Meridian Critic

This study approaches extremism as embodied in the national-socialist ideology through the medium of seven autobiographical works, each of which affords a different perspective on the experience of this totalitarian terror. After surveying the account of its beginnings and expansion through the lens of German journalist Sebastian Haffner, the position of Rudolf Höß, the first SS commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, is unveiled, followed by Pascal Bruckner’s generational vision as the son of an unyielding antisemite. Stig Dagerman describes the ruins left behind by the collapse of the extremist regime that has inflicted so much suffering on both the child victim Eva Heyman and Georges Perec, whose mother was killed in the gas chambers of her native land. Finally, Viktor Frankl, founder of logotherapy, the therapy based on finding meaning in life, describes “tragic optimism”, which provides the overall theory underlying this study and which identifies meaning in life as a mechanism of adaptation and defence in any period of suffering and any experience of extreme trauma, as well as an attitude, a personality trait, and a way of life.

This article argues that extremism has its roots in a system of faith which is far from the one of the main culture, and it permits a reduced flexibility or tolerance towards other faiths. These faiths can be religious, political, or often a mixture of both. Even from ancient times religion was considered to be the source of extremism problem, the willingness to die for a cause being, perhaps, the most extreme characteristic of religious extremism. Extremism is an individual or group reaction against threat, even if it does not correspond to reality.

This essay examines unusual aspects of The Prioress’s Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer and makes the case that the story’s moral protagonist releases a vicious anti-Semitic tale in the guise of Christian devotion. The essay explores the Prioress’s depiction in The General Prologue, highlighting the contradiction between her seeming compliance and underlying problems by drawing on the theories of John Ruskin. Ruskin’s theory of the grotesque acts as a mirror through which one can view the anxieties and biases that society has ingrained in her story. The essay also looks at Chaucer’s use of premonition, using The Prioress’s as a cautionary tale and advising readers to look past outward appearances. It talks about anti-Semitic attitudes from the Middle Ages, the opinions of critics, and the story’s applicability to modern culture. Ultimately, it highlights Chaucer’s continuing critique of society and the Prioress’s position as a problematic figure in The Canterbury Tales through a comparative analysis of prejudices in the mediaeval and contemporary times.

This article analyses some of the reactions to the war in Ukraine produced by French-speaking Ivorians on social media. Russia’s increasing influence on the African continent has also led to the expansion of the Russian media, which promote a certain view of the war. Under this influence, part of the population tends to blindly support Russia, even in its most violent actions, and we are confronted with a discourse on the verge of extremism, in the common political sense, but also in the broader sense of a vision that only recognises the extremes, erasing all nuance.

The Hutsul minority from Bukovina represents an area of interest for researchers from several points of view: historical, literary, linguistic, ethno-folkloric. The present study is an analysis of the cultural extremism that appears in the relationship between Romanians and the Hutsuls, but also within the Hutsuls society, known as an isolated, conservative group and preserver of old traditions and rituals. Due to the fact that stereotypes about the features of a collectivity were constantly developed in the collective mind of the archaic world, they eventually led to the formation of sometimes false ideas or prejudices by which ethnic communities lived in conflict. Mircea Streinul is a writer from Bukovina who in the novel The Wolf from Hutsul Land (Lupul din Țara Huțulilor) presents the ethnic specificity of the Hutsuls group and analyzes the mythical valences of an archaic civilization that manifests through an extremist identity, with its own laws, without subordinating to anyone.

The study reconstructs an unknown episode in the life of T. Maiorescu concerning his challenge to a duel by Aurel Onciul. The context is the political life in Bucovina at the beginning of the 20th century, more precisely, the struggle between democrats and conservatives. Following a letter that Maiorescu sends to Eudoxiu (Doxuță) Hurmuzachi, which the latter publishes in Deșteptarea, Aurel Onciul feels aggrieved. As a consequence, Titu Maiorescu challenges him to a duel, and Eudoxiu Hurmuzachi sends him to court. The study also succinctly reconstructs both Titu Maiorescu’s physical and mental state at that time and the relations Titu Maiorescu had previously had with Bucovina.

Literary historian, essayist and poet, Vladimir Streinu fosters a compelling exchange of ideas between literary criticism and theories on and about the act of literary criticism. The present paper considers his understanding of art as well as his rejection of critical method, both as a matter of principle and as historical and psychological readings of literature; furthermore, it gives insight into literary criticism as the self-awareness of a functorial failure that conjures up a mood of melancholy. Against the backdrop of the intrinsically ‘external’ nature of critical practice, the impossibility of penetrating the intimate space of creation is underpinning not only Streinu’s Problems of Literary Criticism, but many of his critical studies on Tudor Arghezi or Mihai Eminescu.

This study is presented not only as a bibliographic report, but nonetheless as a reflection. It involves an explicit polemic against the endeavours to ideologize the cultural canon and dogmatize the criteria for canonical selection. The author give rise to discussion for sociological and ideological reductions of the cultural canon’s definition; furthermore, he denounces the risks and abuses of the concept of an open canon. Noting the tension between the cultural canon and canon theory (which presupposes a certain canon of theory), the author emphasizes that the „canon battle” is not just a theoretical polemic but an axiological conflict (with significant cognitive, educational, social, and cultural consequences). Skeptical about relativistic and antifoundationalist epistemologies, the author proposes a comprehensive perspective on the literary canon and a structural and functional definition: the canon is a dynamic structure with a matrix and genetic dimensions, it is a model of cultural valuation and production, and it is formed as memory and accumulated experience. It operates based on the selection, which must be conceived as the main characteristic of critical thinking (and of the disciplines of the critics). The author suggests replacing models built on the (ideological) center – periphery relationship with a model built on the (dialectical) center – circumference relationship. Aware of the dynamic aspect of the cultural canon system, the author also proposes interpreting classicism, romanticism, and avant-gardism as possible situations in relation to tradition, so as typological moments in the formation and evolution of any cultural canon. Finally, the study aims to justify the perspective of a polyphonic canon, where pluralities are orchestrated, and the eminent function remains the formative one.

The essay is a comparative analysis of the function and meaning of food in three novels dealing with shipwrecks and outcasts: Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), Tournier’s Friday, or The Other Island (1967), Coetzee’s Foe (1986).In Lord of the Flies food is reduced to two invariable, repetitive foods, fruit and pork, which represent two primary aspects of prehistoric human civilization, the gathering and hunting stages. Picking fruit is a benign activity, free of risks and immediate dangers, be it psychological discomfort. It is an Edenic pose, safe, with which, however, the boys will not be satisfied. We seem to be in the golden age of humanity, innocent, pure, ideal; a land of original promise populated by naive children. In the novel, fruits and fruit trees become a symbol of a Paradisiacal, non-conflictual age of human civilization, ideal and idealized, but insufficient for the species. However, the consumption of pork and, above all, the hunting of mammals will focus the attention of the protagonists, in a symbolic, antagonistic parallelism with the maintenance of fire. Jack discloses a natural inclination for the very act of hunting no matter what and wherefore. For him, meat, hunting are, in fact, simple pretexts, occasions or alibis for a disposition or a vocation specific to the human species, involuntarily stated by himself from the very beginning: “I thought I could kill”. The fact that all the children eat the pork, including those who remain formally faithful to the ethical and rational principles of human civilization, including Ralph after Piggy has been killed by the same hunters from whom the meat comes, is one of the undercurrent themes of the novel: to what extent even the purest, most idealistic, most cerebral, most well-intentioned can remain completely outside the darkness, forced by context and adverse circumstances to survive. The answer to the dilemma is implicit.In Friday, or The Other Island food is an arch-presence of the internal history of the novel, in an agglomeration bordering on gastronomic Epicureanism, to the lucid expression of the danger of satiety. Basically, the author presents us with the nutritious abundance of the island, configuring it in the data of the plentiful, sufficient Eden. References to food are extremely varied, frequent and diversified (as should be the nutrition that the fetus receives in the mother's womb, through her...). Robinson’s forager posture, reiterating the golden age of primitive mankind, will be firmly defined. But Robinson overcomes the stage of the primitive era and persistently emancipates himself in the position of the farmer. In the fifth chapter, the expression of a crisis already intervenes, the harvests become very poor due to the assiduous, untimely exploitation of the island by Robinson (the baby in the womb drains of strength the mother who shelters him). The excessively civilizing approach of the protagonist is the final point of the evolution of human culture and civilization in relation to the surrounding universe; it leads to its destruction through recklessness, intemperance. The saving solution is provided by Friday’s intervention, which brings back natural harmony to the island, restores the ecological balance between man and nature. Robinson’s entire evolution from hunter-gatherer to rapacious farmer is undone, Friday saving not only the island from destruction, but also the protagonist, the man as a species. In Foe food is not mentioned too often in the first part of the novel, and this is because, from the very beginning, we learn that it was not varied at all. Robinson has no explicit input in fishing, farming, gathering, cooking, as all these tasks essential to survival on the island are falling to Friday, sometimes helped by Susan. It is Friday who feeds and keeps both Robinson and Susan alive, not at all surprising. He reproduces in the diegesis the destiny of his race in relation to the white man. The overlooked supporting character is, in fact, much more. Overcoming the impasse of the creative act of the character Susan will be offered, presumably, by Friday, the one who knows best what to write, if only because he seems to have been the man who brought the water, the fire, the food.

It is known that Aron Pumnul - linguist, historian, literary critic, theologian, teacher of Mihai Eminescu - was born into a Greek Catholic family in the village of Cuciulata in Transylvania, and after completing his theology studies in 1846 at the Catholic Institute “St. Barbara” in Vienna, he was ordained a Greek Catholic priest. In publications in Romania, especially in Transylvania, the Greek Catholicism of Professor Aron Pumnul was strongly emphasized. The author presents an unpublished document, found in the State Archive of the Chernivtsi Region (Ukraine), from which it appears that in 1849 A. Pumnul switched to the Orthodox confession following his baptism, which was recorded in the register of the newborn of the Church of St. Nicolai in Chernivtsi. In support of this idea, other unpublished documents are presented, such as the record of the professor's marriage to Ecaterina Teodorino, the birth of his son John or the death of the scholar, documents in which his Orthodox confession is confirmed.After the passing of the Greek Catholic A. Pumnul to Orthodoxy, his activity as a militant for the social and national rights of the Romanians takes on a new scope: even from the first months he stands out as editor of the Romanian section of the newspaper “Bucovina”, promotes national culture, researches Romanian history, language and literature, educates a young generation of Romanian intellectuals, writes and prints the famous “Lepturariu...”, is the beloved teacher of the poet Mihai Eminescu. Having arrived in Orthodox Bukovina, the great scholar understood that only by becoming Orthodox could he be of real use to the Romanians here. For him, above all, it was the service of the nation and its culture, regardless of political boundaries and religious differences that had arisen in the course of history.

The historical archetype of the bandit has many variations, but the literary prototype of the hajduk, present both in folklore and in written literature, best exemplifies the nature of the social outlaw, the one who constructs an image of boundless bravery in the collective imagination, feared and admired alike by peasants and boyars. The suggestive power of the hajduk’s archetype equates to the romantic principle of seeking refuge in a heroic past, where the glory of the social rebel is a construct of the collective imagination, eluding the need for introducing real biographical details. The allure of the myth draws reflections on lost virtue, freedom against oppression, and the ideal of justice, principles the outlaws fight to impose.

The academic discourse of criticism and theory of literature and arts has been promoting in recent years with great insistence quantitative computational analyses, based on the interposition between reader consciousness and textual consciousness of artificial intelligence. The current article, named after Franco Moretti’s distant reading, clearly indicates an alienation, through effective distancing, from the text read, which produces several direct consequences.The concepts of person and ideal, consciousness, personal consciousness and consciousness of the ideal – in the sense of major landmarks for the appreciation and interpretation of the text read – are deliberately marginalized or excluded from the discussion. Talking about the ideal is an action as reckless as it is necessary in our world. Through ideological-social discourse, legitimised and fed by the discourse of science and philosophy, modern man is driven towards a definitive alienation from his natural need for the ideal. Inherited teachings about the ideal are also quickly abandoned.On the other hand, art reflects realities and often anticipates them. In this essay, we would like to show that a simple analytical survey of the backbone of the representation of the ideal in artistic thought, seen in its historical consanguinity with philosophical and theological thought, reveals an unsettling dynamic of the vision of the ideal. Modern philosophical consciousness, especially after Kant and then Nietzsche, and the ideologies it has generated, are changing the original figure of the ideal to such an extent that today it is unrecognisable. Man is driven outside his own nature, but also outside the memory of the historical civilisations he has built. The perception conveyed by writers, artists and philosophers, especially after 1850, is that of a loss of the ideal. Unsurprisingly, this negative energy has given rise to an entire culture of the crisis of modernity which, without addressing the causes of the crisis, amplifies the crisis, justifies it and gives it, especially in the 20th century, an expansion which today breaks Western societies away from the claimed civilisational models: the Christian-Jewish model and the Greco-Latin model. What we propose is to point out a few more significant fragments of a very broad debate. And, finally, the analysis sends the reader towards the spiritual and discursive presence of solutions to the crisis of the ideal in the (apparently) anarchic combustion of our strictly contemporary culture.Posthumanists talk about the human species, and not about man, person, consciousness. They undifferentiatedly call all previous history traditional humanity and claim to leave it by so-called overcoming the conventional limits of human existence and traditional biological constraints. Post-humanist discourse calls for the abrupt redefinition of the human to justify the improvement of the 'human species' through technology. In fact, posthumanism reduces man to biology, matter and corporeality in order to legitimize the massification of people and their expropriation of their inherited civilizational memory, but above all of their own consciousness and their original need to live within the horizon of an ideal. The return to the consciousness of the ideal in artistic and philosophical thought is today more than a natural reaction to posthumanist ideological aggression. It is both a way of knowing inherited culture and a foundation for the culture of the present.

The need for systematization in terms of post-war Romanian exile, felt by Romanian researchers of the phenomenon, produced, after 1989, some harmful genera-lizations. The post-war Romanian exile, especially the literary one, embodied by writers, is not a monolithic block. This is why I believe that in the coming period, the study of particularities, of what escapes the generally accepted schemes of exile, of what cannot be labelled, should be privileged. In what follows, I will try to show precisely the power of reverberation of the literary word, through a quick entry into the work of Virgil Tăna-se/Tanase, a special figure of the Romanian exile. In a first stage, my contribution will highlight the writer's relationship with the Romanian exile, while the rest of the study will be devoted to an analysis of the novel Zoia, his masterpiece, in which the focus will be on the themes of exile and history.

The idea that self-knowledge is a path to happiness was widespread in the 18thcentury. This concept was developed by both Rousseau and Skovoroda, in the context ofthe aforementioned triplet. Rousseau considers the good to be aprioristic in man andexplains its corruption as deterministic, by the action of the environment. In Skovoroda'sconception of life, the core is represented by thought about man and the harmoniousdevelopment of his personality. An important place in this anthropological approach isoccupied by the symbol of the “stone” as the imperfect spiritual centre exposed to theexternal influences of the soul, which ultimately must be self-confident.

With this article, we aim to present the controversy opened by Iorgu Iordan at the publication, by Cicerone Poghirc, of the monographic study dedicated to Hasdeu. Belonging to different schools, often in dispute, the two linguists estabilish an exchange of ideas that seems to revive the polemical dialogue waged decades ago by their predecessors. Situated in the scientific lineage of such scholars as Alexandru Philippide and B. P. Hasdeu, the young linguists inherited from their ancestors, along with doctrine and linguistic conception, the animosity.

In the present study, we follow, through the phenomenon of migration and the appeal to affective memory, an extensive effort to recover the past and one’s own identity by the central character of the novel Zaira, written by Cătălin Dorian Florescu, but also to outline some contrasting eras; reality thus becomes a relation to otherness. We see times and eras that forced the protagonist to live the drama of the collapse of her family, together with the war and the establishment of communism, and to survive far from her native places, building a new life in America, among foreigners, always living with the pain of being uprooted and the loss of loved ones, of the love of youth. The past recovered in its subjective side and relieved from the perspective of the passage of time is brought to the readers’ reflection by the return of the protagonist, years later, to her own roots. The novel illustrates, through retrospections and introspections, lost loves, moral values, family and interethnic relations, but above all, the recovery of one’s identity in order to overcome the trauma of exile.

This article aims it constructing the image of Mihail Sadoveanu as a bridge builder across time, space, and ideologies, a representation that is characteristic of this writer who has long disappeared from the area of interest of Romanian literary criticism. To achieve this, elements of a biographical, ideological, and aesthetic nature will be discussed, which, when combined, give expression to a specifically antimodern and polemical attitude towards the cult of the present, of rupture and of fragmentation sustained both by modernity and the modernist movement. This is the response that the mature writer gave to the interwar period, to the political context that, on the brink of World War II, was taking an increasingly radical turn, and to ‘the new spirituality’ associated with both the new generation of writers (Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran, Eugen Ionescu etc.) and the Legionary Movement.

Starting from the hypothesis that an exhibition can be analyzed independently of its formal particularities, as well as being aware of the need for a research exercise focused on the conceptual mechanisms with which Belu-Simion Făinaru operates, the present article represents an interdisciplinary study on his most recent solo-show (The void of silence, Romania, 2023). Although controversial, the exhibition project stated an anti-extremist stance, criticizing political ideologies and the polarizing perspectives in contemporary status-quo. The purpose of this paper is to identify the methodological landmarks and the functional principles used in the act of artistic representation, respectively to point out the curatorial mechanism of valorization of the above-mentioned project. By using research strategies from the field of cultural studies, art history and the philosophy of arts, the main objective of this article is to identify the junction between the objectual and imagistic dimension of Belu Făinaru’s installations. The research is structured on three levels: a contextual one, necessary for (art) historical and archival documentation; an imagistic/video-graphic one, regarding a possible turn in the artist’s creative practice; respectively an objectual (corporeal) one, which interprets the indexical systems used to aggregate the exhibition. On a side note, the present article brings together the diachronic insertions (of a technological and video-graphic nature) from Belu Făinaru’s works, in order to foreshadow his current and future visual discourse. Also, this paper aims to engage in future researches regarding the origins of his conceptualist reasoning, the artistic practices debating effects of extremism and political polarization, all the above-mentioned placed in the context of Belu Făinaru’s creation affiliated within the existentialism of Paul Celan’s poetics.

This is the fifths study in a series dedicated to analyzing the process of historicizing the horse in Native American cultures and it focuses on its representation in The Swift Blue One, a Tejas/Caddo story. The blue horse in this story is drafted as a synergistic coalescence of history and myth (it manifests spiritual powers in a factual context) and this allows the narrative to historically legitimize and mythically dimensionalize it. As the horse transfers meaning(s) from Spanish to Tejas culture, it also ensures a cross-realm navigation of representation(s), an approach consistent with the usual myth-historical background in Native American stories. Rather than trying to explain the historicization of the horse in Tejas culture, the story narrates what can be considered a precursory stage, that of the emergence of the first herds of mustangs – the Spanish horses that became wild and ran in herds, which, in their turn, would set in motion the incipient phase of historicizing the horse.

Learning Amazigh means opening up to the world of the Amazigh culture, the discovery of new possibilities of expression, action and interaction, partying, discovering the pleasure of learning. We have chosen to devote our work to the insertion of music to teach the Amazigh language in a fun and simple way. In other words, to learn with pleasure.

During the French electoral campaign, the candidate often uses the war metaphor in order to convey his opinions and convince the French that he is the best person who deserves their votes. This trope has taken on a new analysis with cognitive linguistics, which is interested in human cognition.Thus, in this study, we will adopt the cognitive theory of Georges Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980/1985) to analyze the war metaphor while going beyond its classic analyses (Aristotle 2002, Le Guern 1973).Nowadays, the importance of artificial intelligence, as a cognitive science will encourage us to develop our studies in linguistics and to opt for new cognitive theories.

Transylvania has a long history of interethnic contacts – both peaceful and conflicting. As a result, a multitude of either “shared” or divergent place names were recorded throughout centuries in all regions of the respective province. The focus of this article is on central-southern Transylvanian village names, most of them recorded in the Sibiu County (judeţul Sibiu), an area inhabited by Romanians, Transylvanian Saxons and Hungarians. Cases of parallel evolution, bilingualism, diglossia, folk etymology and imposition of official names (in Medieval Latin, German, Hungarian and Romanian) will be highlighted and discussed in detail below.