Meridian Critic

The spectacular evolution of the novel, which currently places it at the top of the hierarchy of genres, certainly has several explanations. Initially ignored and considered a literary byproduct unworthy of a place in the hierarchy of genres and species proposed by earlier poetics, the novel managed both to enjoy its freedom (in order to build its audience) and to adhere to certain rules (when the moment required it). Ultimately, step by step, as literature evolved, the novel constructed its legitimacy and earned the right to penetrate the literary canon, ultimately coming to dominate it today. How did it reach this position? In this article, I will attempt to answer this question, approaching the issue from different perspectives.

The article recalls the most significant moments in the history of comics, briefly presents the context in which the evolution of comics favoured the emergence of the graphic novel and describes its main features. The author, who is deeply involved in the study of graphic literature and its promotion activities, summarizes the situation of graphic novel publishing in Romania, highlighting the important place of women creators in the development of this genre.

The graphic novel, despite having an initially strict definition, has undergone significant redefinition through its interaction with the market and the public. The term, which distinguishes itself from comics and attracts a new audience, has now gained undeniable notoriety. In libraries, this raises several questions regarding classification, categorization, and highlighting. In this article, after a conceptual approach to the term, the author examines how it has established itself on the French market, emphasizing the notion of format, in order to decipher the subsequent use by key mediators such as librarians. A final section aims to propose several solutions, based on field visits, to address this ambiguous yet desired object by the public.

The portraits of the noble robbers and images of their bravery have a double role: on the one hand, they break the linearity of the discourse and intensify the suspense, and on the other hand, they give concreteness to the carefully constructed fleeting image of the literary text. The very practice of publishing works of fiction accompanied by graphic representations of significant scenes underpins the rise of the novel. Western literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took full advantage of the commercial success of graphic inserts, and Romanian literature adopted this technique to streamline the circulation of the novel's message. In addition to its specific role as an entertaining element, we cannot deny the fundamental role of illustration as a semiotic instrument. In the hajduk novel, the illustration mediates the crystallization of the noble outlaw image because it compresses essential biographical information and offers a translation of his personality. The graphic elements direct the novel's content to a specific audience with an appetite for particular ideological messages. The portraits of the main characters, captured in edifying poses for the development of their identity as symbols of social resistance, are likely to influence the entire literary system configured by the subgenre, imposing their associative and analogical force.

This study will focus on identifying the most effective narrative techniques used by Art Spiegelman in his graphic novel Maus, begun in 1973 and completed in 1991, and analyzing them from a literary theorist’s perspective. Up to a certain point, they will be separated from the visual techniques that enable the reader to understand Spiegelman’s dramatic account of the Holocaust in World War Two.

The paper describes a representative set of terms from the lexical field of affection, by following the meaning and occurrences in which the terms from the lexical field of positive and negative affections are engaged in different contextual hypostases from the graphic novel Maus. The story of a survivor, by Art Spiegelman. Following the disambiguation of contexts, contextual-semantic and onomasiological analysis, we came to the conclusion that the affective lexicon includes a wide range of primary affections, related terms in tone and significance. Their focus is achieved by engaging several parameters: subjectivity/ interiorization/ exteriorization/ intensity/ duration, as well as by marking and gradual modeling with the help of the context.

My study entails an inventory of some typical procedures pertaining to the graphic novel seen as a multimodal subgenre and analyses a variety of pragma-semantic rules guiding the interaction between visual and verbal language. The Leonardo da Vinci. The Renaissance Man case study constitutes the starting point of a theoretical and critical reflection on strategies enabling fiction to permeate graphic novels.

In the present article, I explore a number of aspects pertaining to the esthetics and the poetics of the graphic novel through an analysis of Marjane Satrapi’s novel. Broderies, a novel of mentalities, a novel illustrative for revisiting gender stereotypes, but also ethnical, racial, and cultural ones, becomes exemplary of the genre it pertains to, even if the author had already written another masterpiece, Persepolis, which established the characteristics of the genre. The novelistic Ekphrasis adds another layer to the narrative of emancipation, a narrative that recovers the traditional forms of the witness-told stories, frame stories so characteristic of oriental literature.

The article argues that in Batman. The Killing Joke, the graphic novel by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland (1988), the character of the Joker is dimensioned so that he goes beyond the simple relationship of opposition to Batman, his great adversary. Although the story is built, in general, respecting the Batman canon, Joker stands out through a complex positioning, which leaves the simple categories of psychopath and criminal and becomes a social rebel with multiple ideological valences. The article highlights the means used by the graphic novel to construct characters and undertakes a hermeneutic analysis of the discourse, which occupies a central place, held by the Joker. The analysis is based on the theory of distance to insanity and crime, as elaborated in the work The Autonomous Discourse. Communication Strategies (2013).

The present paper aims to discuss the journey from page to screen of The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a gripping novel written and illustrated by Brian Selznick. Throughout this process, critical approaches will be examined to understand how specific narrative elements have been condensed or reimagined for the purpose of cinematic flow. This article delves into the fascinating world of film production and emphasizes the harmonious relationship between film and literature.

Literature’s qualities can be highlighted by combining it with other forms of art. Manga, which is a Japanese traditional literary genre that involves visual art, has gained worldwide popularity in the last few decades. Subsequently, it was adapted into anime. This study explores the legitimacy of manga in literature, its global influence among notable figures such as prime ministers or presidents, and the zenith it attained in anime, which is a universal language. Are manga and anime universal solely due to their graphics and stories? Or is it rather because of their ability to connect people to the sacred? Is image universal? If so, what kind of image? Static one? Moving one? Which, manga or anime, can rather be considered universal? What does the future hold for literature and its various adaptations?

Junji Ito is one of the most famous mangakas. His 1998-1999 work Uzumaki is a prime example of how mangas integrate symbols (such as that of the spiral) and narratives from literature and collective memory, creating complex stories. Manga, just like graphic novels, have suffered from the stigma of being considered not as “serious” as the more established genres, thus they have not been as much the object of academic research. In the following article, I show, through a descriptive and thematic analysis, that there are in fact a lot of intricacies when it comes to a work such as Uzumaki, and that the author manages to create a story as compelling as that of any well-written novel.

In an era when the former supremacy of a form of language has been replaced, programmatically, by the return to conjugative principles of avant-garde origin and declared transdisciplinary vector, the hybridization of types of artistic expression no longer belongs to the regime of urgency, but to that of normality. It does more than reflect, at a deep level, a whole series of substantial changes at the meta-artistic level or illustrate the needs of a market (artistic, literary, cultural in the broadest sense of the term) shaped by new – economic, social and mentality – realities.Whether we see it as the natural result of progressive sublimations and clarifications or as the discrete consequence of entropic densifications and disturbances, we must recognize that the hybridization process was already manifesting in multiple ways a few years ago. But many artists felt it as a circumstantial necessity after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic (which produced, as we well know, decisive transformations of the artistic field). It proved to be an effective solution for bringing together identities and artistic formulas otherwise condemned to malignant isolation, not only psychologically or socially, but also creatively speaking. Regardless of their age, all artists have extensively used – although filtering it in various degrees – the forms of social and visual media they found available in the context of isolation or lockdown, in order to promote their products and protect the illusion of belonging to a wider or smaller community.Although, inevitably, most actors on the literary and artistic scene have looked for alternative solutions for aesthetic survival or have shifted their main centres of interest to the online sphere, the products resulting from rather traditional collaborations between writers and artists have not ceased to be designed and even realized.I find it significant that numerous products of this type do not feed on the usual pandemic imaginary (v. Ilie 2022), nor graft on the consciousness of imminent death, but prefer to configure alternative worlds of almost unreal beauty or to re-activate canonical artistic themes. Starting from these premises, my study will analyze two of the most interesting books resulting from the fruitful complicity between Romanian writers and visual artists that could be possible between 2020-2022: Dalí's mustache and other colors, the spectacular pictonovel by Felix Aftene and Lucian Dan Teodorovici (2020), respectively Subversive (sarcasms and paradoxes), by Mircea Oprea, with drawings by Liviu Şoptelea (2022). In the parenthetical, very difficult interval of the pandemic, such substantial artistic projects proved capable of (re)dimensioning the cultural and even proposing it as one of the surest remedies against total isolation and radical loneliness.

In 2007, poet Serban Foarta published two books in collaboration with Romelo Percolovici and Ion Barbu, both visual artists. These books highlight the remarkable dialogue between poetry and image, so much so that their analysis becomes a pretext for engaging with the forms, the functions, and the limitations of graphic novels.

This approach tries to emphasize the similarities and differences between the poetics of Surrealism and that of the new Romanian avant-garde of the late sixties called “structural onirism”. The two leaders of this group, the poet Leonid Dimov and the novelist Dumitru Țepeneag, produced a series of literary manifestos in a few literary magazines of the time, in which they tried to build a coherent and original aesthetic program. The main ideas were the rational structure of the new literature and its dream-like atmosphere produced by a deliberate technique, characteristics which placed it in the category defined by Angelo Guglielmi in the late fifties as “experimentalism”. However, the dark dreamy atmosphere, the “convulsive beauty”, the programmatic incoherence of the narration in order to create the dream-like effect, the incompatibility of the associations, etc. are features that still link this new literature to older Surrealism.

The contemporary Romanian novel of the last three decades, having at its center a child-character, changes the reader’s attitude towards its value also through the building of the narrative from the narrator’s outlook. The author of the text addresses an adult reader, but entrusts the narration to a child’s voice. In this case, both the author and the reader pass a comprehension test, the first simulating authentically the innocent speech, the other receiving the figurative narration as a narration itself (T. Todorov).If Aristotle does not value the character so much, considering that the interest towards this removes the narration from the innate sense (the action matters, the character being just its agent), then, in the modern novel that we analyze, the narrator’s voice deserves special attention. Through it we follow the growing up, transformation and degeneration, education, disillusionment of the child-character.In this article we propose to state the relationship between the author and the narrator, to clarify the hypostasis of the narrator in the text, to constitute the typology of the narrator specific to the contemporary Romanian novel. Capitalizing „The Dictionary of Narratology” by Gerald Prince, we will identify in some novels of the last three decades the narrative voices exposed or faded, homodiegetic or heterodiegetic, dramatized, authorial, having the role of an agent etc.

Exploring the relationship between genius and madness, this paper hypothesizes that the birth of the idea of genius, as a mark of exceptionality in arts, is linked to the emergence of positivism. The focus on the characteristics of the genius was intuitively an attempt to justify the role of art in a context where science seemed to have monopolized the knowledge. Thus, moving from the exceptionalism of the Enlightenment to the Romantic eccentricity, genius is associated with madness in order to restore the irrational dimension of knowledge.

The following study is an attempt to reconstruct the figure of Ernest Rabener, a professor of Romanian Literature in Chernivtsi, at the beginning of the 20th c., by using: 1. the evocations present in the memoirs of Ovid Țopa and Ion Nandriș; 2. studies regarding the theatrical life in Chernivtsi, written by Alice Niculică and the “National Defence” [„Apărarea Națională”] publication’s collection, published in Chernivtsi between 1906-1908. As a promoter of Romanian language and culture, deeply involved in public cultural activities aimed at fostering a Romanian national identity, and in social activities, professor Ernest Rabener is an emblematic figure in all the senses one may give to the expression. On the one hand, it is clear that the Romanians living in Chernivtsi experience a strong process of acculturation; at the same time, the case of professor Rabener illustrates the precariousness of any cliché, as he is a true Romanian in Chernivtsi.

Victor Wittner's volume Der Mann zwischen Fenster und Spiegel (1929), illustrates and records in a lyrical register the Bukovinian poet's journey from Expressionism to Neue Sachlichkeit. This article analyses the permanent balancing act between inside and outside, between inclusion and acceptance by the community and exile or ostracism, between corporeality and spirituality, also between reflection as mirroring and reflection as contemplation.

This article aims to present some aspects considered of interest about the literary history and criticism concerns which the linguist Alexandru Philippide exhibited in a few articles published during his youth period in “Convorbiri literare” and “Viața românească”, along with the Romanian scholar’s opinion about poetry.

Grounded on Columbian Héctor Abad Faciolince’s first novel, the paper at hand aims to shed revealing light on the core features of the aforesaid Post-Boom-adhering writer’s fictional paradigm, which make it possible to look on his writings as pointing forward to the so-called “Mutant Generation” [Mejía Rivera 1999]. Consequently, the present research takes it upon itself to highlight the literary influences, key themes and stylistic idiosyncracies of an innovative approach promoting recourse to long-established stylistic tenets through recycling the latter rather than discarding them altogether. The sui-generis relation permeating the book, that of individuals to their native culture, past, memory and roots draws in its wake a host of thought-provoking meta-historical reflections. Turning to good account pastiche and creative re-reading of canonical types of discourse, Héctor Abad Faciolince can best be viewed as a fervent advocate of a new type of anthropocentrism, as well as a bold trail-blazer of Postmodern Neoclassicism, which magnificently merges the latter with Neo-Baroque traits.

Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf is more than a schizophrenic novel, it can be considered a very long fairytale that presents the human path to self-knowledge and the passage to timelessness through the individuation process and archetypes. Hesse shows that the classic double is just a simplified myth, that the human being consists of a great variety of selves, not only of two. He is also bringing out the importance of playfulness as modus vivendi.

This is the fourth study in a series dedicated to analyzing the process of historicizing the horse in Native American cultures and it focuses on its representation in two stories: un untitled story told by the Diné and Ghost Stallion, recorded from the Yinnuwok. None of them is a creation story (in the sense of explaining how the first horse was created), but both fall into the category of stories that narrate how the historical legitimacy of the horse was constructed, following a recurrent pattern that first de-historicizes and then re-historicizes the horse. In this process, the structural identity of the horse, internal and external, is changed though an act of mythicization, which allows it to be logically enculturated in a tribe’s narrative.

Against the backdrop of the war launched by Russia in Ukraine, social networks have become a resonance chamber of the conflict on the ground, a huge theatre of imagological battle, where different versions of reality face each other in order to gain popularity among public opinion. Digital memes represent a highly visible phenomenon of contemporary digital culture and could not escape the mobilization process triggered by the war in Ukraine.

2022, among other celebrations, marked 160 years since the birth of the Romanian ethnographer Elena Niculiță-Voronca and a century since the death of Romanian ethnographer Mihai Lupescu. The two researchers' activity is important both for understanding the historical, political and cultural context of the region and for understanding the evolution of Romanian ethnology as a whole. The current survey of the works of Elena Niculiță-Voronca and Mihai Lupescu needs to be transformed, due to the posthumous publication of some of their papers and the changing reception of their writings.

The article starts from the hypothesis that media consumers are more drawn to a deeper emotional response or connection to social stories that are geographically closer to them in contrast to similar stories that are placed farther away [Allan, 2005]. We used a focus group to test this theory and we approached a general subject that was reported on different occasions, in different states and continents. The study focuses on the subject of children in distress, being abandoned or separated by their families on state borders. Sample stories from the Ukrainian-Romanian borders, Mexico -United States borders and stories from the scenes that occurred in Afghanistan during the U. S. military retrieval from the country have been used. Photojournalistic images to showcase the stories have also been employed. The chosen events took place in recent past and produced strong visual content, photojournalistic images that really assist media consumers in visualizing and understanding the story.