Volume XVI (2011), no. 2

An existentialist type of fiction, the novel A Personal Matter by Kenzaburō Ōe, examines the human condition (Ningen to wa nanika.) and the limits of possibility for humans. Privileging the anthropocentric world, subjecting it to insights not only into the past but, also, potentially, into the future, highlighting the crimes that man might commit against himself, the novel outlines a possible “human renaissance” (ningen kaifuku 人間恢) through an extreme personal dilemmatic situation, which is connected to world history. The present study proposes an investigation delving on existentialism and social anthropology, attempting to prove how in the afore-mentioned novel, Kenzaburō Ōe, the humanist, protests against and resists an inhuman world, with a view to defending and protecting fragile values ​​such as humanism and the humaneness of man, the right to life and peace, which are under constant threat in contemporary history. The individual, the society and the universe are all connected on a single tier, despite the crisis of the moment that seems to deconstruct humanism: here is a new myth, a new outlook on human history proposed by Kenzaburō Ōe.

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The paper is a first case study researching the Formaţiunea 0830 Periprava labour camp in the Danube Delta (1957–1964). The analysis focuses, pertinently and objectively, on the situation of political prisoners sent to this unit of forced labour in the first two decades of communism. The work is based on a wide range of historical sources (published and unpublished archival documents), the legislation of the age, and sources of oral history (testimonies and interviews). This study is the result of a two-year research, including the examination of files connected to the subject from the archives of the Consiliului Naţional de Studiere a Arhivelor Securităţii (National Council for the Study of Security Archives) and field research in the village of Periprava conducted on two occasions. The analysis failed to identify any published materials approaching the subject from the same perspective as the present research. From this point of view, the study can be regarded as an original contribution to the subject discussed.

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The study investigates philosophically the issue of human illness and its organic pertinence to the meaning of human life starting from the recognition that the dangerous encounter with the experience of illness is an unavoidable – and as such crucial – experience of the life of any living being. As for us humans, there is probably no mortal man who has never suffered of some – any! – kind of disease from his birth to the end of his life… Illness is therefore an experience or outright a danger of existence and its possibility, as well as a way of being that nobody has ever been and will ever be ontologically or existentially exempted from. So, it may well be “arbitrary” or “accidental” which disease affects which being or person, when and to what degree, in what way, etc., but it is factually unavoidable that in the course of one’s entire life – from its very beginning to its very end – one would never fall ill in some respect. The paper discusses this issue by the ontological investigation of possibility.

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This paper aims at presenting the way in which the subjective experience of an illness is transposed and renegociated within the illness narrative. Our case study reveals the hermeneutical travail through which a woman suffering of breast cancer tries to give meaning to the experience of her illness. In the first part of the article I present the main conceptual instruments regarding the relationship between illness and narrativity, as it was theoreticized by specialists in the domain. The second part of the study focuses on the process of deconstructing the life narrative – prior to the disease – and on the attempt to reconfigure the narrative into one that is able to restore the order that was destroyed by the disease.

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The paper tries to recompose a few aspects of rural hygiene on the basis of information gathered from oral inquiry. It is about the parasites which once infested the body and household of peasants – lice, fleas, bugs –, to which we added a parasitic illness by excellence – the scab. Finally, we were also interested in data upon body and clothing hygiene. All this was done with the declared aim of comparing the peasant discourse with the medical one on the same topic.

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