Meridian Critic

Faced with earth vanity and in order to insure the survival of his work, the Serapiontic artist has no other means than to challenge temporality while he is aware of its pervert effects. It is for this purpose that to writing he applies music, the most temporal art according to the first Romantics, here understood both in its material and symbolic forms. Moreover, the general structure of The Serapion Brethren, where texts and discussions alternate, underlines this very destructive aspect of time and meanwhile fixes the latter in a reality in which each reader can find his place. In often addressing a universal and atemporal reader, Hoffmann aims at passing on his work and, in this way, at making it durable.

As a literary genre, the Bildungsroman was a specifically German reaction to the cultural modernization of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In it, time-related conflict has a philosophical and poetic import, at the level of both form and content. The protagonists often need free, indeterminate time to develop self-reflection. In most cases, they gain autonomy, social intelligence and cultural knowledge by ignoring familiar and socially accepted demands. The heroes as well as the readers have, therefore, to cope with advantages and dangers of leisure such as dilettantism, idleness, melancholy and disintegration

Looking at Fontane's novels Irrungen Wirrungen and Effi Briest, I shall focus on his position in the debate about the difference between plot and style: as I point out love-affairs as reflected by Fontane are minor matters; fortune hasn't smiled on the characters, but does affect each of them. In his poetic writing Fontane avoids suspence, and one maior topic dealt with in his books is using certain means of representing time and tenses in different ways. By focusing on Effi Briest and Irrungen Wirrungen this article deals with the linguistic characteristics mainly used in Fontane's novels. Firstly, it will be discussed whether Fontane avoids suspense by putting the main emphasis on ordinary everyday life. Secondly, it considers the question whether fate, as motivating force behind our actions, replaces ordinariness.

Walter Benjamin has extensively discussed the work of Franz Kafka. He dealt very critically with contemporary interpretations of Franz Kafka's texts and worked out his own model: the interpretation of Kafka's texts from the center of his image world ("aus der Mitte seiner Bildwelt"). Benjamin does not only put a theory of the image in the center of his reading, he also raises questions for the dimensions of time that Kafka's texts deal with and the historico-philosophical perspective they imply. Benjamin draws this perspective to the present and pleads for a constellative approach to time, history and interpretation of texts. Kafka becomes his ally in his criticism of linearity. This essay wants to show that this even affects Benjamin's own writing on Kafka.

In From nine to nine, two levels of temporality overlap. They are structured around a twelve-hour fictitious time superimposed on the clock time reduced to a few seconds. This story recounts the various episodes during one of Demba's days, from nine in the morning to nine in the evening. Only on the last page does it become clear that what has been described so far is actually pure fiction made up by Demba's mind as he dies. Such a crafty narrative challenges the reader's view on time. Time's motionlessness refers to the character's motionlessness. The original approach to temporality throughout the novel will thereafter lead to studying temporal distortion from a thematic, historical and structural angle.

Time, its mysterious inconceivability and boredom are recurrent topics in Robert Walser's writing. This essay discusses a series of texts which all feature an office scene and tell the story of a protagonist who seems to be obsessed with the clock, a symbol for the topics connected to time. The following analysis delineates how time is narrated and individualised in the story – the protagonist is not doing anything apart from being bored and looking at the slow movement of the watch hands. But as he is trying to kill and escape time, the text and time are taking form, and time is transformed into space. These observations exemplify how time and ‚ennui' are essential to the articulation of Walser's protagonist, his stories, dreams and digressions as well as to the author's writing.

Thinking about time plays a crucial role in the historical turn to postmodernity. The publication of Walter Benjamin's works were part of the new discussion of time since Benjamin himself had developped a special perspective on melancholy as a turn from time to space. His definition of allegory and the spacialization of time give the key to many aspects of his works from the Trauerspiel-book to the Passagen-Werk.

This paper discusses the relationship between the recently published prison notebooks of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), the Carnets de captivité, and his early philosophical work. It will take into consideration the various concepts and notions of his early writings regarding the notes he made during his captivity. As I will show, the war experience had a strong impact on the development of Levinas's early philosophical notions, e.g. the notion of the there is (il y a). Further, I draw attention to the great significance of poetical and literary aspects in Levinas's work. As can be seen from his prison notebooks, the connection between literature and philosophy is stronger than usually assumed. In conclusion, the importance of Judaism for Levinas's thinking is emphasized and re-evaluated against the background of his experiences during the war.

Besides the spatial and temporal reflective dimension in Bachmann's prose works, there are subversive ways of handling with time and space that Bachmann's characters use for revolutionary purposes. The literary confrontation and dissolution of opposites – a characteristic of the avant-garde art – is an important component within the process of building-up a second, "new" reality. The article focuses on the concept of dissolution, degradation and reconstruction of time and space in Bachmann's fiction.

In his latest novel Austerlitz, W.G. Sebald presents us with a phenomenology of time. Time is not only discussed as a philosophical problem, but also as a problem of literary representation. In the context of the protagonist's traumatic memory, the novel creates ist own kind of narrated time, a nonsimultaneous time of phantom structure. The time of Austerlitz has not completed, but is always reiterating itself.

Starting point of the text is questioning the understanding of history Maxim Biller represents in his narrative work. Three exemplary stories were examined to solve this task. The type of a "cultural creator" (dt.:Kulturschaffender) is identified. In this type of character collective identity is linked with personal identity. This type tries to create both identities, in society and in privacy. The problem that is letting fail the attempts to constitute a personal identity is the impossibility of an objective historical truth. Furthermore a formal analysis of one of the stories is given, especially with respect to the connection between Biller's message and the formal shape. The failure to constitute personal identity must be taken as a failure to constitute collective identity too.

The present paper shows how Tournier's novel "Les Météores" is a "secondary" novel in the characterology meaning. This novel brings a thought on time. It stages time initiation in the scope of the main character, Paul. Initially, Paul was anguished by change before accepting these time properties. However, this initiation must be qualified. This novel is mainly a retrospective narrative in which Paul is the narrator. The young man wrote this narrative at a time when his initiation comes to an end: he reminisces about his past and is always wistful about his childhood, considered as an off-time phase.

This paper examines two poems of the contemporary German poets Ulrike Draesner and Barbara Köhler for their poetic approaches and techniques to depict complex time-structures. While Draesner's ferngespräch shows the dissociation of a consciousness in the process of reconstruction of different possible versions of an event, Köhler's Brechung develops a multi-dimensional poetic organism with a multitude of references to keep the poetic subject from a rigidly fixed order of events. The reading of the poems refers especially to time concepts of Gilles Deleuze as a theoretical background.

The present paper analyzes some poems by Joachim Wittstock and aims at interpreting them in their dual relation to the concept of time, namely as instances of political poetry written in the specific context of the 70ies and 80ies in socialist Romania and as instances of a genre specific relation between poetry and time.

In light of the new dimensions acquired by the literary discourse in the XXth century, we intended, through this paper, to identify the linguistic methods used by modern writers to shape the spatial and temporal framework of the surrealist literary discourse. Our analysis focused on three novels by Boris Vian: L'Écume des jours, L'Herbe rouge and L'Arrache-coeur. In order to do this research, we surveyed the morphosyntactic, the lexical and the semantic dimensions of these literary works, where we emphasized the innovative techniques used by the author to delineate the objective and subjective time and space of his literary discourse.

The description of the beloved women occupies a dominating place in the poetry of front the Islam. It is considered as the highest degree of the poetic genius. One of the main characteristics of the woman over whom the poets linger is the physical description. The introduction of every feminine face dresses then a singular and extraordinary character which keeps pace with its importance in the society or the life of the poet. The sensory perception of the beloved woman corresponds to five senses, and every sense calls up to the memories.

This article aims to show how Québécois authors of the nineteenth century use their educational background to describe the Canadian wilderness, even though a dispute over teaching Classics arises among intellectuals. It focuses on the example of "La Débâcle" from Les Anciens Canadiens by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé.

Within the 19th century Romanian literature, our first metanovel focuses on poietics and poetics, on inter/meta/paratextuality as second grade literary fiction as well as on the relation between art and reality. Build on the complementary connection among the fictional narrative patterns of the period, overtly rooted in the Erotic theme, but covertly deconstructing them, the discourse of Catastihul amorului points to a double-oriented internal temporality: that of literary construction and de-construction, ever simultaneously placed within representative narratives temporally marked thus suspended within textual virtual extensions and losing their internal chronology.

This paper discusses the nature of historical truth as represented poetically in literary works, analyzing a series of texts belonging to German authors like H. Mann, L. Feuchtwanger and A. Döblin. For a complete and correct interpretation, using stories in the way described in this article develops critical thinking and strategic flexibility. Idea or word, figurative language or historical reality: which one has priority? We are in part created by the words we use. The opposite position is that things always exist before they can be named. We would like to advocate a middle position. As literature changes from age to age, we see reflected in it a shifting range of identifiable facts and sensations.

This study aims at presenting the intimate connection between geopoetics as an artful rendering of world cuts and geograms as figures of identity with two dimensions: the human consciousness and the world scale. For the Canadian poet Paul Chamberland, the ontology of the geographical being sums up a series of takes, genuine geograms whose matter is the "topical" text, examined with a poetic telescope and microscope. Our analysis focuses on Chamberland's Geograms, three volumes composed of brief, rapid, unachieved units: collages of journal cuts, quotes, references, names, sayings, pieces of novels, fragments of poems and cries specific of a spirit haunted by the urgency mode. During this eco-regeneration, the Canadian essence is reinforced despite its apparent dissolution in the global fact.

The theoretical positions of Camil Petrescu have been dramatically challenged in the last years by studies such as Simona Sora'a Regăsirea intimităţii, thus making one of the writer's most successful novels, Patul lui Procust, if not suspicious, at least problematic. Yet challenging the way we read the text could turn up to be one of the novel's strong points, as its authorial position constantly sets the reader under suspicion, while asking for a more "against the grain" reading. Therefore there arises a difficulty in trying to identify the image of the reader that the text proposes, as the theoretical background of the novel, presented to us by the authorial figure that makes itself heard in the footnotes of the work, is continually betrayed by the same instance, thus making the reading process more problematic and asking for a "strong reader".

This article proposes to envisage the construction of the main characters' identity in three of Maalouf's novels: Les Jardins de lumière, Le rocher de Tanios and Samarcande. Standing as three authentic identities, their existential voyage to their self knowledge is also a passage through a diversity of cultures and peoples. The characters carry in themselves the author's message to the entire humanity: the necessity of stopping the conflicts caused by the Other's difference felt as a menace to one's cultural specific.

Language and translation are two different concepts that often rediscover in their definition the same features, one determining the other, and yet keeping their autonomy. Still, it is difficult to rejoin the didactics of languages with the study of practicing translation in order to find interdependence. These two disciplines – learning languages and translation practice - so different and so alike at the same time, often involve different principles and antagonistic views, and are about to expel each other, as in a war. The aim of the article is to reflect on the specific features of these two disciplines, to recognize these two professions involved by these: on one hand teachers of modern languages and translators on the other hand.

Invoking a prison world may involve a theological memory, through literary forms such as text document value and aesthetic. Since modernism, the importance of theology falls. Amid this crisis, in a world that is becoming increasingly secularized, risk of dehumanizing experiences, as the communist Gulag, can not be avoided. Literature testifies detention cases of clerics, laity unjustly imprisoned, whose suffering can get even Christ's sacrifice meaning. Detention memory has the role to prevent a new inhuman totalitarianism.

This paper aims to analyze the manners in which Negoiţă Constantin Virgil, computer science specialist and Romanian writer, who currently lives in the United States, relates himself to the literature. Opposing to binary logic and proposing as joint nodes of his writing a number of concepts of vague logic such as fuzzy sets or pullback, Constantin Virgil Negoiţă proposes a new kind of literature, characterized by subdual of epicity, fragmentarism, biographical and autobiographical strong anchoring.