Meridian Critic

The article aims to analyse two female characters from Marcel Proust’s novel À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, starting from the distinction between le costume (the suit) and l’habillement (the clothing) which Roland Barthes makes in one of his papers. According to Barthes, the concept of vêtement (garment) contains both. Odette de Crécy, married to the bourgeois Charles Swann, retains marks of her former status of courtesan in her way of dressing, but at the same time, she gives expression to an entire age, her age, la belle époque. The Duchess Oriane de Guermantes dresses in accordance with her unique personality, but because she is idealized, she is also transfigured by the gaze of the narrator who transforms her into a myth, a saint and places her in a supernatural world. In Proust’s works, women’s clothing represents the social class and an expression of women’s inwardness, as well as object of the narrator’s fantasy.

This article offers a parallel between the doubling of characters in the works of Shakespeare and Marguerite Duras. In Shakespeare, characters change their identity by changing their clothes, while in Duras the same effect is achieved through discursive changes. In both cases, deceiving appearances are created in order to question social or scriptural codes, allowing characters to find their freedom.

This article analyzes the way in which characters in the novels of George Sand and Theophile Gautier invent a new identity by choosing their clothes. Thus, they liberate from either the constraints imposed on a certain social class or from sexual determinism.

Humanity’s impulse of dressing can be compared only to the impulse of changing the face of the world, under the permanent illusion of control over the natural phenomena, which are uncontrollable most of the time. At the same time, man’s need to surround himself with walls is another manifestation in which psychoanalysis has perceived a process of adaptation of the man faced with a severe, common, initial trauma: the birth.

Rich in mythical elements, female clothes from Romanian tales were not mere ornaments. In theory, Romanian traditional imagery was based on the real-fictional opposition. In practice, the real and the fictional were always juxtaposed, in order to be credible and efficient. Thus, female clothes represented, in an anagogical sense, the character’s spiritual identity, and conditioned or restructured the content of epic narratives.

The present paper aims to study clothing as a form of understanding the individual and society, by analyzing instances of expressive language that are proof of everyday experience, that have stood the test of time and that have become fixed in the collective mentality. The source material is constituted by phraseologisms, a generic term which includes proverbs, idioms, phrases and sayings recorded by Iuliu Zanne in the collection entitled Proverbele românilor (vol. III).

This paper is aimed at highlighting the way in which practising the translation of proverbs constitutes a gateway to acquiring the intercultural competence, in all its dimensions: cognitive, affective and behavioural. The corpus that will be subject to analysis is made up of a series of proverbs which sanction the discrepancy between essence and appearance by means of artistic devices resorting on items of clothing. The languages under scrutiny in this comparative approach are Latin and the following Romance languages: French, Romanian, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. Becoming aware both of the prominent network of analogies and of the dissimilarities in verbalising a particular conclusion to a particular universal life experience and drawing on the intercomprehension between related languages can but contribute to enhancing intercultural sensitivity.

The article analyses the terminology associated with the traditional Romanian clothing in the basin of the Siret River from an ethnographic, ethnologic, and ethno-linguistic perspective, underlining the dynamics of the Romanian language in Ukraine. The Terminology of Romanian Traditional Costumes in Valea Siretului, Ukraine, also presents the ethnolinguistic aspect, for language is a product of society and a function of its culture. For that reason, this terminology is a part of spoken language that constitutes a living proof of the continuance of a certain material and spiritual culture that is connected to the life of the community, to its traditional costume and vocabulary, to its conservation and evolution in time to its vitality.

This article aims at establishing whether there is a typical advertising discourse for a specific group of products, namely luxury goods, fashion, perfumes jewels and glasses. The author examines both the image and the text of the advertisements, the enunciation frame, the type of advertising (classical or modern) and the advertising ethos. The corpus consists of French magazines published in 2013 and 2014.

If the majority of the avant-garde writers and artists considered necessary at one moment to put their tools in the service of the proletarian revolution, they followed closely in fact the main theses of Marx and Lenin, in which they strongly believed for a while. The idea of a “proletarian” or “revolutionary” art (i. e., of an art in the service of the proletarian revolution), discussed with a grain of salt by the main theorists of the Marxist doctrine (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, etc.), was also emphasized in many writings of the avant-garde writers; thus, in 1930, the main surrealist publication symbolically changed its title from La révolution surréaliste to Le surréalisme au service de la révolution, as the French surrealists considered themselves in the service of the Comintern. Following their example, the first Romanian surrealists (Geo Bogza, Gherasim Luca, Paul Păun, S. Perahim, etc.) sustained in the fourth decade of the twentieth century the idea of an engaged art, and put their entire activity in the service of the proletarian revolution (during that period they also published political pamphlets and critical articles against the Romanian oligarchy, Fascism and the war in the left magazines of the time).

The article presents some of the unique characters who dwell in the prose of Fănuş Neagu, from the miraculous woman, capable of breaking the steadiness of normality, to romantic prototypes that shape the ultimate misfit; lunatic individuals, drifting out of the contingent, driven by illusions or haunted by identity-related confusions, possessing features that place them into the realm of the fantastic. The fluctuant characters of his short prose express a structural instability that is defining for the dualism of their being, for the mixture between vitality and aerial. The writer has a special talent to paint sin in a certain shade of purity, which is evident also in Frumoşii nebuni ai marilor oraşe (The Beautiful Madmen of Big Cities), a novel whose characters swivel between boastfulness and innocence. While they can be superficially labeled as funny rakes, inclined towards vagrancy and libertinism, rebel and with no inhibitions, their inner depth reveal individuals whose sensitiveness could sometimes take a pathologic turn. Falsely disabused, those heroes prove themselves incapable of „doping on illusions”, of vibrating and discovering fragments of beauty and innocence in the ordinary humdrum.

This article addresses two phenomena of contemporary literature from Southeastern Europe: the assertion of the novel of social persuasion and of the novel of manners. The authors focus their attention on the woman’s fate and the child’s fate in the contemporary world. Social and domestic violence against the woman and the child psychological and physical abuse are thematic axes in the novels of Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko, Romanian novelist and writer Doina Ruşti, and the Romanian writer, from Republic of Moldova, Liliana Corobca.

Our study attempts to summarize the last fifty years of theories and trends regarding the genealogical classification of world languages in a few language macro-families. These new classifications have in view the correlation of linguistics data analysis with the new findings pertaining to areas such as archeology, paleoanthropology and to genetics in particular (the mitochondrial DNA).

In this paper I aim at developping, through John Dewey’s work, one of Eugenio Coseriu’s ideas regarding the necessity of free speech in science. In order to adequately approach such a topic, I thought it proper to refer, first of all, to the relation between thought and speech, and afterwards to the relation between the freedom of thought and freedom of speech. John Dewey accurately demonstrates that there is no authentic freedom of thought in the absence of freedom of speech. Expression as such is necessary, since, on the one hand, in order for us to clarify our own ideas, we have to verbalize them (either in an oral or written form); on the other hand, we have to communicate them to the others, to deliver them to the public debate, with a view to verifying the accuracy of these ideas, so as to correct, confirm or reject them. Starting from the way Dewey discussed about the relation between intuition and expression, Coseriu refers in a similar manner to the relation between theory and inquiry of facts (as it happens in linguistics, for instance).

The issue of idiomatic accuracy is of major importance to Alexandru Graur’s work. The article examines his main works in the field, as well as his contributions to the development of a genuine Romanian school of linguistics, whose representatives were the products of his influence.