Meridian Critic

One of the most representative women-writers of the francophone Romanian authors, Marthe Bibesco (1889-1973) was the descendant of an aristocratic family and a princess, after her marriage to prince Georges-Valentin Bibescu. Her writings, published during the first half of the 20th century in Paris, include novels, as well as biographies of personalities, travel notes, diary pages, etc., among which the most important are: Les Huit Paradis; Isvor, le pays des saules; Le Perroquet vert; Pages de Bukovine et de Transylvanie; Au Bal avec Marcel Proust. This paper attempts to deal with some of the most important characteristics of Marthe Bibesco’s work, such as: her passion for history and for travelling; the part that ethnology plays in her writings, especially in Isvor; the obsession of contraries, of very different human types which feel a fatal attraction to each other, so as Orient and Occident often do.

This article is first of all an introduction to some heroic figures of “girls” in the volumes of traditional tales collected in various areas of Algeria. It examines the representation of the girl through examples of accounts of tales retained in the project of “the young girl in the literature of youth”, for which the AUF contributed its share within the framework of the network of children’s literature (LDE).

One of the tendencies characteristic of the vision of the world in France, during the 17th century, is immensely imbued with the Jansenist view. The features of the human being’s life are thus envisaged as a consequence of the Fall. The human being becomes encompassed in key-concepts like: corrupted nature, amour-propre, excessive pride, self-interest or deluding principles. The present article aims at capturing these essential attributes, as they unfold themselves throughout the century.

The article is questioning the identity of the first person narrator in three well known novels : L’Étranger by Albert Camus, Les Fous de Bassan by Anne Hébert, and Le Roi des Aulnes by Michel Tournier. Based on intertextual and intratextual interaction, the author of this article suggests that multiple re-readings of a subtle narrative text may clear the path of a hermeneutic code regarding the hidden narrator. Who is really Meursault? Why do the five “books” of Les Fous de Bassan have the same intertextual code inside? And why does Abel Tiffauges - the first person narrator of Tournier’s Le Roi des Aulnes - introduce a Sartrean intertext from L’Être et le Néant in his journal written a few years before Sartre published his book? While attempting to answer these questions, the article also aims to open the door to a critical debate on the magic power of the rereading.

The author draws a parallel between the character called Lizuca in The Wonderful Glade by Mihail Sadoveanu and Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum. Despite the cultural differences, there are similar features shared by the two characters, in their way of perceiving the magic and the miracle. Their encounter with the magic turns the exploration of the world into a search for their inner self.

Gherasim Luca is undoubtely, one of the most brilliant poets of the Romanian avant-garde, and, according to the French philosopher and critic Gilles Deleuze, “a great poet among the greatest”, who “invented his own prodigious stuttering”, i.e. a startling new poetic language. He started his literary activity in the early thirties, when, following the model of Geo Bogza, he became famous for his violent erotism and social revolt. During the Second World War, together with Gellu Naum, he founded The Romanian surrealist group, which activated between 1945 and 1947, when it was forbidden by the communist regime. In 1951, he managed to quit his country, and finally he became a French citizen and a French poet. Although he gained international recognition, he committed suicide in 1994, by throwing himself into the Sena. This study follows the main stages of his literary activity, by emphasizing the main themes and characteristics of his poetic discourse: the “anti/Oedip”, the “eroticization of the proletariat”, the “prodigious stuttering” etc.

The paper deals with the intricate relations established between parody and postmodernism. I intend to analyse parody’s status in postmodernism and the way in which it overcomes the negative connotations, becoming an important concept, sometimes equated with intertextuality and metafiction. I summarize a few of postmodernism’s features in order to prove parody’s role in defining this cultural movement. Thus, hybridization, irony and de-canonization are the main characteristics relating parody and postmodernism.