Metacritique, as a means to provoke and to question any methodological use of criticism is an essential requirement in present cultural studies, especially when we often take for granted our own affinities for certain types of discourse. This need to challenge one’s own interpretive and reading habits is of particular interest in humanities and social sciences, where method and perspective are intrinsic part of any given analysis. In our cultural era, meta- is constantly used (might we say, religiously even) as...   ⇨ Read more

An interview with Olga Voronina, translator and co-editor of „Letters to Vera”, by Vladimir Nabokov. On translational culture, Nabokov and migrant identity.

The aim of this study is to challenge the view that narrative metalepsis is incompatible with the writing about the past and history. I study three works by francophone writers in which metalepsis and another similar narrative device, syllepsis, are used in interesting ways in stories dealing in different ways with the past. In C F Ramuz’s short story Scène dans la forêt, both devices are used in order to give the reader the impression of being in physical contact with past events and with the fictional events...   ⇨ Read more

What does it take for the cultural analyst to actually engage in a hermeneutical dialogue with ekphrastic artworks and to critically echo their mutual exchanges? How should the art critic acknowledge the dialogism that is intrinsic to different artistic media? It may be as if one adopted not only a meta perspective of interpretation, but also an infra view, by delving into the interstices of artistic praxis. This would amount to a methodological leap, from an encompassing, transcending gaze at artworks and...   ⇨ Read more

The paper aims to develop and put into operation the concepts of metafiction, transfictionality and possible worlds, particularly fictional worlds. The analysis is placed within the context of fictional studies, discussing the status of fiction and its relationship with reality, not only from a modal logic perspective, but also by exploring the fictional possibilities of the world outside the fictional text, while taking fiction as a starting point. Possible worlds theory has the means for understanding and...   ⇨ Read more

The main purpose of the present study is to detect and portray the way in which Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari aligned their views with a movement of annihilation of the self-otherness equation. It also tackles with the explanation of the concept of transindividuality, by which the overtaking of the polarised obsession of the ipseity-alterity definition is proposed. This concept encapsulates both a space of indeterminacy of identity and the incorporation of the multiple alterity – the collective. The present...   ⇨ Read more

This paper explores Romanian literary histories in the light of the theoretical acknowledgements of “World Literature”. Its foremost representatives define the international literary space as a competition for universal acknowledgment among nations. The complex dynamic between culture and socio-economic power is responsible for the hierarchical distinction between (semi)peripheral and core literatures. The case of Romanian literature is significant for the East-European struggle to overcome the socio-political...   ⇨ Read more

The aim of this paper is to describe and interpret some of the challenges that digital humanities pose to Romanian culture and Romanian studies. Apart from technical difficulties such as the lack of digitized archives, further problems arise when it comes to the interpretation of existing archives, to public perception of digitization in terms of free access to information but also, more often than not, in terms of exposing a “national identity” and national values to what are perceived as malicious...   ⇨ Read more

The literary domain has suffered several delineations throughout the centuries. No matter if it is perceived from a chronological, theoretical or constitutive perspective, there is a ceaseless readjustment regarding the perception of literature, with its afferent notions, such as the literary canon, translations or its own dynamics. This article outlines one of the major approaches for the literary space, due to David Damrosch, who has made visible the concept of “world literature”. Moreover, this article is an...   ⇨ Read more

The following paper addresses two different ways of constructing social and private visibility by means of cinematic investments of corporeal territoriality. Drawing upon transgender and national identity issues in Breakfast on Pluto (2005) it formulates the sense of belonging in relation to body representation. The other type of bodily material belonging is investigated through the cinema of Kusturica. In these films, images of the private are constructed as impossible self-portraits, generating new politics...   ⇨ Read more

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the misfit concept defined by the New Materialisms, as it appears in the Canadian movie Incendies (Denis Villeneuve, 2010). Thus, the study focuses on the corporeal dimension, illustrating the human being, capable of experiencing both the fit(ting) and the misfit(ting) condition in its both material and spiritual existence. In this regard, the key-points in the analysis of the film are the focus on the affect, the representation of the vulnerable body as agent,...   ⇨ Read more

Although contemporary Romanian filmmaking is recognized today as an important part of the global cinema and the young Romanian filmmakers have created a cinematic culture accepted as a model in Europe and internationally, there has been much criticism about the role of the “New Wave” in Romanian culture. The most common critiques describe the productions of this new generation of filmmakers as promoting a negative image, clearly “denigrating” the Romanians, Romanian education or medical systems, suggesting that...   ⇨ Read more

The totalitarian states from the former east side of the Iron Curtain used the archives as a weapon of mass submission. By employing a huge network of formal and informal agents to spy on their own citizens, to prevent any unsettlement of the political status quo, and keeping records on anyone who had a certain level of social clout or institutional role in the society, those in power installed fear on all the levels of the society. Knowing that a certain kind of document about some possible crime against the...   ⇨ Read more

This article intends to examine the avant-garde manifestoes that were written during the period in which the historical avant-garde movements were active in Romanian literature. We choose to operate with the phrase historical avant-garde in this study because the Romanian avant-garde movements have manifested themselves in a rather fixed period of time, namely in the interwar period. It is during this period that the most important Romanian avant-garde manifestoes were written. At the same time, this paper aims...   ⇨ Read more

Convulsive, Naum’s poetry, this research paper will focus on erotica, another functional possibility to mediate the surreality. This study intends to expand the narrow area of interpretation regarding Surrealism, reduced at the dream as a unique solution to reveal the real existence, a surrexistance. The erotica and the erotical deviations could replace the experience of dreaming in an authentic alchemical process. Or, this interpretative land is still unexplored despite the authority of the theme in universal...   ⇨ Read more

The author’s intention is to analyse the themes of madness and imagination as means of world-making and mediators between them in Cervantes’ novel, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha. The premise of the central argument is that each of Cervantes’ characters relate to the world through their own imagination. The first conclusion generated by this hypothesis is that Don Quixote himself deliberately makes up his world and defines himself as an archetype. This paper proposes a classification of three...   ⇨ Read more

A round table of the Metacritic Circle on some Moretti themes

Mihai I. SPĂRIOSU, Global Intelligence and Human Development: Towards an Ecology of Global Learning (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2004), 287 pp., ISBN 0-262-69316-X

Cătălin GHIȚĂ, and Robert BESHARA, eds. Fear and Anxiety in the 21st Century: The European Context. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2015. Print. ISBN: 978-1-84888-346-8, 153 p.

Bogdan GHIU, Everything must be translated: the new paradigm [Totul trebuie tradus: noua paradigmă], Cartea Românească, București, ISBN print: 978-973-23-3101-9, 2015, 235 p.

Ed. Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek. West Lafayette: Purdue Scholarly Publishing Services, 2013. 375p.

Liliana COROBCA, Book Control - Literary Censorship during the Communist Regime in Romania [Controlul cărții: cenzura literaturii în regimul comunist din România], Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 376 pp., ISBN 9789732330647, 2014

Carmen-Veronica BORBÉLY, Petronia PETRAR, Our Heteromorphic Future: Encoding the Posthuman in Contemporary British Fiction, ISBN: 978-973-595-78-5, 277 pages, 2014