Volume XXX (2025), no. 2

In the early modern period, book ownership was not very common. Books came to their owners in various ways, most educated people owned only one or two books. In the present study, we deal with books owned by humanists originating from the territory of present-day Slovakia, but who lived and worked in Bohemia and Moravia for a long time. These were both book calendars and books in which their owners kept a diary (owners J. Tesák Mošovský, O. Thuri and M. Monkovicenus). The larger group consisted of owners of one or two books, mostly related to their profession, interests, or political orientation (M. Plorantius, S. Omasta, J. Bastner etc.). Although we assume that these individuals also owned a larger book collection, we do not know about their books. So far, we know of only two humanists from the studied group who owned a larger library (E. Berger and S. Rochotius).

Full Text

My paper aims to provide an overview of how Sulina was depicted in Romanian literature. Starting with its geographical location, which provided a basis for its hybridity, and ending with its multicultural milieu and history of piracy, Sulina has been predominantly portrayed as an exotic Other. Another recurring representation of Sulina, also deriving from its geographical position - that of being the terminal point of the Danube - is that of the confluence between two related, yet different manifestations of water: the Danube and the Black Sea. Represented as the clash of two powerful entities in Alexandru Vlahuţă's România pitorească and Alexandru Macedonski's Cartea de aur, this meeting of the two titans is portrayed more realistically and professionally in Jean Bart's Europolis, the most detailed fresco of Sulina's golden era.

Full Text

This study offers an anthropological approach to a celebration of Romanian identity: the Universal Day of the Romanian Blouse. Initially launched as an online initiative in 2013 and rapidly embraced by a wide community of Romanians both at home and abroad, the celebration was later officially recognized by law in 2022. The analysis demonstrates that this phenomenon emerged from a complex constellation of factors, the most significant being the search for identity in a globalized world and the viral dissemination of online content carrying symbolic and identity-driven meanings, both specific to contemporary digital culture. Within a global context marked by cultural homogenization, nostalgia operates as a psychological force of reconnection to one’s roots, transforming the past into a usable cultural resource and providing coherence to the present through the rewriting of tradition. The Romanian blouse becomes a transnational marker of identity, projected into the global sphere through image circulation and the affective participation of digital communities. The phenomenon analysed illustrates the capacity of digital culture to generate new forms of continuity through the intersection of memory, technology, and emotion.

Full Text

This study investigates the literary representations of intimacy and the body in the modern Romanian novel, with a particular focus on works by female authors affiliated with the Sburătorul literary group. Drawing on theories by Virginia Woolf, Pierre Bourdieu, Simone de Beauvoir, and Judith Butler, the article examines how corporeality is constructed and contested within narrative discourse. Through analyses of novels by Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu, Ioana Postelnicu, Cella Serghi, and others, it reveals how intimacy becomes a means of articulating female subjectivity and resisting patriarchal norms.

Full Text

Considered by literary history to be the dominant figure of modern Japanese literature, Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) is the most influential writer of the Meiji era, an era whose oscillation between tradition and modernity he reflects in his texts, imbued with moral scepticism and a lucid critical attitude toward the thought of his time. Starting from the novel Wagahai wa neko de aru 吾輩は猫である, as well as from Natsume Sōseki’s theoretical writings on literature, I will analyse the ambiguous relationship between modernity and tradition as it is reflected in the discussions about literature in the novel. Thus, by using the logical method of argumentum ad absurdum (reductio ad absurdum), the writer shows, in an ironic key, why “haiku theatre,” a hybrid genre created in the spirit of the so-called modernisation of literature, makes no poetic sense. In fact, Buddhist thought was also no stranger to the use of this method in demonstrating that theories of substance and essence, once the logic of their own principles is followed through, prove to be unfounded and absurd.

Full Text

This study explores the intellectual confrontation between Milan Kundera and Joseph Brodsky, focusing on their divergent interpretations of Dostoevsky and the Russian cultural identity. Framed within the ideological contexts of Pan-Slavism and Slavophilia, the analysis reveals deeper tensions concerning European identity, geopolitical discourse, and the role of literature in post-war ideological conflict. While Kundera critiques Russian sentimentalism and its links to authoritarianism, Brodsky defends Russian literature’s complexity and universality. The article underscores literature’s power as a symbolic arena for negotiating identity and cultural memory in a divided Europe.

Full Text

This article explores how conceptual traces of humoral theory, particularly those linked to yellow bile and the choleric temperament, persist in contemporary Romanian idioms. Through an analysis of idioms linked to yellow bile, the present paper seeks to understand how cognitive metaphors of rage, spite, and envy – emotions long tethered to the choleric temperament – preserve a worldview in which bodily fluids once explained emotion and behaviour. The expression of such emotional dispositions as a boiling liquid, as excess and pressure, reveals not only the metaphorical architecture of emotion but also the lingering presence of premodern medical models in everyday language. The analysis is grounded in Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), Cultural Linguistics (CL), and Conventional Figurative Language Theory (CFLT), and is extended through Cultural Residue Theory (CRT), which frames idioms as linguistic fossils of cultural knowledge embedded in speech. The paper highlights how language, embodiment, and cultural memory intersect in the persistence of these expressions and proposes future research into idioms tied to the other humours and across Romance languages, where shared conceptual patterns may reveal further residues of humoral thought.

Full Text

This essay explores the theoretical foundations of multilingualism and the transcending of cultural and linguistic boundaries in contemporary drama and theatre. Drawing on Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of altermodernism—defined as the ongoing reconfiguration of modernity in a globalized context through movement across time, space, and medium—it examines how theatre navigates issues of translation, identity, and intercultural dialogue. Arguing for a cross-cultural, dialogical approach, the essay proposes that contemporary theatre can embody a cosmopolitan ethos and embrace otherness, fostering equality among artistic languages. In this context, theatre enhances its translatability without compromising its distinctive aesthetic and cultural identity.

Full Text

This paper investigates Martin Buber’s appraisal of Heraclitus’ thinking. The main aim of this paper is to discuss the relation between cosmos and logos in the thought of the two philosophers, and to propose a Buberian informed alternative account to this relation which may be called “dialogical dwelling”. The idea of dialogical dwelling is a direct consequence of Buber’s theory of the essential We, in which the members of the community accept and confirm each other, thanks to a sort of reciprocal hospitality. As I will argue, Buber’s theory of the essential We has been heavily influenced by the Heraclitean relation between cosmos and logos. My contribution might throw light on this particular manner of inhabiting the world together, under the heading of dialogical dwelling. The key relation between cosmos and logos rests solely on what Buber has called interhuman cooperation. Nonetheless, I will draw on phenomenological and hermeneutical sources to describe how this dialogical dwelling becomes operative in the case of the essential We.

Full Text

Full Text

Full Text