A More or Less Haphazard Archaeological Finding. The Medieval Sword from Șeica Mare

This paper brings forward a solitary case in Romania when the discoverer of a medieval sword (found with the aid of a metal detector) chose to preserve it in situ, partially uncovered, and to report it to local authorities. Following the report an archaeological diagnosis was run to salvage the item. The results of the diagnosis together with a legislative account, a short history of the discoveries in the area and the typological and chronological framing of the sword (which is a knightly weapon from the first half of the 13th century) are all presented in the following paper.

Keywords: contemporary Romanian archaeology, Șeica Mare, metal detection, archaeological research, medieval sword.

Family ceremonial structures. Linguistic birth habbits in Slanic Prahova Area

Family ceremonial structures constitutes a major component assembly Romanian traditional customs, representing the fundamental moments of life: birth, marriage and death. Family habits are paramount in community life, being respected through the tradition of each area. Family is essential in the life of any community, because here the individual goes through all the stages of his life, forming his future. Each stage of the individual’s life is marked by the transition from one state to another, thus contributing to the modification of the individual’s life. This is why it is important not only for the family, but also for the community to participate in the stages of the human life. In Slanic, birth, marriage and death are as important as celebrations over the year, marking the important stages of human life and for hundreds of years. The compliance of these traditions has attributed to Slănic area the preserving area of traditions character, as they have existed since ancient times.

Keywords: birth, linguistics, ceremonial, family, life

„The Window of the Soul” in the Theological Thought of Father Gheorghe I. Petre-Govora (1910-2012)

The aim of this scientific article is to analyze the concept of the „window of the soul” and the idea of the soul in the vision of the priest and archaeologist Gheorghe-Petre Govora. The first step of this theoretical approach is the analysis of the concept of „window of the soul” from the viewpoint of the funeral traditions outlined by PetreGovora following archaeological discoveries. The second step is the analysis of the Petre-Govora concept of the soul by referring to the philosophical and theological teachings on this issue. At the end of this article, the argument about the immortality of the soul, which represents the test stone of the harmony between the philosophical and the theological conception of the idea of the indestructibility of the spiritual substance, is analyzed.

Keywords: modern Romanian theology, Christian metaphysics, „window of the soul”, soul of man, ritual, funeral traditions.

Living in the Interval

Written in French, the poetry volume (Intervalle ouvert) (Open Interval) reveals not only the inner beauty of a long monologue filled with cultural references that, without defining its endpoints, reinterprets facts and time, by giving back a puzzle of words and emotions, but also the prowess of an intriguing art of poetry. The title, written as in mathematics, using parentheses, reveals the certainty of doubts, empowering an absurd reality to devour the possible answers. We can also perceive traces of a social poetry welled from the constraints of routine. That is why this volume could be the promise of a great poetry author.

Keywords: collection «Poetès de cinq continents», debut, Romanian contemporary poetry, Francophone poetry, Irina-Roxana Georgescu, (Intervalle ouvert), intertextuality.

The Book of Job as Drama

The article examines an interpretation possibility to read the book of Job as a drama. It shows that some of the apparent paradoxes and contradictions in the text can be understood as an inner logic of a drama. The seeming incoherence of narrative Prolog and Job’s later statements can be easily reconciled by following through the dramatic cause-effect sequences and seeing the events as happening in permanently changing present. The dramatic approach enables to see the meeting between God and Satan as an unsuccessfully attempt to make a bet. Deprived from omniscient narrator’s perspective, the drama shows various attitudes, without pointing directly which is the best one. Full of paradoxes and contradictory statements, the main hero’s style can be compared with a modern stream of consciousness. The culminating point of the drama shows a durable change in Jobs posture and leads to surprising changes on a metalinguistic level.

Keywords: The Book of Job, Drama, literary genre, Prolog, monologue, narrator, stream of consciousness

Paternal and Auctorial Figures in Andrei Codrescu’s Prose. „Mesi@” and „Wakefield”

This study advances three reading lines: a theoretical perspective, which circumscribes Andrei Codrescu’s prose within the American gothic tradition, mainly the Southern American gothic one, imprinted as it is by the literary legacy of writers such as Mark Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tennesee Williams. Secondly, our article focuses on narrative studies applied to the representation of trauma in literature, a defining trait of the gothic tradition, and highlights ways in which the latter gives voice to the experience of victims, the marginalized, the oppressed, by resorting to fictional mechanisms which mimick in the literary realm the same trauma mechanisms which operate in the inter and intra-psychic realms. Finally, the third exploration line of Andrei Codrescu’s prose probes the language, via the theories and hypothesis regarding the apparition, functioning, and evolutionary pathways of our body of language.

Keywords: paternal and auctorial figures, Andrei Codrescu, Southern Gothic literature, God and Devil, Mesi@ and Wakefield

The Legitimisation of 2000s Romanian Poetry in Literary Journals

The multitude of texts and authors revolving around the turn-of-the-20th century phenomenon has undisputedly determined the emergence of a common identity that defines this new poetic discourse. The aim of this paper is to analyse the way in which the specialised press has received the Romanian poetry of the 2000s, succeeding to legitimise the new poetic paradigm while exhibiting a series of specific paratextual functions. Therefore, by their competence to certify and recommend, these articles succeeded to validate the generation-like character of 2000s Romanian poetry. Conversely, this new poetic wave has been constituted as a generation respecting the generationforming criteria proposed by Julius Petersen. This way, the analysed articles are in turn validated as solid theoretical discourse.

Keywords: literary generation, Romanian literature of the 2000s, poetry, literary discourse, legitimisation.

Morbid Eroticism in „Cronica de familie” by Petru Dumitriu

The Communist Romanian novel was not laborious in terms of eroticism. However, it illustrated the morbid part of love, reintegrating into Romanian prose the mysticism of the Eros from the philosophy of Bataille and Marquis of Sade. Cronica de familie by Petru Dumitriu is not a love novel in the traditional sense. It is a novel of fierce passions and dissoluteness that characterized the degraded boyar class. Published in 1956, the novel criminalizes, in Communist logic, the insensibility of the old Romanian boyars and the decadence of the bourgeoisie. The characters push the feelings to extremes so that Eros makes a common body with death. Davide’s unshared love for Vogoride urges the woman to kill her lover with cold blood. The novel illustrates the demonic forms alienated love can take.

Keywords: modern Romanian literature, Petru Dumitriu, eroticism, thanatos, excess, violence, transgression.

Rebreanu is Wrong – Detective Criticism and Dormant Metatextuality in the Novel „Amîndoi”

The following essay aims to reanalyze the novel Amîndoi of Liviu Rebreanu from the perspective of detective criticism and to detach it from the typical rules surrounding the genre. This perspective implies not only the existence of a dormant form of metatextuality in a work of a traditional realist writer, but also that of the notion of unreliable narrator. The somehow minor characters prove to exert a certain amount of autonomy without their creator’s knowledge, autonomy that allows them to move undetected through the various ellipses of the text.

Keywords: Rebreanu, Fowles, detective criticism, metatextuality, unreliable narrator, narrative autonomy

Story Teller and Story Receiver

This text has its roots in G. Călinescu’s belief that the novel is based on a characterological typology and that the characters are virtuous (in opposition with mediocre) in the way that they are not ordinary. Therefore, the analysis of Max Blecher’s Adventures in Immediate Unreality finds that the main character is interesting because of its dual stance: he alternates and mixes the roles of the teller and the listener of his story until they merge into a singular personality having some traits enhanced.

Keywords: modern Romanian literature, M. Blecher, G. Călinescu, Thomas Mann

The Mask of the Poetry, The Mask of the Poet

The masks of the poet are, in fact, the masks of Poetry, in its endeavour to reveal the most profound nuances of the spirit, embodied in symbolic, archetypal figures. One single, dedicated love becomes, in two different texts (a poem and a love letter) and in two different voices (of a woman and a man), a unique artistic vision of the feeling that comes from the depths of the human being and is capable of spiritual elevation, reaching its sublime shape in literature, which commits it to eternity.

Keywords: modern Romanian literature, Radu Stanca, poetry, love letters, poetic masks

Radu Stanca – Geographies of the Angst: His Existentialism from a Geocritical Perspective

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that some of Radu Stanca’s essays contain ideas belonging to the philosophical doctrine of existentialism and to analyse the link between his works and the main concepts used by existentialists philosophers. One of the most important aspects of his artistic belief is that one should fight against death and use his gift in order to create something which defies this existential reality. The second part of the study focuses on elements of geocriticism and how history and time appear in Radu Stanca’s essay about Sibiu city. In order to demonstrate that time and space are presented in a different way in Radu Stanca’s essay, we will use a theory developed by Bertrand Westphal.

Keywords: modern Romanian literature, modern European literature, Radu Stanca, existentialism, geocriticism.

Radu Stanca’s poetry and the concept of (in)transitivity

The aim of this article is to analyze Radu Stanca’s works of literature from the perspective of the concept of “transitivity”, term which belongs to Gheorghe Crăciun, but also, to prove why Stanca’s poetry, even though denotes a transitive attitude, has never been examined from this point of view. The comparison with Romanian poets, such as Bacovia and Abăluță, or with American and English poets, like Walt Whitman, Robert Frost and Dylan Thomas, demonstrates the fact that Radu Stanca’s writings are relevant to the present study. The confrontation between “transitivity” and “intransitivity”, encountered in his poems, serves to delimit these concepts theoretically.

Keywords: Radu Stanca’s poetry, Gheorghe Crăciun, transitivity, intransitivity, Walt Whitman.

Radu Stanca and the Myth of Oedipus: Writings and Re-Writings

The paper below aims to depict a non-exhaustive overview of the filiations and influences of one of the most popular Greek theatrical myths, namely the one focused on Oedipus, while it is a source of inspiration for a playwright created by Radu Stanca. If sometimes this myth is a pretext for some writers to create a panorama of their social context of conflicts, this cultural reference is adopted by the Romanian playwright in order to render the poetical function of the dynamic of language. Avoiding the tragic content of Oedipus’s story, Radu Stanca approaches this popular character aiming at re-establishing the capacity of the myths to feed numerous variations and interpretations in a representative literary product of the Romanian theatre of language.

Keywords: modern Romanian literature, modern European literature, Radu Stanca, myth of Oedipus.