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

The phenomenal popularity of the Internet literature in China and the potential for freedom of speech in China’s cyberspace have long fascinated scholars of contemporary China. This article examines the interaction between Chinese Internet literature and the ever-increasing online censorship by focusing on one type of Internet literature in China: the allegorical ghost stories. While observers of censorship in China have expressed worries about the tightening censorship in China’s cyberspace and...   ⇨ Read more

This paper aims at retracing Ana Blandianaʼs ban from publishing, between 1988 and 1989; it also looks at the way in which the writer managed to elude censorship. Ana Blandiana was banned from publishing during the one and a half year before the end of the communist regime in Romania. The reviews of her last poetry anthology were banned, but not the anthology itself, which was published shortly after the author’s ban from publishing. Ana Blandianaʼs name was allowed to appear in literary studies about...   ⇨ Read more

Political humour, as an indispensable part of popular culture, played a complex role under communism in Romania. It was a catalyst of the general discontent towards the catastrophic effects of Ceausescu’s megalomaniac dictatorship, a forbidden, dangerous means of expressing opposition. This dynamic part of folklore captured and exposed essential aspects of life in Communism, from the permanent fear of the Securitate to the ever-growing ridicule of the presidential couple and their acolytes. Unforgiving jokes...   ⇨ Read more

From the traditional perspective of interventionist or “regulatory,” censorship has gained along the democratic era a “polymorphous nature,” as Francesca Billiani designates it. Conceptual changes represent the base of the “new censorship,” also known as “constitutive” or “structural,” in terms conceptualized by Pierre Bourdieu. These new perspectives upon censorship depart from the ideological restrictions specific to totalitarian regimes while they are also defined by mechanisms of repressing intellectual...   ⇨ Read more

This paper attempts to investigate the prevalence of the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ in the ’70s, using the means of the quantitative studies and macroanalysis, as they are theorised by Franco Moretti and Matthew L. Jockers. We will focus on how the subversive nature of the novels of the ‘obsessive decade’ can be detected through quantitative analysis of textual structures (thematic, lexis). In the political context of the ’70s, due to the imposing of certain restrictions (we are referring to the July...   ⇨ Read more