Meridian Critic

Ce bref article interroge le rapport entre l’homme et la nature en termes de communication et de sacralité, en tentant de créer une distanciation à l’égard de notre culture (française) grâce à quelques récents textes fictionnels appartenant au domaine francophone africain. A une époque où nous continuons à valoriser le Progrès, mais devenons obligés de lire les signes de désastre écologique, quelle valeur accorder à la croyance en un langage de la nature ? La folie est-elle du côté de celui qui prétend être en communication avec la nature, en saisir les paroles ou le silence, en lire attentivement et inépuisablement les signes, ou est-elle du côté de celui qui entend lui imposer les marques du Progrès ? Les textes que nous li(e)rons mettent en scène des confrontations de valeurs, imaginent ou décrivent des transformations, retrouvent littérairement les sagesses traditionnelles à partir de la crise contemporaine.

In his Dissolving Landscapes, painted on OSB (oriented strand board), German artist Bertram Kühn (1952-2014) confronts the viewer with an innate double metaphor of ecological crisis. In the paintings the elements that once formed nature are severed and torn apart – whereas all this is indeed painted on OSB ground, which in itself is nature that has been severed. This aesthetic discourse is not threatening but rather surprising and fascinating in its colourfulness, which raises the question whether the artist attempts to overcome the ecological crisis by means of mirroring the very structure of an universal circle of construction and destruction.

The present study aims to treat, the hermeneutic perspective, the role of forests in the Romanian fantastic tale. Given the role of the initiation has been invested this space of traditional mito-geography area, I tried to capture various symbolic poses that you did or received forest, just a better (or correct) perception of these production in Romanian traditional culture. Both evil and deep space oriented, initiation Romanian fantastic tale forest has a strong impact on the psycho-emotional hero who travels, opening his, after passing the samples, the path to self-liberation, just get the ultimate desideratum fulfillment, whatever it is.

The fictional discourse entails seemingly casual reflection on the bond between human beings and nature. The novel genre magnifies a utilitarian view on resources which, essentially, treats the world we live in as a mere commodity. One way or another, human welfare amounts to a cultural narrative that has always considered our survival means. Inadvertently or not, fictional narratives address such issues in the unfolding of their plot. Grand events which claim to develop from first-hand experience into storytelling are particularly informative of the nature trope in creative writing. For example, the historical backdrop of the Second World War provides the reading public with the iconic vision of ravaging our European habitat and, for once, with a fresh and compelling side-effect. Namely, with nature (writing) as it is shown to bear the brunt of military action.

The present essay attempts to bring to attention several elements in the fourteenth-century Arthurian romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that lend themselves to ecocritical analysis. The anonymous poet’s treatment of the alternation of human and environmental settings displays an awareness of the principle of human predominance over creation that advances in two directions: aggression and stewardship. In its concern with the non-human and the environment, the poem invites an ecocritical reading in that it concentrates on an ecological setting described as a recountal of binary oppositions, such as human/non-human, inhabited/wild, hospitable/hostile, etc.

The present study , while unable to avoid the hybridising symbiosis of immediate reality and informational virtuality, will attempt to attach the profile of the biomechanoid to the anatomical differently formulae for the construction of the virtual body with the full effect of the internal morphological details or, on the contrary, the pseudo-morphology/functionality, with macro/microscopic accuracy. It is a paroscopic endeavour which accepts the transhuman as self-subjectivising individuality, based on procedural choices/virtual exteriorities, with all the established profiles of the artisans of the cyberbody.
Expressed through the mouthpiece of those who proclaim the proximity of the birth of a cyborgised “post-humanity”, the “liberating detachment” of the consciousness of the body anticipates a virtual means of imbuing the biomechanoid with the sense of the relationship between man and machine, a combination which reflects the experience of the virtual world – a term used constantly to describe the act of making contact (context s.n.) with the network. The addition of the concept of assemblage pertains to an ambiguous, twofold formula with repercussions for the acceptance of the “content” (“machinistic assemblage”) vs. “expression” (“collective enunciation assemblage”) dispute.
The novelty of this study is given by the interpretation of the biomechanoid as more than a conjoined human-mechanical body – almost an assemblage that comes into being and suffers psychological dysfunctions/viruses (in terms of the stub and Trojan effect), and which can be subjected to psychoanalytical treatment.

This study presents the author Traian Chelariu in the historical and geographical reality in which he lived and grew up. Therefore, starting from the issue of the Habsburg age with the Beech Land invaded by various ethnic groups, further to the problem of Bukovina failing to socially integrate in the Romanian Kingdom due to the air of superiority and indifference developed by the Centre on the expense of the Province, then to the image of Chernivtsi studded by Romanian cultural manifestations that had the purpose of effacing the still dominant foreign element, to the image of a literary scene closely linked to the political scene and proceeding with the post-war period that brought major changes, we get to the point where all these build up the diachronic portrait of Traian Chelariu.

This article follows the intratextual series (most often they are found on the map of some intratextual constellations) derived from two directions of intratextual generation: the “vertical” – the intratextual affiliation and the “horizontal” – the intratextual correspondence. From text to pre-text, from flow to spring, intratextuality searches for the source of certain images and of the poetic tension in prose.

The paper analyzes the novel Când ne vom întoarce [When we return], a biographical work about the people from the historical Bukovina county and their identity conflicts, related not only to their ethnic otherness, but also to their own marginal Romanianness, to its symbolic, heterotopic geography, traceable in the condition of being a Romanian, and not in its territory. The novel follows the destiny of the individual, who fights against the grand history regarded in its catastrophic aspects, or who is concerned with the fictional retrieval of an originally lost space.

The study interprets, from an ethical perspective, Eugen Lovinescu’s stand on modernity. Lovinescu’s position on modernity is considered a major influence on Romanian culture.

At first glance, literature and economics seem entirely different dimensions of the individual’s existence. If the former enables escapement in a fictional haven, the latter does not allow any distancing from immediate reality. Still, without compromising its independence, but sometimes also forcing concessions, economy is a prerequisite for literature, generating thematic and stylistic mutations. And this is even truer in the context of globalization that requires a reconsideration of both economy and society. The present paper will discuss the connections between literature and economics, in the global context, as evidenced in the novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid.

Herta Müller's works have a profound ethical content. Her artistic approach explores the fundamentals of unstable identities, generated by the existential experience of a perpetual exile, that of the state of "in-betweenness” caused by the attempt to exorcise trauma and neutralize an ideological manipulated memory. The parralel reading of her works of fiction and of her memoires – legitimate and neccessary – provides a comprehensive and relevant perspective on a literary project and a human destiny.

Our attempt aims at identifying the sources that have influenced the theories regarding text linguistics, a field in language studies that has Eugenio Coseriu as one of its founders. Besides, text linguistics seen as hermeneutics of meaning is part of a wider, more complex structure, known as integral linguistics. At this point, we will follow certain ideas that were inspired by the thinking of two linguists and philosophers of language, the Dane Louis Hjelmslev and the Italian Antonino Pagliaro, later developed and refined by the Romanian linguist.

The present article aims at investigating one of the main mechanisms of ironic signification within post-1989 media, namely the way in which societal/cultural clichés parasitically function as vessels that either legitimize (in an autoreferential, narcissistic fashion) or disparage the object of irony.

Shakespeare is renowned for having introduced many words in the English language. Some of them, among which six verbs derived with the germanic prefix –un, are present in his his tragedy Macbeth. Our paper focuses upon the translation of these verbs in the eight printed Romanian versions of the play and the ways in which translators dealt with this linguistic challenge beginning with 1850, when the play was first translated into Romanian, and ending with the most recent translation in 2000.

In the present paper we seek to evaluate the extent to which irony, as a discourse strategy employed by the media, can function pragmatically either as a device for settling personal disputes or merely gratuitously, for the sake of the journalist's ludic pleasure.