Identity

The Difficult Beginnings Of A Superstar

An ancient symbol of war, because of its reddish color, Mars started with a low profile in the gallery of inhabited worlds. Up till the 19th century, it could bear no comparison with the Moon. In his Itinerarium exstaticum (1656), Athanasius Kircher (1601-1680) proposed

A History Of The Imaginary. The Truth Of The Myths

CHAPTER I Structures and Methods An Ambiguous Condition What if the history of the imaginary did not exist? Beyond all paradox, the question deserves to be raised. Following a hectic and contorted history, this discipline is hindered by theoretical and ideological difficulties.

The Eroticized Universe

The Bucharest Surrealist Group1939-1947* […] Madness, black humor, dreams, eroticism, revolt: if one cannot speak of Unu (One) and Alge (Algae) as surrealist magazines in the strict sense, these themes indicate however the increasing attraction of a number of Romanian

For Writers Are All Jesters, And All The Jests Together: Literature

For writers are all jesters, and all the jests together: Literature  In the history of literature, Tristan Tzara is regarded as the founder of Dada, an international literary and artistic movement, born in Zurich in 1916, with ramifications and outposts across three continents.

The Dialectic Of Dialectic

A Message to the International Surrealist Movement  We address ourselves to our surrealist friends scattered all over the world and, as in great shipwrecks, we indicate to them our exact location, at latitude 44° 5' North and longitude 26° East. The inexhaustible

How Modern Is the Modern Romanian Fantastic?

As everything modern, the fantastic mode, which seems to be still one of our great favorites in these last years of the modern millennium is to be defined through the series of transformations of the traditional forms of the fantastic art. In her excellent reference book

Minority Major Artists

The early-20th-century major Romanian art is not a block, but a very particular construction of intertwined cultural layers. One could not affirm that the most fertile and valuable Modern cultural period of this country was characterized by a certain, homogenous Romanian

On Multiculturalism

South Pacific, December 1999 To be a Romanian writer (therefore in the minority) in New Zealand! Ibi patria, ubi – wife. In New Zealand, I think about the confluence of our lives. We come from so far apart, we meet unexpectedly, we link our lives, our fates together.

Occurrences In Current Unreality

I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire. P. B. Shelley When I stare at a fixed point upon the wall at length, it sometimes happens that I no longer know who I am, nor where I am. On such occasions I experience my lack of identify from afar, as if for a moment I had become a

On The Romanian Melting Pot

When King Béla of Hungary decided to invite the Saxons to settle in Transylvania, the land had been severely depopulated by the Mongol invasion. The Germans came from the dry lands of Northern Europe and found here what must have seemed to them sort of a Promised Land.

On Hungarian Literature

Four years ago, in June 1996, the World Conference on Language Rights held its session in Barcelona, the capital of the Spanish region Catalonia. As the result of several years' work of preparations, the Universal Declaration of Language Rights was adopted here. PEN,

On Minorities

Historical circumstances have made Romania – before and after the great union of 1918 – a country with various ethnic minorities, some very old: Hungarians, since about the end of the first millennium; Armenians, Gypsies, Greeks, and Germans – since the Middle Ages;