Author: Admin

by Anca Peiu

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Specialized in literary studies of the Old South, Dr. Anca Peiu, an Associate Professor of the Department of English, within the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures of the University of Bucharest, Romania, is the author of a new book: FAULKNERIANA: Back to (and Beyond) Yoknapatawpha. This volume represents the outcome of her devoted research for over two decades. Anca Peiu has meanwhile also published three volumes of translations into Romanian from William Faulkner’s vast literary heritage. She has provided all these books with critical notes and well-documented introductory studies for Faulkner’s Romanian readers.

The book’s title may hint at E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Kreisleriana”, an evocation of a favorite romantic character in some fragmentary fiction – thus suggesting now a kaleidoscope of approaches to some particular aspects of the modern American writer’s inexhaustible works. Another possible echo detectable in the present title is Louisiana, the place where William Faulkner’s career as a novelist actually started, with a generous friend’s encouragement, while Faulkner was living in Pirates’ Alley, New Orleans.   

Anca Peiu’s book is written in English, addressing a larger audience. The “C. H. Beck” Publishing House in Bucharest has offered the best support for this volume, enriched with illustrations and cover design by Ion Aramă, a great graphic artist from Romania.

We may often fall prey to clichés about the masters of world literature. These clichés tend to obscure their actual messages. Many readers, whether scholars or just amateurs, may (think they) know enough about William Faulkner to place him into a thematic context and an absolute literary canon of the late 20^th century.

From an Eastern-European retrospective, Anca Peiu’s book aims at guiding such readers through a labyrinth of universally contemporary fields of significance. Not only fine witticisms, but also the most unsettling prophecies for our times can we find through Faulknerian lines.

These will trouble us today more than ever; from the mock-cynical echo of a rhetorical question in Faulkner’s Acceptance Speech of his Nobel Prize in 1950: “When will I be blown up?” to his ars poetica reasserted in an interview given to The Paris Review in 1956: “I imagine as long as people will continue to read novels, people will continue to write them, or vice versa; unless of course the pictorial magazines and comic strips finally atrophy man’s capacity to read, and literature really is on its way back to the picture writing in the Neanderthal cave.”

by Dragoș Manea

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Historical fantasy – a genre that blends historical reality with elements impossible in their historical periods, such as magic or preposterously advanced technology – affords us new ways of understanding the processes behind the constant remediation of cultural memory by accepting a narrative logic that overtly rejects the paradigm of historical verisimilitude.

In doing so, it allows for an imaginative engagement with the past that is open to radical transformation. Such profound alterations of historical events can also serve to interrogate the grand narratives often associated with them by revealing different, perhaps disturbing potentialities – what could have preferably happened and what has thankfully not.

by Diana Benea

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This book is an attempt to illuminate the ways in which Thomas Pynchon’s later novels – Vineland (1990), Mason & Dixon (1997), Against the Day (2006), Inherent Vice (2009), and Bleeding Edge (2013) – configure a vibrant political imagination, which marks a significant departure from the paranoid and entropic vision of his earlier (high postmodernist) works.

The more recent novels invite reflection on a series of issues invested with a significant ethical and political dimension, committing themselves to a vocabulary that foregrounds the values of community, social justice, relationality, and interdependence. By placing this corpus in conversation with influential works in contemporary (political) philosophy — in particular, late Foucault and late Derrida — this study argues that the subtle shift of sensibility at the heart of Pynchon’s later fiction is most visible in its re-envisioning of the relation of the self to the Other in more hospitable terms.

Reviewed by Scott McClintock for Orbit: A Journal of American Literature 7.1 (2019), Open Library of Humanities, UK. https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.1810

Reviewed by Ali Chetwynd, “Late Pynchon Theorized: A Review of Diana Benea, The Political Imagination of Thomas Pynchon’s Later Novels, and Sean Carswell, Occupy Pynchon: Politics after Gravity’s Rainbow.” American, British and Canadian Studies, Vol. 33 (2019): 233-243.

Ed. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru, Mădălina Nicolaescu, Helen Smith

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This book presents a broad spectrum of studies focusing on fiction, graphic narratives, photography, online forums and interviews.

The contributions engage with important aspects of women’s mobility and migration in the aftermath of communism. Thus the book covers untrodden ground in Eastern European studies, feminism and transnationalism, and is a highly welcome intervention in the field of transnational feminism.

The essays in this collection focus on a wide variety of fictional and non-fictional East European women’s migration narratives (by Dubravka Ugresi’c, Slavenka Drakuli’c, Vesna Goldsworthy, Iva Pekárková, Ioana Baetica Morpurgo and Marina Lewycka), multimodal narratives by migrant artists (Nina Bunjevac and Svetlana Boym) and cybernarratives (blogs and personal stories posted on forums). They negotiate the concept of narrative between conventional literary forms, digital discourses and the social sciences, and bring in new perspectives on strategies of representation, trauma, dislocation, and gender roles. They also claim a place for Eastern Europe on the map of transnational feminism.

Ed. Dana Mihăilescu, Roxana Oltean, Mihaela Precup

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This volume collects work by several European, North American, and Australian academics who are interested in examining the performance and transmission of post-traumatic memory in the contemporary United States. The contributors depart from the interpretation of trauma as a unique exceptional event that shatters all systems of representation, as seen in the writing of early trauma theorists like Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dominick LaCapra. Rather, the chapters in this collection are in conversation with more recent readings of trauma such as Michael Rothberg’s “multidirectional memory” (2009), the role of mediation and remediation in the dynamics of cultural memory (Astrid Erll, 2012; Aleida Assman, 2011), and Stef Craps’ focus on “postcolonial witnessing” and its cross-cultural dimension (2013).

The corpus of post-traumatic narratives under discussion includes fiction, diaries, memoirs, films, visual narratives, and oral testimonies. A complicated dialogue between various and sometimes conflicting narratives is thus generated and examined along four main lines in this volume: trauma in the context of “multidirectional memory”; the representation of trauma in autobiographical texts; the dynamic of public forms of national commemoration; and the problematic instantiation of 9/11 as a traumatic landmark.

by Dana Mihăilescu

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The compelling argument of Eastern European Jewish American Narratives, 1890–1930: Struggles for Recognition is that narratives of Eastern European Jewish Americans are important discourses offering a response to America’s norms of assimilation, rationalized progress, and control in the early twentieth century under the guise of commitment to the specificity of individual experiences. The book sheds light on how these texts suggest an alternative ethical agency which encompasses both mainstream and minority practices, and which capitalizes on the need of keeping alive individual responsibility and vulnerability as the only means to actually create a democratic culture. In that, this book opens up novel areas of inquiry and research for both the academic world and the social and cultural fields, facilitating the rediscovery of long-neglected Eastern European Jewish American writers and the rethinking of the more familiar authors addressed.

by Rodica Mihaila, Irina Grigorescu Pana

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The Sense of America: Histories into Text. A Collection of Essays – Rodica Mihăilă and Irina Grigorescu Pană