👤Author Name: Nicu DIACONIUCAffiliation: Universitatea din București [University of Bucharest], RoumanieContact: ndiaconiuc@gmail.com 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Diaconiuc, Nicu. “L’Orient comme fata Morgana dans les relations de voyage aux Pays Roumains de Stanislas Bellanger”. Synthesis, 4 / 2025: 225-251Pages: 225-251Language: FrenchURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2025/4/9_Diaconiuc.pdf Abstract The journey from France to the Romanian principalities in the fourth decade of the 19th century was counted in the eyes of Westerners as a displacement from the center to the periphery of European culture. In this article, we will have a look at what resulted from the comparison of the image of an area grossly referred to as “the Orient” in the earlier stages of the journey, with the image that resulted after exploring it, while this strongly biased Orient turns out to be receding as the quest progresses. We observe how the main character, a young French scholar who departs with an ethnocentric vision and the idea that Vienna is at the gates of the civilized world, tries to gather proof about the Orientality of the lands and cultures which open up to him, but eventually realizes that only at his destination city, Bucharest, he can truly affirm that he has entered the Oriental world which had been luring him eastwards like a…

👤Author Name: Michèle Fornhoff-LevittAffiliation: Sorbonne Université / Université libre de Bruxelles, France / BelgiumContact: michele.fornhoff@ulb.be 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Fornhoff-Levitt, Michèle. “Staging Synchronization: Yiddish Theatre in the Interwar Paris and the Dynamics of Cultural Negotiation”. Synthesis, 4 / 2025: 161-201.Pages: 161-201Language: EnglishURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2025/4/7_Fornhoff-Levitt.pdf Abstract This article explores Yiddish theatre in interwar Paris (1919–1939) as a case study of cultural synchronization and resistance within a semi-peripheral theatrical system. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of E. Lovinescu, Pascale Casanova, and Itamar Even-Zohar, it analyzes how Yiddish theatre negotiated its position between center and periphery by adapting, reinterpreting, or resisting dominant French theatrical conventions. Through a close reading of repertoire, performance practices, and linguistic registers, the study shows how diasporic Jewish culture mobilized strategies of cultural transfer to assert its distinctiveness while engaging with the aesthetics of the Parisian stage. Rather than simply mirroring a hegemonic model, Yiddish theatre in Paris emerges as a dynamic cultural form responsive to and defiant of its environment. This approach situates the analysis within broader questions of intercultural exchange and minoritarian aesthetics, contributing to a more nuanced understanding of how theatrical systems operate under transnational and intercultural influence, and offering insight into the cultural mobility of Jewish performance traditions. Key-words: Yiddish…

👤Author Name: Ilinca ILIAN & Elena CRAȘOVANAffiliation: Universitatea de Vest din Timișoara, RomaniaContact: ilincasn@gmail.com; ilinca.taranu@e-uvt.ro; elena.crasovan@e-uvt.ro 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Ilian, Ilinca, Crașovan, Elena. “Latin American Literature as World Literature: Cultural and Political Games between Peripheries after the Second World War. The Romanian Case”. Synthesis, 4 / 2025: 132-160.Pages: 132-160Language: EnglishURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2025/4/6_Ilian_Casovan.pdf Abstract The globalization of Latin American literature after World War II is often associated with the emergence of a multitude of influential and successful fiction writers on the world cultural scene, collectively known as the Boom. This article aims to qualify this perception by emphasizing the importance of an earlier phase of globalization that occurred mainly in European socialist countries in the early 1950s under the auspices of the World Peace Congress. This phase had an important influence on the subsequent penetration of these countries by authors associated with the Boom. Focusing on Romanian culture, we demonstrate how it aligns with the successive phases of globalization of Latin American literature. We also highlight that the cultural connection between these regions is based on a dynamic of inter-peripheral relations that largely bypasses cultural consecration granted by traditional “centers” of legitimacy – whether Moscow or Paris Key-words: Boom, politics, synchronization, translation, world literature Bibliography ACHUGAR, Hugo, “Apuntes sobre…

👤Author Name: Anna FörsterAffiliation: Universität Erfurt [University of Erfurt]Contact: anna.foerster@uni-erfurt.de 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Förster, Anna. ‟Translation and the past: Roland Barthes and the “recovery” of Czechoslovak structuralism in the 1960s”. Synthesis, 4 / 2025: 75-111.Pages: 75-111Language: EnglishURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2025/4/4_Forster.pdf Abstract After years of emphasizing translation primarily as a way of bringing “newness into the world” (Bhabha), scholars have recently renewed their interest in translation’s relationship to the past, referring to it as a recovery of lost time or as the (Benjaminian) “afterlife” of past texts. Those who are specifically concerned with the translation of philosophical and theoretical texts now also focus on “untranslatables” that continually produce new translations. So far, this has mostly been seen as a means to emancipate the history of theory from the tyranny of linear time, but it also caters to a discourse that rethinks translation as a way of doing both theory and its history. What unites all these approaches is that they exclusively understand the past that translation relates to as the past of the source text. As the paper claims, however, translation can also function as a means to recover and, potentially, (re)write the history of the receiving context. This is discussed by drawing on the example of the…

👤Author Name: Ana Maria DUMITRAȘCUAffiliation: Universitatea Transilvania din Braşov [Transilvania University of Brașov], RomâniaContact: ana.dumitrascu@unitbv.ro 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Dumitrașcu, Ana-Maria. ‟Dialectique de l’ecriture kunderienne: Bohème – France, 1968-2014”. Synthesis, 4 / 2025: 112-131.Pages: 112-131Language: FrenchURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2025/4/5_Dumitrascu.pdf Abstract This article explores the way in which Milan Kundera problematises and reconfigures the dynamics of cultural and literary synchronisation between France — traditionally conceived as a “cultural centre” — and Central Europe, with particular attention to Czech literature, which is often relegated to the periphery. Through a close analysis of Kundera’s texts, we examine the modalities of literary expression that both articulate and contest the East–West dichotomy, situating them within the broader framework of deferred synchronisation, while also interrogating the underlying ideological, political, and cultural mechanisms and their fictional representations. By traversing and unsettling these oppositions, we aim to demonstrate that fiction functions as a critical space for renegotiating hierarchical cultural relationships—often marked by tension, irony, and ambivalence. The periphery emerges not merely as a site of literary innovation, but also as a reflective counterpoint to the dominant cultural narratives of the centre. Rather than advocating for the simple incorporation of the periphery into the dominant paradigm, Kundera—drawing on the legacy of Kafka—develops a poetics…

👤Author Name: Juan WUAffiliation: University of SydneyContact: juan.wu1@sydney.edu.au 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Wu, Juan. ‟Binding by Synchrony”: Cognitive Pattern Recognition and Narrative Synchronization in Nabokov’s Pale Fire”. Synthesis, 4 / 2025: 45-74.Pages: 45-74Language: EnglishURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2025/4/3_Juan_Wu.pdf Abstract This paper explores the role of synchrony as a central narrative device in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, revealing how temporal alignments transcend mere coincidence to serve complex thematic and ideological functions. Focusing on the intertwined narratives of John Shade and Charles Kinbote, the study examines how Shade’s grief over his daughter Hazel’s suicide is expressed through the alignment of personal tragedy with banal televised broadcasts, transforming simultaneity into a poetic and cognitive mechanism for processing loss. In contrast, Kinbote strategically manipulates synchrony to impose his self-mythologizing agenda, fabricating connections between Shade’s poem and Gradus’s violent journey to assert narrative control and distort reality. The paper argues that these contrasting uses of synchrony reflect broader formal and philosophical concerns in the novel, highlighting the instability of temporal perception and the subjective nature of narrative construction. By situating synchrony as both a structural principle and a metanarrative strategy, this analysis bridges literary theory and cognitive psychology, illuminating Nabokov’s intricate interplay of narrative layers and the interpretive demands placed on readers. Pale Fire dramatizes the…

👤Author Name: Alexandre STROEVAffiliation: Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris, FranceContact: alexandre.stroev@sorbonne-nouvelle.fr 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Stroev, Alexandre. ‟La literature soviétique en France dans les années 1920-1930 : le cas d’Isaac Babel”. Synthesis, 4 / 2025: 23-44.Pages: 23-44Language: FrenchURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2025/4/18-AStroev-2.pdf Abstract At the turn of the 19th century, the political and military alliance between France, England and Russia led Parisian publishers to promote Russian novelists, above all Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. After the revolution of 1917, they published Russian writers who had emigrated to France. Since the diplomatic recognition of the USSR in 1924, they promoted Soviet authors. Boris Pilniak, Vsevolod Ivanov and Isaak Babel embody an innovative and revolutionary literature. However, in France, the strengths of Babel’s prose – the perfect mastery of the shoșrt story genre with a paradoxical ending, the mix of high and low styles, of the sophisticated and the illiterate – were transformed into weaknesses. Publishers prefer novels that are easy to read and sell. The efforts of translators to render the originality of Babel’s works are at odds with editorial demand. In the USSR, Stalinist policies and the domination of socialist realism silenced the writer, who was arrested in 1939 and shot in 1940. Key-words: Soviet literature, Isaac Babel, Vladimir Pozner,…

Table of Contents: Cécile Vaissié Littératures russe et française : deux siècles entre obsessions non-réciproques et bouleversements des statuts / 7 Alexandre Stroev La literature soviétique en France dans les années 1920-1930 : le cas d’Isaac Babel / 23 Juan Wu Binding by Synchrony”: Cognitive Pattern Recognition and Narrative Synchronization in Nabokov’s Pale Firehttps://synthesis.ro/binding-by-synchrony-cognitive-pattern-recognition-and-narrative-synchronization-in-nabokovs-pale-fire/ / 45 Anna Förster Translation and the past: Roland Barthes and the “recovery” of Czechoslovak structuralism in the 1960s/ 75 Ana Maria Dumitrașcu Dialectique de l’ecriture kunderienne: Bohème – France, 1968-2014 / 112 Ilinca Ilian & Elena Crașovan Latin American Literature as World Literature: Cultural and Political Games between Peripheries after the Second World War. The Romanian Case / 132 Michèle Fornhoff-Levitt Staging Synchronization: Yiddish Theatre in the Interwar Paris and the Dynamics of Cultural Negotiation / 161 Shiqian Zhou Voiceless Resistance: Gender, Colonialism, and the Limits of Agency in Xu Xi’s Hong Kong Rose / 202 Nicu Diaconiuc L’Orient comme fata Morgana dans les relations de voyage aux Pays Roumains de Stanislas Bellanger/ 225 Catrinel Popa L’Ouest regarde l’Est. La convention  du voyageur étranger dans la littérature roumaine d’hier et d’aujourd’hui/ 252 Svetlana Karadzhova Eminescu’s The Morning Star in Banat Bulgarian Literature – Between Margins and Centers / 268 Galin Tihanov The responsibility of critical…