Volume XXIII (2018), no. 2

The Romanian elites, educated abroad, acknowledged the necessity towards major changes in different areas concerning the society and the state. Since the second half of the 19th century, the local elites following the European pattern, gradually, also founded associations (sports clubs) in order to get closer to the West, while also modernising the Romanian state. Our paper explicitly aims to investigate how particular associations (sports clubs) encouraged the development of tourism and public utility in modern Romania. Therefore, Jockey Club Român (1875) [the Romanian Jockey Club], Automobil-Club Român (1904) [the Romanian Automobile Club], Liga Națională Aeriană (1912) [the National Air League] were societies created by some ardent people, attaining a more consolidated position over time. Naturally, the leisure perspective was essential, but, gradually, the economic dimension found its place in the concerns of certain members of the Romanian elites. Helping the tourism and the public utility routes develop in the country was also present among the concerns of the Romanian leading classes.

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Drawing on Jan Assmann’s concept of cultural memory and Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, this article examines how personal recollections of Mihai Eminescu’s life (1850-1889) entered the Romanian cultural and literary circuit. At the time of his death, Eminescu’s prestige as a „national poet” was already established, thence at this moment precisely, I argue, starts a complex and collective process of national remembrance, reinforcing the cultural myth of the Romantic poet. In the following decades these recollections are continuously reworked and rewritten, especially through biographical, literary, and filmic representations which shape and canonize Eminescu’s postmemory. Thus my analysis is concerned with the memory-dimension of the Romanian myth of the “national poet”, and at the same time it suggests a new way of reading the memoirs about Eminescu, in the frame of cultural memory studies.

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The article aims to relaunch in the scientific circuit Tiron Albani’s memoirs, from which only an abridged and censored fragment was published on the occasion of the semi-centennial of the Union. Preserved in a typewritten form at the “Octavian Goga” County Library, the manuscript is a unique memorialistic work and a valuable documentary source, especially for the history of the Transylvanian Romanian social democratic movement from its beginnings as a section of the Social Democratic Party of Hungary to the interwar period, as it was seen by one of its leaders. In addition to the description of the manuscript, the article focuses on the intervention of the communist censorship in the fragment related to the Great Union published in 1968.

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The present article is an approach to Bernard of Clairvaux’s treaty On Consideration. Its reading follows the arguments of a thesis according to which this text has a political theology dimension and it could be included in a history on the evolution of the concept “state of exception”, as it was defined by Giorgio Agamben. The primary argument is that Bernard, in order to convince Pope Eugene III of the need to resume the crusade, used the patristic concepts of spiritual formation to legitimise the Pope’s right to make political decisions above the rules, in the name of the divine inspiration of the one who was formed spiritually.

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