Meridian Critic

This article is dedicated to the borrowings of tropes belonging to popular culture (American pop and soviet mass culture), in the works of the postmodern author Victor Pelevin. With the opening of the book market in the 1990s, numerous critics started lamenting the end of an authentic Russian culture, caused by the invasion of pop culture, imported primarily from the anglo-saxon sphere. However, we will see, through the works of Pelevin, how this cultural mix can be a fruitful source of renewal. In Homo Zapiens, Pelevin mixes references as in sots-art technique, and parodizes both Lenin and coca-cola, Sometimes, his use of pop motifs go beyond parody and serve political satire (Tchapaev and Poustota) and social commentary (Empire V, The Sacred Book of the Werewolf). A focus on the display of monstrous creatures in his books will also lead to a reflexion on the presence of numerous folkloric monsters in russian contemporary dystopias, such as mutants or vampires. Far from being just a market strategy, we believe these creatures may also serve as cultural metaphors, embodying some of the changes resulting from the fall of the USSR.

Before 1989, the year when the communist regime was overthrown, Romania’s cultural landscape had been dominated by written culture and, in terms of music, only classical music had been seen as a truly cultural manifestation. Although the population was somewhat familiar with Western pop music, it was only after the fall of communism and the advent of capitalist modes of existence that pop music and culture, by means of audio and visual media, came into its own and gained legitimacy. Actually, the settlement of popular culture as such in Romania went hand in hand with the development of mass media, capitalist relations and a market economy. As life’s circumstances changed so did the ways in which people imagined the world or expressed their viewpoint on reality. In this context, previous cultural figures lost their political power while others went onstage and had the floor. This article traces some of developments that have become landmark events in the transition from an exclusive high culture to an inclusive popular one.

A very famous band during the communist period, Phoenix remained one of the central names of Romanian rock and Romanian music in general after the collapse of the Ceaușescu regime in 1989. This essay analyzes the contradictory and sometimes misleading ideology of the band, as it was laid down mostly by its leader, Nicolae Covaci, in his interviews and memoirs. It aims to support a rather uneasy premise, namely that between the official communist culture and youth culturesa process of convergence occured, a process that in no way did away with the dogmatism and authoritarianism of Romanian communism with reference to youth and it is not theorized in order to alleviate the major shortcomings of the communist period.

The products of popular culture represent the milestones of an industrialised society, driven by demand and supply, which finds in consumerism a real engine of development. As literature is open to social movements, ideological oscillations and cultural tendencies, it embodies and reflects the rise of popular culture. Consumerism comes to shape or even resize identity and social representations. The novel, as an eclectic literary form, makes up concepts and describes them even before they have been theorized by the thinkers of the modern world. Allex Truscă’s novel, I put a spell on you, creates a fictional exploration of a fantasy world filtered through the images of pop culture. The scenario chosen by the novelist relativizes the imaginary proportions of the concept of authenticity, as it combines familiar thematic horizons, conventional literary techniques and references to a colourful popular culture. The harmony with which these elements complement each other demonstrates that their apparent irreconcilability is originated in the “aura” theorized by Walter Benjamin.

This article focuses on the influences of pop culture on literary phenomena in the context of the Romanian post-communist period, explaining the cultural-aesthetic differences. Starting from several studies that have influenced the Romanian literary works, the paper presents the contemporary direction in the study of literature published in the past 32 years: starting with the predilection for non-fiction writings in the first years after the 1989 Romanian Revolution, continuing with the ”2000 generation”, which was based on a new style – caustic language, defiance of literary customs or prosaic formulas –, and concluding with the work of the post-2000 generation, where we notice new codes of behavior and sensitivity, new sensibilities, where feelings and anxieties are created and poured into the online environment, while global contexts are becoming more popular (human rights, global warming, pollution, mental health).

The article interprets Radu Jude’s 2018 film by referring to the political and historical present and having as a starting point the private life of the main heroine, the director Mariana Marin. This approach is camouflaged under the dominance of the directorial conception which insists on the analysis of the historical event (the Odessa massacre). Referring to the current dominant discourse of the film and the story it presents, the study highlights the need to mediate the meaning of the artistic act between the authority and the author of the work of art. Such an approach is necessary because the event presented, namely Romania's participation in the Holocaust, involves an infinite guilt that cannot be instrumentalized either by the authority or by the author of the work.

Japan, as a global soft power, conquers the world through the wise philosophy and mesmerizing art style that it combines in anime, gaining a growing number of fans from all over the world and of all ages. The effect of Japanese culture on the mentality of the young generation is becoming easier to notice. The cultural encounters that we have to face in a global era are an exciting challenge that we must understand and deal with. This article aims to discuss a future perspective for research in interreligious dialogue, based on popular culture. Why should we study anime and what kind of link can exist between it and interreligious dialogue? How does anime, as a global modern heritage, teach us to encounter interreligiousity?

This study analyses how the media covered the event of bringing the Holy Light from Jerusalem for the first time to Romania during the Orthodox Easter in 2009, and how the ritual and tradition associated with this fact were constructed. The paper is structured on two intertwining axes. One analyses the bringing of the Holy Light from Jerusalem from the perspective of the media event (Daniel Dayan, Elihu Katz, 1992; 1980; Coman, 2011; 2008), and the second follows the description and analysis of the ritual of bringing the Holy Light from Jerusalem from the perspective of the phenomenology of religions developed by Mircea Eliade – the concept of heterotopia, formulated by Alexei Lidov, and the construction of tradition from the perspective of Catherine Bell. To identify major themes and dominant symbols, I used content analysis, and for ritual analysis, the interpretive method. The concepts “holy light”, “charitable light” and “holy fire” define the fire that miraculously ignites on the Saturday before Orthodox Easter in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. “Bukovina” is a historical region divided between Romania and Ukraine, the southern area forming most of Suceava County. Here the concept is used to illustrate the whole Suceava county. “Jerusalem of the Romanian people” refers to the Putna Monastery, where the tomb of Stephen the Great was canonised in 1992 as “Righteous Voivode Stephen the Great and the Holy”. The results show that bringing the Holy Light from Jerusalem to Romania meets the characteristics of a media event, in the Dayan-Katz paradigm. The initiative to complete a religious holiday with a new ritual came from political power, taken over by the religious authority, which later ruled out political interference.

In the present study I analyze a topic little discussed in the current humanities literature: the appearance and evolution of laughter in today’s society. It refers, of course, to the presence of laughter in the public space, to its importance and role from an imagological point of view. The article begins with an introduction in to the issue of laughter, followed by a brief history of the presence of laughter, of relaxed and detached expression, in the public space, especially in the political one, in the second section. It is worth noting that in the Romanian public space laughter is used as an element of non-verbal communication, as a political tool to express charisma, self-confidence or, above all, at least in a first phase, of change. I will finally look at laughter has spread and conquered the entire public space, currently being appropriated as a social norm of behavior and politeness.

The ritualization of community spaces is consecrated throughout history by means of symbolic communication. Starting from the cultural influence of troubadours and going all the way close to present in pop-culture, we can identify the immutability of the inherent factors for the collective imaginary. Seen from an imagological perspective, the dissident socio-cultural groups occupy a special place in history, as capable vectors for closed sociolects capable of trasmiting coded messages through the symbol. As messengers for a rebellious philosophy in the fight for freedom of the individual himself, additionally stigmatised as decadent through the lens of the moral norms imposed by the institutionalized church, the troubadours of courtly love, seekers in the Quest for The Holly Grail, as well as the esoteric group from Monte Verità, were the major players of the cultural revolutions that shook and shaped the very foundations of the Zeitgeist of Humanity.

In the social sphere in general and in the educational sphere in particular, there is more and more talk about the disinterest of the current generation of students or their tendency to spend more and more time in the virtual environment. We often see a blockage on the part of teachers in understanding the thinking of new generations. This article aims to provide some theoretical perspectives on understanding and approaching teacher-student communication from the digital culture paradigm. To this end, I will highlight the main characteristics of the new actors of contemporary teaching communication: digital immigrants (teachers) and digital natives (students), and then I will analyse the implications of the TPACK pedagogical model in the teacher-student relationship.

The fall of the communist regime in 1989 fundamentally changed Romanian society. The changes refer to the state institutions, fashion perceptions, consumerism, new educational fields, and a different vision regarding the foreign. This process is directly related to economic changes and global integration. Romanian society was open to an avalanche of changes, aimed at destabilizing the last strongholds of the communist regime. In this context, consumerism was encouraged through the public speaking of post-December advertising. Those were the exciting years after the 1989 Revolution when everyone in Romania began to discover capitalism, the market economy, and the free market. The filmmakers were the ones who produced Romanian commercials for the first time. They experienced real difficulties in expressing a story in just one minute. After almost 33 years, a substantial shift took place from post -1989 advertising to the public discourse of influencers. The social media space promotes a large variety of products rebranded by influencers. Today, we are witnessing a new type of growing culture, the culture of influencers. More and more brands decide to invest in contracts with influencers who can promote their product and influence a distinct target group to choose a product or service.

This article brings together several titles on the work of singer-poet Pierre Claver Akendengué, songwriter and pan-African musician of Gabonese origin. It aims to highlight the close relationship between poetry and music, but also the influence of pop culture on local poetic writing. Verlaine writes that poetry is “music above all things” ([1874] 2009: 21). Poetry is the genre that has been able to integrate into the contemporary wind by linking to other arts (music, photography, cinema). Pierre Claver Akendengué whose musical work puts him at the pedestal of the icons of Gabonese music is also a thurifer of pop music in Gabon. By making a thematic study of his texts, we intend to link the different themes that make up the work of the poet-musician in order to bring out their significance (Riffaterre, 1983: 25). The thematic reading proposes to elucidate the relationship between “living” and poetic “saying” via song, because literature, if we are to believe Jean-Pierre Richard, is “discovery of a true perspective on oneself -even, on life, men; it is the adventure of being” (1954: 14).

Memes are the most typical manifestation of pop culture in the era of social media. Usually consisting of a hybrid between text and image, memes nowadays tend to drift away from the original philosophical or motivational purpose, and we find increasingly more humorous memes on social pages, to the point that the most successful memes are sometimes translated and adapted to other languages. Memes are created on a variety of topics; in our paper, we will try to analyze a series of memes about linguistics and languages, in an attempt to find the sources of humor in such memes and in the metalinguistic comments of the readers.

We aim to identify behind some of the most common expressions of our quotidian language some of the discursive strategies responsible for creating and perpetuating power relations in capitalism. Our approach to deconstruction is borrowed from cultural studies, which provide us with the methodological and conceptual basis for the analysis of the ideological processes that structure society.

The text below includes an interview with the poet Dan Sociu, conducted on May 25, 2022, in Book-Café, the coffee shop of “Ștefan cel Mare” University in Suceava. Born on May 20, 1978, Dan Sociu is one of the most important Romanian writers of the 2000 generation. The interview focuses on some biographical and literary aspects, starting from the 2000 generation’s common interest in the relationship between literature and biography.

This interview with researcher and professor Mustapha Elouizi highlights ideas about the media reality in Morocco and elsewhere. Having worked in the media for several years, Mustapha Elouizi published a book on the workings of communication during the health crisis. In it, he analyzes the damage caused by journalistic communication, which did not take into consideration the particular circumstances of the crisis. He also focuses on the political field, which did not have the strategy of anticipation. In this interview, he mainly gives us ideas related to the different epistemological fields; a way to bring a critical look to the reality.

According to old physics theories, our universe might be the result of a black hole which generated the big-bang: the genesis of space, time and substance. The figurations of the theatre play Mais, Maman, ils nous racontent au deuxième acte ce qui s’est passé au premier / Look, mom, in the second part they tell us what happened in the first (2003) by Matéi Visniec (which presents a hole) and Ciels/ Skies (2009) by Wajdi Mouawad (very sympathetic of this hole) are against this law of universal gravity. That’s good. But, metonymically speaking, they are not without connection with the postmodern chaos that exists in the contemporary francophone theatre: birth of a hole which swallows everything and melts in a total ambiguity. They propose a manner of thinking this creation as being somewhere up at the top of an art whose rules can be reversed by the playwrights. These two plays bring a new light on the evolution of francophone theatre, which started with Aristotle rules, going forward to the new theatre and “theatre of the absurd” written by Eugen Ionescu, as well as the situational theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre, and, of course, Beckett. All this originates in the famous “bonnet rouge” of Hugo’s preface of the play Cromwell. Both the French-Romanian writer and the Lebanese-Canadian one appeal to the stage director, to character/ actors, to readers/spectators under the influence of a space situated at the intersection of arts and disciplines such as: mathematics, computer science, cryptanalysis and many others.

Kitsch is a word of complex nature. It is a male name, an invariable qualifying adjective, an adverb in a way and a verb of action. According to the dictionary, kitsch is used to designate an aesthetic style and attitude characterized by the heterogeneous use of old-fashioned or popular elements, considered in bad taste by established culture and produced by industrial economics. By extension, it qualifies the baroque and provocative tastes. In our opinion, the deep meaning of kitsch is limited by the complexity due to the versatility of its referents. It is majority of the employment contexts of the term that we wish to highlight. Thus, the word will have more semantic readability and more ease of use at the national level in Côte d’Ivoire. Several works make kitsch a fallow concept. He already undergoes sociological, political, economic and literary studies. A semantic and pragmatic analysis of the item will help to better mark out the significant trends that underpin its lexical richness. Researchers like Hermann Broch, Abraham Moles and Mindié Manhan Pascal gave the kitsch a fertile connotation to allow a fairly varied exegesis.

This paper is an attempt to present the main Western theories regarding the novel – the artistic novel to be more precise – that were also translated into Romanian and fecundated the national literary field. We focus on the evolution of the thought about the novel, starting with Georg Lucaks’ seminal work, dedicated to what was the literary species, and up to Franco Moretti’s paradigm of shifting studies. This could prove to be an opportunity to observe the manner in which the genre was conceptualized and why.

This paper analyzes that in Daniel Mendelsohn’s novel, although the metaliterary character is obvious, the novel construction is not limited to the hypertextuality relationship highlighted by the structural resumption of the Homeric epic in the act of narrative construction, rather it involves the overlapping of intertextual elements with biographical transtextual elements. Mendelsohn’s novel is not just a narrative about the father-son relationship or a simple anxious rewriting of the Homeric text, but a narrative that systematically resumes the structure of the epic, thus outlining the narrative topos in which the central characters, Daniel and his father Jay, extend in a contemporary perspective the Homeric couples Odysseus-Telemachus and Odysseus-Laertes. The intertextual relationship is much deeper, encompassing both the Kavafisian experience of the journey and the topos of Ithaca, as a substitute for the destination, as well as the Joycean and Tennysonian experience of the Odyssey, all of which are in relation to Proust’s vision of rediscovered time, the Proustian intertext providing a new telos, much more subtle, to the novel. The anamnesis is the contrastive solution by which Mendelsohn distinguishes, proposes past forms, thus restoring the relationship with the paternal figure lost and found through the bookish mediation of the hermeneutic approach.

In the poem Au champs, beyond the poet’s sensitivity and the grandfather’s love for his grandchildren, we have identified marks of the relationship between man, nature and divinity. Victor Hugo sees nature as a place for meditation on the meaning of human life. It is necessary to convey to children a reverent and loving attitude towards what God has created for them. From a stylistic point of view, the use of stylistic devices in this poem reflects the undeniable evidence of the talent and genius of the man-ocean, Victor Hugo.

Just two years after the novel The Passion after Gödel (2020), which still enjoys an astounded reception, a little delayed by its scientific (particularly, mathematical) intertext, Varujan Vosganian returns to the formula of short prose, which he had previously practiced in two other volumes: The Game of the Hundred Leaves and Other Stories (2013) and The Statue of the Commander (1994; 2018). Unlike the latter, Stories about Ordinary People (2022) combine in a very successful manner the old thematic and stylistic strengths of the writer who became famous with the Book of Whispers (2009), with a totally surprising emphasis on pandemic themes. Most of the stories included in the book set their framework in this iconic period and explore without detours and confusing euphemisms some of the most powerful identity themes, associated with this fearsome, both individual and community, revelator. On the one hand, the terrible lesson of loss (of the loved ones, but also of the ties, habits and social taboos perceived as natural), extreme isolation, radical solitude, the spectrum of nothingness, etc.; on the other hand, the (in)conscious appeal to digital remedies and other forms of simulacrum, the return to literature and art as forms of therapy and survival exercises. Considering this volume, the present study will illustrate how literature (to a greater extent than other forms of cultural discourse: visual arts, music, dance, etc.) has related to the imaginary pandemic. Even when it did not allow itself to be contaminated by the language of the pandemic, literature thematicized the common worries, the (un)recognized fears and even the most profound anxieties of humanity and reflected in its own way on its survival in the most turbulent epochs.

The present study is the third in a series dedicated to analyzing the process of historicizing the horse in Native American cultures and it focuses on its representation in a Blackfoot story, The Orphan Boy and the Elk Dog, retold from several sources around 1910 and included in the anthology of Native American myths and legends published by Richard Erdoes and Alfonso Ortiz. Although it is not a creation story, since it does not narrate how the first horse was created but explains how it was acquired by the tribe, The Orphan Boy and the Elk Dog follows a common pattern, very similar to the one present in the stories I analyzed in my previous studies on this topic: the historical legitimacy of the horse is constructed through a process of de- and re-historicization, which can only be achieved via mythicization.

2022, among other celebrations, marked 160 years since the birth of the Romanian ethnographer Elena Niculiță-Voronca and a century since the death of Romanian ethnographer Mihai Lupescu. The two researchers' activity is important both for understanding the historical, political and cultural context of the region and for understanding the evolution of Romanian ethnology as a whole. The current survey of the works of Elena Niculiță-Voronca and Mihai Lupescu needs to be transformed, due to the posthumous publication of some of their papers and the changing reception of their writings.

In the main table of contents that “Junimea literară” (Chernivtsi, the first series, 1904-1914) published in the first years, there was a section entitled “Folcloristică” (1905), then “Folclor” (1906) and “Folklor” (1907), where there are mentioned well-known names at the time: Sim. Fl. Marian, Dimitrie Dan, I. G. Sbiera, Elena Niculiță-Voronca, Artur Gorovei, but also many unknown people in this field of folklore. Changing its entitlings through numerous and valuable published writings that it comprised, the section offered its readers (between 1904 and 1907) an appropriate image about the folkloristic activity at the time in Bukovina. In 1903, in Chernivtsi it was published the volume Datinile și credințele poporului român adunate și așezate în ordine mitologică written by Elena Niculiță-Voronca. Surprinsingly, there is almost nothing written about it in the pages of “Junimea literară”. What are the possible explanations for this ignorance/misunderstanding in Chernivtsi of the editorial appearance of an author considered “one of the most important leaders and most prolific authors when speaking about folklore?” I also asked myself to what extent the press of the time (from Bukovina and from Romania too, in which Elena Niculiță-Voronca published more constantly) could clear up through possible articles about the book and how the appearance of this monumental volume was received, or on the contrary, if by not promoting the book she did not contribute to the unfortunate fate that until recently had followed the collection of the author from Bukovina.

This study starts from the assumption that discussing about Elena Niculiță-Voronca implies, among many other things, the reconstruction of the ideas and things that define her personality, as well as the social, political, moral and even family context in which she lives. It is a fragment of a larger study of Elena Niculiță-Voronca and Zaharia Voronca, her husband, whose ideas and deeds and all sorts of contexts are analysed. The present pages analyse first of all some diary entries, dated 12 May 1904, published by Elena Niculiță-Voronca in the newspaper “Românul” on May 1, 1916, but also some opinions about her own experience as a scientist. The diary pages implicitly constitute an additional argument in favor of her militancy not only for the preservation of the identity of the Romanians in Bucovina (a constant theme with her), but especially for civilization and even feminism. At the same time, the study invokes Zaharia Voronca's presence in Vienna as a priest at the Orthodox chapel in the capital of the Empire, a fact often overlooked by scholars.

Datinile și credințele poporului român adunate și așezate în ordine mitologică (Customs and Beliefs of the Romanian People Gathered and Arranged in Mythological Order) can be considered a true encyclopedia of Romanian traditions. Here are fairy tales and oral legends, references and descriptions of important regional customs along with peasant traditional recipes, information about magical rituals, riddles, proverbs, and seemingly insignificant and difficult to classify beliefs. Elena Niculiță-Voronca’s book carefully reproduces information received by correspondence from all regions inhabited by Romanians. She also records a large number of beliefs formulated as interdictions: what should not be done, what you are no allowed to do, what is not good to say, to look at, to eat, to believe and so on. My presentation aims to make an inventory of these prohibitions, describing the most important types.

Regular everyday practices, as opposed to ritual / ceremonial ones regarding food in traditional Romanian society reveal symbolic meanings of a socio-cultural code. Our paper highlights certain aspects of the quite varied gastronomic register, of the practices and beliefs circumscribed to it, from the first volume of the work Datinele şi credinţele poporului român (The customs and beliefs of the Romanian people), authored by Elena Niculiţă-Voronca at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. Our research focuses on the symbolic and ritual values of food, on the existing nuances in the human-food-cultural system relationship.

Din bucătăria țăranului român, by Mihai Lupescu, represents not only a work of ethnographic interest, but also one of linguistic interest. In the spirit of Frédéric Damé’s work, Încercare de terminologie poporană română, published in 1898, Mihai Lupescu aspires to depict the way the peasant prepares food, but also to record the terminology of rural life regarding food. The author marks the specific and regional names of the places where the food is prepared, of the installations, tools and materials needed and provides glosses of terminological series for the peasant’s food and drink, in specific contexts. All this proves Mihai Lupescu’s intuition regarding the importance of variation of popular terminology. The collected linguistic material, the glosses of words and, especially, the organization of food knowledge represent an extremely important source of documentation for understanding the deep relationship between words and things.

The influential survey of the study of folklore in Romania, “Istoria folcloristicii românești” (1974), written by Ovidiu Bîrlea, creates a canon of folklore and folklorists during the first century of the study of ethnography in Romania. There is no chapter dedicated to the teacher Mihai Lupescu (1861-1922). He features on three occasions in chapters dedicated to other folklorists: (1) as secondary author of two monographs, the first with Tudor Pamfile (“Cromatica poporului român” – 1914) and the second with Artur Gorovei (“Botanica poporului român” – 1915); (2) as co-founder of the folklore journals Șezătoarea. Revistă pentru literatură și tradițiuni populare (1892) and Ion Creangă. Revistă de limbă, literatură și artă (1908); (3) as “collector of folklore” and “correspondent” for the well-known folklorists S.Fl. Marian and Iuliu Zanne. Lupescu’s bibliography has been reconstructed relatively recently, and reflects the common areas of interest within the study of ethnography and folklore at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, when everything was still in need of being studied: folk tales and proverbs, popular medicine and botany, customs related to specific times in the year and rites of passing, beliefs and magical practices. At the same time, his bibliography also reveals a specific interest which was atypical within the study of ethnography at that time: food. Mihai Lupescu wrote 17 articles about “The Peasant’s Kitchen” (“Bucătăria țăranului”) in the journal Șezătoarea between 1899 and 1904, and in 1916 he submitted a manuscript for a monograph with a similar title to the Romanian Academy, to be published in the series “Din viața poporului roman” (“From the Life of the Romanian People”). For various reasons, as I will explain in my paper, Lupescu’s manuscript did not get published until 2000, thus denying the theme of food an early entrance, one could say canonisation, within the study of ethnography in Romania. My paper will offer an examination of Lupescu’s engagement with Romanian alimentation, and it will raise the issue of how the monograph “Din bucătăria țăranului român” (“From the Kitchen of the Romanian Peasant”) stimulates a reconsideration of the place assigned to its author, and to the topic of food, within the canon of the discipline of ethnography.

This article tries to present some very important “ongoing” phenomena for linguists: the birth of linguistic mixtures called pidgins, creoles and mixed languages. These processes are considered by many specialists to be very similar to the formation processes of all the world’s languages.

This article is an investigation into persuasive radio discourse (advertising) and the extent of the phenomenon of media communication through the radio press, presenting the various discursive and situational brands spotted on airwaves. We performed audio monitoring and considered, from a linguistic point of view, the radio advertisement broadcast on Viva FM Radio Station. The corpus that was the basis of our research is made up of transcribed speech fragments and we want the linguistic investigation achieved through our research to stimulate the development of new studies.

Our article aims to describe some characteristics of the language of fashion, probably the most dynamic of contemporary languages. The phenomenon of creativity and linguistic change is also evident in the Romanian language of fashion which, in less than 50 years, has undergone spectacular and profound transformations, especially at the phonetic and lexical levels.