Using a sociological and philosophical approach, this paper discusses the legitimacy, utility and functionality of art censorship both as a social practice and as an autonomous discourse. My intervention reconstitutes and deconstructs the legal arguments underlying the decision to censor artistic products, by investigating the most common accusations by which the law seeks to justify art censorship: immorality (pornography, obscenity), the encouragement of indecent behaviour or incitement to...   ⇨ Read more

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

Romanian literary discourse on nature and the effects of industrialization following the 1989 revolution in comparison to the ideological discourse of the post-war era. If Romanian post-war literary discourse is firmly tied to the underlying ideology of Communism, then any attempt to investigate the discourse on nature in this period must be made alongside a reading of the Communist discourse on nature. In this respect, the situation of Romanian post-1989 prose that contains aspects of the influence of...   ⇨ 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

Having as a theoretical premise the idea that “essential personal identities” do not always synchronise with the essential identity of the group they are supposed to belong to, and that this de-synchronisation can have an ethical opposition at its core, the paper focuses on the way in which Mircea Nedelciu’s typical protagonists – nomads, socially marginal individuals with confusing, “unaccomplished identities” – attempt to (culturally and morally) reconstruct their damaged personal identities by disengaging...   ⇨ Read more

Mircea MARTIN, Christian MORARU, Andrei TERIAN, Romanian Literature as World Literature, Bloomsbury Academic, 2017, ISBN 978-1- 5013-2791-9, 357 p.

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

For the better part of the last three decades, Romanian poetry has undergone a series of mutations that led to the recovery of the interwar avant-garde, both in terms of poetic discursive strategies and in the militant rhetoric of its manifestoes. Although the first avant- garde influences date back to the 60ies, with a major iteration in the 70ies and the 80ies, because of the socio-cultural context of these periods we can only speak of a formal influence of the avant-garde. This paper intends to analyse how...   ⇨ 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

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

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