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Limbă, Cultură şi Civilizaţie, Noi căi spre succes, vol 1, Politehnica Press, Bucharest, 2010
Abstract: The paper proposes a new definition of Romania’s Occidentalization at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, understood as full acceptance of American values on the one hand, and as a nationalist counter-reaction on the other. The first part of the paper will discuss Valentine’s Day and the Disneyland as two famous examples of cultural globalization, seen also as Americanization, with reference to their history, traditions and purpose in order to define them and see the message they send. The second part of the paper will analyze the Romanian Dragobete and Dracula Park as particular examples of hybridity: an American holiday is celebrated by 21st century Romania who, at the same time, rediscovers a lost but native Dragobete; and an American Park is “copied” by the same Romania who uses a national myth as its name. This part will also include the opinions of several Western, mostly American, Professors and researchers in order to see how the ‘West’ perceives both Bram Stoker’s novel and its connection to Romania, and those of some Romanian historians in order to see how some ‘natives’ perceive the myth and how they try to explain it, therefore the message Romania sends.
Constructions of Identity (IV), 2 volumes, ed. Napoca Star, Cluj-Napoca, 2008
Romanian Identity in the Context of DisneyficationThe paper makes a comparison between Disneyland and Dracula (Park), exploring the idea of a national myth both in America and in Romania. The concept of identity is understood here as shaped by historical and political national figures for both countries. In the case of America I will analyze the origins, history and structure of her most famous theme park, while in the case of Romania, I will talk about Bram Stocker’s 19th century Dracula and, then, I will see what Romanian historians have to say about the two Romanian rulers made famous by this legend, Vlad Dracul and Vlad Ţepeş.
The article analyses two recent fictional reiterations of Count Dracula’s topos – namely, Alucard in Kouta Hirano’s Hellsing manga series (1997-2008) and Fifi/FAD (Florin Anghelescu Dragolea) in Alexandru Muşina’s novel Dracula’s Nephew (2012) – as two rather authoritative contemporary references modifying the vampiric epitome originally outlined by Bram Stoker (and others). The focus is set on the evolution of ‘nation branding’ related elements reflected inside the common fictional paradigm. More specifically, this imagological investigation revolves around the ethical-symbolic dimension of the two selected contemporary works, in its particular relation to the controversial tendency of ‘branding’ Romania (or Transylvania) as the ‘actual’ homeland of the vicious vampire count. The ethical response both works imply is distinctive as well as significant, in the sense that it illustrates a current tendency towards what will be referred to in the present study as a ‘pop-cultural détente’.
Revista Transilvania
The Trope of the Vampire (and Strigoi) in Romanian Culture and Cultural Products Imported to Romania (1839–1947)2023 •
This article explores the different iterations of the vampire trope, as they emerge from the cultural products which originated in Romania or were imported to this country between 1839, the year when the term "vampire" entered the Romanian language, and 1947, which marks the debut of the communist regime in the country. For reasons of space, the study briefly touches on the myth of the strigoi and only insofar as it deviates from or converges toward the various manifestations of the vampire trope in the interval submitted for analysis. By looking at a wide range of media-literature, theater, music, cinema-and cultural products-prose fiction, poetry, translations, drama, radio performances, and motion pictures-, I show that the early evolution of the vampire trope aligns closely with the German and French cultural models emulated by the fledgling Romanian society and that its development reflects those pop culture elements and real-life phenomena which left their mark on public consciousness until the late 1940s. However, the Romanian culture was late to embrace the supernatural dimension of the trope, so much so that G.M. Amza and Al. Bilciurescu's Vampirul (1938), the first Romanian novel to feature an explicit vampire antagonist, was published a century after the introduction of the word in the Romanian language.
The topic of this paper is part of a larger research project that aims to question the validity of the concept of Transylvanism and its potential use in the marketplace of ideas, together with similar, firmly established notions, like, for example, Orientalism, defined by Edward Said, and Balkanism, discussed by Maria Todorova. It presents an analysis of only one segment of the Transylvanian discourse (vampire films) 1 , in order to emphasize the two main paradigms that cinematic representations about the Transylvanian space share, namely the (more traditional) symbolic paradigm and the (updated) pseudo-realistic. Two of the key-features of these paradigmatic visions will also commented upon: heterogeneity and mobility. Most vampire fiction─even Bram Stoker's famous novel (1897)─identifies the name Transylvania with Count Dracula's homeland, a wild and backward country, at the end of the civilized world. 2 This image, a highly effective vehicle for the dissemination of geographical, historical, ethnic, ethnographical, and political information, is closely related to the survival of not only the clichés from gothic literature but also the hegemonic Western views over Eastern, especially Balkan, otherness. Nevertheless, apart from the ideological issues─which on the hole are still valid today, as has been proved by Edward Said and Maria Todorova, amongst others–we have to take into account the fact that the image of Transylvania as a cultural construct has been created mostly in the realm of literature and film. 3 It is precisely the distinctively unreal and fictional nature of this image that may set Transylvanism apart from the ideological constructs referred to above as Orientalism and Balkanism, created by literature and art, in general, as well as by a large corpus of non-fictional texts (historiography, travel memoires, newspaper articles, reports and political discourses, etc.). It is mainly because of the importance of non-293 fictional texts that Orientalism and Balkanism have gradually become two institutionalised, organised, didactic and politically instrumentalised discourses, while Transylvanism is still relegated to the field of fiction and popular culture.
East-West Cultural Passage Journal
Civilization Confronted with the Wilderness of Europe: Dracula and the Balkans2019 •
Based on Maria Todorova's concept of Balkanism as the Eastern European variation of Orientalism, the paper investigates how Dracula, the novel by Bram Stoker, is an embodiment of Late Victorian colonialist attitude towards Romania and the Balkans. By selecting and discussing fragments from the novel, it presents the ramifications of this attitude and how it is affected by and, in turn, affects the wild-civilized essentialist dichotomy between West and East. Accordingly, the paper also points out the influence the novel has had on the external perception of Romania in the West, arguing that its profoundly negative connotation is a mark of an overarching Othering of and epistemic violence against Eastern Europe.
VDM Verlag Dr. Mueller e.K.
Cultural Stereotypes: From Dracula's Myth to Contemporary Diasporic Productions2007 •
This book is focused on a highly topical theme which aims at investigating a remarkable phenomenon of identity-shaping and cross-cultural exchange. Starting from an analysis of Dracula as the epitomized image of the Balkans (and of Romania, more specifically) abroad, it provides a comprehensive historical and (con)textual investigation of the myth, enlarged to incorporate it into the fictions of exile and to draw the reader's attention to the "demonic" dimension of the Balkan area in general, and the Romanian area in particular. By redefining the notion of cultural stereotypes, undertstood as stereotypes impressed upon us through a cultural channel (books, movies, cartoons, computer networks, musicals, etc.), this book points to the fact that they depict a movement in double direction: not only do cultures generate their own stereotypes but also perpetuate the stereotypes created by the "significant Other," urging us to reconsider categories such as "central" and "marginal" from a more complex perspective. The book is addressed to students and scholars with an interest in South-Eastern Europe and transatlantic encounters, diasporic, postcolonial and cultural studies, as well as to researchers in Sociology, History, Globalization and Ethnic Studies. Given the interest of the theme and the accessibility of the material presented, it is also directed to the larger reading public.
Much more appreciated and known in his time than by posterity, V.A.Urechia was a historian, politician and learned man, formed together with great personalities of the generation of the 40's, A.I.Cuza's collaborator (the first ruler of the United Principalities), and also our first hispanist. After finishing his studies in Paris, he married Francoise Josephine Dominique Plano, the daughter of Queen Isabela's of Spain personal doctor, Urechia showed a constant interest and maintained strong connections with the Spanish cultural space that he discovered to be the origin of the founding emperor of Dacia Traiana. The subject-matter of the present paper is Urechia's "capital of Spanish education" (enhanced in time), the contacts with the great personalities of the Spanish culture of his time , that can be reconstituted due to his work, his memoires, his letters a intercultural dialogue and articles published in the Spanish and Romanian press, as well as the infl...
2011 •
The aim of this paper is to analyze trauma as constructed in a corpus of texts identified as Romanian-American literature. More precisely, we have focused on the violence of departure from Romania and the violence of adaptation to America in the novel Train to Trieste by Domnica Rădulescu, in Petru Popescu’s The Deputy, and in Alta Ifland’s collection of short stories Elegy for a Fabulous Land. All these writers were born in Romania and were confronted with totalitarianism and its impositions upon individual identity. For many years escape was the main target of their identity politics.
The progressive enlargement of the European Union has up to now entailed a steady effort made by the member states in view of reterritorialization and symbolic translocation. The participation in the construction of the E.U. always meant a rescaling of the geopolitical space, depending on the rights and duties that have kept reshaping its borders. The articles referring to the free circulation within the E.U. have proved to modify the concrete daily exercise of cultural exchanges over the borders, on the one hand, and, on the other, the collective perception of each single state's borders and of the Union's borders. The interest for what remains on the outside of such a construction at a certain point is vital, and the phenomena of partition, disruption and/or cooperation always say something essential about the internal architecture of this construction. This paper explores the ways in which Romanian culture builds up a border identity before but also after Romania's accession to the European Union. This border identity stands for something other than a peripheral identity which only has to ensure security. The public discourse in Romania tries to find arguments for a comfortable and speculative positioning in its own condition; thus, the border identity is always attributed mediation assignments and offers – without making any difference – resistance towards the separation, autarchy and homogenization phenomena. For a culture building its border identity, taking responsibility for the way it plans the relationships with its neighbors is vital. How does the periphery imagine the outside world, what are the benefits for its own economy, but also for the whole economy of the world it is part of? To ask such a question means to surpass the traditional articulation of the terms of center and periphery so as to shift the attention upon the relation between the periphery and the outside world, which the periphery necessarily is interested in and which, at some point, may become " central ". Such exercises, by which one can imagine the vicinity relations symbolically shift the borders between cultures, facilitate the exchanges and provide suggestions for subsequent re-territorializations.
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