Meridian Critic

T.S. Eliot, in his famous essay "Tradition and Individual Talent" overtly attacks the Romanticist understanding of poetry in England, which was defined by William Wordsworth as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity". What brings Eliot and Wordsworth together in this paper is their interests in memory as the main source of inspiration while creating art. Wordsworth's interest in personal memory made him an autobiographical poet constantly transforming his diaries into lyrical poems. Eliot, on the contrary, approaches to memory as collective memory, never considering himself outside the cultural continuum the product of which he is, and instead of the autobiographical tone he assumes a rather impersonal one in his poetry.

Double-rooted in the "self-biographic pact" (P. Lejeune) and the "history-centred" one (E. Simion), the life stories have always interfere with the socio-cultural background to which the authorial-narrator reflects his own identity narrative. By means of the "mise en intrigue" (P. Ricoeur) and the emotional dimension, both being linked to the authorial personal myth and those of the period, as well as to the reader's expectations, the life stories call for interdisciplinary analysis gathering various methods. Objects of study for different socio-humanistic disciplines (sociology, socio-psychology, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, phenomenology, philosophy of history etc.), the narratives implied by the biographic genres are ever more analysed by critics and literary historians through multiple-reading strategies (from the narrative one up to the reading aesthetics).

This paper argues for the importance of the description of processes of involuntary memory in the novels of the Swiss author Adolf Muschg, born in Zollikon, Switzerland in 1934, who taught German Language and Literature at the ETH Zurich from 1970 to 1999. Muschg's departure in his rewriting of Wolfram‟s Parzival (Der Rote Ritter, the red knight) and in the novel Eikan, du bist spät (Eikan, you are late) is a loss of the integrity of the contents of experience by processes of involuntary memory, which plays an equally important function in the work of Proust, Benjamin, and Beckett. The actors Parzivâl and Leuchter are able to recapture states of their forgotten life. In both novels, exactly those intellectually disturbing memory traces that arise unconsciously in the involuntary memory are capable of repossessing all the wealth of the personality which has been occluded by conscious memory. [WOLIN 1994: 229] The adventitious encounter with certain constellations (Benjamin calls them "Aura") initiates the chain reaction of spontaneous reminiscences of Parzivâl (The red knight) and Leuchter (Eikan, your are late).

How does the juvenile protagonist Christian handle the sudden death of his English teacher Stella, who was his beloved contemporaneously? Which role does memory play for him? Does he remember Stella to keep her alive in his mind or to find closure? The different functions and structures of memory expressed in diverse manners by Siegfried Lenz, are analysed in this article.

In this paper, I will discuss the representation of personal memory in two novels, The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson and Holiday by Stanley Middleton, and try to answer two questions. First, which narrative mode, experimentalism or realism, is more successful in representing the memory process. Second, whether the clear distinction between these two narrative conventions is still possible. I will base this debate on three aspects of personal memory, namely, its metaphors, paradoxical character and the undermined existence of embodiment in the memory process.

Günter Grass has accompanied his artistic creations - fiction, graphics and sculpture – by essays, speeches, letters and interviews, describing the interdependence between artists and their art and the socio-political reality. Here belongs for instance the connection of literature to history, because the global historical picture is completed by the literary depiction of the particular histories of individuals, without which a thorough representation of past times would be impossible. The present article looks into Grass´ poetological points of view on the subject of history and remembering on which the author has written some important essays.

Both texts analyzed in this article are a quest toward memory in order to reclaim and decipher the inner self. But memory is not remembrance; it is the metaphor that frames oblivion, that which has not been revealed yet through words. At the origin of oblivion remains the wound that Marie Cardinal and Hélène Cixous want to become fertile. A semio-narrative approach combining the Freudian drives theory with language allows analyzing the text in a multiplicity of vectors, which do not attempt to signify but rather reach "signifiance". Writing becomes the quest toward a sense the writer doesn't know inhabits her and through which she will be reborn.

Literature rooted in myth, the prose of the two writers is structured around the downfall-redemption axis. In their view, the adamic fall means living in Time. Approached from the angle of primordial authenticity, existing in time is practically an ontological non-entity, which means that historical existence is devoid of the authentic, profound and plenary dimension of the paradisiacal beginnings of humanity, any sacred reference being eliminated. Oblivion, amnesia, slumber, rootlessness are parameters of this desacralised world that is nevertheless offered a chance to redemption through the initiatic regaining of adamic memory.

The paper focuses on chronological patterns in Romanian cyberfiction, Derapaj, by Ion Manolescu. Time-space compression, an accelerated recontextualization or archive fever are some of the novel' tensed time features. The dissolution of the subject as the owner of a well known set of memories is accompanied by a serious meditation on nowadays Romania. The literary imaginary of the novel combines signs of a concentrationary space with postmodern theories about virtual realities, mind and memory control, or about computers shaping collective and personal histories and identities.

This paper aims at exploring Mircea Eliade's creative hermeneutics applied to his own existence in his continuous attempt to articulate the basis of an anthropological philosophy structured on archetypal models. This endeavour allows for the configuration of universal man's way and attitude to life, which the writer himself seems to have experienced while continuously cultivating that structure of consciousness that would be open to the revelation of man's cosmization.

Ionesco's attempt throughout his theatrical works is that of vindicating the spoken word and thus of overcoming the tragedy of language. The failure of language is obvious both in The Bald Soprano and in The Lesson: the characters do not communicate with each other or they encounter real communication difficulties, since they have nothing to say, thus living with painful intensity a monstruous event which manifests itself within the discourse, practically witin its lack of meaning.The Lesson is but a pretext, the play deals with the problem of language, the tragedy of language which loses its essential function: that of communication.

Architecture theorists have recently sought to understand the importance of urban constructions in the constitution of memory with regards to the remembrance of a traumatic past. Through the study of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman, this article attempts to demonstrate how contemporary architecture can broaden their perspectives. By opening a dialogue between Eisenman's Memorial and a corpus of theoretical works from the writings of Maurice Halbwachs to those of Pierre Nora and James Young, the article asks: What kind of memory does architecture creates? How, in its attempt to represent the past, does architecture treat the categories of time and space in their relation to memory? And how does this treatment differ from that of other mediums of representation?

The work of Princess Bibesco is vast, with great variety not only regarding the thematics, but the literary genres she chooses in order to convey her most intimate thoughts to the readers, as well. In all of her creations, we can easily recognize persons who were part of the writer's world, or events in which the writer took part. The same thing happens in Catherine-Paris novel, which tells the story of the childhood, adolescence and the adult period of the eponym character, who is somewhat given the same identity as Princess Bibesco, borrowing even the place and date of birth of the writer. Catherine-Paris is best characterized by the coexistence of two trades which are specific to auto-fiction through the writing style adopted by the writer, which implies at the same time revealing to the readers events regarding the private life of the writer, and maintaining a certain distance between the writer and the character who represents her.

The article represents a comparative analysis of the Balzacian novel Eugenie Grandet and its translation versions into the Romanian language. Our research is based on the analysis of four translation versions into the Romanian language, related to the original in the French language: the version of Marius from 1896, the version of Vera Leonard from 1939, that of Cezar Petrescu, included in the critical edition of the human Comedy, which appeared in the Univers publishing house in 1986 under the coordination of Angela Ion and also the version of Mioara Izverna from 2006. The chosen fragment occupies a veritable strategic place in the text, which allowed us to observe the different ways to translate, to identify various translation procedures, but also the "sins" sometimes committed in the process of translation.

The present paper deals with the relationship between the author and the reader after 1989. The analysis focuses on aspects of changing in value and thought patterns after the Romanian revolution and how this changing affects the literary field. The research applies theoretical aspects on the novel of Carmen Puchianu "Amsel – schwarzer Vogel" that brought about much controversy.

As a Chicano in the United States of America, Richard Rodriguez oscillates permanently between two opposite worlds: the traditional Mexican family and the public space of the American society. This article aims at showing how memory and language knit in Rodriguez's autobiography in order to articulate the mestizo consciousness of an inter-American identity. Moreover, Rodriguez's memory of himself is correlated with the Chicano collective memory of immigration and its particular history of the borderland.

The ogre fascinates by his ambiguous nature, as a story character, it is attached to the mythology, therefore, to a very distant reality and fiction at the same time. Nowadays, the ogre turns into the metaphor of reality itself. It is used to give a name to atrocious acts that happen in this era called modern times. From the savage escaping his thick forest, the ogre evolves into a monster that is hiding behind the mask of an intellectual who can be easily discovered at a manager's, professor's, doctor's desk. Mythical tradition demands that the ogre lock his victims in a castle or fortress. The purpose of the article Les lieux dévoreurs de l'ogre is to classify the areas in which the ogre appears in a selection of novels belonging to French and Francophone literature. Starting from the dichotomy indoors / outdoors, the spaces in which the ogre intervenes become ogresques and their representation invests the literary space with new ideological values.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary, in 2011, of Mihail Sadoveanu's death, this article represents the first approach of the way the novelist was perceived by the Czech cultural milieu during the communism. Sadoveanu is one of the Romanian authors most translated into Czech in these four decades. However, the rate of the reception of his works is oscillating. Also, the intensity of the ideological interferences depends on the evolutions on the political totalitarian stage. While in the first ten years the focus was on Sadoveanu's biography, more precisely on his connections to the new regime, the emphasis switches afterwards to his literary works. The de-ideologization of literary reception achieved through the Velvet Revolution is nevertheless accompanied by a dramatic slowing down of the rhythm in which the author is translated and presented to the Czech public.

If the Greek film Politiki Kouzina (A touch of Spice) is considered as one of the most renowned Greek movies of all time, it is due in large part to its historically accurate depiction of the tragedy of Constantinople Greeks forced into exile during the 50's and 60's. However, the major significance of this movie lies in the narrowing of Hellenism, thus reduced to the frontiers of the Modern Greek state. The long-term socialization pattern of these Greeks (Byzantine and Ottoman Empire) reveals the Orthodox religion and the Greek language as critical vectors, more temporal than spatial. Consequently, these Greeks, once established in Athens, were bound to elaborate their own remembering space in order to maintain their identity-ipseity (oneself as another). Two kinds of collective memory are thereby involved: first, a mimetic memory where action, reminding and recognizing become one; memory-habitus which is inferred, throughout the movie, from culinary ritual and emotionally charged spices. At the same time, enclosed in its new anchoring Athenian space, the Constantinopolitan memory is subject to reappraisal. Here again, their oriental gastronomic repertoire will let them to preserve a collective feeling of continuity and to face their otherness position.

Part of a wider research project of interpreting Caragiale's works, the present paper aims at proving and illustrating the fascination of I.L. Caragiale not only with the material nature of the world, with the surface of the real, but also with its "Archeus". The ontological crisis is revealed by the fact that the 'real' becomes in the end the degraded image of the thing itself. Nonetheless, this epicurean writer identifies an embodied musicality in the matter's absence of transcendentness and lack of meaning.