Meridian Critic

This study intends to define more accurately the concept of avant-garde, by making a series of necessary delimitations: avant-garde / traditionalism, avant-garde / modernism, avant-garde / experimentalism, and avant-garde / postmodernism. If avant-garde can be defined in terms of „opposition and break” (E. Ionesco), as essential for it is negation, there is also a constructive aspect in any vanguard movement: after the old idols have been demolished, others new are raised instead. Any vanguard movement is revolutionary, and the revolution it proclaims is not only aesthetic, but also political, as its final purpose is man’s total liberation.

In this article, the author analyses the main tendencies in the reflection upon translation, throughout the replies given by the theoreticians and the practitioners in the translation to the survey initiated by the ETIB (School of Translators and Interpreters of Beirut) entitled Pour dissiper le flou and published recently by the ETIB in Sources/Cibles collection.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the intricate relationship between culture and criticism. While attempting a brief survey of the numerous definitions that culture has received in the (post-)modern society of recent years, as well as an analysis of the modern critic’s profile, it also tackles concepts such as “avant-garde”, “popular culture” and “non-culture”, all of which seem to be claiming - and taking - an ever-expanding place in the so-called cultural press of the new millenium.

The work discusses the features of parodic discourse in I. Budai-Deleanu’ Tiganiada. We also fallow the linguistic implications of this process, taking into account the development of Romanian literary language. As far as the parodic relations are concerned, we discover two types of such relations: the first type is established between Tiganiada and some other texts, most of them belonging to the heroic genre, while the other one focuses on the connections between footnotes and the text’s main corpus. This text simultaneously deconstructs the sense of heroism from the target-texts and reconstructs it at the level of Vlad’s army.

The beginning of a narrative text is a very important element in the construction and the development of the literary work. This is why the paper, by dealing with the novels of the contemporary Algerian writer Rachid Mimouni, underlines the importance of the incipit (from the latin “incipire”, to begin) within some of his most important writings (Le printemps n’en sera que plus beau; Une paix à vivre;L’honneur de la tribu;Une peine à vivre etc. ), as a strategic part which leads the way for the text to come.

This article attempts to establish a connection between Gherasim Luca’s poetical experiences, starting with 1952, and his theoretical principles as he expressed them in Romania, in the 40’s. “The open dialectics” acquires (a) meaning as opposed to any elapsed state or any future one, differing from “the natural dialectics”, which is always the repetition of the same pattern. G. Luca goes so far with this attitude, that he intends for it to become a real restructuring of the human psyche. Rendering language subject to the laws of this “open dialectics”, G. Luca had already published in Romania his first “poetical stammering exercises”, where, by simulating linguistic pathology, the utterance of each word was liable to be interrupted by the intrusion of a phonetically resembling word. Within this phonetical game, the significance was always latent.

The paper addresses a few issues raised by Stanley Kubrick’s Clockwork Orange from a semiotic standpoint with a view to identify the cinematic “codes of meaning” in the film. Thus, ranging from a structuralist approach to a feminist one, the paper investigates (comparatively, to a certain extent) the cinematic adaptation of Burgess’s homonymous novel, with its specific means of representation: settings, codes of dress, soundtrack, etc, which give a precious insight into the way Kubrick manages to put forward his own interpretation of the text.

The short stories “Jesus' Mother”, “The Fortune Tellers”, “Nature”, “The Footbridge”, “Mary's Accord” and “My Saviour” written by Olga Kobylianska and Natalena Coroleva present the writers' aspiration of transposing Jesus Mother's sanctity in the common details of a natural woman, the woman preoccupied with every-day cares. In the same time, the most representative features of the mother-woman are associated with those that Jesus' Mother embodies. It's expressed the characters' deep belief in the protection of the Virgin Mary in her defence in front of the risk of life.

Because the reflexive discourse upon the contemporary French novel is exceeded by a caustic derisive critical opinion, often ill-intentioned and unjustified, we submit to analysis a particular writer, David Foenkinos, and a novel, My Wife’s Erotic Potential. The beginning of the novel will be also analysed from a translational viewpoint.