Mapping literature. Edited by Balázs Imre, Ioana Bot, Adrian Tudurachi, Sanda Berce, Petronia Petrar, Erika Mihálycsa, Elena Pãcurar

• Editors’ Note, p. 5

• Frontières intérieures / Inner Borders, p. 7
Foreword. Inner Borders within “Small” Nations: A Proposal, p. 9

I.1. Hétérotopies : dislocation de la nation

Patrick Suter, Dans le tremblement de la frontière. Césaire : Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, p. 12

Abstract - Crossing the Inner Border in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal d’Aimé Césaire - Inner borders, assuming such a thing does exist, are not perceived in like manner by those they confront. While the triangular colonial trade allowed free passage to slave traffic, it drew impervious borders for Caribbean slaves, separated from Africa by a chasm and having no chance of tra­velling to Europe [Cf. Christopher L. Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle]. Borders are thus not the same for the colonizer and the colonized. During the 20th century, the situation changed, inasmuch as Aimé Césaire was appointed member of the French National Assembly, subsequent to having attended higher education institutes in Paris. The fact abides nonetheless that the border, the one separating in the Cahier… “the native land” from the space the author inhabits, entails a feat of imagination in order to be retraced to the point of a genuine reversal. Even though it is not exclusively geographic or political, it does mark the insular landscape and, furthermore, the interiority of the colonized. The current article aims at simultaneously revealing the importance of the border in the Cahier…, the manner of its crossing, and the consequences of this crossing when it comes to developing a novel imagery of the relationship between peoples.

Keywords - borders, Antilles, Césaire, Postcolonialism.

Adrian Tudurachi, La découverte de la province dans la littérature roumaine, p. 21

Abstract - Discovering the Province in Romanian Literature - The status of the province in the endeavor of establishing a „revolutionary” literature in the 19th century is ambiguous. On one hand, we are dealing with an indispensable component of the emerging literature. In the province there are the models of spoken language, the folklore treasure, the specific landscape, namely everything that represents the production material for the works of a culture without literary tradition. On the other hand, the peripheral arrangement, the plurality and diversity of the provinces involves a centrifugal dynamics and a tendency towards heterogeneity which are incompatible with the myth of national unity. Thus, in many “small” cultures the national ideal has imposed itself to the detriment of the province, sometimes involving an explicit anti-provincial policy. The article examines the sources of this tension by analyzing the Herderian project which legitimized the Romantic rediscovery of the province. It also proposes a reflection on the main consequences arising from the elimination of the province from the national project: the decoupling of literature from the resources of the spoken language. If the role of the province in an emerging literature is that of supporting the production of literary works, then the literary evolution should be reinterpreted given the fact that such a resource is suppressed for political reasons.

Keywords - province, nationalism, J.G. Herder, literature “factory”, the avant garde myth of the province.

Doris Mironescu, The Ruin as Milestone: Negociating National Identity in 19th and 21st century Romanian Literature, p. 33
Abstract - The Ruin as Milestone: Negociating National Identity in 19th and 21st century Romanian Literature - The ruin motif in literature is often the site of a fierce negotiation of identity, whereby a writer tries to recapture from the past an aspect of national character that seems lost or forgotten. But while internalizing collective anxiety, the writer also enacts his/her own anxiety towards death, personal loss or failure. In 19th century Romantic literature, and even more in countries like Romania (The Danubian Principalities) that were barely awakening to national statehood, the poetry of ruins was an important way to define and promote national character. But the real complexity of the motif was only reached by Mihai Eminescu, who in his ample poem Memento mori (1872) added to these a personal meditation on the failure of history, on poetry as ruin and on the individual soul. Almost 150 years later, the identity question has changed, but the anxiety towards the past is still there. The novelist Ioana Bradea writes, in her book Scotch (2010), about the devastated monuments of the Communist regime, abandoned plants and warehouses turned into vast graveyards of a past that people either want to forget, or desperately cling to. It is also a reflection on individual identity and the powers of literature in a time defined by belatedness: post-communism, post-industrialism, post-modernism.
Keywords - negotiation of identity, romanticism, poetry as ruin, postcommunism, postmodernism.

T. Szabó Levente, Negotiating the Borders of Hungarian National Literature: The Beginnings of the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum and the Rise of Hungarian Studies (Hungarologie), p. 47
Abstract - Negotiating the borders of Hungarian national literature:
the beginnings of the Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum and the rise of Hungarian studies (Hungarologie) - The beginning of the first international comparative literary journal, the Összehasonlító Iroda­lom­tör­ténelmi Lapok / Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, has hardly ever been investigated from the perspective of the Hungarian literary field, even though the founders of the review often emphasized their belonging to Hungarian literature. The article explores this lesser-known primary context of the journal, revealing the cultural and historical patterns behind the misunderstanding and repudiation of the new discipline. It presents the founding editors, Sámuel Brassai and Hugo von Meltzl / Meltzl Hugó as cultural mediators, negotiating the place of early comparative literary studies on the borderline between Hungarian national literature and the transnational literary-cultural flow. From this angle, the change of the Hungarian main title of the journal into the Latin one is interpreted as a decisive phase in this cultural-literary identification and negotiation.
Keywords - Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum / Összehasonlító Irodalomtörténelmi Lapok, history of reception, literary nationalism, modern literary professionalization, Hungarian studies.

Ayşe Saraçgil, La ricezione del canone europeo nel contesto turco, p.62
Abstract - The Reception of the European Canon in the Turkish Context - Considered as the pre-condition for participation in modernity, the Judaic-Christian bases of the European literary and cultural canon created many problems for the Ottomans. Their writers applied a “pragmatical” approach, because their interest was turned in the first place to the potentiality of European narrative genres to transmit to the readers the politics of change. They therefore tried to reform the Ottoman language; to import new narrative matrix and technics, to introduce a scientific approach to the context. The debate on the creation of a new literature, founded on the European model evolved within the political and ideological framework of turchism, which, beginning from the first decade of 1900s’ gave life to a national literature created around an idea of turchity as the foundation of the nation’s identity. In this context there emerged the problem of preserving the nation’s autenticity. Even if from different ideological postures, there prevailed the consideration of the necessity to move closer to Europe without losing the specific characteristics of the Turkish nation’s culture. During the first decades of the Turkish Republic the State took direct control of the construction of an authentic Turkish culture, fully integrated into a model of European modernity. This culture had to be grounded on the Greek and Latin heredity, which permitted the realisation of a Turkish humanism, capable of ensuring the resurgence of the nation.
Keywords - Ottoman Empire, Turkey, modern Turkish literature, Turkish nationalism, Turkish humanism.

Angelo Mitchievici, Nationalism as a Stylistics Issue in Interwar Romania, p. 77
Abstract - Nationalism as a stylistics issue in interwar Romania - I examine the association of nationalism with a concept of beauty in Romania by means of representations of ethnic stylistics, imagological and iconic frameworks circumscribed to an aesthetic-mythological repertoire both national and European in the context of emerging/coming up with some theories whose purpose is to validate the cultural profile of a certain identity complex. Firstly, I analyze those identity theories which embed the aesthetic imagery of nationalist rhetorics in the context of interpretative and discursive practices. The imagery mobilized by the identity constructs maintains a complicated connection not only with the different episthemes and theories currently on the market/used but also with art history, literary critics and aesthetics, which conveys a series of tropes, stylistics, a mythological property and cultural references. Along with ideological trends evolving to the extreme right in Romanian interwar policy, the stylistics of Romanian identity is validated by means of invoking a new aesthetics in the case of Emil Cioran, Mircea Vulcănescu, I.E. Torouþiu or Nichifor Crainic among the others. Their theories do not remained contained within the literary fields of interest, beeing recovered by a politicized market of ideas. I analyze the spontaneous or intentional affiliation of Romanian theorists and writers to the models of European ideas concerning the same issues of a national stylistics and the connection between ideology and aesthetics as well.
Keywords - Style, Nationalism, Identity, Ethnicity, Folklore

I.2. La guerre et le territoire : dislocation de vie, dislocation de poétique

Balázs Imre-József, Body, Love, Object: Frontiers for Romanian Surrealism, p. 90
Abstract - Body, Love, Object: Frontiers for Romanian Surrealism  - The group activity of the Romanian surrealists meant a re-invention of certain surrealist practices that the artists around André Breton promoted by the end of the 1930s. When the II World War destroyed the network of communication between surrealist artists from different countries, the Romanian group continued the surrealist experiments on its own. Their results were very well received by the Paris surrealist group when the links were reestablished around the 1947 international surrealist exhibition at Galerie Maeght. The paper analyses the surrealist discourse of the Bucharest group as a minor language usage, where some key concepts like body, love, object are reinterpreted in a way that they cannot be inserted into the value system of the emerging Romanian society in the late 1940s. Works by Gherasim Luca and his fellow group members explore territories that the dominant language does not integrate into the discourse of ’normality’.
Keywords - body, cultural mediation, love, minor, object, surrealism

Ana-Maria Stan, Biographies sociopolitiques et littéraires des avant-gardistes roumains pendant
la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, p. 99

Abstract - Socio-political and Literary Biographies of Romanian Vanguard Artists during WW2.
A Franco-Romanian Confrontation - This article compares the biographies as well as the political attitudes and literary achievements of Romanian avant-garde writers and artists during the troubles times of World War II, both in France and in their native Romania. This approach reveals the similarities and the differences between each individual experience, outlines how the networking, friendships and/or rivalries evolved and survived in a time of crisis. Looking at the involvement of avant-garde poets in antifascist activities, either by joining clandestine communist organizations or les Maquis, we can demonstrate the highly political character of this artistic movement, which for a longtime was analyzed by the Romanian specialists only from an aesthetic point.
Keywords - Romanian avant-garde, World War Two, political options, literature, communism

Antonio Patraş, E. Lovinescu’s Doctrinarian Crystallization. Before and After the First World War, p. 113
Abstract - E. Lovinescu’s Doctrinarian Crystallization. Before and After the First World War - The present essay endeavours to throw a glimpse into the genesis of Eugen Lovinescu’s train of thought, chiefly into those keynote critical ideas currently known amongst scholars as “modernism,” “synchronism,” “the mutation of aesthetical values” and so forth. Some of them apparently had already crystallized before the First World War and yet gained real ascendancy only in the inter-bellum period and only as a reverberation of the Liberal doctrine circumscribed by “Sburătorul” circle and by the modernist critic’s great synthesis, Istoriei civilizaþiei române moderne (The History of Modern Romanian Civilization). Therefore, a consistent part of our analysis focuses on Lovinescu’s paradoxical and, most of the times, wry definitions and understandings of “modernity” and “modernism.” They bespeak not only the critic’s attempt to find and neutralize, throughout convincing explanations, the real source of these contradictions—that is, the particular traits of Lovinescu’s own psychology and somehow “in-between” personality—, but also a similar process of relocation and neutralisation which can be traced in the Romanian society itself. Our psychological assumptions on both transitional society and its prominent figures led to a mirrored scheme: the theoretical and doctrinarian inconsistencies (a certain blending of Liberalism and Conservatism in Lovinescu’s own discourse on “the necessity of revisions”) cannot be perceived but as a system of communicating vessels which senses the deep social convulsions worked out after either World Wars.
Keywords - Modernity, Modernism, Tradition, Traditionalism, Liberalism, Conservatism, Theory of Revisions, Mutation of Aesthetic Values, Transition, In-between Personality

Eugenia Bîrlea, The Transylvanian Elite in the Great Romania and its Difficulties of Integration: The Case of O. Goga, p. 130
Abstract - The Transylvanian Elite in Greater Romania and its difficulties of integration.
The Case of O. Goga - This study focuses on the new political and social realities in Greater Romania and on the Transylvanian Romanian elite in its effort to integrate itself in the new country. The process of uniformising the institutions, the legislation and the political practices is confronted with the major changes which occurred after 1918, when the agrarian reform and the universal suffrage mutate the country’s political and social structure, compelling the old politicians to adapt themselves to the new realities. The case of the poet Octavian Goga, who got involved in politics by taking advantage of the immense moral capital he amassed during his activities in favor of the Union of Transylvania with Romania, reflects the difficulties encountered by the poet and the failure of his career, both artistic and political, in which he played exclusively the nationalism card.
Keywords - Transylvania, Greater Romania, elite, integration, nationalism, O. Goga

Nagy Zabán Márta, Competing Concepts of the Academic Freedom Within the Discourses Concerning the Inauguration of the Hungarian Royal University of Kolozsvár/Cluj, p.143
Abstract - Competing concepts of the academic freedom within the discourses concerning the inauguration of the Hungarian Royal University of Kolozsvár/Cluj - The problematic of academic freedom represents an important issue in the public education of the 19th century. Both the educational theory arguments and political arguments are put forward in the debates that formed around it. The study provides the contextual analysis of the writings of the corpus (acts, provisions, theoretical writings, debates, press material) regarding academic freedom, which represented the context of the launching of the Hungarian Royal University of Kolozsvár/Cluj, in 1872. It aims to interpret the sometimes very different meanings of academic freedom occurring in this discourse, as well as to define the role of theses meanings at the moment of the establishment of the university.
Keywords - academic freedom, Hungarian Royal University of Kolozsvár/Cluj, Faculty of Letters, professionalization, professorship, conceptual history

I.3. Le clandestin : dislocation de la politique

Rodica Ilie, An Anti-Canon of the Self-excluded Writers. Counter-discursive Forms of Romanian Prose, p. 154
Abstract - An Anti-Canon of the self-excluded writers. Counter-discursive forms of Romanian prose - In this research our aim is to pursue the Romanian case through the renovation of cultural codes by means of the voluntary action of engaging “inner frontiers,” considering this action as being relevant for unofficial literary practices, for both the phenomenon of salvation through culture during the communist regime—when literary experiments were a form of escapism from political censorship due to the euphemistic discourse, and also for the affirmation of an identitary cultural model which did not eliminate the dilemmas and controversies despite the assertion of the national-communist ethos of that time. We thereby propose the study of the canonical writers of the period from the perspective of the history of ideas thus aiming to show that the canonical selectivity can choose works by Romanian writers which have not only the merit of founding an anti-canon and an autochthonous ethos, but should also be valued in the dynamics of a European, cosmopolitan ethos. We shall try to go beyond the theoretical patterns that marked the literary expression of Romanian writers during the communist regime, as singular and symbolic actions defying political power. Our goal is to determine a literary meta-model of “Clandestinity” by drawing upon the paradoxical revolution of artistic codes (e.g. the contributions of Gellu Naum, Matei Călinescu, etc).
Keywords - Romanian prose, salvation through culture, “revolution” of the artistic codes, euphemistic discourse, symbolic actions in communism.

Oana Fotache, Margin Calls: Regimes of Exclusion in Contemporary Romanian Histories of Literature, p. 165
Abstract - Margin Calls: Regimes of Exclusion in Contemporary Romanian Histories of Literature - The genre of literary history—as theoretically impossible as it may be (according to David Perkins)—employs subjective decisions from the historian’s part that often remain implicit. This paper analyzes the criteria involved in selecting the significantly historical ‘facts’ out of the heterogeneous amount of literary phenomena that fall under the scope of literary history. The case studies include several contemporary Romanian histories of literature and attempt to answer a few questions: Are there any recurrent patterns in leaving aside certain literary categories/ forms that could be accounted for and explained through the logic of the literary field? In what ways these exclusions affect the configuration of the literary historical genre as such?
Keywords - literary geography, literary history, estrangement theory, aestheticism, selection criteria.

Magda Rădută, Aktionsgruppe Banat – l’enjeu canonique d’une littérature ‘minoritaire’, p. 175
Abstract - Aktionsgruppe Banat – canonical status of a ‘minority’ literature - The article proposes an overview of the German-Romanian literature in the 70s and 80s by analyzing the canonical functions of the anthology Moderate wind up to strong wind (Romanian translation 1982), collected poems of Aktionsgruppe Banat. We will consider a triple pers­pective, from the literary sociology to poetics and aesthetic reception: the analysis will consider the anthology as a collective work, as an experimental literary act, who wants to challenge the poetical language of the times (not only the official, ideological trends, but also the traditional poetics of the German-Romanian literature) and finally, as a translation who had a significant impact in Romanian culture: the German-Romanian poetics are recognized as one of the most influential for the last Romanian literary generation of the communist era, the 80s generation.
Keywords - Romanian literature under communism, German poets from Romania, literary canon, sociology of literature, generations.

Ioana Bot, De l’indicible et autres démons. Les mémoires de prison de Lena Constante, p. 187
Abstract - Of the unsayable and other demons. Lena Constante’s prison memoirs - Lena Constante was among the victims of the Stalinist show trials staged by the communist power in 1950 Romania. Released from prison after 12 years (8 of which she spent in solitary confinement), she was late in recounting her experiences there. She only did it at the end of the 80’s, on two occasions, first writing her memoirs in French and subsequently in Romanian. Our study focuses on the “literary” solutions of that double écriture, meant to record the horrors of the tortures she was subject to, of the prison, of the solitary confinement term. Along the (admittedly elusive) frontiers separating the human from the beast, the spiritual from the monstrous, Lena Constante’s experience is doubtlessly exemplary for the human perspective. It is furthermore exemplary as regards the ways of saying what appears to be unsayable. The rhetorics of confession, the autofiction, and the literary topoi help her transcend the frontier, however painful, between the suppression of the experience and its artistic expression.
Keywords - Lena Constante, prison memoirs, Romanian communism, autofiction, literarity.

Ionut Miloi, Drifting Between Worlds and Breaking the Mental Frontiers. Vişniec’s Rewriting of Kafka, p. 198
Abstract - Drifting Between Worlds and Breaking the Mental Frontiers. Vişniec’s rewriting of Kafka - In the last decades, limology, or border studies, successfully managed to raise a vast interest within the scientific community and argue, in a convincing manner, its own relevance. Becoming a well calibrated seismograph, this interdisciplinary field of research preserves the memory of an almost Brownian motion in which frontiers—geopolitical, linguistic or cultural ones—get blurred and overlap. But crossing a border means more than just a passing beyond, it also requires an internalization of this process in which transcending the mental frontier represents the last redoubt that an individual has to overcome. On the strength of such a frontier can testify Matei Vişniec, a writer who although left Romania in 1987, will succeed only later to transform the geographical distance that separated him from the Iron Curtain into an inner detachment. By rewriting Kafka, who himself is positioned at the interstices of different spaces, histories, and languages, Vişniec initiates not only a transcultural dialogue, but also opens a space in which an identity can be negotiated.
Keywords - Matei Vişniec, Franz Kafka, rewriting, border studies

Gabriela Glăvan, Laughing Matters: the Cultural Dynamics of Political Jokes in Communist Romania, p. 204
Abstract - Laughing Matters: the Cultural Dynamics of Political Jokes in Communist Romania - Despite the lack of critical consensus regarding the social/cultural role of political jokes, a close investigation of their status in Romanian clandestine popular culture during communism can be a relevant initiative from many perspectives. A coherent approach of the subject must nevertheless target the complex network of cultural phenomena developed during the repressive communist regime while it should also aim at identifying the specific place of the genre of political jokes in this framework. Both as oral and written texts, the literature of political jokes can be regarded as an indicator of isolation from the official cultural canon, a means of “silent protest” and implicit subversion, a “weapon of the weak.” Published abroad before 1989, circulating underground as private texts in communist Romania, then printed freely early in the ‘90s, political jokes establish a particular type of literature in Romanian popular culture. The anonymous authors, their heroes and narrative structures draw on the vast domain of folklore, but their impact goes further than immediate comic relief. The present article tries to explore the anatomy and dynamics of this particular genre as a parallel system of thought and creation in Romanian communism from the vantage points of popular culture, literature and cultural history.
Keywords - Political jokes, humour, Communism, social protest, popular culture, subversion

Corina Boldeanu, Ironie sans frontières. L’Ironie comme frontière. La démocratisation de l’ironie dans l’après-guerre et l’expérience totalitaire, p. 218
Abstract - Irony without Borders. The Irony as a Border. Democratisation of Irony in the Afterwar Period and the Totalitarian Experience - Assuming the democratization of ironic technique due to the impact of the First World War on the collective consciousness, this paper aims to observe to what extent this assumption is legitimate in East European societies in the context of the totalitarian order settled here at the end of the Second World War. The approach focuses particularly on the case of Romanian literature—especially poetry—written during the communist period and attempts to emphasize, on the one hand, the transnational aspect of a « post-war irony » understood as a generalized reaction to a hostile environment (irony without borders) and to identify, on the other hand, the specific meanings of an irony viewed as a border discursive strategy in a particular national frame, where the ability to express and simultaneously hide sense marks a distance from the official literary field, but also a liberating dynamic of the writer and his work (irony as a border).
Keywords - Irony, Boundaries, Poetry, Communism, Geo Dumitrescu, Marin Sorescu, Ioanid Romanescu, Nicolae Prelipceanu, Dorin Tudoran

• Canon, Modernity and the Institution of Literature, p. 227
Preface. Canon, Modernity and the Institution of Literature, p. 229

Sanda Berce, Canonicity: A Hypothesis. Anticipating the Global. D. H. Lawrence in the Hue of the Century, p. 231
Abstract - Canonicity: A Hypothesis. Anticipating the Global. D. H. Lawrence in the Hue of the Century - An inquiry into the terminology about the process of canonization (canon-canonicity), as it presents itself in the critical-theoretical use, the paper questions two of the theses about canon formation and evaluative judgments considering that what is called canon formation is a problem of access to the “means of literary production and consumption” and that “evaluative judgments” are necessary, but not sufficient for the process of canon formation. It is also an analysis of the subtle change of sensibility that occurred in the English novel of the 1920’s (in D. H. Lawrence’s novel), as a remarkable effect of types of relations (or relationship) between modernity and canonicity—defined and understood as “historical crisis in literature.”
Keywords - canonicity, canon-formation, authenticity, literature as institution, reshuffling, centripetal construction, field of interaction.

Rareş Moldovan, Canon omnibus, P. 244
Abstract - Canon omnibus - The paper explores the dismantling of the problem of the literary canon in recent years, after the canon wars of the nineties, the resurfacing of replicating canon problems in specialized areas of “literature,” and the relevance of the canon issue in a literary landscape that no longer abides by the mechanics of canonic selection.
Keywords - literary theory, literary canon, canon wars, legitimation, modernity

Elena Păcurar, Literary Canon à Rebours, p. 249
Abstract - Literary Canon à Rebours. The Case of James Joyce - The paper aims at a theoretical revisitation of the literary canon, with a case study on James Joyce’s work, whose institutionalization and canonization were the result of both receptive strategies and publishing policies. The paper also discusses a sub-element of canonicity, namely influence, starting from Harold Bloom’s theories and ending with more recent criticism on the topic.
Keywords - canonicity, canon, influence, tradition, modernity

Erika Mihálycsa, Errorist Joyce, p. 260
Abstract - Errorist Joyce. Misrepresentation, Linguistic Misplacedness in Ulysses - The paper explores the strategies by which Joyce’s Ulysses co-opts chance and error (typographical, as well as resulting from mishearing and contextual misunderstanding), missed understanding as a structural principle, thereby creating a plural, dialogic text characterized by radical indeterminacy and lateral proliferation of meaning. The emphatic presence of linguistic mislays and misrepresentation, as a series of examples taken from ‘Proteus’ to ‘Oxen of the Sun’ demonstrate, is vital in Joyce’s shaping of a poetics of language which favours dislocution (Senn) over linguistic/stylistic norm, and in which the (postmodern) no-language of Finnegans Wake is pre-programmed.
Keywords - Joycean studies, textual criticism, indeterminacy, language poetics, linguistic misrepresentation

Petronia Petrar, Textual Memories: History, Tradition and Novelty in Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence, p. 269
Abstract - Textual Memories: History, Tradition and Novelty in Salman Rushdie’s
The Enchantress of Florence - Focusing mostly on Salman Rushdie’s 2008 The Enchantress of Florence, the paper explores the controversial relations between history and the idea of the present, suggested in the text through a reinterpretation of Western and Eastern canons; the novel’s intricate games with historical and geographical structures are taken to reveal a radical revision in the understanding of time-perception.
Keywords - time awareness, fictional temporality, anticipation of retrospection, excess, self-consciousness

Carmen-Veronica Borbely, Ex-orbiting the Canon: Neo-Gothic and the Contemporary Reassessment of Monstrosity, p. 278
Abstract - Ex-orbiting the Canon: Neo-Gothic and the Contemporary Reassessment of Monstrosity - This paper examines the Gothicism saturating the postmodern imaginary and the reinstantiation of the Gothic as a literary mode; it also outlines a genealogy of monstrous corporeality in contemporary British fiction, and, in particular, in Martin Amis’s Einstein’s Monsters (1987) and Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things (1992) with a view to answering the question whether Post-Gothic monstrosity maintains its capacity to incarnate a host of anxieties that demand abjection, or whether approaches to monstrosity have significantly altered towards embracing its promises as the future of humanity.
Keywords - Gothicism, the new Gothic, monstrosity, the posthuman condition, Martin Amis, Alasdair Gray.

Alina Preda, Literary Art versus Technological Performance: The Case of Jeanette Winterson, p. 287
Abstract - Literary Art versus Technological Performance: The Case of Jeanette Winterson
  - The advent of the personal computer and the ever more increasing use of the Internet have revolutionized the ways in which literature is written and read in contemporary society. My analysis dwells on the intricate relation between the technological boom and the evolution of the novel, as mirrored in the work of Jeanette Winterson. Her writings aim to show that the novel is not going to become a kind of second-order phenomenon in our highly technologized consumerist post-capitalist world because, through enchanting literary language, this particular literary genre can offer a compelling account of the conflictual dynamics of contemporary self-formation and self-representation.
Keywords - print fiction, modern technology, fragmentation, intertextuality, defamiliarization.

Adrian Radu, Northern Ireland and the Canonization of Conflict, p. 298
Abstract - Northern Ireland and the Canonization of Conflict - This article discusses a few instances of the committed literature of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and brings arguments in favour of the canonization of this kind of literature as being representative for this territory and specific period in its history.
Keywords - Troubles, sectarianism, Protestant, Unionist, Loyalist, Catholic, nationalist, republican, committed.

Roxana Mihele, The American Multiculturalism and the Western Canon, p. 310
Abstract - The American Multiculturalism and the Western Canon: A Study Case in Jewish American Literature - Among American cultural policies, multiculturalism is considered to be not only the latest and most fashionable trend, but also the most controversial one since it opposes the traditional canonical values of WASP America. In this battle of the “ancients” and the “moderns”, a particular case that defies clear-cut boundaries and exposes both the qualities and the limitations of these two paradigms is that represented by the Jewish American literature.
Keywords - multiculturalism, Jewish-American, canon, community of choice

• List of Authors, p. 316

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