Antisemitic or Bordering on Antisemitic? Grey Areas in Romanian Fake News Discourses in the Wake of the Covid-19 Pandemic

Jews as a collective have long served as scapegoats for epidemics and pandemics, such as the Bubonic Plague and, according to some scholars, the 1918–1920 influenza pandemic. This practice reemerged in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, when more and more fake news outlets in the US and Europe started publishing articles on a perceived linkage between Jewish communities and the novel coronavirus. What this article aims to achieve is to facilitate a dialogue between the observations on the phenomenon made by the Elie Wiesel National Institute for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and the latest related EU reports, with a view to charting its beginnings in Romania in relation to other European countries and in an attempt to see whether Romania, like France and Germany, has witnessed the emergence of “grey area” discourses which are not fully covered by International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance working definition of antisemitism.

REVIEW: Mihaela Mancaș, Metafora afectivității în poezia românească

The book Metaphor of Affect in Romanian Poetry authored by Mihaela MANCAȘ was published in 2020 with Bucharest University Press – the second book in which the author has tackled the topic of affect in Romanian poetry. It comprises a corpus of affect transposed to metaphor which makes reference to Romanian poetry belonging to different periods, ranging from the pre-modern period, the classical one and the first half of the 20th century. Her research proves the long-lasting connection between language and literature, fields which are successfully brought together by literary stylistics.

The Pressure of Eurochronology and the Romanian Rural Prose

The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms.

Poezia modernă și tradiția

The article is a brief revisitation of the relationship between modern poetry and tradition, such as it was understood by poets starting with Charles Baudelaire. The theoretical proposition advanced here postulates the existence of two complementary attitudes in this respect: the first one progressive, characterized by the denial of tradition, represented by the European avant-garde (most of all futurism, dadaism, and surrealism); the second one conservative, illustrated first of all by German expressionism, but also by modernism and Anglo-American postmodernism’s attempts to recover or recycle the contents of tradition.

https://revistatransilvania.ro/the-unknown-michael-cernea-at-90/

This paper is written for Professor Michael Cernea’ 90th birthday. However, I did not perform an in-depth analysis of his work as a sociologist of development because his contributions are worldwide known. What is less known is his activity before his employment at the World Bank, in 1974. He did his studies during a period when sociology was banned in Romania. Despite this, he became one of the pioneers of the process of rehabilitation of sociological field research in Romania. First, he dealt with industrial and urban sociology. Then, under the influence of interwar sociological traditions, he turned to rural sociology. The activity after 1974 cannot be fully understood without knowing the Romanian background of this sociologist who has recently turned 90.

What Is Fake News: A New Definition

Fake news is one of the most debated social phenomena of recent years. It has been the subject not only of several attempts at defining it, but also of numerous comparative analyses of prevalent definitions. Nonetheless, the present article fosters the ambition of offering a new definition. The innovation of my definition stems from the fact that it departs from the dominant “hybrid view” on fake news, which considers the defining traits of the phenomenon to be its truth value (i.e., its falseness) and the intention of its author (i.e., to mislead its public). Opposing this view, the present article argues that the producer’s intent is irrelevant in regard to classifying news as fake news. On the contrary, the defining trait of fake news is, alongside the falsehood of its content, the discourse’s perlocutionary force, which invariably entails a call to action addressed to the text’s recipient.

Estetica vieții cotidiene în filozofia RSR

The present paper analyses the emergence of a novel field of interest in the philosophical aesthetics of the 1960s in Romania: the aesthetics of everyday life. As such, it first starts by drawing out an overview of the aesthetic discussions in 1950s Romania by closely reading several articles from the main philosophical journal of the period: Cercetări filozofice. In this regard, I focus on two main aspects, namely the theory of reflection, which was the guiding principle of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, and the theory of the social function of art. Further on I will sketch out how these two aspects defined the main traits of the local aesthetics of everyday life, a topic which took the center fold of aesthetic interest for almost a decade, and which has ever since the early 2000s found renewed interest.

What’s new, Scooby Doo? Observații asupra dinamicii lexicului și a structurii gramaticale românești în subtitrarea desenelor animate

An examination of the vocabulary and the current Romanian grammatical structure in the subtitling of recent cartoons identifies specific issues regarding grammatical, semantic, lexical creations, especially some extremely productive prefixes which circulate from one register of the language to another, according to the principle of communicating vessels. By analyzing the language on social networks and television channels, one can see how the same word, prefix or structure migrates from its specific area in that of everyday speech. One could transfer Pascal’s principle from physics into language sciences and re-define it as the pressure of language use transmitted from one area of the language to another, manifested in the whole mass of speakers and in all directions. A wrong word or an aberrant grammatical form approaches the verge of imposing itself when the pressure of language use pushes it into areas other than those of its specific use.

Materialism dialectic și istoric în comunismul românesc (I)

The article (to be published in 2 parts) analyzes the expression and evolution of Marxist philosophy in communist Romania, as seen in the evolution of the official handbooks and courses of dialectical materialism and historical materialism. Its first part looks at the original Marxian foundations (Marx and Engels’ views on metaphilosophy and their actual philosophical practice), the Soviet mediations (the institutional and conceptual reconfigurations of Soviet Marxist philosophy until the death of Stalin) and the initial local configuration, as seen in the first two editions of the handbooks, published in the early 50’s and early 60’s respectively. The second part of the article will follow this evolution further, up to 1989, and will conclude by developing a series of observations on the uses and abuses of Marxist philosophy in communist Romania.

Căldură mare. Temperatura pasiunilor în Ion de Liviu Rebreanu

This article aims to explore the meanings and functions of temperature in Liviu Rebreanu’s novel Ion. The conclusions of my research are paradoxical from at least two points of view: first, the Romanian writer uses a language that is at once rudimentary and subtle, encoding a small number of meanings, but in a discreet manner; then, Rebreanu creates a genuine scale of passions arranged on the axis cold (death) – warmth (life), but at the same time he regards the boiling passions as forebodings of death.