: the oblique Capitu, the heroine of Machado de Assis in the novel Dom Casmurro (1900); Gabriela, la mulâtresse de Gabriela, cravo e canela (1958) by Jorge Amado, and Hilda Furacão, the prostitute from the homonymous novel by Roberto Drummond (1991). The echoes of the myth allow us to see that these heroines are fatal women par excellence, their figures moving within an evolving patriarchal society in Brazil.
[i] Voir Gilbert Durand, « Lettres sur les deux mythes directeurs du XXe siècle », in Champs de l’imaginaire, Grenoble, ELLUG, 1996.
Brasilian literature; Machado de Assis; Jorge Amado; Roberto Drummond; Femme fatale; Myth; Metamorphosis
Université Bordeaux 3, France
gerard.peylet@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.21
P. 309 – 324
Le masculin et le féminin dans le roman sandien: Vers un dépassement de la dualité
Abstract:From Indiana to Nanon, from 1832 to 1872, G. Sand never ceased to revolt against the abuse of power of which women are victims in a society made for men and directed by them. She also sought to find a positive response to this tyranny which makes women a dependent being, by reflecting on another form of relationship between man and woman and on a new role that women could play within the society. After being a victim, the Sandian woman becomes an educator of herself and others, a true mediator before engaging in social life alongside men. In this male/female relationship, education, which plays a central role, is based on dialectical thinking. Through education, the Sandian character learns to overcome the social, political, cultural and psychological barriers that hinder being. It is a weapon to conquer freedom, to give back to the degraded feminine identity its dignity. George Sand was not content to seek another power for women. She did not want to affirm the superiority of women either. She dreamed of a harmonious union between masculine and feminine and even tried to find the way to overcome duality through art.
Keywords:Masculine/feminine; George Sand; Feminine identity; Power; Duality.
University of Piteşti, Romania
crina_zarnescu@yahoo.fr
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.22
P. 325 – 340
Sous le masque du masculin? Approche poétique du roman Mémoires d’Hadrien de Marguerite Yourcenar
Abstract:Marguerite Yourcenar could have said “Hadrian, it’s me” like Flaubert whose conception of impersonal narrator she shares, but she didn’t say it! She leaves behind her Me and all the emotions, feelings, life experiences which Me represents by replacing it with and auctorial and imperial I of Hadrian. She barrows Hadrian’s voice to convey her thoughts on human condition, liberty, authenticity, and truth. Her author traits meet the emperor’s traits which manifest themselves wonderfully in this novel by their capacity to access the essential, to immerse in the historical context to unveil in an a-historical way, let’s say, Hadrian’s eminent, august, and human personality. Beyond this writer-character “substitution”, one accedes to her literary credo on the originary divine, and androgyne unit which writers can remake in their texts by putting the human being with all its the attributes in the natural order of its sacred existence. By the above assertions, we have configured the main directions of our poetical approach which also uses hermeneutical and psychoanalytic instruments.
Keywords:Marguerite Yourcenar; Mémoires d’Hadrien; Masculine/feminine; Me/I, Human condition; Authenticity; Masculine writing
Université Mohamed Boudiaf de M’Sila, Algérie
Souad.labidi@univ-msila.dz
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.23
P. 341 – 353
Réinvention et détournement du féminin ou Schéhérazade au masculin dans ZABOR ou les psaumes de Kamel Daoud
Abstract:Scheherazade, an important female character in the collection of tales The Thousand and One Nights, its main storyteller and guarantor since she ensured its continuity by inventing each night a new story to achieve a specific goal: (to) save from the execution. She is also presented as the perfect embodiment of the therapist who wields speech with great intelligence to heal the king of his complexes and his insatiable desire for revenge. But what fate was reserved for her after the thousand and one nights stories (Les Mille et Une Nuits)? What was the destiny of this “out of the ordinary” female character after her last story? Her fate has certainly changed… The current literary writing has ensured many mutations and important metamorphoses. In this article, we analyze the novel by Algerian author Kamel Daoud ZABOR ou les psaumes focusing our attention on the reinvention and diversion of the female character of Scheherazade to the masculine.
Keywords:Kamel Daoud; Scheherazade; Literary imagination; Zabor; Reinvention; Diversion; Scheherazade to the masculine
Faculty of Letters, University of Bucharest, Romania
andradaeylul@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.24
P. 354 – 370
“The Harem Within” The complexity of female identity in Elif Shafak’s Black Milk
Abstract:In a post-modern world where selfhood is defined by diversity and multiplicity, Elif Shafak’s Black Milk outlines how women’s experiences depict a tragic fate. In this memoir Elif Shafak writes about motherhood and authorship and the many stereotypes women face in a patriarchal society. For many women writers, motherhood became a burden, because they had to choose between being a “good” mother and a “good” author. This article aims to explore the complexity of women’s identity in Black Milk through a feminist perspective and also to analyse Elif Shafak’s feminine discourse and its empowerment process. Elif Shafak questions the norms of the patriarchal society, because it enforces a “given” identity for both women and men. Black Milk also outlines the anxiety women face when it comes to writing, motherhood and many other experiences, describing an enormous pressure put on women to reflect an ideal.
Keywords:Elif Shafak; Black Milk; Feminine identity; Motherhood; Authorship; Memoir; Feminist theory
Université Hassan II, Casablanca, Maroc
taznoutfatimazohra@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.25
P. 371 – 386
Yasmine Chami, une écriture de l’intranquilité
Abstract:Yasmine Chami’s fictional work is made of the meticulous exploration of the sphere of the intimate in the manner of a caving of the consciousness of being in the world. A narrative motif in particular comes off for the systematic nature of its occurrences, that of abandonment (of the woman by her spouse). This leitmotiv strikingly crystallizes the fragility of couple bonds and inevitably induces a profound questioning of the relationships between women and men and the representations that underlie them. In order to shed new light on the life path of her heroines, the author mobilizes a multifaceted imagination. In the present study, the focus will be primarily on the ingenious use she makes of storytelling and mythology as major narrative springs which allow the work to unfold simultaneously on the intimate and the universal level.
Keywords:Yasmine Chami; Gender imaginaries; Myth; Oral tradition; Memory; Interpretation; Abandonment
Université de Sfax, Tunisie
Ismail_hichem@yahoo.fr
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.26
P. 387 – 400
L’antagonisme du féminin et du masculin dans Salammbô de Flaubert
Abstract: In Salammbô by Flaubert, the representation of the ancient universe reveals a struggle between two opposing principles, masculine and feminine, which takes on a character that is both mythological and cosmological. While revealing the dangers of the encounter between these two poles, the story stages a fierce confrontation between these two imaginaries presenting themselves as mutually exclusive. The fiction is driven by a single project and revolves around a single purpose: to highlight the antagonism between the mythical configurations of the masculine and those of the feminine. This antithetical construction will give rise to a whirlwind of passion and cruelty that will consecrate the triumph of monstrosity over amorous emotions. In the Punic work, the language of violence prevails over that of love so much so that the deep energy that nourishes amorous desire is transformed into a veritable force of generalized annihilation. Flaubert’s nihilism strives to undermine the highest values of bourgeois culture, which disgusts it, and reaches its peak when it attacks the roles it assigns to the opposite sexes.
Keywords:Gustave Flaubert; Salammbô; Antagonism; Myth; Sexual stereotypes; Feminine vs. Masculine; Desire; Subversion
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
laura.ilea@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.27
P. 401 – 413
La littérature féminine en infrarouge. Au-delà du nihilisme
Abstract:The article analyzes two versions of feminine nihilism in the French-speaking Canada: Nelly Arcan, especially in her posthumous book, Burqa de chair, and Catherine Mavrikakis, in two of her novels, Deuils cannibales et mélancoliques and La ballade d’Ali Baba. By emphasizing the terms mélanomanie and néantisme, the headliners of the “professors of despair” in the homonymous book by Nancy Huston, my text defends the idea that the story-telling operation specific to the search for the “great novel” in La ballade d’Ali Baba is capable, through its reiteration of nomadism, cosmopolitanism and a “poisoned narrative”, to overcome the nihilism inherent to the solipsistic writings of Nelly Arcan.
Keywords: Canadian Literature; Feminine nihilism; Professors of despair; Nelly Arcan; Flesh burqa; Catherine Mavrikakis; Poisoned narrative
Library Survey
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
andreiczamfirescu@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.28
P. 417 – 423
Marius Conkan, Building Secondary Worlds in Portal-Quest Fantasy Fiction, Interdisciplinary Discourses, 2020
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
carmen.borbely@ubbcluj.ro
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.29
P. 424 – 428
Marcus Tomalin, Telling the Time in British Literature, 1675-1830. Hours of Folly?, New York and London, Routledge, 2020
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
indnpavell@gmail.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.30
P. 429 – 433
Călin Teutișan, Scenarii ale criticii. Protagoniști, metode, interpretări, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Școala Ardeleană, 2021
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
airarle@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.31
P. 434 – 438
Cătălin Pavel, Archéologie de l’amour. De l’homme de Néandertal à Taj Mahal, Éditions de l’Aube, La Tour-d’Aigues, 2022
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
costeaunot@yahoo.com
DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2022.43.32
P. 439 – 445
Vasile Voia, Religia în epoca romantică: Un imaginar al Absolutului, Cluj-Napoca, Școala Ardeleană, 2022