Vladimir Streinu. Melancolia eşecului critic / Vladimir Streinu. The Melancholy of Critical Failure

Abstract: Literary historian, essayist and poet, Vladimir Streinu fosters a compelling exchange of ideas between literary criticism and theories on and about the act of literary criticism. The present paper considers his understanding of art as well as his rejection of critical method, both as a matter of principle and as historical and psychological readings of literature; furthermore, it gives insight into literary criticism as the self-awareness of a functorial failure that conjures up a mood of melancholy. Against the backdrop of the intrinsically ‘external’ nature of critical practice, the impossibility of penetrating the intimate space of creation is underpinning not only Streinu’s Problems of Literary Criticism, but many of his critical studies on Tudor Arghezi or Mihai Eminescu.

Keywords: Vladimir Streinu, literary criticism, historical criticism, psychological criticism, Mihai Eminescu.

Fațete ale unor naufragii: mâncare / Facets of Shipwrecks: Food

Abstract: The essay is a comparative analysis of the function and meaning of food in three novels dealing with shipwrecks and outcasts: Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Tournier’s Friday, or The Other Island (1967), Coetzee’s Foe (1986).
In Lord of the Flies food is reduced to two invariable, repetitive foods, fruit and pork, which represent two primary aspects of prehistoric human civilization, the gathering and hunting stages. Picking fruit is a benign activity, free of risks and immediate dangers, be it psychological discomfort. It is an Edenic pose, safe, with which, however, the boys will not be satisfied. We seem to be in the golden age of humanity, innocent, pure, ideal; a land of original promise populated by naive children. In the novel, fruits and fruit trees become a symbol of a Paradisiacal, non-conflictual age of human civilization, ideal and idealized, but insufficient for the species. However, the consumption of pork and, above all, the hunting of mammals will focus the attention of the protagonists, in a symbolic, antagonistic parallelism with the maintenance of fire. Jack discloses a natural inclination for the very act of hunting no matter what and wherefore. For him, meat, hunting are, in fact, simple pretexts, occasions or alibis for a disposition or a vocation specific to the human species, involuntarily stated by himself from the very beginning: “I thought I could kill”. The fact that all the children eat the pork, including those who remain formally faithful to the ethical and rational principles of human civilization, including Ralph after Piggy has been killed by the same hunters from whom the meat comes, is one of the undercurrent themes of the novel: to what extent even the purest, most idealistic, most cerebral, most well-intentioned can remain completely outside the darkness, forced by context and adverse circumstances to survive. The answer to the dilemma is implicit. In Friday, or The Other Island food is an arch-presence of the internal history of the novel, in an agglomeration bordering on gastronomic Epicureanism, to the lucid expression of the danger of satiety. Basically, the author presents us with the nutritious abundance of the island, configuring it in the data of the plentiful, sufficient Eden. References to food are extremely varied, frequent and diversified (as should be the nutrition that the fetus receives in the mother’s womb, through her…). Robinson’s forager posture, reiterating the golden age of primitive mankind, will be firmly defined. But Robinson overcomes the stage of the primitive era and persistently emancipates himself in the position of the farmer. In the fifth chapter, the expression of a crisis already intervenes, the harvests become very poor due to the assiduous, untimely exploitation of the island by Robinson (the baby in the womb drains of strength the mother who shelters him). The excessively civilizing approach of the protagonist is the final point of the evolution of human culture and civilization in relation to the surrounding universe; it leads to its destruction through recklessness, intemperance. The saving solution is provided by Friday’s intervention, which brings back natural harmony to the island, restores the ecological balance between man and nature. Robinson’s entire evolution from hunter-gatherer to rapacious farmer is undone, Friday saving not only the island from destruction, but also the protagonist, the man as a species.

In Foe food is not mentioned too often in the first part of the novel, and this is because, from the very beginning, we learn that it was not varied at all. Robinson has no explicit input in fishing, farming, gathering, cooking, as all these tasks essential to survival on the island are falling to Friday, sometimes helped by Susan. It is Friday who feeds and keeps both Robinson and Susan alive, not at all surprising. He reproduces in the diegesis the destiny of his race in relation to the white man. The overlooked supporting character is, in fact, much more. Overcoming the impasse of the creative act of the character Susan will be offered, presumably, by Friday, the one who knows best what to write, if only because he seems to have been the man who brought the water, the fire, the food.

Keywords: civilization, food, gathering, history, hunting, island, outcast, salvation, savagery.

The Ideological Instrumentalization of Literary Myths in 19th Century Romanian Literature

Abstract: The historical archetype of the bandit has many variations, but the literary prototype of the hajduk, present both in folklore and in written literature, best exemplifies the nature of the social outlaw, the one who constructs an image of boundless bravery in the collective imagination, feared and admired alike by peasants and boyars. The suggestive power of the hajduk’s archetype equates to the romantic principle of seeking refuge in a heroic past, where the glory of the social rebel is a construct of the collective imagination, eluding the need for introducing real biographical details. The allure of the myth draws reflections on lost virtue, freedom against oppression, and the ideal of justice, principles the outlaws fight to impose.

Keywords: ideology, hajduk, hero, history, social banditry.

Virgil Tănase sau Celălalt exil românesc postbelic / Virgil Tănase or The Other Postwar Romanian Exile

Abstract: The need for systematization in terms of post-war Romanian exile, felt by Romanian researchers of the phenomenon, produced, after 1989, some harmful generalizations. The post-war Romanian exile, especially the literary one, embodied by writers, is not a monolithic block. This is why I believe that in the coming period, the study of particularities, of what escapes the generally accepted schemes of exile, of what cannot be labelled, should be privileged. In what follows, I will try to show precisely the power of reverberation of the literary word, through a quick entry into the work of Virgil Tănase/Tanase, a special figure of the Romanian exile. In a first stage, my contribution will highlight the writer’s relationship with the Romanian exile, while the rest of the study will be devoted to an analysis of the novel Zoia, his masterpiece, in which the focus will be on the themes of exile and history.

Keywords: literature, history, “other” exile, ideology, creative freedom.

Iorgu Iordan – Cicerone Poghirc: o polemică „moștenită” / Iorgu Iordan – Cicerone Poghirc: An “Inherited” Polemic

Abstract: With this article, we aim to present the controversy opened by Iorgu Iordan at the publication, by Cicerone Poghirc, of the monographic study dedicated to Hasdeu. Belonging to different schools, often in dispute, the two linguists estabilish an exchange of ideas that seems to revive the polemical dialogue waged decades ago by their predecessors. Situated in the scientific lineage of such scholars as Alexandru Philippide and B. P. Hasdeu, the young linguists inherited from their ancestors, along with doctrine and linguistic conception, the animosity.

Keywords: linguistics, scientific criticism, polemic, history of language, diachrony.

Sadoveanu – un constructor de punți peste timp, spațiu și… ideologii / Sadoveanu – A Bridge Builder Across Time, Space and… Ideologies

Abstract: This article aims it constructing the image of Mihail Sadoveanu as a bridge builder across time, space, and ideologies, a representation that is characteristic of this writer who has long disappeared from the area of interest of Romanian literary criticism. To achieve this, elements of a biographical, ideological, and aesthetic nature will be discussed, which, when combined, give expression to a specifically antimodern and polemical attitude towards the cult of the present, of rupture and of fragmentation sustained both by modernity and the modernist movement. This is the response that the mature writer gave to the interwar period, to the political context that, on the brink of World War II, was taking an increasingly radical turn, and to ‘the new spirituality’ associated with both the new generation of writers (Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionescu etc.) and the Legionary Movement.

Keywords: Mihail Sadoveanu, modernity, the novel, antimodern, radicalism, WWII.

Historicizing the Horse (V). The Swift Blue One (Tejas)

Abstract: This is the fifths study in a series dedicated to analyzing the process of historicizing the horse in Native American cultures and it focuses on its representation in The Swift Blue One, a Tejas/Caddo story. The blue horse in this story is drafted as a synergistic coalescence of history and myth (it manifests spiritual powers in a factual context) and this allows the narrative to historically legitimize and mythically dimensionalize it. As the horse transfers meaning(s) from Spanish to Tejas culture, it also ensures a cross-realm navigation of representation(s), an approach consistent with the usual myth-historical background in Native American stories. Rather than trying to explain the historicization of the horse in Tejas culture, the story narrates what can be considered a precursory stage, that of the emergence of the first herds of mustangs – the Spanish horses that became wild and ran in herds, which, in their turn, would set in motion the incipient phase of historicizing the horse.

Keywords: horse, mythicization, historicization, conceptual dimensionalization of culture.