Meridian Critic

The representations of fashion, social phenomenon par excellence, are the object of scriptural and poetic creations. The desire of fashion as desire of distinction, social membership and aesthetic representation is expressed in the comedies of Molière, Edme Boursault, Goldoni or Labiche, who portrayed the ridiculous aspects of a mimesis fascinated by the frivolity of appearance.

Two centuries after Antoine Galland’s translation of the Arabian Nights (1704-1717), ‘Doctor’ Joseph-Charles Mardrus offered a new French version of the famous oriental collection (1899-1904). Close to Mallarmé, the translator reworks and embellishes the Arabic versions, emphasizing Eastern exoticism and eroticism. In his interpolations system, the discourse concerning clothing plays a key role: Mardrus multiplies words like babouches and voiles and invents, for its sultanas, oriental outfits inexistent in Arabic sources in order to convey images and mythologies associated with the East. This Orientalist discourse naturally goes beyond his translation and resonates in world of art and fashion: orientalisme vestimentaire were absorbed by artists, dressmakers and designers, orientalist clothing becoming wardrobe essentials for le Tout-Paris. The first part of this article focuses on how Mardrus treats the topic of clothing, inspiring artists of his time, especially the impresario of the Ballets Russes, Serge Diaghilev; the second part analyzes the repercussions of this orientalism in « real » and « written » fashion of Belle Époque Paris, taking into account creations of couturier Paul Poiret.

Maghrebian identity is one of the major concerns of authors such as Mouloud Mammeri, Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem, whose writings depict the North-Western part of Africa, where Arab, Berberian and French cultures create a unique mixture. In their novels, many of the French speaking authors coming from this space bring forth various aspects of the “Maghrebian soul”, in an effort to show real life in villages and homes, to create characters that stand for the whole community. One of the most important parts of Maghrebian identity is the traditional outfit, often seen by the Western civilization as simply “picturesque”, as the whole North-African culture.This article attempts to show the connection between identity and traditional outfits in some important works belonging to the first wave of this literature (La Colline oubliée, Les alouettes naïves, Les Hommes qui marchent), but also in more recent ones, in which authors tend to act like ethnologists, depicting many details of spiritual and material culture. Thus, the traditional man’s or woman’s costume becomes a part of the character’s identity and its presence/absence most often shows the influence of the colonizer on the colonized people’s identity or the hybrid identity of the characters, as a result of the acculturation process.

Ahmadou Kourouma was a mathematician and a novelist born in the Ivory Coast, who revealed himself through a rich and fundamentally revolutionary production translated all over the world. His work is a systematic break from former writings in its themes and language as a strong expression of literary freedom. In this article, we will study the use and the importance of women’s clothing in his novels, an element almost irrelevant, but essential for the comprehension of female characters and hidden significance of their behaviour, which is speaking to the reader.

In the Comédie Humaine, description holds a privileged role, due to both its importance in the scheme of the work and the functions it accomplishes. The profusion of descriptive elements is often regarded as a lack of style, a disdain for the artistic rules of the novel: the critics reject this accumulation of heterogeneous elements, apparently impossible to assimilate by the structure of the plot, this descriptive meticulousness, this baroque narrative lacework which invades half of the story. At Balzac, the “painting” is the object of a “double diversion”, both a metaphorical and a psychological one: there is a whole semantic field, concerning the body and its accessories, object and subject of the descriptive discourse. The descriptions concerned with the setting, the physical appearance, or the clothes ensure the character’s psychological coherence and represent auxiliary instruments in his/her characterisation.

The clothing choices of a fictional character lead to reflections on both their physical and moral portrait, as well as the social conditions in which the author imagines them. Between fact and fiction, the literary work sets, through the clothing trends, typologies with psychological profiles in accordance with the customs of an era.This article addresses the role of clothing as an essential element for the representation of the personality of an individual located in a certain social context. Thus, we visit the French society of the nineteenth century described by Balzac and that of the twenty-first century from houellebecquien novels. If Balzac had retained the physiognomy mechanism to anticipate the moral portrait of his characters, we wonder how this outside inward movement may be revealing today, given the development of a mass ideology that Michel Houellebecq spreads with enough accuracy and a lot of irony. Similarly, the parallel will show the change of field in the combat for rankings, from the social plan as described by Balzac, to the sexual plan found in Houellebecq’s work.

Angela Carter's double allegiance to feminism and postmodernism involves a heightened consciousness of the fluid nature of gender identity, whose unambiguous representation she avoids programmatically. In The Bloody Chamber, she explores a multitude of possibilities of conceiving and representing femininity, masculinity, and gender relations. The present paper examines the sartorial rhetoric by which Carter complexifies and subverts entrenched perceptions and ideas. Clothes-related imagery which emphasizes artificiality, spectacle, ceremony, carnival, and the cultural implications of nakedness is shown to constitute part of her peculiar strategy of dealing with difference and otherness.

The article proposes a close reading of the debut novel, Quilt, written by Nicholas Royle, Professor at the University of Sussex and author of many books on critical and literary theory. Quilt unveils a fantastic experience of encountering death and explores the language of mourning as well as phenomena such as telepathy, melancholia, mourning, monomania and the uncanny. Within a broad psychoanalytic framework, the essay deals with a stranger notion of ‘clothing’ than the reader of an issue on ‘The Discourse of Clothing’ might expect: the mood of mourning, in which somebody dresses in black, is not only physical but, as it were, also psychical. Royle’s writing and the uncanny strategies deployed by his mourning protagonist testify to a cover-up which also results in the estrangement of language. The narrator-protagonist’s increasing obsession with his father’s stingrays shrouds the text in a mantle of linguistic alienation from which there seems to be no escape but the unnamed narrator’s final disappearance from the textual universe.

This paper aims at analysing how memory and identity are forged in the novel Beatles, written by the Norwegian author Lars Saabye Christensen in 1984. Special attention will be given to the role of clothing for the act of walking and the use of music, two main strategies at work in this novel. Beatles is a text deeply engaged with remembering and mapping the city while also being an initiation story narrated on the background of Oslo and the Beatlemania that spread through the 60s. Clothing becomes important in two ways. Firstly, in connection to the spatial practice of walking the city as shoes become symbolic for this act. Secondly, the cultural revolution that manifested itself during these years was very much concerned with breaking away from established norms, a direction visible also in clothing style and hair length, for example. These two aspects will be examined throughout this paper and set against other themes in the novel.

Theatrical costume as the actor’s attire plays a specific role in the theatre. It is a mark of theatrics, portrays the play’s character and is an integral element of acting itself. In the Pirandello theatre, the costume is not only of importance due to the above said features but also because it is a part of the so called ‘role playing’, one of the key problems raised by the Italian dramatist. To Pirandello, society is a costume, and man as a social creature must put it on so as to cover all that is ugly in him/her, despicable, not acceptable by others. Similar to an actor who puts on a theatrical costume appropriate to the character he/she will play, man, in real life, puts on an appropriate attire to suit the role he/she wants to play in front of others to make a good impression and be accepted by other members of society. The costume has characteristics of a mask which covers man’s true self. Hence, Pirandello’s conviction that life is a never-ending masquerade overflowing with hypocrisy and pretense, in which there is no room for authenticity and truth.This article presents the definition of costume in Pirandello theatre through the analysis of the costume function in Pirandello’s following plays: Clothing The Naked, Henry IV, The Man, the Beast and the Virtue.

This study approaches Panait Istrati’s first years of press writing; in his militant political and social articles we can especially identify the foreshadowing of his future literary works. In perspective, these nuclei filled with really expressive authenticity, but otherwise void of literary intentionality, seem defining for the writer’s personality, its stylistic aspects included. Some of the coverage episodes in this period announce, arrestingly, Geo Bogza’s finest pages on labor accidents in the “oil landscape” and they plant the seed of Istrati’s typical literature of the revolt.

This paper aims at offering the post-Communist Romanian literature a historical frame starting from Stanislaw Lem’s concept of “search for resistance”. Following the paradigmatic change between Communist and post-Communist literary champ, I briefly discuss the difficult negotiations the Romanian writers had to assume after the fall of Communism in 1989; they suddenly found themselves in the position to confront the disappearance of the censorship institution, which they had learned to live with, or the coming out of fashion of various themes, characters or strategies. It was not only their social life that suffered a sudden change, but their literary art, too.

The present article is a fragment of a more elaborate study that aims to cover the evolution of the Romanian narrative fiction of the last two decades – between traditional models, international influences and the forces of the market. This article puts forward several remarks on the evolution of the Italian narrative fiction of the last 20 years, focusing on three popular and widespread forms: the historical novel, the autofiction and the proliferation of the short story. Examples are given for each of the three forms, while the presentation is framed by the critical observations on the given phenomena of the Italian literary historian Giulio Ferroni. The article also tries to answer, through comparison and appeal to the wider context, some relevant questions for the contemporary Romanian literary critics.

This paper is based on a poietical approach meant to investigate the process of creation and gaining art-related knowledge in relation to Annie Ernaux’ creative conscience. We shall analyse the set of relations between the faire créateur and the forms of knowledge acquired by the creative subject in his confrontation with the unknown of the book and his own dilemmas within the literary field.

This paper, part of a more elaborated study, attempts to highlight that category of verbs – usually considered to be non-dicendi verbs – that aquired the special status of speech verbs due to their metaphorical use in certain contexts. This is how verbs coming from a wide variety of fields, such as animal communication sphere, physiological processes, natural phenomena, musical performances or certain onomatopoeic verbs may occasionally be considered as dicendi and, by their secondary meaning of human specific language (sometimes even gibberish or unintelligible), come to be perceived as reconfiguring the picture of the speech verbs in the lexicon of a language.

This article uses lexicometry to analyze the patterns of word usage in the discourses of left and right wing ideologies. Explicitly, we will verify the report according to which political self-identification is plain to see in language and is particularly obvious in a hackneyed vocabulary.

Our paper deals with several lexical English elements in the play Macbeth, by William Shakespeare, and their translation in Romanian. Our approach is mainly a descriptive one, the main purpose of our research being the recording and analysis of linguistic data offered by the English play and its Romanian versions. We focus on the hyponymic series of the word dog and on the the special case of the word equivocator, in our attempt to show the disponibility of the Romanian language to convey meanings that might prove problematic in the translation process.

This paper aims at pinpointing a series of speech situations within the area of technical discourse which show that the scientific terminology has gradually permeated everyday speech. Our analysis will focus on the hunting-related terminology, as a subfield of the forestry domain. The lexical richness and the beauty of the hunting-related phrases which have come to be commonly used in everyday speech demonstrate that the scientific discourse is not an isolated area in the language economy but a generous field offering any speaker the possibility to actuate legitimate interferences throughout the communication act.