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- Author or Editor: Monica Spiridon x
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Summary The focus of this essay is on ethnic stereotypes that emerge in particular areas of group identities, as ideological products articulated through collective representation. The fervid exchange of stereotypes between Western and Eastern Europe has its sources in specific contexts: the two distinct “Europes', historically divided by unstable borders and the purportedly peripheral status and socio-economic belatedness of the latter. Due to the frequent journeys of the Occidentals to the European “Far East', Western stereotypes have been set swiftly by widely circulated texts. The cultural stereotypes I am pointing to - crafted in Romania, a liminal area of Eastern Europe - should mostly be identified as a response to these. The polar stereotypes of the “Happy Good Savage' and the “Pitiful Westerner' represented as such in an insightful series of literary texts, have an interesting prehistory dating back to mid-nineteen century, when Romanian intellectuals educated in Western Europe started building a modern national identity. In their birthplace, these polar stereotypes have constantly been evaluated on rhetorical, ontological and moral grounds. My analysis of both fictitious and non-fictitious texts (novels, travelogues, essays) clearly follows and underlines these levels of stereotyping.
Résumé
Les propos suivants s’appliquent à démontrer que la construction des espaces discursives de la mémoire s’impose comme un vrai carrefour problématique où les approches les plus diverses des études culturelles se rejoignent et parfois se recoupent. D’après nous, ce tournant méthodologique relativement récent pourrait être pris pour le signe de départ d’une longue période de division du travail de représentation dans le domaine socioculturel. A cet égard, les études littéraires pourraient tirer pleinement profit des démarches de quelques avant-coureurs qui ont configuré ce qu l’on pourrait appeler une topologie et respectivement une tropologie de la mémoire culturelle. Par son biais herméneutique et rhétorique, ce domaine qu’on se propose de circonscrire dans ce qui suit, parvient à faire le pont entre les approches réputées « intrinsèques »et respectivement « extrinsèques » du champ littéraire.
Abstract
My contribution draws on the tenuous retrospective assessment of Bakhtin’s theoretical legacy, consistent with a wide array of epistemological agendas, that “interpreted” him in all the possible meanings of this word. It emphasizes Bakhtin’s early concerns for the axiomatic cooperation between aesthetics, theology, ethics and science, from his first important study Art and Answerability (1919) through the early seventies, unveiling the top-down dynamic of his thought which took off from anthropology and ethics towards cultural theory and linguistics rather than the other way around. The very core of his system, the most diversely interpreted and the most frequently misunderstood concept, remains the “dialogue” now almost embodied by him. As defined by Bakhtin, dialogism is a theatrical performance implying three main instances: a speaker, his targeted audience and a transcendental addressee. Bakhtin’s theoretical legacy legitimates a phenomenology of dialogism, apparently rooted in the text, but pointing to much wider horizons.
Abstract
Our study draws on the array of functions assigned to the textual Coda in Ian McEwan’s novel Atonement, also turned into a successful movie. It follows two diverging narrative discourses—the Text and its Paratext—that overtly compete over the understanding of the story and over its reading transaction. In McEwan’s novel, the closing Paratext provides genre patterns and alternative reading strategies to the Text. Turning back upon the story itself and upon its process of writing, its understanding and its genre expectations in a particular cultural context, Coda is being assigned by the British novelist an overt meta-narrative task.
