Summary

  1. CRITICISM FILE. TEXT, MEMORY, OBLIVION (I)
  2. EXEGESIS
  3. REVIEWS

B. Literature, Tome XVIII, No. 1, 2011

Die Magie des Erinnerns und Vergessens in Stefan Zweigs Buchmendel
Mirko Gemmel
Universität Berlin, Potsdam und Wuppertal

In Stefan Zweig's novella the story of the bookseller Mendel provides the basis for reflection upon the topic of memory and forgetting and thereby emphasizes the mnemonical dimension of literature. Buchmendel's phenomenal memory which is, however, restricted to bibliographic information refers to the connection between Jewish identity and Viennese coffee house culture in the period before the First World War. In its narrative treatment of the problem of the mutuality of remembering and forgetting, motives of literary, i.e. fictional libraries play a fundamental role. The actual knowledge space of the library, however, is transformed here into the café, moving concretely into the memory of Buchmendel while he is sitting at a table of one such coffee house. His identity is constituted by the fusion of the space of the café and his specific knowledge, which results in a heterotopia (Foucault) in which character, knowledge and function-laden space mutually shape one another. Buchmendel's expulsion from this heterotopia leads to a loss of his bibliographic knowledge as well as his memory, just as Buchmendel himself, and with him a whole time period, will be forgotten - to be retained solely through literature.

remembrance, forgetting, memory, Vienna, library
Le devoir de mémoire: Lettre à une petite fille, de Georges Hyvernaud
Sabine Pétillon et André Petitjean
Université de Franche Comté et Université de Metz

In 1945, Georges Hyvernaud publishes, in the review Espace, the Lettre à une petite fille. In that letter, he first wants to confide his life in the camp to his daughter, and the difficulties during the coming back to France. But this letter is above all a way not to forget his daily suffering and the projet to tell not only to his daughter but also to each of us, to memorise these events. In some very short unpublished notes, that he used to write at night, in the barn where the prisoners take shelter, Georges Hyvernaud makes a precise list of what should be written in this letter to a little girl: captivity, happiness to be alive, human condition. Very poignantly, these themes are expressed in a letter as a textual genre in which the author gives his testimony about truth, a letter that also has to be seen as a literary work. Our goal is to analyze precisely the transition from the notes to the letter, not only as a historical document but as a short literary piece. We will consider simultaneously the concept of project, the status of a short piece and of the sequence, mainly through the prism of textual linguistic typologies.

textual linguistique, style, war and memories, account, human condition
"La memoria xe come un fogheto" Le devoir de mÉmoire de Mario Rigoni Stern
Emira Gherib
University of Tunis El Manar

Mario Rigoni Stern (1921-2008), Italian contemporary writer, lived body and soul the Second World War. This traumatizing experience, which one never leaves unscathed, leads him to tell with the first person, during more than one half-century, what he lived with his comrades, and especially to pay homage to many of these same comrades who left their life on the front. The paradigm of the memory and the forgetting is thus central in the work of this author. Memory, this "small fire", according to him, that it is constantly necessary to revive for fear it does not go out, is its weapon against the forgetting. This article will thus endeavour to present how Rigoni Stern tells the war in spite of the great difficulties of this task, and will treat contents of its testimony.

Mario Rigoni Stern, memory, war, homage, inexpressible
Mnemotechnik und Archivpoetik: Victor Klemperers Tagebücher als Speichermedium des Alltags
Arvi Sepp
University of Antwerp and University College of Brussels

The main objective of this paper will be to analyze the mnemonic character and archival poetics of Victor Klemperer's Third Reich Diaries I Will Bear Witness (Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten). Klemperer's writings are conceived of as a medium of gathering and saving the most diverse information items from everyday life under National-Socialism. As such, the notes form the foundation of his language-critical study Lingua Tertii Imperii. In a next step, the paper will shed light on the archival function and meaning of the enormous amount of quotes in the diaries. Thereafter, under the key word 'Paper Soldiers', his interest in collecting and saving will be traced back to his childhood days. To conclude, Klemperer's notes will be interpreted as a 'profane space' (Boris Groys) of everyday life.

Victor Klemperer, National-Socialism, Diary, Archive, Everyday Life, Writing
La mémoire et l'acte créateur: le culte du souvenir chez Bibesco, Chateaubriand, Proust et Barrés
Simona-Veronica FERENT
Romanian independent researcher

When the work of memory is uttered in terms of vocation and symbolic debt to the past, the creative act opens towards a space within which to cultivate reminiscence means a ritual act carried out by a writer who becomes a poet of History. Princess Bibesco's writings give us the opportunity to revive the debate on the functioning and the meaning of this memorial temporality which supposes a return to the source and an owe to the dead. At this level of discussion, the discourse of the French-speaking writer betrays three major influences: the questioning regarding the work of memory as a main concern for Chateaubriand, Proust and Barrès.

M. Bibesco, memory, worship of memories, vocation, owe to the dead, funeral rites
Memory, Poetry and Tradition for T.S. Eliot and William Wordsworth
Zekiye Antakyalioglu
Gaziantep University, Turkey

T.S. Eliot, in his famous essay "Tradition and Individual Talent" overtly attacks the Romanticist understanding of poetry in England, which was defined by William Wordsworth as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquillity". What brings Eliot and Wordsworth together in this paper is their interests in memory as the main source of inspiration while creating art. Wordsworth's interest in personal memory made him an autobiographical poet constantly transforming his diaries into lyrical poems. Eliot, on the contrary, approaches to memory as collective memory, never considering himself outside the cultural continuum the product of which he is, and instead of the autobiographical tone he assumes a rather impersonal one in his poetry.

T.S. Eliot, William Wordsworth, private memory, collective memory, tradition, poetry
THE CRITICAL DISCOURSE BETWEEN MEMORY AND FORGETTING: STRUCTURES, IDEOLOGY AND THE AESTHETIC BET IN VIAŢA ROMÂNESCĂ – ANUL 1958
Nicoleta Ifrim
"Dunărea de Jos" University of Galaţi

During 1958, the articles published in Viaţa românească relate to a new literary canon which functions as a general rule for writing works. Now, the writers have to focus on specific themes and their works display specific narrative strategies in order to reflect the ideological content of the age. It functions as a way of translating ideology into textual canon, making text and writer to accept political constraints.

ideology, stereotype, theme, politically-oriented writing, literary canon
BETWEEN MEMORY AND HISTORY: "THE STORIES OF LIFE". THEORETICAL AND METHODICAL POINTS OF VIEW
Alina Crihană
"Dunărea de Jos" University of Galaţi

Double-rooted in the "self-biographic pact" (P. Lejeune) and the "history-centred" one (E. Simion), the life stories have always interfere with the socio-cultural background to which the authorial-narrator reflects his own identity narrative. By means of the "mise en intrigue" (P. Ricoeur) and the emotional dimension, both being linked to the authorial personal myth and those of the period, as well as to the reader's expectations, the life stories call for interdisciplinary analysis gathering various methods. Objects of study for different socio-humanistic disciplines (sociology, socio-psychology, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, phenomenology, philosophy of history etc.), the narratives implied by the biographic genres are ever more analysed by critics and literary historians through multiple-reading strategies (from the narrative one up to the reading aesthetics).

life stories, identity narratives, socio-cultural context, interdisciplinary perspective
Eric HENDRYCKS
Faculté Libre des Lettres et des Sciences Humaines de l'Institut Catholique de Toulouse
PEREC OU LA MÉMOIRE TROUÉE

It acts, starting from the autobiographical novel of Georges Perec entitled W or the memory of childhood, to better understand the importance of the cohabitation of the memory and the forgetting in the identity search carried out by the author. The developed axes of reflection clarify the following questions: How to reconcile the preliminary sentence "I have no childhood memories" with the autobiographical project?, What stagings, stylistics or others, the author does it use to say the memory or its absence? , Which roles play the system of encoding of letters and numbers, as well as onomastics perecquienne, in the work of the anamnesis?, Which place photography does it occupy in identity rebuilding work?

Perec, memory, forgetting, encoding, identity
Je(u), Pere(c)
Charlotte Werbe
University of Massachusetts Amherst

I propose that the autobiographical game throughout W ou le souvenir d'enfance, by Georges Perec, is symbolized by the disjunction of reality (the autobiography) and fiction (the allegory). These two elements converge and intertwine through the techniques of parataxis, metanarration, and false depictions. The ellipsis in the center of the text is representative of Perec himself. This intentional absence reveals Perec's story―the hole in his life, his emotional and physical lacuna. Several ruptures are revealed throughout W; the voluntary rupture of words and the explicit rupture demonstrated by the ellipsis. While W attacks language itself, memories, and recollections―W is a game; Perec manipulates his readers. Finally, I propose that Perec does not resolve his "search" or "quest" through W.

Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d'enfance, lacuna, memory, ellipsis, second world war, game, father, mother, loss, psychoanalysis
UNWILLENTLICHE ERINNERUNG ALS "AMABILIS INSANIA" IN ADOLF MUSCHGS DER ROTE RITTER UND EIKAN DU BIST SPÄT
Nadja MÜLLER
Heinrich-Heine-Universität in Düsseldorf

This paper argues for the importance of the description of processes of involuntary memory in the novels of the Swiss author Adolf Muschg, born in Zollikon, Switzerland in 1934, who taught German Language and Literature at the ETH Zurich from 1970 to 1999. Muschg's departure in his rewriting of Wolfram‟s Parzival (Der Rote Ritter, the red knight) and in the novel Eikan, du bist spät (Eikan, you are late) is a loss of the integrity of the contents of experience by processes of involuntary memory, which plays an equally important function in the work of Proust, Benjamin, and Beckett. The actors Parzivâl and Leuchter are able to recapture states of their forgotten life. In both novels, exactly those intellectually disturbing memory traces that arise unconsciously in the involuntary memory are capable of repossessing all the wealth of the personality which has been occluded by conscious memory. [WOLIN 1994: 229] The adventitious encounter with certain constellations (Benjamin calls them "Aura") initiates the chain reaction of spontaneous reminiscences of Parzivâl (The red knight) and Leuchter (Eikan, your are late).

Muschg, involuntary memory, Benjamin, Proust, Beckett
Siegfried Lenz' Schweigeminute
Constanze Fiebach
Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf
"Die Sprache hat es unmissverständlich bedeutet, daß das Gedächtnis nicht ein Instrument für die Erkundung des Vergangenen ist, vielmehr das Medium. Es ist das Medium des Erlebten wie das Erdreich das Medium ist, in dem die alten Städte verschüttet liegen."
[BENJAMIN, 1981:400]

How does the juvenile protagonist Christian handle the sudden death of his English teacher Stella, who was his beloved contemporaneously? Which role does memory play for him? Does he remember Stella to keep her alive in his mind or to find closure? The different functions and structures of memory expressed in diverse manners by Siegfried Lenz, are analysed in this article.

memory, Siegfried Lenz, a minute's silence
Realism versus Experimentalism. Form and Personal Memory in The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson and Holiday by Stanley Middleton
Marta Lupa
Independent scholar

In this paper, I will discuss the representation of personal memory in two novels, The Unfortunates by B.S. Johnson and Holiday by Stanley Middleton, and try to answer two questions. First, which narrative mode, experimentalism or realism, is more successful in representing the memory process. Second, whether the clear distinction between these two narrative conventions is still possible. I will base this debate on three aspects of personal memory, namely, its metaphors, paradoxical character and the undermined existence of embodiment in the memory process.

memory, realism, experimentalism, embodied memory, mediated memory
Schreiben gegen das Verstreichen der Zeit. Zu den poetologischen Standpunkten und Aussagen in den Essays von Günter Grass
Ioana-Andreea Diaconu
"Transilvania" University of Braşov

Günter Grass has accompanied his artistic creations - fiction, graphics and sculpture – by essays, speeches, letters and interviews, describing the interdependence between artists and their art and the socio-political reality. Here belongs for instance the connection of literature to history, because the global historical picture is completed by the literary depiction of the particular histories of individuals, without which a thorough representation of past times would be impossible. The present article looks into Grass´ poetological points of view on the subject of history and remembering on which the author has written some important essays.

remembering, history, image of the past
Écrire "l'oublieuse mémoire"
Lucienne Serrano
L'université de la ville de New York

Both texts analyzed in this article are a quest toward memory in order to reclaim and decipher the inner self. But memory is not remembrance; it is the metaphor that frames oblivion, that which has not been revealed yet through words. At the origin of oblivion remains the wound that Marie Cardinal and Hélène Cixous want to become fertile. A semio-narrative approach combining the Freudian drives theory with language allows analyzing the text in a multiplicity of vectors, which do not attempt to signify but rather reach "signifiance". Writing becomes the quest toward a sense the writer doesn't know inhabits her and through which she will be reborn.

text, analyse, solipsism, way of memory, significance, symbol, reality, space of transition
La chute dans le Temps. Entre l'amnésie et l'anamnèse. Une analyse myhtocritique de la temporalité dans les fictions de Mircea Eliade et Michel Tournier
Daniela Mirea
Military Technical Academy, Romania

Literature rooted in myth, the prose of the two writers is structured around the downfall-redemption axis. In their view, the adamic fall means living in Time. Approached from the angle of primordial authenticity, existing in time is practically an ontological non-entity, which means that historical existence is devoid of the authentic, profound and plenary dimension of the paradisiacal beginnings of humanity, any sacred reference being eliminated. Oblivion, amnesia, slumber, rootlessness are parameters of this desacralised world that is nevertheless offered a chance to redemption through the initiatic regaining of adamic memory.

time, downfall, oblivion, amnesia, rootlessness, slumber, arts, initiation, anamnesis, redemption
TEXTUAL MEMORY AND VIRTUAL MEMORY
Daniela Petroşel
Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava

The paper focuses on chronological patterns in Romanian cyberfiction, Derapaj, by Ion Manolescu. Time-space compression, an accelerated recontextualization or archive fever are some of the novel' tensed time features. The dissolution of the subject as the owner of a well known set of memories is accompanied by a serious meditation on nowadays Romania. The literary imaginary of the novel combines signs of a concentrationary space with postmodern theories about virtual realities, mind and memory control, or about computers shaping collective and personal histories and identities.

derapaj, cyberfiction, memory, present
MIRCEA ELIADE: THE PATH OF THE UNIVERSAL MAN AND THE REVELATION OF THE MEANING OF LIFE
Ana Maria BUNDUC (FOMIN)
Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava

This paper aims at exploring Mircea Eliade's creative hermeneutics applied to his own existence in his continuous attempt to articulate the basis of an anthropological philosophy structured on archetypal models. This endeavour allows for the configuration of universal man's way and attitude to life, which the writer himself seems to have experienced while continuously cultivating that structure of consciousness that would be open to the revelation of man's cosmization.

universal man, creative hermeneutics, coincidentia oppositorum, memory
La Leçon de Ionesco – satire hilarante de l'enseignement
Aurel BǍRBÎNŢǍ
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca

Ionesco's attempt throughout his theatrical works is that of vindicating the spoken word and thus of overcoming the tragedy of language. The failure of language is obvious both in The Bald Soprano and in The Lesson: the characters do not communicate with each other or they encounter real communication difficulties, since they have nothing to say, thus living with painful intensity a monstruous event which manifests itself within the discourse, practically witin its lack of meaning.The Lesson is but a pretext, the play deals with the problem of language, the tragedy of language which loses its essential function: that of communication.

absurd theatre, language, communication, incommunication, lesson
UNE MÉMOIRE GRAVÉE DANS LE BÉTON, PARCOURS ENTRE LES STÈLES DU MÉMORIAL AUX JUIFS ASSASSINÉS D'EUROPE DE PETER EISENMAN
Claudie Massicotte
University of Western Ontario, Canada

Architecture theorists have recently sought to understand the importance of urban constructions in the constitution of memory with regards to the remembrance of a traumatic past. Through the study of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe by Peter Eisenman, this article attempts to demonstrate how contemporary architecture can broaden their perspectives. By opening a dialogue between Eisenman's Memorial and a corpus of theoretical works from the writings of Maurice Halbwachs to those of Pierre Nora and James Young, the article asks: What kind of memory does architecture creates? How, in its attempt to represent the past, does architecture treat the categories of time and space in their relation to memory? And how does this treatment differ from that of other mediums of representation?

Eisenman, Peter, architecture, narration, memory, trauma
LA DIMENSION AUTOFICTIVE DU ROMAN CATHERINE PARIS DE MARTHE BIBESCO
Cristina-Maria Obreja
Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava
La vie n'est pas ce que l'on a vécu, mais ce dont on se souvient et comment on s'en souvient.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The work of Princess Bibesco is vast, with great variety not only regarding the thematics, but the literary genres she chooses in order to convey her most intimate thoughts to the readers, as well. In all of her creations, we can easily recognize persons who were part of the writer's world, or events in which the writer took part. The same thing happens in Catherine-Paris novel, which tells the story of the childhood, adolescence and the adult period of the eponym character, who is somewhat given the same identity as Princess Bibesco, borrowing even the place and date of birth of the writer. Catherine-Paris is best characterized by the coexistence of two trades which are specific to auto-fiction through the writing style adopted by the writer, which implies at the same time revealing to the readers events regarding the private life of the writer, and maintaining a certain distance between the writer and the character who represents her.

auto-fiction, Princess Bibesco, Catherine-Paris, writer, character
Eugénie Grandet entre l'original français et ses versions de traduction roumaines
Dana-Mihaela Bereholschi
Theoretical High School "Ion Luca" in Vatra Dornei, Romania

The article represents a comparative analysis of the Balzacian novel Eugenie Grandet and its translation versions into the Romanian language. Our research is based on the analysis of four translation versions into the Romanian language, related to the original in the French language: the version of Marius from 1896, the version of Vera Leonard from 1939, that of Cezar Petrescu, included in the critical edition of the human Comedy, which appeared in the Univers publishing house in 1986 under the coordination of Angela Ion and also the version of Mioara Izverna from 2006. The chosen fragment occupies a veritable strategic place in the text, which allowed us to observe the different ways to translate, to identify various translation procedures, but also the "sins" sometimes committed in the process of translation.

adaptation, translation, translator, translation unit, translation version
In der Freiheit schreiben. Autorintention und Lesererwartungen nach der Wende 1989 unter Berücksichtigung des Bandes Amsel – schwarzer Vogel von Carmen Elisabeth Puchianu
Delia Cotârlea
Transilvania University of Brasov

The present paper deals with the relationship between the author and the reader after 1989. The analysis focuses on aspects of changing in value and thought patterns after the Romanian revolution and how this changing affects the literary field. The research applies theoretical aspects on the novel of Carmen Puchianu "Amsel – schwarzer Vogel" that brought about much controversy.

author-reader-relationship, changing of value and thought pattern, the literary field after 1989
MEMORY, LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY IN RICHARD RODRIGUEZ'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Diana ŞTIULIUC
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iaşi

As a Chicano in the United States of America, Richard Rodriguez oscillates permanently between two opposite worlds: the traditional Mexican family and the public space of the American society. This article aims at showing how memory and language knit in Rodriguez's autobiography in order to articulate the mestizo consciousness of an inter-American identity. Moreover, Rodriguez's memory of himself is correlated with the Chicano collective memory of immigration and its particular history of the borderland.

memory, language, identity, Chicano autobiography, private vs. public
Taxinomie des espaces: les lieux dévoreurs de l'Ogre
Florina-Liliana Mihalovici
Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava

The ogre fascinates by his ambiguous nature, as a story character, it is attached to the mythology, therefore, to a very distant reality and fiction at the same time. Nowadays, the ogre turns into the metaphor of reality itself. It is used to give a name to atrocious acts that happen in this era called modern times. From the savage escaping his thick forest, the ogre evolves into a monster that is hiding behind the mask of an intellectual who can be easily discovered at a manager's, professor's, doctor's desk. Mythical tradition demands that the ogre lock his victims in a castle or fortress. The purpose of the article Les lieux dévoreurs de l'ogre is to classify the areas in which the ogre appears in a selection of novels belonging to French and Francophone literature. Starting from the dichotomy indoors / outdoors, the spaces in which the ogre intervenes become ogresques and their representation invests the literary space with new ideological values.

Tournier, Chessex, Hébert, Devi, ogre
THE CZECH INTERPRETATION OF MIHAIL SADOVEANU UNDER THE SIGN OF TOTALITARIANISM
Gabriel MAREŞ
Press and cultural attaché of the Romanian Embassy in Prague

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary, in 2011, of Mihail Sadoveanu's death, this article represents the first approach of the way the novelist was perceived by the Czech cultural milieu during the communism. Sadoveanu is one of the Romanian authors most translated into Czech in these four decades. However, the rate of the reception of his works is oscillating. Also, the intensity of the ideological interferences depends on the evolutions on the political totalitarian stage. While in the first ten years the focus was on Sadoveanu's biography, more precisely on his connections to the new regime, the emphasis switches afterwards to his literary works. The de-ideologization of literary reception achieved through the Velvet Revolution is nevertheless accompanied by a dramatic slowing down of the rhythm in which the author is translated and presented to the Czech public.

literary reception, M. Sadoveanu, Czech milieu, communism, ideological element
Mémoires en rétention et ruptures identitaires: Une approche socio-historique du film «Politiki Kouzina»
Michel Calapodis
Université "Paul Valéry" Montpellier III

If the Greek film Politiki Kouzina (A touch of Spice) is considered as one of the most renowned Greek movies of all time, it is due in large part to its historically accurate depiction of the tragedy of Constantinople Greeks forced into exile during the 50's and 60's. However, the major significance of this movie lies in the narrowing of Hellenism, thus reduced to the frontiers of the Modern Greek state. The long-term socialization pattern of these Greeks (Byzantine and Ottoman Empire) reveals the Orthodox religion and the Greek language as critical vectors, more temporal than spatial. Consequently, these Greeks, once established in Athens, were bound to elaborate their own remembering space in order to maintain their identity-ipseity (oneself as another). Two kinds of collective memory are thereby involved: first, a mimetic memory where action, reminding and recognizing become one; memory-habitus which is inferred, throughout the movie, from culinary ritual and emotionally charged spices. At the same time, enclosed in its new anchoring Athenian space, the Constantinopolitan memory is subject to reappraisal. Here again, their oriental gastronomic repertoire will let them to preserve a collective feeling of continuity and to face their otherness position.

memory, memory paradigm, reminiscing, Hellenism, Community, Nation, representations, gastronomy
I.L. CARAGIALE. MATTER AND MEANING (ANALITICAL PERSPECTIVE)
Mircea A. DIACONU
Stefan cel Mare University of Suceava

Part of a wider research project of interpreting Caragiale's works, the present paper aims at proving and illustrating the fascination of I.L. Caragiale not only with the material nature of the world, with the surface of the real, but also with its "Archeus". The ontological crisis is revealed by the fact that the 'real' becomes in the end the degraded image of the thing itself. Nonetheless, this epicurean writer identifies an embodied musicality in the matter's absence of transcendentness and lack of meaning.

I.L. Caragiale, Archeus, ontology, the thing itself, kitsch