Bakhita or what’s in a name? – the dynamics of identity reconstruction throughout memory work

The article focuses on the analysis of various aspects concerning the functions of name in Véronique Olmi’s recent novel Bakhita (2017). How can identity be reconstructed after the loss of the name and, more important, after the devastating experience of modern slavery? How relevant is the memory work in putting together the self and what are the literary techniques that the writer uses in constructing the novel? What are the limits of words and language in rendering Bakhita’s Harrowing to Hell and her Redemption?

Keywords: contemporary French literature, name, identity, alterity, memory, language, Bakhita

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Literary Legends: The “Daybreak Boys” of the Beat Generation

This article focuses on the birth of the Beat Generation in the 1950s as a natural reaction to mainstream culture in postwar America. Even though the Beat Generation’s literary productions were initially perceived as (obscene) provocations by allegedly uneducated writers, Beat literature has survived the test of time and is still influential today. The works of the most famous Beats, such as Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, or William S. Burroughs pushed the limits of what might be labeled “adequate” and eradicated censorship in (American) literature.

Keywords: modern and contemporary American literature, Beat Generation, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Dylan.

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The American Dream Between Reality and Illusion

The American novel of the 1920s explored the mixture of experimental excitement about the new and anxious awareness of historical loss. F. Scott Fitzgerald perfectly express this epoch and subsequently became the representative of this decade in the literary field. Fitzgerald is also a novelist of immersion, deeply knowing the dreams of these years and fully understanding the meaning of “The American Dream”. But, as the title of his own novel The Beautiful and Damned suggested, there was a darker side of this earthly paradise, therefore almost all his writings, from The Great Gatsby to Tender is the Night have a touch of disaster in them. The author knew how to express the driving forces behind all the glittering social display and also to stress upon the psyche of this very specific age of economic overextension.

Keywords: American novel, modernism, literary influence, „Jazz Age”, „The American Dream”.

• F. Scott Fitzgerald, Blândeţea nopţii (Tender Is the Night). Traducere de Mircea Ivănescu, postfaţă de Mihaela Anghelescu Irimia, Iași, Editura Polirom, 2009.
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, Marele Gatsby (The Great Gatsby). Traducere de Mircea Ivănescu, Iași, Editura Polirom, 2007.
• *** The New Pelican Guide to English Literature. Edited by Boris Ford, London, Penguin Books, 1983.
• *** The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, London, The Penguin Group, 1999.
• *** Contemporary Literary Criticism, Detroit, Michigan, Gale Reasearch Company Book Tower, 1975.
• Conrad Aiken, Collected Criticism, London, Oxford University Press, 1968.
• David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, London, Secker & Warburg, 1960.
• Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence. Studies in the Contemporary American Novel. New York, Harper Colophon Books, Harper & Row Publishers, 1987.
• Ihab Hassan, Selves at Risk, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

« Living on the Sound of My Voice ». Aspects of writing of the self in Anna de Noailles’ Le Livre de ma vie (The Book of My Life)

Throughout an attentive reading of Anna de Noailles’ autobiographical book, Le Livre de ma vie (1932), we will explore various aspects of autobiographical writing such as: the relation between time and memory, the work of recollecting and constructing a multiple identity, the springs of literary and existential becoming, the importance of reading and of meeting the personalities of the time on the creation of an insatiable spirit of culture. A true ethical concern seems to govern Anna de Noailles’ works and exploits, always in search for an authentic writing, faithful to life, considered as a principle of work.

Keywords: autobiography, writing of the self, identity, life account, Anna de Noailles

The “Human Resources” of the Socialist Censorship. From Bureaucracy to Psychobiographies

Part of a larger research project dedicated to the study of censorship in Romania during communist regime, the present article focuses on the “human resources” mobilized by the political power between 1949 and 1977 and active within an institution specialized in censorship in literature, arts and media: the General Directorate for Press and Print (Direcţia Generală a Presei şi Tipăriturilor, DGPT) and, with a changed name beginning with 1975, the Committee for Press and Print (Comitetul pentru Presă și Tipărituri, CPT). Obviously, there is no censorship without censors. Assuming his/her role in an impersonal manner, the censor should ideally be a transparent medium (Thomas Schlesser) through which the objectives of the party-state are accurately transmitted and applied. In reality, the censor carries all the vices of this profession. Detested by most, although admired by others, the censors were fearsome persons. Abstract bureaucrats condemned to remain anonymous while working in the proximity of celebrity, the censors were self-sufficient and arrogant. Highly intolerant and reluctant, as the job description requires, they had a cynical– or indifferent, at best – approach towards the destructive effect of their work. What is more is that by intervening politically in the artwork by correcting it, some censors were convinced, with an incredible vanity, that they participate to the act of creation. Incurable flunkies, they had, however, a strong team spirit. People’s hatred against them was equal only to the hate they have against people. There were only a few who assisted to the birth of this “institution” of censorship, but there were none to regret its disappearance. Like any other “identity kits”, the portrait sketched in this essay hides in itself a history and tries to compress a typology, both of them remade after a long search and research in the dust of the archives.

Keywords: Romanian culture, Communism, Censorship, Political surveillance, Socialist bureaucracy. Romanian National Archives.

Love Songs, Engagement Songs and Wedding Songs

The present writing aims at re-examining the rich Aromanian repertoire of love, engagement and wedding songs from the area of Veria (Greece). The traditional Aromanian poem is an important poetic document, with an undeniable beauty. For the Aromanians, the song represents something sacred and sublime, which also needs a predetermined context: the engagement, the wedding or parties. In her research, the author has used the extant collections in Greek language, as well as some ofthe numerous collections that could be found in Romanian language. The major new element is constituted by the critical reassessment of the published writings through the perspective of modernity, and also the putting into circulation of some old, lesser known texts.

Keywords : Aromanian traditional poetry, love songs, engagement songs, wedding songs

Exile and Marginality. A Possible Re-Thinking of Romanian Exiles

The paper attempts to identify some of the motivations of exile in the case of Romanian writers and painters of Jewish or German origin during the 20th century, and to assess the possibilities of their artistic assimilation into the European or world culture, according to the strategies and modes of creative discourse: from the experimental character of the avant-garde to the apparently aestheticizing forms having opposed the official discourses of the communist regime.

Keywords: contemporary Romanian literature, exile, communism, experimentalism, adoptive cultures.

„Life Is Elsewhere”. Notes On The Contemporary Diary”

The present article focuses on the particularities of the contemporary diary as a literary form, with a case study on Radu Vancu’s recent book The Sign of Cancer. Diary 2012-2015, in wich persists a certain impression of the desubstantialization of the real ego, somehow in contradiction with the stakes of an intimate diary, although the species as such is not longer exclusively assimilated to non-fiction, as demonstrated by the theoreticians of the genre. The author considers that, if poetry is a genre of the biography, the journal is a genre of the lyric – i.e. the intensification, in the etymological sense, of pulsations, emotions, feelings.

Keywords: Radu Vancu, contemporary diary, intimacy, non-fiction, autobiography.

• Kundera, Milan, Viața e în altă parte / Life is Elsewhere, traducere din cehă de Jean Grosu, Humanitas, București, 2003.
• Mihăieș, Mircea, Cărțile crude. Jurnalul intim și sinuciderea / Cruel Brooks. Intimate Diary and Suicide (ediția a II-a revăzută), Polirom, Iași, 2005.
• Simion, Eugen, Ficțiunea jurnalului intim / The Fiction of the Intimate Diary, vol.I, Editura Univers Enciclopedic, București, 2005.
• Simion, Eugen, Genurile biograficului / The Genres of the Biographic, Editura Univers Enciclopedic, București, 2002.
• Vancu, Radu, Zodia Cancerului. Jurnal 2012-2015 / The Sign of Cancer. Diary 2012-2015, Humanitas, 2017.