'Everything and nothing' : Shakespeare in Blanchot

This article discusses several moments in Maurice Blanchot’s work in which he delves into the space of Shakespeare’s oeuvre. For close contemporaries of Blanchot like Derrida and Levinas, Shakespeare is a decisive figure who inspires some of their major work. On the other hand, Shakespeare is not someone to whom Blanchot turns in decisive ways, except, perhaps, in a discussion of ‘Hamlet’ in The Space of Literature. The article discusses why Blanchot’s thinking may resist moving into the space of Shakespeare and proposes that, for Blanchot, Shakespeare’s name is inextricable from notions of human freedom and mastery that the modern work, which Blanchot is primarily interested in, dismisses. The (non-)relation with Shakespeare explored here reveals itself to be significant in what it discloses about Blanchot’s thought and the way he positions himself in relation to other writers.peer-reviewe

Un-sexing Ulysses: The Romanian Translation “under” Communism

The essay reviews Mircea Iv?nescu’s Romanian translation of Ulysses, in particular the last chapter, “Penelope”, by placing its achievement within its historical context. After outlining the ideological climate during which the translation was being elaborated (censorship of sexual explicit references, xenophobia or xenophobic resistance to experimental foreign novels), the article examines some of the strategies Iv?nescu resorted to in order to overcome the strictures imposed on his re-creation of Joyce’s work in his language

Witnessing Horrorism: The Piteşti Experiment

This article presents an irrational, sadistic experiment based on cruelty and complete disregard of human values, carried out between 1949 and 1952 in Romania and known under the infamous name of the Piteşti experiment. Its agenda was based on ‘re-education’, metaphorically presented as a sort of ‘healing’, supposedly performed to eliminate the ‘rot’ from prisoners. In the light of existent theories on the process of witnessing and testifying, I explore Dumitru Bacu’s, Grigore Dumitrescu’s, Paul Goma’s and Virgil Ierunca’s accounts of this despicable experiment and discuss the different roles assumed by witnesses while writing about Piteşti. Using the notions of ‘terror’ and ‘horror’ as developed in the works of Hannah Arendt and Adriana Cavarero, as well as Judith Lewis Herman’s findings from Trauma and Recovery and Anne-Marie Roviello’s work on ‘the hidden violence of totalitarianism’, the article suggests how the Piteşti experiment can be compared to the Shoah. Through this comparison, I point out the ‘unnarratability’ of the events that happened in the Piteşti penitentiary and, explaining the positions of the victims, I discuss the elements that made this experiment a uniquely tragic event in the history of communist prisons: on the one hand, that any tortured prisoner was forced to become the torturer of his fellows, on the other hand, that no one was allowed to die

Representations of the Romanian Holocaust in testimonial literature and films: from trivialization, denial to working through the past (part 2)

Synthesizing the way in which the Romanian Holocaust has been represented in testimonial literature and films, this article deals with notions such as Holocaust trivialization and denial, as well as with “mastering the Romanian past” of the interwar period and WW2. The article is a cartography of the representations of the Romanian Holocaust; to that end, it follows the chronology of published literary works (documentary texts, memoirs and fiction) and documentary and artistic films which were produced about the Romanian Holocaust in Romania and outside Romania from 1945 to the present

Representations of the Romanian Holocaust in testimonial literature and films: from trivialization, denial to working through the past (part 1)

Synthesizing the way in which the Romanian Holocaust has been represented in testimonial literature and films, this article deals with notions such as Holocaust trivialization and denial, as well as with “mastering the Romanian past” of the interwar period and WW2. The article is a cartography of the representations of the Romanian Holocaust; to that end, it follows the chronology of post-1945 published literary works (documentary texts, memoirs and fiction) and documentary and artistic films which were produced about the Romanian Holocaust in Romania and outside Romania

Anathematizing Barthes and Admiring Beckett with Eugène Ionesco

This article explores the world of theatre from within and beyond the stage and brings together Roland Barthes as a critic and Samuel Beckett as a playwright via a third character, the Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco, who anathematized the former and admired the latter. The article starts from Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), which defined Beckett’s and Ionesco’s art, pointing out that whilst Esslin showed why their works produced ‘bewilderment’ in England and the US, he ignored the Paris debates of the 1950s to early 1960s. It then covers the intricate history of Barthes’s polemical articles on avant-garde theatre and focuses on Barthes hailing Bertolt Brecht as an innovator who redefined theatre as belonging to a community. The next section engages with Beckett’s and Ionesco’s ideas on staging and their relation to Brecht and the Brechtians. The epilogue proposes a reading of Ionesco’s satirical play Improvisation or the Shepherd’s Chameleon (1955), which features Barthes and two other representatives of nouvelle critique as characters. </jats:p