Meridian Critic

So far, hagiographic novels have been mainly dealt with from a strictly religious, rhetorical or historical perspective, neglecting their aesthetic dimension. Moreover, they have not been considered individually, but only in terms of the genre features they illustrate. This has been due to their heavy religious content, which in the hands of copyists, editors, and compilers became a hybrid kind of prose that, throughout the centuries, turned into a mere object of Christian worship. Hagiographic novels were usually written by prominent religious people such as, for instance, St. Augustine whose first-person narrative Confessions provides a unique key to grasping the genesis of the Western Medieval novel, as well as to later prose works produced in the various national East European cultures by writers such as Demetrius Cantemir, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Dmitri Merezhkovsky, Mihail Sadoveanu, Ivo Andric, Nikos Kazantzakis, Jordan Radishcev, Paul Goma, a.o. The epic structure of the hagiographic novels originated and was perfected in Byzantium. This allowed their hero or heroine to realize, following a period of sinfulness or lassitude, their dire state and thenceforward to turn their lives around by setting out on an ascensional path toward the divine light, and thereby earn redemption and the aura of sainthood.

During the last fifty years translation studies have been dominated by analytical approaches, victims of the «myth of objectivism» and an illusory belief in machine translation. The hermeneutic tradition lived an underground life. The relative failure of machine translation has raised questions about the validity of analytical approaches. But what furthered a new interest in a hermeneutic approach to translations studies were mostly the results of cognitivist research which furnished a scientific legitimation to the descriptions of translational activities from the heuristic perspective, the more so as these descriptions are confirmed by the testimony of practitioners in translation. Thus cognitivistic research provides the basis for the new evaluation criterion of “intersubjektive Nachvollziehbarkeit” (intersubjective understanding) exacted by the epistemological revolution as demanded by Stefanink (1997).

The purpose of this paper, which is part of a much larger project, is to sort out the three meanings of what the German press has been calling, for the past two hundred years, “das Feuilleton”, namely: the newspaper articles related to culture, seen as a whole (“Feuilleton als Sparte”); the style of such articles (also known as “Feuilletonismus”); and finally the most representative kind of such articles (“Feuilleton als Textsorte”). There follow a brief history of the Feuilleton, a sociological analysis of its readers, as well as a presentation of one of the first species that the Feuilleton has adopted: the novel. After dwelling, in the first part of this paper, on the nature of the Feuilleton, we go on to demonstrate that it actually represents the link between literature and the press. We survey its 77 species, subjecting three of them to closer examination: the letter, the essay and the reportage. We take into account its language and stylistic peculiarities, in order to support the theory of the triangle literature - Feuilleton - remaining newspaper contents.

This article analyses the parodic dimension of Caragiale’s writings. Most of his parodies have satiric purposes, the Romanian author making his contemporaries’ texts the object of laughter. Thus, Delavrancea, Macedonski, Vlahuta are some of his favourite target-authors. Caragiale’s parodic intention is also oriented to the newspapers’ style, stressing its artificial and ridiculous constructions. Even in his serious works we can detect parodic traces, parody being used for its metafictional values.

This article has as a starting point the play The Little Mermaid, a free transcription of the writer Marguerite Yourcenar, based on Andersen’s homonymous story. The analysis is based on the phenomenon of intertextuality that is implied by the reading of Yourcenar’s writing. It also deals with certain immediate consequences detected within the passing from one epical genre to another (a dramatic one.) We envisage, briefly, a third reflection path, the symbolical one. It is true that, traditionally, in terms of form, Yourcenar’s theatre offers the prospect of a plural reading which our analysis cannot ignore.

In the latter part of the XVIIth century, passion is, besides glory, ambition or revenge, one of the largely resorted to topics. If Pierre Corneille ranked it low, Jean Racine considered it to play a pivotal part in the human being’s life. In the present article, we shall try to unveil the way in which the Racinian tragedy reflects the importance of this theme, abiding by the constraints imposed by the trend of classicism.

Matei Visniec, one of the most important poets of the 80’s, wrote The Pas-Parol Cafè when all the other generation mates stubbornly wrote only short stories. The novel is mostly an allegory, concerning the fate of the intellectual during a cruel history. The characters ressemble those in his theatre and the athmosfere is similar to that of his poems - Visniec is a constant writer. Without being a masterpiece, the novel succeds, however, in creating the main coordinates that the future work of the author is to use. Kafka, Buzzati and the authors of the absurd seem to be the models. All in all, Matei Visniec’s novel is an experiment, probably not one of his best works, but, anyway, a god example of his unique method of writing, a consolidation of his style.