Tenderenda der Phantast: Ein Roman, der zum Theater des Geistes wird / Tenderenda the Fantast: A Novel that Becomes Theater of the Mind

Abstract: This article explores Hugo Ball’s novel Tenderenda der Phantast as an intermedial text, written between 1914 and 1920, in a period marked by the First World War, exile in Switzerland, and Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire and Galerie Dada. The novel embodies the essential components of a total artwork — text, music, dance, and painting — translated into language and recombined in an experimental structure. Fragmentary in form and hybrid in genre, Tenderenda consists of prose, hymns, sound poetry, dialogues, and stage-like directions, which together create a performative textuality. Through these devices, the work not only destabilises silent reading processes but also simulates a “theatre of the mind,” where the reader is invited to re-stage a synaesthetic performance.
Central motifs such as dance, musicality, grotesque imagery, and the leitmotif of death evoke the structure of a Totentanz. By examining its multimedia strategies and its tension between chaos and order, I argue that Ball’s text can be read as a literary Gesamtkunstwerk, which transforms language into a “magical complex image” and redefines the act of reading as an imaginative performance. In this way, Tenderenda reshapes perception and thought, pointing toward the possibility of cultural renewal and broader social transformation.

Keywords: Hugo Ball, Dada, Tenderenda der Phantast, Totentanz, Gesamtkunstwerk, multimediality, sound poetry, avant-garde.

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Ulysses as an Intertextual Performance: Figuration, Travesty, and the Staging of Text

Abstract: This article explores the figure of Ulysses as an intertextual performance rather than as a stable character or heroic archetype. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s and Tiphaine Samoyault’s theories of intertextuality, as well as Erika Fischer-Lichte’s concept of performance as a transformative, autopoietic event and Richard Schechner’s notion of restored behaviour, the study argues that Ulysses functions not as a subject but as a dynamic textual operator. This spectral, reactivable presence traverses literature as a mechanism of poetic and structural destabilisation. From Ulysses by James Joyce to Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric, the name of Ulysses is cited, fragmented, erased, or reconfigured through citation, travesty, repetition, and rhythmic transformation. Intertextuality is treated as a scenographic device—a performative space in which meaning is produced not by identity but by echo, rupture, and variation. In diasporic and postcolonial literatures, Ulysses becomes a spectral operator—no longer a returning hero, but a figural rhythm of loss and non-return. Ithaca is not a destination but a gap in the narrative field. Ulysses, as a performance of intertextuality, exemplifies a broader mode of literary existence: writing as affective deviation, as unfinished recurrence, and as poetic persistence in the absence of closure.

Keywords: fragmentation, intertextuality, performance, restored behaviour, spectrality.

Epifanii intertextuale în poezia lui Emil Botta / Intertextual Epiphanies in Emil Botta’s Poetry

Abstract: The aim of this study is to provide a succinct analysis of intertextuality as a method of creating literary works, both in form and meaning. Emil Botta’s poetry is deeply intertextual, because it extracts its substance from a vast network of cultural, mythological and literary motifs. This study will subject the text to a reception analysis. Meaning can be created in the text through dialogism and polyphony, but also through the act of reading. The theoretical support will have as its literary support the work of Emil Botta, starting from the first stage of his literary creation, with the volumes Întunecatul April [Dark April] and Pe-o gură de rai [At Heaven’s doorsill], and until the last stage of creation, with the volume Un dor fără sațiu [An Insatiable Longing]

Keywords: intertext, intertextuality, dialogism, discourse, dynamics of the text.

Ana Blandiana, Sertarul cu aplauze – poetica Döppelgängerului / Ana Blandiana’s The Applause Drawer – The Poetics of the Döppelgänger

Abstract: This research paper aims at mapping the context in which Ana Blandiana’s novel, Sertarul cu aplauze [The Applause Drawer], appeared and the connections between the above-mentioned book and the poetry volumes written by Ana Blandiana in the ‘80s. The novel fits in the category of unpublished literature of dissent, due to the fact that, in the late ‘80s, Ana Blandiana became a persona non grata for the communist regime and was banned from publishing. Her text envisions a layered dystopic world which mirrors the communist reality. At the same time, the imagery from the novel communicates with motives from the poetry volumes. These recurrent motives and images encompass a self-referential reality, self-sufficient and independent from the reality itself.

Keywords: Ana Blandiana, Sertarul cu aplauze, literatură română, literatură de sertar.

Verbalizarea ca act performativ. Lumea „la feminin” sau „libertatea trăită pe propria piele” în Omul de la fereastră de Alexandru Vlad / Verbalization as a Performative Act. The “Feminine” World or “Freedom Experienced Firsthand” in The Man at the Window by Alexandru Vlad

Abstract: After reconfiguring the world according to Adam’s vision, I now offer an analysis of Monica’s perspective, without which the map of individualities – shaped at the intersection of past and present, communism and democracy, oppression and freedom – would remain incomplete. Female memory does not preserve the nuances of an idyllic childhood, which, when filtered through a mystifying lens as in Adam’s case, contradicts the monstrosity of the system. Nor does it establish clear boundaries between communism and post-communism, because the past and present have become inextricably linked through a devastating process of entanglement. What we are discussing here is a present of being that no longer recovers the past as a life lesson or a memory of the future but instead relives the nightmare. It is burdened with frustration and resentment, rejecting the possibility of purification. In this insectarium-like world, various human “specimens” are pinned and analyzed with horror and grim detail. The epic dissolves into description, an accounting of individual obsessions and an examination of different mentalities under the magnifying glass. Human degradation is also viewed here as a progressive mechanism that does not cease with the fall of communism. The redefinition of identity becomes a painful exercise in (re)visualizing trauma, leading to suffering, an awareness of existential emptiness, an intuition of individual and collective “sin,” or the acceptance of false happiness as part of the new normal.

Keywords: Alexandru Vlad, communism, postcommunism, identity, female perspective.

Romanul lui Emilian Galaicu-Păun: dimensiunile ludice ale experimentului estetic / Emilian Galaicu-Păun’s Novel: The Playful Dimensions of the Aesthetic Experiment

Abstract: Establishing Emil Botta’s identity in a way that facilitates the reception of the self is a challenge, because a writer’s identity is a complex set of interrelated voices. With regard to the connection between the self and the other, it is important to observe how it is achieved and, above all, how it is received. The main means of conveying the distance between the self and its otherness is discourse. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the construction of the self’s identity through the different types of discourse that Emil Botta uses for both his personal and literary identity, such as journalistic, narrative, poetic, theatrical and ironic discourse. For the identity of the writer, we will refer to interviews given to the press at the time, and for the identity of the narrator, we will use the short story Un timp mai prielnic (A More Favourable Time) from the volume Trântorul (The Drifter).

Keywords: personal identity, narrative identity, self, other, discourse.