Find a journal

Search our journals and articles

Find a journal

5 / 2024

Views: 2,016
Featured Transilvania 5.2024
Download Full Magazine PDF
Revista: 5 / 2024
Anul Publicarii:2024
Print ISSN: Print ISSN 0255-0539; Electronic ISSN 3061-2217

Științe socio-umane

Arte vizuale

Filozofie și studii sociale

Antropologie și etnologie

Sociologie

Științe politice & juridice

Istorie & Antropologie

Studii culturale

Biblioteconomie

Științele limbii

Științele economice

Antropologie. Studii filozofice

Teologie

Studii literare

Measuring Tragedy—and Drawing Its Borders

Autor: Franco MORETTI, Andrei TERIAN
Email: franco.moretti@ulbsibiu.ro

Abstract: The present article introduces the METRA project, a project within which 22 researchers coordinated by Professor Franco Moretti will analyze the tragic form across 12 European cultures, making use of literary geography, comparative poetics, and a broad array of computational tools. This special issue of Transilvania represents a preliminary foray into the project’s topic, meant to present METRA’s methodology and discuss the generic, chronological, and geographic delimitations of tragic form.

Keywords: tragedy, the tragic, European literatures, network semantics, definition

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn, edited and with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, Preface by Leon Wieseltier. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

Eagleton, Terry. Tragedy. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 2020.

Kettle, Martin. “The Downfall of David Cameron: A European Tragedy.” The Guardian, June 24, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/david-cameron-downfall-european-tragedy, accessed on August 8, 2024.

Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics. An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1996.

Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1966.

Rossi, Elena. “Les detours obscurs”. Le annotazioni di Racine alle tragedie greche. Fasano: Schena, 1994.

Spitzer, Leo. Critica stilistica e semantica storica. Bari: Laterza, 1975.

Network Semantics. A beginning

Autor: Franco MORETTI
Email: franco.moretti@ulbsibiu.ro

Abstract: This article follows two previous attempts at using networks for the understanding of drama, “Network Theory, Plot Analysis” (2011)—also in Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (New York & London: Verso, 2013)—, and “Simulating Dramatic Networks,” Journal of World Literature (2020). Franco Moretti shows here the steps of “visualizing dramatic structure as a network” and critically engages the idea of symmetry in tragedy. In the course of the next two years, the METRA project will continue to investigate the heuristic potential of dramatic networks. 

Keywords: tragedy, dramatic networks, network semantics

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.

Bibliography

Girard, René. La violence et le sacré. Paris: Pluriel, 2010 [1972].

Moretti, Franco. “Network Theory, Plot Analysis.” New Left Review 68 (2011).

Moretti, Franco. “Simulating Dramatic Networks.” Journal of World Literature 6 (2021): 22-44.

Moretti, Franco. Distant Reading. New York & London: Verso, 2013.

Rossi, Elena. “Les detours obscurs”. Le annotazioni di Racine alle tragedie greche. Fasano: Schena, 1994.

Spitzer, Leo. Critica stilistica e semantica storica. Bari: Laterza, 1975.

Tragedy in Romanian Literature: Some Conceptual Delimitations

Autor: Andrei TERIAN
Email: andrei.terian@ulbsibiu.ro

Abstract: This article examines the presence and manifestation of tragedy as a literary genre in Romanian literature until the establishment of the communist regime. My analysis begins with an overview of the arguments that various critics, playwrights, and essayists have invoked in trying to explain the alleged absence of tragedy in Romanian culture and continues with a discussion about the errors and confusions inherent to such a position. Starting from these misconceptions, I propose a new definition of tragedy as a dramatic/theatrical genre and then employ that definition in identifying the most important tragedies in Romanian literature from the second half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century. The conclusion of my article, strongly contradicting the dominant idea in the history of Romanian drama studies, is that tragedy not only existed in Romanian literature, but that the genre represented a fundamental coordinate of the Romanian cultural tradition.

Keywords: tragedy, Romanian literature, the tragic, drama, violent death

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.

Bibliography

Alterescu, Simion, coord. Istoria teatrului în România, 1–3 [The History of Theatre in Romania, vol. 1–3]. Bucharest: Editura Academiei R.S.R., 1965–1973.

Blaga, Iosif. Teoria dramei. Cu un tractat introductiv despre frumos și artă [The Theory of Drama: With an Introductory Treatise on the Beautiful and Art]. Brașov: Editura Autorului, 1899.

Călinescu, G. History of Romanian Literature. Translated by Leon Levițchi. Milan: UNESCO-Nagard, 1988.

Călinescu, G. Opere 11: Publicistică 1963-1965. Conferințe [Works, vol. 11: Journalism 1963-1965. Conferences], edited by Nicolae Mecu, Foreword by Eugen Simion. Bucharest: Academia Română-Fundația Națională pentru Știință și Artă, 2012.

Cioran, Emil. Opere 2 [Works, vol. 2], edited by Marin Diaconu, Foreword by Eugen Simion. Bucharest: Academia Română-Fundația Națională pentru Știință și Artă, 2012.

Crohmălniceanu, Ov. S. Literatura română între cele două războaie mondiale 3: Dramaturgia și critica literară [Romanian Literature Between the Two World Wars, vol. 3: Drama and Literary Criticism]. Bucharest: Minerva, 1975.

Cunningham, J. V. “Tragedy in Shakespeare.” English Literary History 17, no. 1 (1950): 36-46.

Lehmann, Hans-Thies. Tragedy and Dramatic Theatre. Translated by Eric Butler. Abingdon-New York: Routledge, 2016.

Mandel, Oscar. A Definition of Tragedy. New York: New York University Press, 1961.

Marx, William. The Tomb of Oedipus: Why Greek Tragedies Were Not Tragic. London-New York: Verso, 2022.

Mîndra, V. Istoria literaturii dramatice românești 1: De la începuturi până la 1890 [The History of Romanian Dramatic Literature, vol. 1: From the Beginnings to 1890]. Bucharest: Minerva, 1986.

Moretti, Franco. “Simulating Dramatic Networks: Morphology, History, Literary Study.” Journal of World Literature 6, no. 1 (2020): 24–44.

Moretti, Franco. “Two Theories.” Daedalus 150, no. 1 (2021): 16–25.

Moretti, Franco. “Network Semantics. A Beginning.” Transilvania 53, no. 5 (2024).

Munteanu, Romul. Farsa tragică [Tragic Farce], second edition. Bucharest: Univers, 1989.

Negoițescu, I., Radu Stanca. Un roman epistolar [An Epistolary Novel], edited by Ioan Cristescu and Ion Vartic, Afterword by Ion Vartic. Iași: Polirom, 2022.

Olaru, Ovio. “Satire Meets Critical Realism in the European Semiperiphery: A Study on Ibsen and Caragiale.” Transilvania 53, no. 5 (2024).

Petric, Gabriel. Viziune și spirit tragic în literatura română a secolului XX [Vision and Tragical Spirit in the 20th Century Romanian Literature]. Florești: Limes, 2014.

Stanca, Radu. Aquarium. Eseuri programatice [Program Essays], edited by Marta Petreu, Foreword by Ion Vartic. Cluj-Napoca: Apostrof, 2000.

Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. New Haven-London: Yale University Press, 1996.

Stoica, Dumitrița. “Manualele de limba română între profesionalism și impostură” [The Schoolbooks for Romanian Literature and Language Between Professionalism and Imposture]. Observator cultural, no. 346, November 9 2006. https://www.observatorcultural.ro/articol/manualele-de-literatura-romana-intre-profesionalism-si-impostura-2/.

Szondi, Peter. An Essay on the Tragic. Translated by Paul Fleming. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Tilgher, Adriano. Studi sul Teatro Contemporaneo, third edition. Rome: Libreria de Scienze e Lettere, 1929.

Ung, Snejana. “Importing and Writing Tragedy in Nineteenth-Century Romanian Principalities.” Transilvania 53, no. 5 (2024).

Vianu, Tudor. Estetica, edited by Vlad Alexandrescu, Foreword by George Gană. Bucharest: Orizonturi, 1996.

Importing and Writing Tragedy in Nineteenth-Century Romanian Principalities

Autor: Snejana UNG
Email: snejana.ung@ulbsibiu.ro

Abstract: This article examines the overlooked import and production of tragedy as a literary genre during the long nineteenth-century Romanian literature. It is not that Romanian tragedies had not been written until 1918, but they were not reprinted, and the critics’ interest in these early tragedies diminished considerably over time. Starting from the observation that this poor acknowledgment is a result of a narrow and de-contextualized perspective, one that leaves aside the earlier as well as non-canonical literature, I investigate what and how tragedies were imported as well as written at the time. Whereas the imports were oriented predominantly towards the Romance-speaking countries and cultures – more than towards the Greek Antiquity –, local production explored, as expected, the historical (inter-imperial) past of the Romanian Principalities. More important, however, is the configuration of imports, which can be divided, as I aim to argue, into three categories: the latecomers, the cognates, and the diversifiers. Hence, this taxonomy, along with the local production, cast light on the fact that not only do we have tragedy – translated and local – but also that it was, as most of the cultural production, instrumentalized to promote the national ideals.

Keywords: tragedy, Romanian Principalities, long nineteenth century, import, local production.

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.

Bibliography

Baghiu, Ștefan. “Translations of Novels in the Romanian Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century (1794–1914): A Quantitative Perspective.” Metacritic Journal 6, no. 2 (2020): 87–106.

Calinescu, G. History of Romanian Literature. Transl. by Leon Levițchi. Milan: Nagard Publishers, 1988.

Caragiale, I.L. Opere, vol. 4. Bucharest: Editura pentru Literatură, 1965.

Cohen, Margaret. The Sentimental Education of the Novel. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Doyle, Laura. Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020.

Drace-Francis, Alex. The Making of Modern Romanian Culture: Literacy and the Development of National Identity. London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006.

Drăgan, Mihai. “Prefață” [Preface]. In B. P. Hasdeu, Răzvan și Vidra. Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1975.

Eliad, I. “Însemnare a traducătorului” [Translator’s Note]. In Lord Byron, Din operele lui Lord Byron. Transl. by I. Eliad, vol. II. Bucharest: Tipografia lui I. Eliad, 1839.

Eliad, I. “Prefață” [Preface]. In Lord Byron, Din operele lui Lord Byron. Transl. by I. Eliad, vol. II. Bucharest: Tipografia lui I. Eliad, 1839.

Glenny, Misha. The Balkans: Nationalism, War, and the Great Powers (1804-2012). Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2012.

Goethe, J. W. von and J. P. Eckermann. “Conversations on World Literature”, in The Princeton Sourcebook in Comparative Literature, ed. David Damrosch, Natalie Melas, and Mbongiseni Buthelezi, 17–25. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009.

Grigorescu, Dan. Shakespeare în cultura română modernă [Shakespeare in Romanian Modern Culture]. Bucharest: Minerva, 1971.

Grimm, Petre. “Traduceri și imitațiuni românești după literatura engleză” [Romanian Translations and Imitations from English Literature]. Dacoromania 3 (1924): 284–377.

Hasdeu, B.P. Răzvan și Vidra [Răzvan and Vidra]. Bucharest: Editura Eminescu, 1975.

Iorga, Nicolae. “De ce n-avem roman?” [Why Don’t We Have Novel]. Lupta, no. 1090 (1890): 2–3.

Lukács, George, and Lee Baxandall. “The sociology of modern drama.” Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 4 (1965): 146-170.

Martin, Anca-Simina. “Critical Reactions to and Early Research into Shakespeare’s Bawdy (Worldplay) in Romania(n)”. Transilvania, no. 9 (2019): 45–50.

Heliade-Rădulescu, Ion. Scrieri alese [Selected Works]. Bucharest: Albatros, 1984.

Moretti, Franco. “Conjectures on World Literature”. New Left Review 2, no. 1 (2000): 54–68.

Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Transl. by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs, and David Miller. London and New York: Verso, 1997.

Pojoga, Vlad. “The Last Bastion of European Romanticism: A Quantitative Analysis of Poetry in the Romanian Literary Magazine Convorbiri literare (1867–1916)”, Primerjalna književnost 47, no. 2 (2024): 9-30.

Ralea, Mihai. “De ce nu avem roman?” [Why Don’t We Have Novel]. Viața românească, no. 4 (1927): 82–91.

Terian, Andrei. “Tragedy in Romanian Literature: Some Conceptual Delimitations.” Transilvania 53, no. 5 (2024).

Terian, Andrei. “Big Numbers: A Quantitative Analysis of the Development of the Novel in Romania”. Transylvanian Review 28, no. 1(2010): 55–71.

Valaori, Iuliu. “Lectura tragicilor greci în liceu (un răspuns)” [Reading Greek Tragedy in High School (An Answer)]. Revista Generală a Învățământului, no. 1 (1906): 23–28.

Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. Edited by Pamela McCallum. Toronto: Broadview Press, 2006.

Satire Meets Critical Realism in the European Semiperiphery: A Study on Ibsen and Caragiale

Autor: Ovio OLARU
Email: ovio.olaru@ulbsibiu.ro

Abstract: Henrik Ibsen and Ion Luca Caragiale seem to have nothing in common but that each is considered the “national playwright” of Norway and Romania, respectively. The present contribution seeks to draw some parallels between the two (semi)peripheral authors from the late 19th and early 20th century based on their ideological positions in the literary fields of their countries. After tracing the relationship between their dramatic output and the idea of revolution, i.e., how revolution in several of its forms is reflected in their works, I work my way towards their common preoccupation for “legalizing” the world—either through bureaucracy or finance—and how this preoccupation finds its most suitable expression. Finally, I discuss how form plays a crucial role in officializing content and how Ibsen’s seriousness reflects the more prosperous, more established Norwegian bourgeoisie, whereas Caragiale’s mockery, satire, and absurdism lays bare the “frivolousness” of the new Romanian middleclass, as aspirational as it is morally precarious.

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.

Bibliography

Ban, Cornel. Dependență și dezvoltare. Economia politică a capitalismului românesc [Dependency and Development: The Political Economy of Romanian Capitalism]. Translated by Ciprian Șiulea. Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2014.

Brandes, Georg. Hovedstrømninger i det 19de aarhundredes litteratur. Emigrantlitteraturen. Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandels Forlag, 1877.

Brooks, Peter. Realist vision. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008.

Brustein, Robert. “Ibsen and revolt.” Tulane Drama Review 7, no. 1 (1962): 113-154.

Calin, Liviu. I.L. Caragiale. Bucharest: Eminescu, 1974.

Cioculescu, Șerban. I.L. Caragiale. Bucharest: Editura tineretului, 1967.

Dobrogeanu-Gherea, Constantin. Neoiobăgia: studiu economico-sociologic al problemei noastre agrare [Neo-Serfdom]. Bucharest: Editura Librăriei Socec, 1910.

Dragomir, Alexandru. O teză de doctorat la Dumnezeu. Exercțtii de gândire. Bucharest: Humanitas, 2016.

Druta, Gianina. Ibsen at the Theatrical Crossroads of Europe: A Performance History of Henrik Ibsen’s Plays on the Romanian Stages, 1894-1947. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2024.

Dumitru, Teodora. Modernitatea politică şi literară în gândirea lui E. Lovinescu. București: Muzeul literaturii române, 2016.

Grytten, Ola. “The Economic History of Norway.” EH.Net Encyclopedia, edited by Robert Whaples. March 16, 2008. URL https://eh.net/encyclopedia/the-economic-history-of-norway/.

Guthke, Karl S. Das deutsche bürgerliche Trauerspiel. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2016.

Hemmer, Bjorn. “Ibsen and the realistic problem drama.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, edited by James Walter McFarlane, 68-88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Hilson, Mary. The Nordic Model: Scandinavia Since 1945. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.

Ibrăileanu, Garabet. Spiritul critic în cultura românească [The Critical Spirit in Romanian Culture]. Iaşi: Junimea, 1970.

Ibsen, Henrik. The Complete Major Prose Plays. Translated by Rolf Fjelde. New York: Plume, 1978.

Moretti, Franco. “Ibsen and the Spirit of Capitalism.” New Left Review 61 (2010): 117-131.

Nădejde, Sofia. “Năpastea.” In I.L, Caragiale în conştiinţa contemporanilor săi [I.L. Caragiale in the Conscience of his Contemporaries], edited by Rodica Florea and Stancu Ilin, 157-166. Bucharest: Minerva, 1990.

Opitzen, Martin. Martin Opitzens Aristarchus sive de contemptu linguae Teutonicae und Buch von der Deutschen Poeterey. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2021.

Schößler, Franziska. Einführung in das bürgerliche Trauerspiel und das soziale Drama. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2015.

Schwarz, Roberto. “Brazilian Culture: Nationalism by Elimination.” In Misplaced ideas: Essays on Brazilian culture, edited by John Gledson, 1-18. London, New York: Verso, 1992.

Szondi, Péter. Theorie des modernen Dramas. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1956.

Terian, Andrei. “Tragedy in Romanian Literature: Some Conceptual Delimitations.” Transilvania 53, no. 5 (2024).

Ung, Snejana. “Importing and Writing Tragedy in Nineteenth-Century Romanian Principalities.” Transilvania 53, no. 5 (2024).

Weber, Max. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978.

Weinstein, Arnold. Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art, from Ibsen to Bergman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Williams, Raymond. Drama from Ibsen to Brecht. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968.

Young, Robin. “Ibsen and Comedy.” In The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen, edited by James Walter McFarlane, 58-67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Tragedy of Monsters: Vampire Fears, Melodrama, and the Modern Horror

Autor: Stefan BAGHIU, Anca Simina MARTIN
Email: stefan.baghiu@ulbsibiu.ro

Abstract: The contemporary understanding of the vampire trope is not solely a literary construct but also the outcome of its theatrical adaptations, often following closely after the publication of the seminal works that shaped the myth. Despite the occasional reading of vampires as tragic figures, works featuring these creatures have yet to be staged as tragedies, translating instead to melodramas and musicals. This article examines theatrical renditions of John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985), demonstrating that although these literary works offer varying interpretations of the vampire trope, they consistently diverge from the tragic form once thet are adapted for the stage. At the same time, vampires represent a world of post-tragic plots, where tragedy is impossible since they live too long after the tragic event had already occurred. Our theory is that the staging of vampire narratives coincides with historical contexts in which audiences experience disillusionment with tragedy’s promise of catharsis, opting instead to look to other dramatic formulas for a reflection of their times. While tragedies often depict the protagonist’s downfall due to an internal fatal flaw, vampire melodramas and musicals, in most cases, explore the collective trauma caused by external flaws, thus resonating more with the social and cultural milieu of their times.

Keywords: tragedy, modern novel, modern drama, horror, Dracula, The Vampyre, vampires

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.

Bibliography

“Nosferatu.” Irish Film Institute. Accessed July 28, 2024. https://ifi.ie/film/nosferatu/.

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969.

Alexander, R.S. “Assassination, Politics and Miracles: France and the Royalist Reaction of 1820 (review).” University of Toronto Quarterly 74 no. 1 (2004), 429–430.

Aquilina, Conrad. “The Deformed Transformed; Or, from Bloodsucker to Byronic Hero – Polidori and the Literary Vampire.” In Open Graves, Open Minds: Representations of Vampires and the Undead from the Enlightenment to the Present Day, edited by Sam George and William Hughes, 24–38. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016.

Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33, no. 4 (1990): 621–645.

Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Butler, Erik. The Rise of the Vampire. London: Reaktion Books, 2013.

Cavallaro, Dani. Gothic Vision: Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear. New York: Bloomsbury, 2002.

Cavell, Stanley. The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Dodd, Kevin. “Plot Variations in the Nineteenth-Century Story of Lord Ruthven, Pt. 1.” Journal of Vampire Studies 1 no. 1 (2020): 19–43.

Dodd, Kevin. “Plot Variations in the Nineteenth-Century Story of Lord Ruthven, Pt. 2.” Journal of Vampire Studies 1 no. 2 (2021): 192–209.

Gibson, Matthew. Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.

Groom, Nick. “Polidori’s ‘The Vampyre’: Composition, Publication, Deception,.” Romanticism 28, no. 1 (2022): 46–59.

Hernandez, Ernio. “Elton John and Bernie Taupin Will Bring The Vampire Lestat to Life as a Musical.” Last modified May 6, 2003. https://playbill.com/article/elton-john-and-bernie-taupin-will-bring-the-vampire-lestat-to-life-as-a-musical-com-113037.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of capital: 1848-1875. London: Hachette, 2010.

Hobsbawm, Eric. Age of revolution: 1789-1848. London: Hachette, 2010.

Iovănel, Mihai. “Hamlet at the End of History: the specter of capitalism haunting communism,” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024): xx-xx.

Jowett, Lorna. “Horrible Histories? Vampire Television, Period Drama and Spectacle.” Horror Studies 8, no. 2 (2017): 313–328.

Kabatchnik, Amnon. Horror on the Stage: Monsters, Murders and Terrifying Moments in Theater. Jefferson: McFarland and Company, 2023.

Kracauer, Siegfried. “Caligari.” In The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a film by Robert Wiene, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, edited and translated by R. V. Adkinson, 5–26. New York: Lorrimer Publishing, 1972.

Levy, Robert I. “Horror and Tragedy: The Wings and Center of the Moral Stage.” Ethos 13, no. 2 (1985): 175–187.

Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vol. 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin Books, 1976.

Marx, Karl. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, Book One: The Process of Production of Capital [1867]. First English edition of 1887, translated by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, edited by Frederick Engels. Moscow, USSR: Progress Publishers, 1887. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf.

Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977.

Martin, Anca Simina. “The Trope of the Vampire (and Strigoi) in Romanian Culture and Cultural Products Imported to Romania (1839–1947).” Transilvania, no. 7 (2023): 17–25.

Martin, Anca Simina, and Stefan Baghiu. “The transmedial triangulation of Dracula: how cinema turned the Gothic bloodsucker into a Gothicized serial killer.” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11, no. 1 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-024-03531-2.

McDayter, Ghislaine. “Conjuring Byron: Byromania, Literary Commodification and the Birth of Celebrity.” In Byromania: Portraits of the Artist in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Culture, edited by Frances Wilson, 43–62. Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1999.

McFarland, Ronald E. “The Vampire on Stage: A Study in Adaptations.” Comparative Drama 21, no. 1 (1987): 19–33.

Meils, Cathy. “Rice Novel Getting Musical Treatment.” Last modified January 28, 1997. https://variety.com/1997/legit/news/rice-novel-getting-musical-treatment-1117432956/.

Moretti, Franco. “Two Theories.” Daedalus 150, no. 1 (2021): 16–25.

Moretti, Franco. Modern Epic: The World-system from Goethe to García Márquez. Translated by Quintin Hoare. London and New York: Verso, 1996.

Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Translated by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller. London and New York: Verso, 1997.

Ní Fhlainn, Sorcha. Postmodern Vampires: Film, Fiction, and Popular Culture. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019.

Picard, Caroline Joan and Cecil Greek. “The Compulsion of Real/Reel Serial Killers and Vampires: Toward a Gothic Criminology.” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture 10, no. 1 (2003): 39–68.

Prendergast, Christopher. Balzac, Fiction and Melodrama. London: Edward Arnold, 1978.

Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. New York: Ballantine Books, 2010.

Riedel, Michael. “‘Vampires’: New Musical Blood.” Last modified May 23, 2001. https://nypost.com/2001/05/23/vampires-new-musical-blood/.

Roof, Judith. Reproductions of Reproduction: Imaging Symbolic Change. New York and London: Routledge.

Scodel, Ruth. “Tragedy and Epic.” In A Companion to Tragedy, edited by Rebecca Bushnell, 181–197. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2005.

Shakespeare, William. Timon of Athens. Edited by John Jowett. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Skal, David J. Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. New York: Faber and Faber, 2004.

Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Stuart, Roxana. Stage Blood: Vampires of the 19th-Century Stage. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1994.

Terian, Andrei. “Tragedy in Romanian Literature: Some Conceptual Delimitations,” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024).

Twitchell, James B. The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature. Durham: Duke University Press, 1981.

Vancu, Radu. “Tragic Poetry and the Cultural Foundation of Power: A Re-examination of Franco Moretti’s Theory of Tragic,” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024).

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957.

Wynne, Catherine. Bram Stoker, Dracula and the Victorian Gothic Stage. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Tragic Poetry and the Cultural Foundation of Power: A Re-examination of Franco Moretti’s Theory of Tragic

Autor: Radu VANCU
Email: radu.vancu@ulbsibiu.ro

Abstract: Franco Moretti posited in his 1983 book, Signs Taken for Wonders, that we live in a post-tragic and anti-tragic age in which tragic has been replaced by compromise both in fiction and in the modern lyric. The present article tries to re-examine Moretti’s conjecture in a historic period which has given up compromise and revived the tragic. In Moretti’s terms, tragic’s condition of existence involves “a civilization irreparably divided between hostile entries and values”. Whenever history allows this radical division between two irreconcilable systems of values, tragic finds a literary form of expression. In this article, tragic’s main contemporary elective form in Ukraine is poetry, while fiction seems somewhat slower in keeping pace with the rapid tragic of history. Moreover, the diary as a confessional genre closer to poetry is also a medium more suitable for the contemporary tragic than fiction. Read by tens of thousands, maybe even more, Ukrainian poetry and diaries are the direct proof of a return to a tragic era, confirming Moretti’s 1983 diagnosis: tragic works within and against the absolutist ideologies. Tragedy may indeed be “an unrepeatable ‘exception’ in the history of literary forms”; but the substance of tragic finds its contemporary expressions in this age of anti-compromise in confessional poetry and, to a lesser extent, in other confessive genres (diaries and memoirs). Tragic poetry is a response to the reappearance of the cultural foundation of absolutist power; its confessional nature is an attempt to rehumanize a history unleashed against the human.

Keywords: Franco Moretti, poetry and tragic, post-tragic culture, contemporary poetry in Ukraine, Volodymyr Vakulenko, Andrei Kurkov, Serhii Zhadan

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania—Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.

Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W. Negative Dialectics. London and New York: Routledge, 1973.

Amelina, Victoria. “Ukraine and the Meaning of Home.” The Guardian, July 6, 2023.

Baghiu, Ștefan, and Anca Simina Martin. “Tragedy of Monsters: Vampire Fears, Melodrama, and the Modern Horror”. Transilvania, no. 5 (2024)

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History.” In Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938-1940, edited by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.

Berlin, Isaiah. The Crooked Timber of Humanity, edited by Henry Hardy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.

Celan, Paul. “Bremen Prize Speech.” In Collected Prose. Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2006.

Celan, Paul. “Todesfugue” [Death Fugue]. In Poems of Paul Celan, translated and introduced by Michael Hamburger. London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2007.

Chang, Tina, Nathalie Handal, and Ravi Shankar. Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2008

Eichler, Jeremy. Time’s Echo: The Second World War, the Holocaust, and the Music of Remembrance. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2024

Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995

Figes, Orlando. The Europeans: Three Lives and the Making of a Cosmopolitan Culture. New York: Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, 2019

Forché, Carolyn, ed. Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993

Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” National Interest, Summer 1989, 1–18.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992

Kundera, Milan. A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe. London: Faber & Faber, 2023.

Miłosz, Czesław. “Campo dei Fiori.” In Poèmes, 1934-1982. Paris: Luneau Ascot, 1984.

Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders. On the Sociology of Literary Forms. London and New York: Verso, 2005.

Moretti, Franco. “Network Semantics. A Beginning.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024)

Miklós, Radnóti. All That Still Matters at All. Milwaukee: New American Press, 2014.

Naydan, Michael M. “Signs of Ethnic and Cultural Genocide in Ukraine: The Murder of Children’s Book Writer Volodymyr Vakulenko”. World Literature Today, December 16, 2022. https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/essay/signs-ethnic-and-cultural-genocide-ukraine-murder-childrens-book-writer-volodymyr.

O’Reilly, Finbar. “The Buried Book That Helped Ukraine’s Literary Revival.” New York Times, July 20, 2024.

Oz, Amos. “Despre trădători, fanatici şi despre criza democraţiilor de azi” [On Traitors, Fanatics, and the Crisis of Contemoporary Democracies]. Interview given to Magda Grădinaru for News.ro on December 13, 2016. https://www.news.ro/cultura-media/interviu-amos-oz-despre-tradatori-fanatici-si-despre-criza-democratiilor-de-azi-lipsite-de-lideri-de-anvergura-dar-prinse-in-capcanele-nationalismului-si-xenofobiei-audio-1922400013002016121216077660.

Oz, Amos. How to cure a Fanatic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Rafeyenko, Volodymyr. The Length of Days: An Urban Ballad. Afterword by Marci Shore. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2023

Shklar, Judith. “The Liberalism of Fear.” In Liberalism and the Moral Life, edited by Nancy L. Rosenblum. Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1989

Sloterdijk, Peter. Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010

Steiner, George. “The Hollow Miracle. Notes on German Language.” In The Reporter, February 18, 1960

Terian, Andrei. “Tragedy in Romanian Literature: Some Conceptual Delimitations,” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024).

Hamlet at the End of History: The Specter of Capitalism Haunting Communism

Autor: Mihai IOVĂNEL
Email: mihai.iovanel@gmail.com

Abstract: In this paper I analyze two versions of Hamlet written and published after the fall of communism in Romania and Russia. Starting from the distinction made by Carl Schmitt in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956) between the real Elizabethan temporality that erupts in Hamlet and the atemporal-literary form of tragedy, I explore the mutations of the tragic produced by the adaptation of Shakespeare’s play in the post-communist East.

Keywords: tragedy, Hamlet, post-communism, capitalism, Romania, Russia

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.

Bibliography

Akunin, Boris. Hamlet. Versiune. Tragedie în două acte [Hamlet. A Version. Tragedy in Two Acts]. Translated by Mihaela Lovin and Ileana Alexandra Orlich, preface by Ileana Alexandra Orlich. Bucharest: EuroPress, 2014.

Baghiu, Stefan, and Anca Simina Martin. “After-Tragedy of Monsters: Vampire Fears, Melodrama, and the Modern Horror.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024).

Borza, Cosmin, and Claudiu Turcuș. “Tragicomedia Occidentului: emigrația economică în romanele și filmele românești din anii ’90.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024).

Chelcea, Liviu, and Oana Druţǎ. “Zombie Socialism and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 57, no. 4–5 (2016): 521–44.

Contea, Bogdan. “Romanul comunismului românesc înainte și după istoria lui Mihai Iovănel” [The Romanian Novel about Communism before and after Mihai Iovănel’s History]. Transilvania, no. 5-6 (2023): 65–73.

Höfele, Andreas. No Hamlets: German Shakespeare from Friedrich Nietzsche to Carl Schmitt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Iovănel, Mihai. “Inside the Labyrinth: The Post-Communist Novel Between Anti-Communism and Nostalgia.” Central Europe, no. 1 (2024): 49–60.

Iovănel, Mihai. Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. Iași: Polirom, 2021.

Moraru, Christian, ed. Postcommunism, Postmodernism, and the Global Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms. London-New York: Verso, 2005.

Morozov, Victor. “Cvasi în direct: evenimentul revoluției române în Istoria lui Mihai Iovănel” [Quasi Live: The Event of the Romanian Revolution in Mihai Iovănel’s History]. Transilvania, no. 7-8 (2021): 133-138.

Morozov, Victor. “Într-un oraș mic: Revoluția Română, între Videograme dintr-o revoluție și A fost sau n-a fost?” [In a Small Town: The Romanian Revolution between “Videograms of a Revolution” and “12:08 East of Bucharest”]. Transilvania, no. 11-12 (2019): 115-120.

Mungiu-Pippidi, Alina. Emanciparea prințului Hamlet. In Moartea lui Ariel. Bucharest: Unitext, 1997.

Neill, Michael, and David Schalkwyk, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespearean Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

Orlich, Ileana Alexandra. Subversive Stages: Theater in Pre- and Post-Communist Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria. Budapest-New York: Central European University Press, 2017.

Schmitt, Carl. Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play. Translated by David Pan and Jennifer R. Rust. New York: Telos Press Publishing, 2009.

Terian, Andrei. “Representing Romanian Communism: Evolutionary Models and Metanarrative Scenario.” In Beyond the Iron Curtain: Revisiting the Literary System of Communist Romania, edited by Stefan Baghiu, Ovio Olaru, and Andrei Terian, 23–42. Berlin: Peter Lang, 2021.

Terian, Andrei. “Tragedy in Romanian Literature: Some Conceptual Delimitations.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024).

Wachtel, Andrew Baruch. Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

Malaria ca tragedie națională: Semnele lui Dănuț (1922) de Gib I. Mihăescu

Autor: Teodora DUMITRU
Email: teodoralilianadumitru@gmail.com

Malaria as National Tragedy: Semnele lui Dănuț (1922) by Gib. I. Mihăescu

Abstract: Some of Franco Moretti’s earliest works investigated the tragic form qua allegory of the desacralization of sovereignty and/ or as an allegory of civil war. Inspired by this type of conceptualization, in the present essay I turn the mirror on an endemic malady which I instrumentalize as an allegory of a national tragedy or as an allegory of the contemporary way of life (concerning especially the 19th-20th century way of life). In this vein, I assert that, just as a literary species can do that, a particular type of illness – an endemic one, such is malaria – can capture a symbolic function in literature. It is the function of expressing a collective drift, a bunch of socio-anthropological symptoms, specters of state policies or rather of their absence.

Keywords: malaria, hallucination, railways anxiety, technology anxiety, Bolschevism, Naturalism, tragedy, Ion Luca Caragiale, Gib I. Mihăescu, Émile Zola, Frank Norris, Franco Moretti

Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania—Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.

Bibliography

Andriescu, Alexandru. “Studiu introductive” [Introductory Study]. In Gib I.  Mihăescu. Opere. I. Nuvele și povestiri [Works. I. Novellas and Short Stories], edited by Alexandru Andriescu. Bucharest: Academia Română, Fundația Națională pentru Știință și Artă, 2008.

Balotă, Nicolae. De la Ion la Ioanide. Prozatori români ai secolului XX [From Ion to Ioanide: Romanian Prose Writers of the Twentieth Century]. Bucharest: Eminescu, 1974.

Caragiale, Ion Luca. O făclie de Paște [An Easter Torch] [1889]. In I.L. Caragiale. Opere. I. Proză literară [Works. I. Literary Prose], edited by Stancu Ilin, Nicolae Bârna, and Constantin Hârlav, preface by Eugen Simion. Bucharest: Univers Enciclopedic, 2000.

Călinescu, G. Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent [History of Romanian literature from its origins to the present day]. Bucharest: Fundația Regală pentru Literatură și Artă, 1941.

Considerant, Victor. Déraison et dangers de l’engouement pour les chemins en fer: Avis à l’opinion et aux capitaux [The Folly and Dangers of the Railway Craze: A Warning to the Public and to the Capital]. Paris: Aux Bureaux de la Phalange et chez Ducor, 1838.

Cotoi, Călin. Holera și „duhul comunismului”. Inventarea socialului în România, 1831-1914 [Cholera and the “Spirit of Communism”: The Invention of the Social in Romania, 1831-1914]. Cluj-Napoca: Idea Design & Print, 2023.

Cotoi, Călin. Inventing the Social in Romania, 1848-1914 (Leiden: Brill, 2020).

Diaconescu, Mihail. Gib I. Mihăescu. Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1973.

Dima, Al. “Note despre La ‘Grandiflora’ de Gib I. Mihăescu” [Notes on “La Grandiflora” by Gib I. Mihăescu]. Datina, no. 3-4 (1928).

Eliade, Mircea. Domnișoara Christina [Miss Christina]. Bucharest: Editura „Cultura Națională”, 1936.

Gardikas, Katerina. Landscapes of Disease: Malaria in Modern Greece. Budapest: CEU Press, 2018.

Howell, Jessica. Malaria and Victorian Fictions of Empire. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Lovinescu, E. Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1900-1937 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1900-1937] [1937]. In E. Lovinescu, Opere, II. Istoria literaturii române contemporane [1926-1929]. Evoluția „prozei literare”. Mutația valorilor estetice. Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1900-1937 [Works, II. History of Contemporary Romanian Literature (1926-1929). The Evolution of “Literary Prose.” The Mutation of Aesthetic Values). History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1900-1937], edited by Nicolae Mecu, notes and comments by Alexandra Ciocârlie, Alexandru Farcaș, Nicolae Mecu and Daciana Vlădoiu, introduction by Eugen Simion. Bucharest: Academia Română, Fundația Națională pentru Știință și Artă, 2015.

Lovinescu, E. Istoria literaturii române contemporane. Vol. IV. Evoluția „prozei literare” [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature. Vol. IV. The Evolution of “Literary Prose”] [1928]; în E. Lovinescu, Opere. II. Istoria literaturii române contemporane [1926-1929]. Evoluția „prozei literare”. Mutația valorilor estetice). Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1900-1937 [Works. II. History of Contemporary Romanian Literature [1926-1929] (The Evolution of “Literary Prose.” The Mutation of Aesthetic Values). History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1900-1937], edited by Nicolae Mecu, notes and comments by Alexandra Ciocârlie, Alexandru Farcaș, Nicolae Mecu, and Daciana Vlădoiu, introduction by Eugen Simion. Bucharest: Academia Română, Fundația Națională pentru Știință și Artă, 2015.

Manolescu, Nicolae. “Existența imaginară a lui Gib I. Mihăescu” [The Imaginary Existence of Gib I. Mihăescu]. In Gib I. Mihăescu. La „Grandiflora”: nuvele I [The “Grandiflora”: Prose, Vol. I]. Bucharest: Editura pentru literatură, 1967.

Manolescu, Nicolae. “Gib I. Mihăescu.” Viața românească, no. 6-7, iunie-iulie (1963).

Manolescu, Nicolae. Istoria critică a literaturii române: 5 secole de literatură [Critical History of Romanian Literature: 5 Centuries of Literature]. Pitești: Editura Paralela 45, 2008.

Manolescu, Nicolae. Istoria literaturii române pe înțelesul celor care citesc. Pitești: Editura Paralela 54, 2014.

Mihăescu, Gib I. Semnele lui Dănuț [Dănuț’s Warning Signs] [1922]; în Mihăescu, Gib. I. Opere. I. Nuvele și povestiri. [Works. I. Novellas and Short Stories]. Ediție îngrijită, studiu introductiv, cronologie, note, comentarii și variante de Alexandru Andriescu. Bucharest: Academia Română, Fundația Națională pentru Știință și Artă, 2008.

Mihăescu, Gib I. Troița [The Roadside Triptich]; în Mihăescu, Gib. I. Opere. I. Nuvele și povestiri. [Works. I. Novellas and Short Stories]. Ediție îngrijită, studiu introductiv, cronologie, note, comentarii și variante de Alexandru Andriescu. Bucharest: Academia Română, Fundația Națională pentru Știință și Artă, 2008.

Minulescu, Ion. De vorbă cu mine însumi [Talking to Myself]. Bucharest: Cultura Națională, 1924; în Minulescu, Ion. Opere. Versuri [Works. Poetry], selection, notes and comments by Ștefan Firică and Alexandru Farcaș, chronology by Ștefan Firică, introduction by Eugen Simion. Bucharest: Academia Română, Fundația Națională pentru Știință și Artă, 2019.

Moretti, Franco. “«A Huge Eclipse»: Tragic Form and the Deconsecration of Sovereignty.” Genre, no. 15 (1982).

Moretti, Franco. “Network Theory. Plot Analysis.” New Left Review, no. 68 (2011).

Norris, Frank. The Octopus: A Story of California. New York: Doubleday Page & Co., 1901.

Petrescu, Camil. Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război [Last Night of Love, First Night of War]. Bucharest: Editura „Cultura Națională”, 1930.

Preda, Marin. Moromeții [The Morometes]. Vol. I. Bucharest: Editura de Stat pentru Literatură și Artă, 1955.

Shah, Sonia. The Fever – How Malaria has ruled Humankind for 500, 000 Years. Penguin, epub, 2018.

Snowden, Frank M. The Conquest of Malaria: Italy, 1900-1962. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006.

Sufian, Sandra M. Healing the Land and the Nation: Malaria and the Zionist Project in Palestine, 1920-1947. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

Zakrzewski, Patryk. “Chroniclers of Iron Roads: How the Romantics Saw the Development of the Railway.” Culture.pl, February 29, 2024. https://culture.pl/en/article/chroniclers-of-iron-roads-how-the-romantics-saw-the-development-of-the-railway.

Zola Émile. La Bête humaine [The Human Beast]. Paris: G Charpentier, 1890.

 

Tragicomedia Occidentului: emigrația economică în romanele și filmele românești din anii ’90

Autor: Cosmin BORZA; Claudiu TURCUȘ
Email: cosmi_borza@yahoo.com

The Tragicomedy of the Occident: Depictions of Economic Migration in the Romanian Novel and Film of the 1990s

Abstract: Our article examines the narrative registers and forms adopted in the 1990s by the Romanian novelists, screenwriters and film directors in order to portray the phenomenon of economic migration to the West. Our focus is on the intriguing and paradoxical employment of tragicomic, melodramatic, burlesque-grotesque and sensational narrative techniques as the Romanian collective imaginary during the 1990s witnessed the peak idealization of emigration in Western Europe and in The United States of America. This process of idealization is also fueled by the fact that, despite the political ban has been lifted after 1989, legislative and economic constraints continued to limit the actual experience of the so-called “free world.” The corpus of our article comprises two cult films of the period, Asfalt tango (1996, Nae Caranfil) and Cristian Mungiuʼs Occident (2002), as well as two novels authored Grid Modorcea and S. Dinger, all of which share the struggle to depict the tensions between the uncritical embrace of Western story-world and the bleak, if not dramatic, reality of migration.

Keywords: economic migration, Westcentrism, tragicomic, Romanian novel and film, the 1990s.

Acknowledgement: This work was supported by a grant of the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2021-1207, within PNCDI III.

Bibliography

Anghel, Remus Gabriel, Alina Botezat, Anatolie Coșciug, Ioana Manafi, and Monica Roman. International Migration, Return Migration, and Their Effects: A Comprehensive Review on the Romanian Case. IZA Discussion Paper No. 10445, https://ssrn.com/abstract=2895293.

Baghiu Ștefan, and Ovio Olaru. “Capitalist Heterotopia & Lost Social Utopia: Documenting Class, Work, and Migration in Post-communist East-Central European Fiction.” Central Europe 22, no. 1 (2024): 2–17.

Borțun, Vladimir. “Un electorat în căutarea unui partid: stânga românească de azi și de mâine” [An Electorate in Search of a Party: The Romanian Left of Today and Tomorrow]. In Ce urmează după neoliberalism? Pentru un imaginar politic alternativ [What Comes after Neoliberalism? Towards an Alternative Political Imaginary], edited by Sorin Gog and Victoria Stoiciu. Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2024, 297–321.

Borza, Cosmin, and Claudiu Turcuș. “Westalgia as the Infantilization of the East: Narrating Communist Childhood in post-1989 Romania and the Administration of the Recent Past” (forthcoming).

Bugariu, Voicu. “Un tânăr prozator” [A Young Prose Writer]. Contrapunct, no. 8 (1996): 12.

Caranfil, Nae, director. Asfalt Tango. Les Films du Rivage–Domino Film–France 3 Cinéma, 1996.

Chelcea, Liviu, and Oana Druţǎ. “Zombie Socialism and the Rise of Neoliberalism in Post-Socialist Central and Eastern Europe.” Eurasian Geography and Economics 57, no. 4–5 (2016): 521–44.

Cărtărescu, Mircea. Occidentul. În Nimic. București: Humanitas, 2010, 105–111.

Dinger, S. Emigrantă în America, vol. I: Săracă în America [Emigrant in USA, vol. I: Poor in USA]. Bucharest: Occident, 1994.

Dinger, S. Emigrantă în America, vol. II: Bogată în America [Emigrant in USA, vol. II: Rich in USA]. Bucharest: Occident, 1995.

Domșodi, Dana. “No Country for Poor Men.” CriticAtac, November 21, 2014. https://www.criticatac.ro/country-poor-men/.

Fulger, Mihai. “Comediile lui Cristian Nemescu, în context național” [Cristian Nemescuʼs Comedies in a National Context]. Revista Film, no. 1 (2019): 46–49.

Georgescu, Diana. “Between Trauma and Nostalgia. The Intellectual Ethos and Generational Dynamics of Memory in Postsocialist Romania.” Südosteuropa 64, no. 3 (2016): 264–306.

Gog, Sorin, and Victoria Stoiciu, eds. Ce urmează după neoliberalism? Pentru un imaginar politic alternativ [What Comes after Neoliberalism? Towards an Alternative Political Imaginary]. Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2024.

Gorzo, Andrei, and Andrei State, eds. Politicile filmului, Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan [The Politics of Film. Contributions to the interpretation of Contemporary Romanian Cinema]. Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2014.

Grid Modorcea, Șobolanii în Italia. Biblia transfugului [Rats in Italy: The Emigrantʼs Bible]. București: Emin, 1995.

Iovănel, Mihai. Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990–2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990–2020]. Iași: Polirom, 2021.

Iovănel, Mihai. “Popular Genres: Science Fiction and Fantasy, Detective Novel, Thriller.” Dacoromania litteraria, no. 7 (2020): 137–153.

Mereuta, Cristina. “Mobilising Migrants Skills and Resources in Romania.” In Coping with Emigration in Baltic and East European Countries. Paris: OECD Publishing, 2013), 127–141.

Mungiu, Cristian, regizor. Occident. Temple Film, 2002.

Necșulescu, Anemarie-Helen. “Geneza apariţiei ONG-urilor din România” [The Emergence of NGOs in Romania]. Studia Politica: Romanian Political Science Review 11, no. 3 (2011): 525–556.

Nicula, Dinu-Ioan. “De ce plâng chitarele” [Why Do the Guitars Cry]. Revista Film, no. 1 (2016): 62–63.

Olaru, Cătălin. “Al doilea val” [The Second Wave]. In Politicile filmului, Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan [The Politics of Film. Contributions to the interpretation of Contemporary Romanian Cinema], edited by Andrei Gorzo and Andrei State, 235-254. Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2014.

Pârvulescu, Anca. Laughter: Notes on a Passion. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010.

Pârvulescu, Constantin, and Claudiu Turcuș. “Specters of Europe and Anticommunist Visual Rhetoric in Romanian Film of the Early 1990s.” In The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures, edited by Aga Skrodzka, Xiaoning Lu, and Katarzyna Marciniak, 693–712. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.

Ricci, Antonio. “Dincolo de «Cortina de Fier»: 30 de ani de migrații din România” [Beyond the “Iron Curtain”: 30 years of Migrations from Romania]. In Rădăcini la jumătate. Treizeci de ani de imigrație românească în Italia [Half Roots: Thirty Years of Romanian Immigration in Italy], edited by Miruna Căjvăneanu et al, 12–39. Istituto di Studi Politici “S. PIO V:” Centro Studi e Ricerche IDOS, 2022.

Rogozanu Costi, “Muntean. Cronicarul României middle-class” [Muntean. The Storyteller of Romanian Middle Class]. In Politicile filmului, Contribuții la interpretarea cinemaului românesc contemporan [The Politics of Film. Contributions to the interpretation of Contemporary Romanian Cinema], edited by Andrei Gorzo and Andrei State, 89-98. Cluj-Napoca: Tact, 2014.

Sandu, Dumitru, coord. Locuirea temporară în străinătate. Migraţia economică a românilor: 1990–2006 [Living Abroad on a Temporary Basis. The Economic Migration of Romanians: 1990–2006]. Bucharest: Fundaţia pentru o Societate Deschisă, 2006.

Segel, Harold B. The Columbia Literary History of Eastern Europe since 1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.

Stan, Adriana, and Cosmin Borza. “Deetatization of Culture, Privatization of Politics: The Case of the Publishing Houses in Postcommunist Romania.” Studia Politica: Romanian Political Science Review 20, no. 3 (2020): 382–397.

Stan, Adriana, and Cosmin Borza. “From Ostalgie to Ostodium: The Anti-Communist Novel in Post-1989 East-Central Europe.” Central Europe 22, no. 1 (2024): 76–87.

Stan, Adriana. “Motherlands in Europe. Economic Subalternity and Fantasies of Family in Contemporary Romanian Literature of Migration.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2024 (first view), https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00111619.2024.2382461?src.

Stan, Adriana. “On Your Own in a One-and-Unequal World: Forms and Worldviews in Contemporary Romanian Narratives of Emigration.” Transilvania, no. 4 (2024): 1–7.

Terian, Andrei, Daiana Gârdan, Cosmin Borza, David Morariu, and Dragoș Varga. “Genurile romanului românesc în secolul al XIX-lea. O analiză cantitativă” [The Genres of the Nineteenth Century Romanian Novel. A Quantitative Analysis]. Transilvania, no. 10 (2019): 17–28.

Terian, Andrei, Daiana Gârdan, Emanuel Modoc, Cosmin Borza, Dragoș Varga, and Ovio Olaru, and David Morariu. “Genurile romanului românesc (1901–1932). O analiză cantitativă” [The Genres of the Romanian Novel (1901–1932). A Quantitative Analysis]. Transilvania, no. 10 (2020): 53–64.

Tudurachi, Adrian, coord. DCRR – Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc de la origini până în 2000, vol. I–II. Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2023.

Turcuș, Claudiu. “Imaginarul europenizării în filmul românesc contemporan” [The Imaginary of Europenization in the Romanian Contemporary Film]. În Enciclopedia imaginariilor din România [The Encyclopaedia of Romanian Imaginaries] vol. V: Imaginar și patrimoniu artistic [Imaginary and Artistic Heritage], edited by Liviu Malița, 198–214. Iași: Polirom, 2020.

Turcuș, Claudiu. Împotriva memoriei, De la noul estetismul socialist la noul cinema românesc [Against Memory. From Socialist Aestheticism to New Romanian Cinema]. București: Eikon, 2017.

Ung, Snejana. “Should I Stay, or Should I Move Back? Literary Representations of Emigration to the US in Postcommunist Romanian Literature.” Transilvania, no. 9 (2023): 1–10.

Vodă, Eugenia. “Spectatorule, fratele meu” [Spectator, My Brother]. România literară, no. 40 (2002): 23.

Walkowitz, Rebecca. „The Location of Literature: The Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer.” Contemporary Literature 47, nr. 4 (2006): 527–545.

Științe vizuale

Dosar

Istorie si studii culturale

Istorie

Științele educației

Filozofie și studii politice

Stiintele comunicarii

Etnografie si folclor

Fizica speculativa

Recenzii

Economie

Artele spectacolului

Eveniment