Meridian Critic

When Japan opened up to the Western forces during the period of Meiji, it had, although mostly unknown in Occident, a revolutionary impact on arts in France, known as japonism, which spread all over Europe at the end of the 19th century, and which is closely connected to exoticism, the picturesque fascination of the Other. Europeans at the time are in search of the mythic-primitive and find all of these components in Japan, a country considered as a paradoxical universe. The Japanese trilogy of the French author Pierre Loti, including Madame Chrysanthème (1887), Japoneries d’automne (1889) and La Troisième Jeunesse de Madame Prune (1905), offers a complex art of reception in which the points of view of the writer are torn between phantasm and aestheticism. Since this travel author cannot satisfy all his exotic expectations, which he formed back in France, he looks suspiciously at a country that is also a strong military force. This trilogy shows the different discourses used by the writer Loti, who is trying, through the act of writing, to denigrate Japan as a whole, leading him to proclaim the “Yellow Peril” emanating from the Far East.

The main focus of our study is Jordan’s representation in Jean-Jacques Bourassé’s travel narrative in the East. To this end, we will first analyse the traveller’s point of view by stressing the new elements that his travelogue brings to the knowledge of Jordan. Then, we will study the influence that stereotypes and prejudices, outspread by previous travellers, had on Bourassé’s perception of Jordanian reality. Lastly, we will look into Jordan’s different aspects according to the traveller: spatial alterity, physical alterity, behaviours and picturesque scenes. This study should allow us to evaluate Jordan’s conception in the French imagination.

In 1828 William Wordsworth, the famous British Romantic poet, wrote a poem entitled « The Egyptian Maid and the Romance of the Water Lily” in which he staged the encounter between the Western world, embodied by the Knights of the Round Table and Merlin, and the East, symbolized by a Maid arriving from Egypt. A series of dichotomies is established opposing a Christian male West to a pagan female East. Yet, because of Merlin’s jealousy when confronted with the sensual beauty of the heathen figurehead of the Egyptian boat, the Maid is led to a deadly doom, which enables the author to subvert the question of faith and of the boundaries between the East and the West. As a matter of fact, the East turns out to be more Christian than the West and becomes God’s chosen agent in his process of resurrection of the Egyptian Maid. Through this poem, Wordsworth reveals his ideal of Romantic aesthetics bringing to the fore the concept of synthesis: of the East and the West, of reason and imagination, of femininity and power.

The “soul of the Balkans” seems to have exercised a deep impression on Roger Vercel, one of the few French authors who has devoted three novels, Notre Père Trajan in 1930, Capitaine Conan in 1934 and Léna in 1936, to the “war of the East”, led in the Balkans between 1915 and 1919 by the “French Orient Army”, an expeditionary force that had landed in Greece in October 1915. Enlisted in 1914 and promoted an officer in 1917, Roger Vercel is assigned to this army from September 1918 to May 1919. Hereby, he discovers countries that he has not known before: Macedonia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Romania, Ukraine, and Bessarabia. He is much disoriented as he discovers here the mystery of the inimitable nature of what he calls in Léna the “Slavic soul” or the “soul of the Balkans” and in Notre Père Trajan and Capitaine Conan the “Balkan soul”. However, he maintains a certain distance, sometimes very ironic, in respect to what he reports. How did he represent this “Balkan soul”, so special, what would have been the distinctiveness of these regions, of these peoples’ attitudes and contradictions?

The article aims at identifying the features of the communist regime, as it was built in Eastern Europe between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. We have written a case study by taking Romania’s example. Thus we have identified that the pillars of this type of totalitarian regime were the necessity to put into prison, from the very beginning, all those whom the Communist Party would consider class enemies, as they were called, the activity of political police, vital to the Party, permanently surveying citizens, the phenomenon of denunciation, dissidence, the existence of Radio Europa Liberă (Free Europe) as the unique means by which the whole people, a prisoner in its own country, could learn the truth about the regime and about the emigrant’s condition. We have used written testimonies, published after 1990, for this research.

Among the francophone writers and Orientalists, the Russian born Isabelle Eberhardt (1877-1904) has a special place: brought up in Geneva and interested in exotic cultures, she wandered in the Maghrebian territory dressed up as an Arab knight, seeking for the mystic beauty of the desert. After becoming a Muslim, during her short life, she wrote stories in which she outspeaks her passion for Oriental culture, for Islam. She was fascinated by alterity (in terms of language, culture, religion) and her trips in this space gave her the opportunity to better build up her own identity, inspired by French writers such as Loti, interested in the recent discovery of Oriental spaces. This article deals with Isabelle Eberhardt’s vision of the Islamic world and with her identity, as one of the most peculiar orientalists of her time.

The commercial TV station Jurnal TV’s broadcasting policy is to showcase the former soviet republic of Moldova as an ideological combat zone. Conflicting political and aesthetical paradigms are both delineated and actually employed for the use of a pro-European, Romanian-speaking audience. Particularly, the TV show Ora de Râs is a case in point example. The broadcast is Moldovan infotainment at its best, targeting issues of civic commitments and, generally, public ethics.

In order to establish a standard the concept of generation has created enough suspicion amongst theorists especially because of the inevitable ingnorance towards the individual profiles. Regarding the Romanian concept it imposed itself almost evidently as it hasn't been subjected to serious questioning or theoretical debates, despite the fact that there were theorists trying to contest the tendency of importing concepts and creating new theories that will impose even in the injured Romanian literary field.

Mariana Marin’s poetry is one of the great representations of Romanian woman lyric and also a remarkable representation of the eighties generation. She is hardly known to the large public and also little interpreted in the academic environment. The present study aims to reveal some important elements of Mariana Marin’s poetry, and more precisely to explain the meaning of the word Elegythat appears in many titles, to present the characteristics of this elegiac style (in the poet’s terms), to analyze her poetic consciousness and the way she understands the writing process. To highlight the fundamental feature of her poetry ̶ the desire to confess, and to underline the strong connection it has with great established themes of the literature (as the theme of love being absorbed by death), we used the analysis of the poem Elegy XII. The confession, for Mariana Marin, doesn’t express only nostalgic feelings and moments of existential meditation, but also frustrations and discontent caused by the inequities of the communist regime. This attitude of commitment to the immediate reality brings her closer to American poet Sylvia Plath. We tried a comparative analysis between these two poets’ texts just to highlight an important feature of feminine poetry in this dark period of world history: revolt by word, by poetry.

One of the most famous French Canadian writers, Anne Hébert deals in her novels with the theme of violence in the complex relationship between men and women. The difficulty to express oneself has its sources in a molested childhood and so, the hebertien characters are victims of a violent sexuality. Considering novels such as Kamouraska, Les Enfants du sabbat, Un habit de lumière, our article is dealing with the various forms and shades of a perverted sexuality, as seen by Anne Hébert.

The paper presents Mircea Eliade's correspondence during his exile with Jewish friends and acquaintances, some gone abroad, others remained in communist Romania: Peretz Reiter, Lucian Boz, Mircea Lungu, Miron Grindea, Ionel Jianu, Sergiu Dan, Edgar Papu, Nicolae Steinhardt. The impressive number of letters to Mircea Eliade proves that his Jewish friends and acquaintances in interwar Romania admired him and did not perceive him as an intolerant nationalist, thus clarifying the unsubstantiated allegations about his antisemitism. The letters are also human documents of several elite intellectuals who had their destiny torn apart by the advent of the communist regime.

This study argues that in any literary text, there is a textual consciousness that speaks to the reader. The analysis focuses on the relationship between the author of the text, the textual consciousness and the conscience of the reader. It aims at highlighting the forms of power and influence exerted on the reader by the textual consciousness through ethical imagination transferred to an individual.

This paper aims to show how the dialogue between proverbs pertaining to different peoples can be used as an intercultural key enabling a constant reconstruction of self and of the identity attached to the individuals with whom one interacts. The analysis of both resemblances and dissimilarities in the case of gnomic sayings dwelling on the same life aspect grants access to different views of the world specific to different communities. Furthermore, it invites us to reflect upon what the individual and the collective sense of belonging is constituted of. Having as a starting point the commentaries to different bywords provided by Paul Desalmand and Yves Stalloni in the book Proverbes expliqués (2014), this article shows how the confrontation of different versions of the same proverb can be conducive to achieving a better grasp of who we are, to renegotiating our own perimeter whilst steering clear of stereotypes and clichés.

In post-1989 media, irony has nearly become a goal in itself, more than just a slippery discourse strategy, an utterly unequivocal device, meant primarily as indicative of the journalist's adherence to a certain axiological system. The present article aims at investigating the main mechanisms of ironic signification, focusing on their pragmatic function as vessels that either legitimize or disparage, within the post-1989 media arena, a rather confrontational playground for personal disputes.

In this paper I aim at making a survey and commenting on a series of queries regarding the way in which Coseriu’s text linguistics has been received in the Romanian academic/scientific circles. The respective queries were expressed by Eugenio Coseriu himself, Nicolae Manolescu, Ioan S. Cârâc and by other specialists. At the same time, I intend to discuss about some possibilities of applying text linguistics, in accordance with the work already written by the famous Romanian linguist.

The present study aims at summarizing the most important theories and classifications concerning the universals of language, a theme regarding the theories and philosophies of language, subject to extensive debates starting with the 1960’s.

This article examines specific translation strategies at work in the transfer of dramatic dialogue from English into Romanian. Based on micro-sequences extracted from translated versions of Tennessee Williams’ plays, the paper sets out to illustrate the case of mimetic conversational feature transfer in order to attain relevant equivalence standards in the translation of drama. The focus of the analysis is on pragmatic particles, markers and syntactic patterns which build up the natural flow of created spoken discourse.