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Swedish Journal of Romanian Studies
Number of Followers: 0  Open Access journalISSN (Print) 2003-0924 Published by Lunds universitet  [14 journals]
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- Ființele ficționale: ce sunt și la ce folosesc
Authors: Alina Buzatu
Pages: 11 - 19
Abstract: My paper problematizes the (non)existence of the fictional beings, addressing a series of important theoretical questions and comparing some relevant (realist / antirealist) answers archived by the modern and contemporary conceptual history. I have examined contrastive philosophical perspectives that define the ontological condition of fictional beings, in an attempt to represent the specific difference of these imaginative constructs and their experiential roles. The argumentative stake of my concise research is to prove that, in the coordinates of the imaginative worlds, fictional beings, their behavior, language, emotions, intentions, help us „read” and interpret real life - they are cognitive tools of exceptional value.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25958
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- I.L. Caragiale. Despre autor, cititor și diferite mecanisme de seducere,
pornind de la O conferență
Authors: Mircea A. Diaconu
Pages: 20 - 36
Abstract: The present text aims to problematise the work of I.L. Caragiale through the lens of reception theories, hermeneutics, and textuality while at the same time questioning some of the structuring themes of his writing, such as truth, the quest and the reader. Using texts such as ‘O conferență’, ‘Două loturi’, ‘Inspecțiune’, ‘Năpasta’, ‘D’ale carnavalului’, ‘Abu Hassan’, ‘1 Aprilie’ and others, the author aims to highlight elements of substance, attitude and style that converge in Caragiale’s writing, which, beyond the social, it associates the metaphysical comic or the idea of empty transcendence with the concern for truth, meta-textuality or the social. In this context, the proximity of I.L. Caragiale to Alphonse Allais or Henry James, in the interpretations of Umberto Eco and Wolfgang Iser, is supported beyond the similarities that legitimise the reading of I.L. Caragiale from the perspective of reception theories, by the fact that their relevant texts were written at the height of the Belle Époque. Therefore, Caragiale’s world appears as a luminous, complicit, seductive irony.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25957
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- Romanul judiciar. Către un nou subgen al romanului istoric
românesc
Authors: Alexandra Olteanu
Pages: 37 - 56
Abstract: The lifespan and popularity of a subgenre are determined by the inventiveness with which novelists develop and innovate the standard formulas. The judicial novel emerges as an extension of the popularity of the outlaw novel, adding a technical dimension to the misdeeds committed by wrongdoers. The outlaw and judicial novels are anthropomorphized subgenres that set in motion symbolic models, with a central figure dominating the entire course of events. The judicial novel reconfigures the perspective of naturalism, transforming the social milieu into a triggering factor for reprehensible acts. Shocking acts, such as crimes or suicides, and their mysterious circumstances, are analyzed from multiple angles, akin to using a set of parallel mirrors, while the brisk steps of investigations are fascinatingly reconstructed within the eloquent phrases of the novelists. One of the central ideas that the judicial novel seeks to develop is the sacrifice as a social practice, whether symbolic, articulated in the imposition of precarious living conditions leading to extreme gestures. Spatiality and temporality constitute the central pillars that compose the dramatic scenes of the Romanian judicial novel. Crimes are plotted and committed in the moonlight, in neighborhoods or on winding streets. The schematism of gloomy settings and the rudimentary nature of character profiles are countered by allusions to an undefined darkness, the contours of which elude discernment. The judicial subgenre utilizes conventions from the detective novel formula, involving the exaggeration of a cause-and-effect relationship as inevitable and the conquest of a reassuring imaginary, complementary to the moral imperatives discussed by Romanian novelists determined to rehabilitate the reputation of the genre through fictional digressions on morality. In its dimension of historical crime fiction, the Romanian judicial novel not only accentuates its documentary aspect, showing how the institutions responsible for investigations and judicial processes function but also the expansiveness of historicizing interpretations of the analyzed bloody events. Within the context of a dynamically structured novel distinguished by thematic configuration and ideological significance, the incorporation of illustrations transcends mere decorative intent. The judicial novel strategically incorporates illustrations as a highly effective extratextual approach. This not only disrupts the linear narrative trajectory and heightens suspense but also concurrently bestows substance upon the ethereal images adeptly invoked by the literary text.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25927
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- Cărtărescu vs. Cărtărescu: el imaginario literario de Melancolia,
cambio y pervivencia
Authors: Alba Diz Villanueva
Pages: 57 - 82
Abstract: The aim of this paper is to analyze the differences and similarities between the latest volume of stories published by the Romanian writer Mircea Cărtărescu (Melancolia, 2019, Bucharest, Humanitas) and his previous literary production. Although Melancolia has been associated with Nostalgia and indeed exhibits many parallels with the first volume of short novels published by Cartarescu, the truth is that the 2019 volume refers to the literary universe created from other texts as well. By comparing and contrasting Melancolia with some of his main works, from novels such as the three volumes of the Orbitor trilogy (Aripa stângă, Corpul, Aripa dreaptă), Travesti or Solenoid to his poetry, through the stories of Nostalgia, the essay aims to demonstrate how this volume dialogues, more or less explicitly, with all the previous ones while distancing itself from them in some narrative and stylistic aspects. After examining elements such as characters, motifs, symbols, metaphors, subjects, intertextuality, and metafiction, the work focuses on space and time as the two main categories in which the most significant changes take place as they move away from their usual context, communist Bucharest (more precisely, from the late 1950s to the end of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s regime in the late 1980s). This temporal and spatial framework is one of the fundamental axes of all Cărtărescu’s literary texts, which gives them unity, stability, and continuity. However, as the article tries to demonstrate, the change is not total, but Mircea Cărtărescu, through his usual intertextual play, refers indirectly to this space well known by his readers and, consequently, perhaps also to that historical period. To argue this issue, this article outlines the direct allusion to a specific space mentioned in some of the author’s earlier texts. This is the factory where one of the most important episodes of the first story (Punțile) takes place. The spatial descriptions of the first and third stories are also analyzed to check the parallels between them and some settings of Nostalgia, Orbitor or Solenoid. The work also investigates the possible objectives of these changes and similarities. On the one hand, it is possible to identify some of Cărtărescu’s characteristic elements in Melancholy due to its thematic and stylistic permanence (child and adolescent characters, the games as creation and as a gateway to a magical universe, the mother, rites of passage, onirism, the use of polysemic symbols such as the butterfly, duality, symmetry and twins, fractal images, anti-mimetic references, etc.), as well as the allusions (explicit or implicit) to his previous works. On the other hand, by neglecting (at least unequivocally) the preferred space-time frame of his previous works, Melancolia can be universalized, and the fictitious components can prevail over any possible reference to extra-literary reality. In this way, the Romanian writer achieves a work that is both very similar to and very different from his broader literary corpus, from everything he had written until the moment of the publication of Melancolia.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25843
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- Homeland in Romanian children’s literature written in the Diaspora
Authors: Cristina Sărăcuț
Pages: 83 - 94
Abstract: Romanian children’s literature has always been situated at the crossways of cultural ideologies. The Romanian texts for children lack innocence due to the implicit level of cultural, social, and historical knowledge they mirror at different epochs. In this paper I investigate how literary texts for children written in Romanian communities living abroad present the idea of homeland. I examine literary works written by three contemporary Romanian writers living in Romanian communities in Serbia: Ana Niculina Ursuleanu, Radu Flora and Slavco Almăjan. My selection includes books published in between 1970 and 2010: Cu Soarele-n Creștet [With the sun on the head], (2006); Soare, Bună Dimineața! [Sun, good morning!], (1998); Cărările Nilului [The paths of the Nile], (2008); Piticii au Uitat să Crească [The dwarfs forgot to grow up], (1987); Pianul cu Păienjeni [The piano with spiders], (1991); Când Vine Primăvara [When spring comes], (1970). In my analysis, I focus upon the role of settings in building the image of an eternal Romanian homeland that transcends the national borders. Thus, I discuss three main types of settings that shape the fiction imagined by the proposed authors, related to the following environments: landscape, family, and school. My analysis considers the theory of landscape proposed by Mitchell (2002, p. 5) in Landscape and Power. According to it, landscape implies the interaction between the human, the natural, the self and the other. For each novel, I analyse the role of settings within the literary texts. I explore Radu Flora’s novel in connection with two elements of setting, landscape and school, respectively. In Ana Niculina Ursulescu’s books I look at the bond between family and landscape, while in Slavco Almăjan’s literary work I highlight the importance of landscape in building the image of childhood. These functions are classified according to a sophisticated range, from the purpose of clarifying the conflict or its function as a symbol (in When Spring Comes by Radu Flora), to the task of mood intensifier attributed to setting (in Balul Strugurilor [The party of grapes] by Slavco Almăjan). My conclusions validate the idea that literary texts constantly build and convey an image of the Romanian identity and a sense of belonging to the Romanian homeland as marked by borders. I focus on nostalgia and irony as the main feelings the authors transmit about the image of homeland. On the one hand, the image of homeland in the literary works written by these three writers implies nostalgia, a feeling conveyed through an adult’s perspective of childhood. On the other hand, sometimes, as it happens in the case of the novel When Spring Comes, the narrator adopts a humorous perspective on history and human interactions among characters. As a final remark, I show that the selection of these three settings (landscape, family and school) creates the image of homeland in connection with a nationalist ideology. More precisely, children’s books reinforce the idea of unity between the two Romanian speaking communities (in Romania and Vojvodina) that share common cultural values. The representation of homeland reiterates a history-oriented ideology and legitimates the assimilation of nation to childhood.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25874
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- For a noble and sentimental literature: N. Steinhardt and the essay as a
form of freedom
Authors: Antonio Patraș, Roxana Patraș
Pages: 95 - 111
Abstract: N. Steinhardt, the author of Jurnalul fericirii [The Diary of Happiness], was not only an exquisite intellectual colporteur, but also an erudite essayist of astonishing spontaneity, who gave his intellectual discourse a remarkable cultural breadth, which places him in the same spiritual family as Alexandru Odobescu, Paul Zarifopol, Mihail Ralea, Alexandru Paleologu or Andrei Pleșu. In spite of the diversity of the themes addressed, the essays of the later monk of Rohia preserve a basic unity, revealed in a coherent modus cogitandi and a defensive ethos, intended to protect individual freedom through recourse to modesty and to what Paleologu called common sense as paradox. Reading Steinhardt’s essays is also a powerful antidote to laziness of thought, offering the reader the chance to escape from the narrow horizon of commonplaces. Leaving aside the prison memorial and the texts on religious subjects, which are permeated by the same essayistic vein, we highlighted the fact that Steinhardt understood literary criticism as an ingenious creative activity, polemically anti-positivist, susceptible to new and surprising cultural analogies, incessantly pleading for the rehabilitation of subjectivity, emotion and feeling as essential factors in the process of knowledge, from the perspective of a fundamental humanism drawing from Montaigne’s tradition.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26127
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- Représentations et pratiques nocturnes dans la société roumaine (XVIIIe
– XXe siècles)
Authors: Alexandru Ofrim
Pages: 112 - 123
Abstract: Folklorists, ethnographers and anthropologists have dedicated few studies to the night, and they especially emphasized its negative representations: an interval of darkness, of anxiety and fear, a time of intensified activities of evil supernatural forces. By favoring imaginary and mythical components, night was taken into consideration as an exceptional and extraordinary time, as a negative counterpart to the day, and not as a natural reverse of it. For a long time, the night did not draw the attention of historians, being perceived as a time when nothing happens, a time for rest and sleep. Starting with Jean Verdon’s pioneering book (“La Nuit au Moyen Âge”, 1994), historians have become increasingly interested in night habits, and explored the nightlife of people in ancient societies, bedtimes and waking times, sleep duration. The history of sleep has become a new field of research, opened by the American historian Roger Ekirch (2001, 2005), who advanced the theory that people in pre-industrial societies used to sleep differently. During the night, the sleep was biphasic (or segmented), divided into two moments and separated by a period of wakefulness (watch) at around midnight (between the first sleep and the second one). In our study we intend to verify if the results of Ekirch’s research are also applicable to the realities of the Romanian society in the 18th-20th centuries. We must recognize the difficulties of a history of nocturnal time, the fragmentary nature of the sources, the lack of direct and explicit testimonies (few people have been able to subjectivize their experience of sleep and transmit written testimonies). Therefore, we investigated sources such as chronicles, judiciary documents and literary texts, in search of the segmented sleep pattern. We have identified direct or indirect references to the two periods of sleep, and the intervening period of wakefulness. These references allow us to cautiously advance the hypothesis that this sleep pattern also existed in pre-modern Romanian society, in rural and urban environments. The future researches, based on teamwork, will more accurately determine the validity of this hypothesis.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26016
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- Decline of a national icon: Derogatory representations of the Romanian
peasant in recent television programs
Authors: Anca Șerbănuță
Pages: 124 - 140
Abstract: Intellectuals and artists have been crafting an image of the Romanian peasant as the building block of the nation since the second half of the 19th century. The process went hand in hand with the modernization of the elites, and the peasant was thus mainly ‘discovered’ within the cultural framework of Romanticism, as the ‘eternal autochthon’ (Mihăilescu,2017, p.173), creator of the specific Kultur of the Romanian people. However, dramatic social transformations such as the difficult transition period of the ʹ90s have shifted the focus from a complimentary representation of the peasant as the national foundation – and all the positive characteristics of his/her habitus in terms of material, spiritual and aesthetic values– to a rather alienated and anachronistic figure coming across as a burden that has to be carried into modernity by the enlightened social strata. This paper uses visual analysis, grounded in Barthesian semiotics, to explore the changes in modes of representation of the peasant in popular media from the depository of national values to a marginal lower class, striving to keep up with the urban lifestyle. Various portrayals of peasants in TV series and sketches, movies and memes point to the degradation of the peasant figure in the public imagination. Images of poverty, bad taste and a lack of hygiene seem to pollute the bodies, garments and home environments of the rural characters, with a toxic effect on their language and behaviour as well. Although there have always been derogatory images of the peasants in the discourse of the elites (Mihăilescu also coined the term ‘domestic primitive’ for the representation associated with the historical tendency to portray the peasants as a backward population incapable of progress), in recent times this tendency has prevailed, especially with the rural-themed successful TV series Las Fierbinți, for mainly ideological reasons which will be discussed. Thus, apart from deconstructing a national myth, I argue that the representation of contemporary peasants and their degenerating habitus also contributes to the polarization in the Romanian society.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25952
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- Economia și societatea sub lentila multiculturalismului. Contraste:
heterocromie și heterocronie economico-socială
Authors: Gabriela Bodea
Pages: 141 - 155
Abstract: Multiculturalism implies social acceptance: it does not involve consensus, but social awareness. As witnesses of diversity, we identify change itself, as a continuous process, relativised by aspects of heterochromy and socioeconomic heterochrony. The dichotomy of differentiated development does not follow a particular pattern. Simultaneously, it seems dual: it seduces through a certain degree of freedom (discernible, perceptible, or apparent), but it also makes itself guilty through the reticence that singles it out. In the end, differentiation brings advantages and requires sacrifices, but it is as much a part of the spirit of the individual as it is of the way economic entities act.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26137
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- King Oscar II of Sweden and his connections with the Romanian freemasonry
Authors: Attila Carol Varga
Pages: 156 - 163
Abstract: The present analysis represents a novel approach to the issue of Romanian-Swedish bilateral relations in the second half of the 19th century. This time, the focus is on the dimension of contacts between Romanian and Swedish Freemasonry. This was conducted in the second half of the 19th century by King Oscar II himself. In 1885 he made an official visit to Bucharest with Queen Sofia. On this occasion, he was made an honorary member of the Grand National Lodge of Romania (M.L.N.R.). Far from being merely a protocol award, it held a special significance. This visit underlined the desire of Constantin Moroiu, Grand Master of the Grand National Lodge of Romania, to gain international recognition for this Romanian Masonic powerIt was a very turbulent period in the history of Romanian Freemasonry, marked by a series of interventions by the Grand Orient of Italy in its internal affairs. With the award of this distinction, Romanian Freemasons sought to strengthen their internal unity through external recognition from all Masonic powers. To this end, the help of the Grand Lodge of Sweden was essential. The desire to consolidate the unity of Romanian Freemasonry was a natural reality, given the fact that Romania was proclaimed a Kingdom in 1881 and became a base of stability in this part of the continent.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25931
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- Considerații privind valoarea de optativ a conjunctivului românesc și
bulgăresc în propoziții independente
Authors: Boryana Emiliynova, Silvia Mihăilescu
Pages: 164 - 176
Abstract: The Romanian and Bulgarian languages share common features stemming from the Balkan linguistic aria. Among the distinctive grammatical constructions in Balkan languages is the new-type analytic subjunctive, a replacement for the infinitive in various languages such as Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Albanian, and Greek. The subjunctive can manifest in present, imperfect, perfect, and pluperfect tenses in most languages. However, Romanian has more limited combinations, employing only the present and perfect tenses. Despite these differences, the subjunctive shares structural, semantic, and usage similarities across Balkan languages. The use of the subjunctive in optative sentences is a common feature in Balkan languages, conveying achievable desires in the present and strong but unrealizable wishes in the past. This paper aims to broaden the research on the Balkan-type subjunctive by illustrating parallels in the modal values of this mood in Romanian and Bulgarian in independent optative sentences. The research underscores numerous correspondences in the use of the subjunctive in optative sentences in Romanian and Bulgarian. In both languages, within the optative context, the subjunctive expresses various sentiments such as desire, wishes, regret, protest, and indignation. The expression of both factual and counterfactual desires using present and past subjunctive forms is also similar in both languages. The present forms of the subjunctive express a factual desire, meaning an achievable wish that could be fulfilled in the future. The present subjunctive forms are very often encountered in idiomatic expressions that convey wishes and imprecations. Many similarities are noted between expressions in the two languages, both in terms of structure and in semantics and lexical means. The use of present subjunctive forms is not typical for expressing counterfactual wishes (unrealizable or difficult to achieve) but occurs in specific contexts. Wishes expressed through past subjunctive forms are counterfactual because the circumstances in which they could have been realized are omitted. Such statements convey the speaker's regret regarding an unfulfilled desire. In Romanian grammar, detailed treatment of the uses of the perfect subjunctive is lacking, but it is noted to have optative value. In Bulgarian, counterfactual wishes are expressed using three past tenses of the subjunctive – pluperfect, imperfect, and perfect. In this regard, the capabilities of the perfect subjunctive in Romanian stand out for expressing multiple meanings. With the exception of some meanings of the imperfect subjunctive in Bulgarian, the perfect subjunctive in Romanian can convey nearly all the meanings of the three past tenses in Bulgarian. The study highlights numerous similarities in the use of the subjunctive in Romanian and Bulgarian in optative sentences, offering observations that contribute to a deeper understanding of this mood within the field of Romanian, Bulgarian, and Balkan linguistics.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25974
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- Construcțiile incidente cu funcție expresivă: analiză cantitativă pe
momentele și schițele lui I.L. Caragiale
Authors: Denisa-Maria Bâlc
Pages: 177 - 188
Abstract: The present work is composed of two parts: a theoretical part, in which some critical and personal considerations on the incident constructions are exposed, and the second part represents a qualitative-quantitative approach to the moments and sketches of I.L. Caragiale. In the theoretical part, the aim is to present incident constructions, especially in relation to GALR, where a complex and up-to-date classification of them is made from a semantic-functional point of view, into: allocutive incident constructions, direct speech reporting constructions, metadiscursive incident constructions, incident constructions with the role of pragmatic connectors, incident constructions with expressive function, with conative function, and verbal automatisms. However, according to the three basic features of incidents, namely the representation of an additional syntactic structure, the lack of syntactic links to the underlying utterance, and the provision of information of the type comment, explanation or direct speech reporting, it can be seen that not all the categories listed above fall into the narrow class of incidents, which is why we hypothesised that those categories that do not exhibit all three defining features of incidents belong to paranthetic constructions, a superclass of incidents. After this theoretical presentation, I carried out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the incident constructions with expressive function in Caragiale’s moments and sketches. The analysis was carried out manually and with the software Voyant Tool. From the category of incident expressive constructions, we first considered interjections and imprecations, as these are the most representatives for Caragiale’s work. As far as interjections are concerned, we made an inventory of them according to the number of occurrences, which showed that the most frequent interjections in Caragiale’s work are the interjections: a!, as!, ei! and uf!, followed by ah!, ei aș! o! aoleu! and ehei! Taking contexts and representative examples from Caragiale’s moments and sketches, we have analysed their semantic valences, highlighting the fact that interjections known positively in Caragiale’s work receive many more semantic nuances than those known negatively. Using concrete examples, the main semantic nuances identified were admiration, determination, disappointment, disapproval, dissimulation, exaltation, hesitation, anger, irritation, irony, melancholy, satisfaction, puzzlement, dissatisfaction, disbelief, fear, hope, surprise, suspicion, confusion, disappointment, indifference, irony, joy, boldness or even suffering. The semantic analysis of the interjections identified in Caragiale’s work was followed by a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the imprecations, which produced an impressive list of imprecations that suggest the linguistic inventiveness of the Romanian prose writer and support the orality of his style. Interestingly, most of the imprecations are found in the texts "Întârziere" and "Un pedagog de școală nouă", in the speech of a female character and a teacher, characters often associated with elevated language. Taken as a whole, all these incident expressive constructions, whether interjections or imprecations, are intended not only to emphasise the characters’ feelings, but are also evidence of their attitude and relationship to the world, to other characters and to society in general. Through the variety of semantic nuances they update and the multitude of forms identified in Caragiale’s texts, they acquire a central role in the articulation of the message and meanings.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26121
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- Behind–the–scenes: Aspects of a film reception. The case of The
Independence of Romania (Aristide Demetriade, Grigore Brezeanu, 1912) and
The Rest is Silence (Nae Caranfil, 2007)
Authors: Andra Bruciu-Cozlean
Pages: 189 - 200
Abstract: The foreign reader and viewer can find nothing better -or faster, given the exigencies of modern life- than the film as an introduction to the character, history, identity of a nation. With the awards garnered by directors like Cristian Mungiu and Nae Caranfil, new interest has been focused on Romania’s film, community, and history. That is why, an investigation regarding the Romanian early cinema would be necessary in the field of improving education from abroad. The purpose of this paper is to analyze a number of aspects, such as the importance of incorporating a course on cinema in foreign language teaching, one of the major goals being the opportunity to educate the students in the field of movies and thus offering them distinct cultural perspectives. However, this article does not plea for the need of a pedagogy of media studies in higher education, given the complexity of the topic. It rather aims to focus on the history of two Romanian movies: The Independence of Romania (1912) and The Rest is Silence (2007) and highlight the reasons why an urban icon of the city of Tampere is called “Plevna”. This paper sets out to analyze the two mentioned Romanian films who proved to be interesting for Finnish students since they depict an episode of our common history, the 1877 War of Independence (The Russo-Turkish War). At the same time, the paper aims to familiarize them with the allure of the event when Romanian and Finnish soldiers fought shoulder to shoulder on the same front, at Plevna. The Romanian film, The Independence of Romania shot in 1911-1912, was the first feature film to be kept almost entirely in the Romanian National Film Archive; the other one, The Rest Is Silence directed by Nae Caranfil (and representing Romania’s first entry into the 2009 Oscars) and inspired by The Independence of Romania wanted to show the real story of our first full-length filmmaking. Therefore, this latter film contains like a palimpsest an older mute movie, discovered in Romanian Movie Archive. The current article draws upon the insights provided by the Finnish students after watching the two films and summarizes their conclusions. In other words, these lines provide a behind-the-scenes glimpse of what they learned and discovered. The films were met with positive reviews, and we tried to follow the students’ spontaneous reactions and emotions. An important part of our work was to put in perspective the two inspiring patriotic marches which are commemorating the departure of the Romanian and Finnish soldiers at Plevna in the Balkan’s theater of War: Drum bun! (farewell song composed by Ştefan Nosievich to the lyrics of Romanian patriot Vasile Alecsandri) and Kauan on Kärsitty / Long have suffered, a well-known patriotic song of the Finnish Guard (Suomen kaarti). This article tangentially discusses the role of perception in educational activity, which is presented under two correlated aspects, namely: the activity carried out in this sense by the teacher and by the students and the role of cinema in creating cultural memory from a general perspective, in a way that transforms the manner we think of film and its social importance. This article starts from a very particular point of view, as we discovered by pure chance the name of Plevna building in Tampere, and goes to a more general aspect, which is the battle of Plevna, one of the most important episodes from Romania’s modern history.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26228
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- The Séance of Reading. Uncanny Designs in Modernist Writing by
Professor Thomas Cousineau
Authors: Sorin Ciutacu
Pages: 201 - 205
Abstract: Professor Cousineau demonstrates an impressive original scholarly kind of comprehension of modernist texts, submitting them under scrutiny with an archetypal critical lens and thus reveals “the uncanny return of the Manole Complex in nine masterpieces of literary modernism”. The intellectual spark that inspired Professor Cousineau was Mircea Eliade’s Commentaires sur la Légende de Maître Manole where Eliade’s claims that Manole’s wife does not actually die: “She is, rather, transformed; her soul leaves her body of flesh and bones and goes to live in the stone and plaster body of the monastery”. (Eliade, 1994, p.168) In each of the chapters of the volume under discussion, the author further elaborates on Eliade’s concept of architectural body, finding it under sundry metamorphoses in the iconic literary modernist works from Europe and USA.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.25976
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
- The journey to the end of the world under the sign of reconciliation with
oneself and the world
Authors: Gabriela Chiciudean
Pages: 206 - 208
Abstract: The novella Cînd Nu mai ai pe Cine să Îmbrățișezi [When you have no one to hug], by Răzvan Brudiu, offers a wild and isolated image of a hamlet in the Apuseni Mountains, where old Joseph lives in solitude, strengthened by the power of faith, waiting for the last road to eternity. In the volume we can identify a dialogical construction on the waiting theme, under the sign of silence. If Joseph speaks, it is to banish loneliness, as rarely does anyone cross his threshold, so that in the narrative ego his words and gestures provoke deep meditations on existence. The profile of the central hero is gradually built up through simplicity, modesty, and natural gestures, contrasting with the erudition of the theologian who constantly feels the need to refer to various passages in the Bible, to church events and services, to quotations from the writings of saints or famous writers, etc. Two different worlds emerge from the dialogue between the two protagonists, that of the city, where life is full of daily hassles and worries, where people judge things with a ‘correct’ mind, and the world of old Joseph, for whom time has already become ‘eternity’. These worlds, symbolically confronted, generate meaningful images. The 90-year-old man serenely looks towards death, aware that he does not have much more to expect from life and wishing to be reunited with his wife. He leads a simple life, but his prayer, uttered without worrying about tomorrow, generates in his heart love and longing for the Creator. For him, the end of the world is, in fact, the meeting with God, and everything he does since his wife’s death is a preparation for reaching the final goal, thus becoming an example for everyone who believes in eternal life.
PubDate: 2024-05-15
DOI: 10.35824/sjrs.v7i2.26124
Issue No: Vol. 7, No. 2 (2024)
