Metacritic Journal


for Comparative Studies and Theory

Non-themed issue, 5.2 (December 2019)
ISSN 2457 – 8827
Bogdan Ștefănescu Bogdan Ștefănescu

Exile in Reverse: Constantin Noica as an Example of Paraexilic Life in Communist Romania


This article illustrates a relatively less charted form of exilic dislocation which I have dubbed paraexile. Unlike Claudio Guillén, who claims that exiled writers can triumph over their native attachments and create a literature of “counter-exile”, I propose, alongside critics like Lamming, Rushdie, or Said, that the trauma of displacement can never be entirely left behind and is constantly part of exilic writing. In addition, I make the claim that paraexilic literature is a peculiar form of internalizing...   ⇨ Read more
Alina Preda Alina Preda

Crossing the Boundaries between Modernist and Postmodernist Poetics: the Critical Reception of Jeanette Winterson’s Novels


Since Jeanette Winterson’s works display an electrifying combination of features, some characteristic to modernist poetics, others representative for postmodernist poetics, this paper aims to assess the oppositional critical claims that tend to assign Winterson’s novels to the postmodernist trend and, respectively, to the modernist tradition, by taking into account both the author’s work (fictional, as well as non-fictional) and her own self-proclaimed affiliation to modernism. Keywords: modernism,...   ⇨ Read more
Bijoy V.G. Philip Bijoy V.G. Philip

Marker’s Madeleines: the Essay beyond Text and Film


This paper focuses on Chris Marker’s status as an essayist but, instead of taking his cinematic works, it explores his early print essays Commentaires (1967), Le Dépays (Chrismarker.org), and his later digital works – Immemory (Gorgomancy.net) and Ouvroir (SecondLife.com). This study is based on the argument that the essay is a malleable form and that it serves its primary function of expressing thought through a process of combining disparate elements in a non-linear format. Further, it argues that this...   ⇨ Read more
Mihaela Ursa Mihaela Ursa

Metanationalizing Theory in Comparative Studies


The paper is a conceptual proposal in favour of employing the metanational, a term and concept born in the economy theories on the multinational, as a descriptor and a theoretical tool in the humanities, here represented by comparative studies. Namely, addressing the lack of target and purpose of transnationalist descriptions, as well as the Romanticization of the uneven character of cultural peripheralities and of scholarship on marginality, the metanational has a useful vectorial definition pointing to a...   ⇨ Read more
Barbara Miceli Barbara Miceli

Margaret Atwood’s The Heart goes Last: Panopticism, Discipline, Society, and Ustopia


The prologue of the novel The Heart Goes Last (2015) written by the Canadian author Margaret Atwood describes a crime-stricken future society plunged into an economic crisis. The alternative to such misery is the Consilience project, a city created to offer jobs and all the basic comforts (now considered luxuries) to all its inhabitants. The success of the system relies on the local prison, Positron, where all the citizens must present themselves once every two months, swapping their lives with those of other...   ⇨ Read more
Loredana Bercuci Loredana Bercuci

Now you hear it, now you see it. Silence and Trauma in Autodocumentary Film


Although trauma and memory have been a focus of cultural studies for more than twenty years now, few scholarly works focus on medium-specific representations of trauma and even fewer comment on the tendency of trauma representations to be autobiographical in the twenty-first century. Since it was established as a genre in the 1960s, the autobiographical documentary has flourished due to the increased accessibility to recording equipment offered by technological advancement. The present paper will analyse two...   ⇨ Read more
Patricia Șoitu Patricia Șoitu

Food Porn at the Crossroads: Between Postmodernism and Digimodernism in Stephanie Sarley’s (Un)orthodox Visual Art


Since its emergence in the late 1990s, the cultural paradigm of digimodernism has been regarded as a hybrid product, born out of postmodernism’s toxic ashes. Meant both as a partial continuation and as a reaction against its monolithic predecessor, digimodernism brought to light Lyotard’s ambivalent legacy of the grand narratives and sought to demonstrate their actuality, despite the few muffled screams of irony and ambiguity, found at the dying heart of postmodernity. Alternatively, the postmodern is seen as a...   ⇨ Read more
István Berszán István Berszán

Can Humans survive the Anthropocene? An Eco-Rhytmological Approach


This paper proposes an ecocritical approach based on a practice-oriented physics of literature. Considering Henri David Thoreau’s romantic transcendentalism and contemporary trends of ecocriticism as experiments of practical orientation, it examines the immanent kinetic spaces which are supposed to encompass all their alternatives. By distinguishing different rhythmic „strata”, eco-rhythmology reveals that Anthropocene-generated climate change or dramatically diminishing biodiversity are not the only actual...   ⇨ Read more