Volume XXI (2016), no. 1

IDEAS • BOOKS • SOCIETY • READINGS

Contents

Studies

Péter KŐSZEGHY
Institution:
Institute of Literary Studies, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest
Email:
koszeghy.peter@btk.mta.hu
Abstract

Certain researchers think that the poem Balassa János éneke sólymocskájárul (Song of János Balassa on His Falconet) was written in the 16th century, while others – including the author of this paper – reckon it was penned down in the first half of the 17th century. The mood and style of the poem differ greatly from its surviving contemporaries; it uses a picto-language imbued with unique sexual allusions. Also, it cannot be categorized as popular (rogue) or aristocratic in register – such notions are of no use here. It is something completely different: this picto-language was used by the lexicon of the Old Testament (cf. motto), that of sexual mysticism, commedia dell’arte and the reversed world of carnivals (including numerous illustrations as marginalias in mediaeval codices), constituting a special supranational system of images and picto-language – however, in different, language-specific forms that survived in each folklore. Moreover, this code system is also used by prolific Renaissance painters, authors of high literature and a good many examples can be found in 15th-16th century Italian painting and literature as well. Thus, the author of the analysed poem – almost surely not Gáspár Madách – chose a road often travelled: the eyes, fluids (eggs), the falcon (birds in general), the aperture, the hare: all sexual references, a grotesque piece of art paraphrasing a biblical text in the Marcolphusian way. It covers János Balassa with ridicule and its poem-language is the usual allusion system of the 16th and 17th centuries, based on mediaeval prefigurations. These are not the clouded reveries of an old man but the frolicsome wishes of a man in his prime – and their mockery.

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Hajnalka ILYÉS B.
Institution:
István Báthory Secondary School, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
ilyes.hajnalka@gmail.com
Abstract

Based on the most recent information about the old books from Cluj, we are aware of a number of sixty-two almanacs printed in this town during the 17th century. Although the look and content of these almanacs did not change significantly during these years, almost each printer tried to include something new in order to facilitate a better selling of the product. The detailed presentation of the content of these books and the highlighting of the different changes that occurred in some of the almanacs printed in Cluj can provide new information about this genre.

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Amelia PRECUP
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Faculty of Letters
Email:
amelia.nan@gmail.com
Abstract

This paper explores the changes in the representation of the urban space in poems written during the long eighteenth century. After analysing and comparing poems written in the last decades of the seventeenth century with poems by eighteenth-century authors, the contention of this paper is that there was a clear movement away from idealization and mystified representations, which often served political agendas, and towards quotidian and familiar versions of urban experience, which would comment on urban mores and social values. This shift was mainly caused by the dissolution of the traditional system of patronage and is attuned to the period’s dominant literary tendency of favouring daily life and the presumption of plausibility over abstract descriptions and idealised projections.

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Péter BÉNYEI
Institution:
Insitute of Hungarian Cultural and Literary Studies, University of Debrecen
Email:
benyei.peter@arts.unideb.hu
Abstract

The interplay of literature and psychology, the cross-section of these areas opens up vast possibilities for literary studies, but, at the same time, they cause just as many dilemmas: the reader enters an uncertain terrain when s/he endeavours to lay down the foundations for his/her reading at the cross-sections of the two disciplines. This paper sets out to answer a number of strategically posed questions: in what kind of conceptual discourse can we interpret the psychological representations of literary texts? What are at stake at such interpretations? Another aim of this investigation is to find a conceptual and discursive structure in which the novels of Mór Jókai can be analyzed within the framework of psychological criticism.

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Ștefan BOLEA
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Faculty of Letters
Email:
stefan.bolea@gmail.com
Abstract

The Jungian conflict between the persona (“the mask of the soul”) and the shadow (a sort of “counter-persona”) is, from a philosophical perspective, akin to the dialectic between appearance and essence or, in a more existential fashion, similar to the difference between falseness and authenticity. Starting from a suggestion made by V. Dem. Zamfirescu, we will compare C. G. Jung's persona with J. P. Sartre's bad faith and Martin Heidegger's das Man. If the persona were a mask mediating between the Ego and the external world, the shadow would be an interface between the Self and the Ego. Remembering that Nietzsche (not only S. Freud and A. Schopenhauer) deeply influenced Jung in the constitution of the shadow, we will evaluate it in comparison with one of the key terms of Nietzschean nihilism, the last human being.

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Zsuzsa SELYEM
Institution:
Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca
Email:
selyemzsuzsa@lett.ubbcluj.ro
Abstract

Imre Kertész wrote in one of his novels, Fiasco, that what he has always tried is to transform his eternal state of object into a state of person. Starting from the problem of personality, my research in Imre Kertész’s oeuvre (novels, essays, and diaries) is led by the following questions: What is the role of writing in order to gain one’s freedom, to transform an initial state of being an object into a state of being a person? What is the role of creating fiction in the representation of the personal experience? How can death be the gesture of maintaining the world? (B.’s suicide in Liquidation) How can withdrawal serve as a creative force? How can one ethically interpret the tension between the responsibility of remembrance and the possibility of love?

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Rajkumar SINGH
Institution:
Professor & Head, P.G. Dept. of Pol. Sc., B.N.M.U., West Campus, P.G. Centre, Bihar (India)
Email:
rajkumarsinghpg@yahoo.com
Abstract

The growth of literacy from 12% at the end of British rule to 75% in the census of 2011 the country has registered a greater than six-fold improvement but with current rate it would take until 2060 to achieve universal literacy. The Government of India along with states executed successful programmes to boost literacy rate, it needs deliberate steps to engage the various communities/agencies to succeed effectively with purpose. In globalisation the bright prospect of literacy demands policy intervention required for accelerating the expected results in sphere of literacy.

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Robert CINCU
Institution:
Babeș-Bolyai University, Faculty of Letters
Email:
robertcincu@yahoo.com
Abstract

The paper analyses the evolution of Romanian theories concerning the concept of postmodernism, from the first (enthusiastic) contributions of the 1980s to the recent sceptical views. The case of Gheorghe Crăciun is very relevant in this respect, given the fact that he is considered one of the most important Romanian theorists of postmodernism and his articles (mainly those dating from 2006) describe multiple “vitiated” aspects regarding this cultural paradigm. My aim is to give a critical analysis of these texts and also to place them in the larger context of Romanian theories on postmodernism.

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Smaranda Maria TODORAN
Institution:
Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism
Email:
arh.smaranda.todoran@gmail.com
Abstract

The post-modern disappointment with modern utopia, with the megalopolis as its preferred example, represents the general context of the present study. More particularly, in the context of contemporary re-evaluations of modernity, the paper tries to see whether holding to the validity of the modern paradigm, in respect to the scientific model, may still create space for contemporary utopia. In the realm of architecture, such texts do exist, but a framework of analysis is needed in order to make their evaluation. Addressing the intrinsic relation between myth and utopia, under its various forms (rural – city, nature – culture, domus – megalopolis), the paper borrows from science-fiction criticism considerations on such discourses and proposes a possible set of criteria for their analysis.

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Book reviews

István KIRÁLY V.
Reviewed by
Zsuzsanna Mariann LENGYEL
Email:
lengyelzsm@gmail.com
Abstract