Volume XXIX (2024), no. 1

Contents

Studies

Alina BRUCKNER
Institution:
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iași
Email:
alina.bruckner@uaic.ro
Abstract

This paper intends to present the way in which the biography of the Moldavian prince Dimitrie Cantemir entered the Romanian culture at the beginning of the 19th century. Written in English, as an abridged version of a French prototext, the biographical text about Dimitrie Cantemir reached the Romanian culture through a German intermediary, the preface to the second German edition of Descriptio Moldaviae. Almost simultaneously it appeared in Romanian translation in two versions: as foreword to Scrisoarea Moldovei (1825) and as independent text, in the periodical Bibliotecă românească (1829). The purpose of this paper is to identify the circulation of the biographical text from French to English, German, and Romanian, with a focus on the textual changes along this route. Furthermore, this paper also concentrates on the versions of the biography, initially designed as afterword, then as foreword, and which also circulated as independent text in Romanian. The analysis of these versions focuses on the intentionality of each translation: a paratextual element with an informative scope, and an autonomous text, published in a periodical, whose purpose was the education of the Romanian readership, and the creation of a national identity.

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Dan-Ionuţ JULEAN, Dana JULEAN
Institution:
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca
Email:
ionut.julean@arch.utcluj.ro, dana.julean@arch.utcluj.ro
Abstract

The article is an in depth investigation, which brings face to face two almost unknown portraits belonging to the Transylvanian heritage. They represent unique traces, two instances as an introspective glimpse into the history of an aristocratic family that became extinct more than 100 years ago. The genealogy of the Korda family is quite intricate, thus, virtually infinite connections begin to unfold, bringing together people, places, stories, houses, objects which sometimes are surprisingly scattered in space and time. The research is contextualised within the broader issue of heritage assets in contemporary Romania.

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Mădălina Elena MANDICI
Institution:
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Iasi
Email:
madalina.mandici@staff.uaic.ro
Abstract

This study argues that Victorian female characters like George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss (1860), denied the classical education their more practical male counterparts enjoy, attempt to create stories around their readings, anticipate plot developments, and finally come to realize the deficiencies of male worldly wisdom. As a result, they turn to out-of-this-world masculine wisdom, the Word of God, practice submission and self-renunciation, and ultimately escape their own plots in a heroic gesture, announcing, as it were, that heroines of the stamp of a Saint Theresa can no longer emerge from a Victorian society that systematically fails to educate its women. Maggie Tulliver is neither the first nor the last female character who struggles to combine a literary discourse of the past with newer forms of narrative discourse, yet she is perhaps the most vibrant example of the nineteenth-century passive-aggressive reader. George Eliot’s precocious female sage is at a crossroads historically, culturally, as well as ideologically, emblematically enacting the shift in reading practices that characterized the nineteenth century, when the Victorian reader became part of a larger cultural movement transitioning from homogenous, selective reading to a heterogenous, scanning type of reading. Eliot’s novels seem to be pivoting on this shift, allowing their readers to practice non-sequential reading of characters who themselves are readers of parts. This fragmentariness, as Eliot seems to say, defines the very psychology of nineteenth-century print culture.

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Rodica FRENȚIU
Institution:
Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
rodica.frentiu@ubbcluj.ro
Abstract

In a world overwhelmed by emerging technologies, in which the idea that humanity has lost its “authenticity” is increasingly more widespread, the literary narration that explores the territories beyond the “human” realm becomes an excellent laboratory for conducting observations on the posthuman concerns. Thus, in the final wave of the contemporary Japanese literature – covering the first two decades of the 21st century (2001-2021) –, seven novels have the word neko (‘cat’, ‘tomcat’) in their titles, written by Takashi Hiraide, Yōko Ogawa, Genki Kawamura, Makoto Shinkai, Naruki Nakagawa, Hiro Arikawa, Sōsuke Natsukawa. These Japanese novels have been translated into several dozens of languages, circling the globe and encountering, in their path, other books dedicated to the aforementioned feline. The present study aims to analyse these Japanese postmodern narrations from a zoopoetic-hermeneutic angle and to emphasise the cat-character’s role as the social marker of a “private space” shared by the human and his animal companion – which, naturally, is part of the “public space” of society –, connected to the present time of postmodern contemporaneity, as a means for “survival” in an alienated urban world. As part of an obvious intertextuality, the cat-character seems to dominate the gallery of non-human animal characters from the contemporary Japanese literature. Postmodernity, by its own means, adds to the study of the relation between the human animal and the non-human animal, which has previously been approached predominantly from an anthropological or a cultural-historical angle.

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Paul-Daniel GOLBAN
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
paul.golban@ubbcluj.ro, daniel.golban.go@gmail.com
Abstract

This present article is an account of the sense of place in the poetry of Seamus Heaney and John Montague. Each poet is approached through poems representative of a rural imaginary of boglands, potato drills, and bodies of water. The line of argument is sensitive to the numinous meanings Heaney and Montague imbue their natural worlds with, and the analysis focuses upon their rootedness and reliance on place for poetic inspiration. In Heaney's account, this is demonstrated with a nuanced and deliberative approach to poems that excavate the historical layerings of the bog while also tying this back to agricultural labor. This yields the source of Heaney’s craft of writing, just as Montague constructs a sort of ars poetica through images of water. This is a brief and comprehensive analysis of both poets and the importance of regionalism in late twentieth-century Irish or Northern Irish poetry.

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Aura POENAR
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
aurapoe@gmail.com
Abstract

Drawing on David Joselit’s critique of modernity in relation to the proprietary mindset that regulates the production and circulation of art on the art market, this article focuses on a few examples of artists employing gestures of displacement around techniques involving collage and montage – in various fields of expression from performance art, theatre, photography, installation to mixed media and sculpture and in relation to their spaces – to declassify the dominant perceptions of the real and history by exposing the arbitrary nature of social hierarchies and giving voice to those who are traditionally silenced. We will observe how these different approaches tackle, disrupt and offer an alternative to the commodified modes of spectatorship that in both the space of art and of the city (embodying and reflecting the mechanisms of modernity) perform a systematic dispossession of the other.

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Daniela SOREA
Institution:
Transylvania University of Brașov
Email:
sorea.daniela@unitbv.ro
Abstract

The current study shows how the traditional feminine clothing functions as a system of signs in Rupea (Romania). For this purpose, several photos taken on the occasion of various community events, and commented in interviews with local people, were capitalized through photo elicitation. The differences in the outfits worn by girls and women underline the importance given by the community to its female members’ nubility and fertility. The clothing is a sign showing marital status. The community uses it as a means to guide males’ connubial choices. Moreover, it indicates each woman’s place in the community and in her kin.

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Ion TALOȘ
Institution:
University of Cologne; The Folklore Archive Institute of the Romanian Academy, Cluj-Napoca Subsidiary
Email:
iontalos@gmail.com
Abstract

Founded in 1909 by W. Doegen in Berlin, the Sound Archive (Lautarchiv) was enriched during the First World War with valuable texts and folk songs recorded on discs and wax cylinders or recorded on paper. The research took place in 32 of the 175 prisoner-of-war camps of the Allied Powers, which covered the territory of Germany at that time. The prisoners came from European, Asian, African countries and the United States of America, and the research was carried out by a team of 50 German specialists in the languages spoken in those countries. Among them are three camps with prisoners from the Kingdom of Romania and from Bessarabia located in the perimeter of the cities of Chemnitz, Mannheim and Lamsdorf. The study presents some of the results obtained by the professors M. Friedwagner and H. Urtel in the research of the Romanian prisoners in those camps.

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David-Augustin MÂNDRUȚ
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
davidmandrut@gmail.com
Abstract

The present paper aims to outline the process of humanization using certain concepts proposed by Daniel Stern in his works. Whereas Marc Richir has drawn on Husserl and applied phenomenological concepts upon psychoanalytical theories, for example those of Donald Winnicott, in Stern we can find an alternative to this process. By following Stern’s thematizations of the infant’s life, as they evolved throughout his work, I want to analyse the concepts of affect attunement, moments of meeting and vitality affects, so that I can prove that there might be such a thing as the Sternian process of humanization.

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Radu Simion
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
radu.simion@ubbcluj.ro
Abstract

This article delves into the dynamic landscape of contemporary ecological discourse, focusing on the intersection between anthropos and the environment—a complex interplay shaping their relationship. Within this context, non-places emerge as seemingly unnoticeable spaces, deserving comprehensive investigation in the evolving ecological rhetoric. Non-places, often overlooked in conventional analyses, play a profound role in shaping our interconnected existence with the environment. In response to this imperative, the present study endeavors to delve into the intricate layers of these non-places, employing the conceptual lens provided by Timothy Morton's hyperobject and ecological thought theories. By adopting Morton's theoretical framework, the investigation seeks to unravel the multifaceted dimensions of non-places, shedding light on their profound implications for the ongoing evolution of ecological consciousness. It advocates for a comprehensive and responsible perspective that transcends the boundaries of conventional approaches. In this way, the contents that delineate the complex field of ecology can be reduced to simpler meanings, which, although not organically leading to more optimistic perspectives, can however, revitalize and guide the spectrum of contemporary ecological discourse toward real possibilities for achieving sustainability goals and a genuine connection to what paradoxically has always been closest to us—namely, the biotic community and its constituent elements.

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Ecaterina PAVEL
Institution:
Transilvania University of Brașov
Email:
ecaterina.pavel@unitbv.ro
Abstract

The purpose of this article is to trace the journey of the term stihii within the Romanian language, focusing on its evolution from the early modern period to the 19th century. Deeply connected with the Byzantine theology and philosophy, stihii traditionally refers to the four fundamental elements of nature (air, earth, fire and water), and their inherent powers. The study examines the term’s progression from representing the four classical elements to embodying more abstract notions such as spiritual or incorporeal entities. Through an analysis of predominantly theological sources, the article explores how stihii served as a lens through which the natural world was understood and interpreted in harmony with theological thought. The research highlights the transformation of these elemental concepts within Romania’s culture, underscoring their role in shaping language, practices, and beliefs. The article aims at providing a broad cultural analysis, encompassing language, mythology, ancient philosophy, theology, anatomy, folklore, and literature, to explore the multifaceted significance of stihii in the Romanian ethos.

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Réka KOVÁCS, Diana Anneliese SOPON
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
reka.kovacs@econ.ubbcluj.ro, diana.sopon@econ.ubbcluj.ro
Abstract

The present study aims to explore the linguistic journey of polite communication in the last two centuries. For this purpose, the article scrutinises German and Romanian professional correspondence and identifies the transformations letter writing has undergone by defining the most relevant patterns of politeness: semantic typology, idiosyncratic language, epistemic and deontic modalities. We conclude that polite interactions unfold in a multitude of eloquent and expressive formulations in earlier letters, whereas modern writings orientate themselves towards the mundane, seek simplicity and are stripped off from ornaments and redundant formulations.

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Alexandra STAN
Institution:
Transilvania University of Brașov
Email:
alexandra.stan@unitbv.ro
Abstract

Modality is characterized by the important fact that it may be found within the grammar of all languages, which cannot be said of mood, for instance, another category of grammar. The present paper aims to identify deontic modal markers, specifically four English modal verbs, in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and analyze the grammatical / lexical instruments used for rendering them into five Romanian translated editions. The conclusions reveal that, although English seems easier in lexicalizing the meanings of modality, Romanian tends to be more explicative and thus, more comprehensive, due to its analytic character, which provides it with more variety in the choice of words.

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Mihaela BUZEC
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
mihaela.buzec@ubbcluj.ro
Abstract

Motor aphasia has long been considered an agrammatic condition, characterized by the omission of functional items. Inquiries into the discourse of non-fluent aphasics from morphologically rich languages have caused researchers to reconsider the degree to which agrammatism characterizes motor aphasia. This article is a single-case study of a Romanian patient with motor aphasia. The speech is analyzed qualitatively, with particular emphasis on morphological errors. Contextualization is offered in order to understand the degree of agrammatic constructions in relation to the analyzed language. The article also presents a justification for single-case studies, a general description of the parameters of the subject's speech, and evidence for considering agrammatism in aphasic speech a result of the economy of effort hypothesis.

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Book reviews

JOHN FOOT
Reviewed by
Răzvan CIOBANU
Email:
razvan55ciobanu@yahoo.com
Abstract
AÏCHA LIMBADA
Reviewed by
Constantin BĂRBULESCU
Email:
barbulescucoo@gmail.com
Abstract