👤Author Name: Muguraș CONSTANTINESCUAffiliation: „Ștefan cel Mare” University of Suceava, RomaniaContact: mugurasc@gmail.com 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Constantinescu, Muguraș. “Portrait d’un comparatiste : Yves Chevrel”. Synthesis, 3 / 2024: 162-173.Pages: 162-173Language: FreanchURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2024/3/10_Muguras.pdf Abstract Abstract (original):  This paper proposes a portrait of the French comparatist Yves Chevrel, Professor Emeritus at the Sorbonne University in Paris. We will showcase his professional development, research career as well as his major works and achievements. The paper will particularly focus on comparative literature as envisioned by Chevrel, namely a concept broad enough to accommodate an acknowledgement of foreignness and of alterity, in general. Key-words: comparative literature, openness, interlinking, translation, comparative method Bibliography CHEVREL, Yves, « Les premières revues de littérature comparée (1877–1910) », Revue de littérature comparée, no. 380, 4/2021, pp. 397–403. https://www.cairn.info/ revue-de-litterature-comparee-2021-4–page-397.htm CHEVREL, Yves, « Entretien avec Muguras Constantinescu », Atelier de traduction, 2019, pp 17–29.  CHEVREL, Yves, « Présentation du séminaire », Actes du séminaire national Enseigner les oeuvres littéraires en traduction (Paris, le 23 et 24 octobre 2006), Paris, 2007, pp. 12–18 actes_oeuvres_en_traduction_109568, consultés le 20 mars 2024 CHEVREL, Yves, D’HULST, Lieven, LOMBEZ, Christine (dir.), Histoire des traductions en langue française ; XIXe siècle 1815–1914, Lagrasse, Verdier, 2012. FASSEL, Horst, « Acta comparationis litterarum universarum: prima revistă de literatură universală din lume », Philologica Jassyensia;…

👤Author Name: Chen HONGYUAffiliation: Tsinghua University, ChinaContact: hychen.ella@gmail.com 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Chen, Hongyu. “Rewriting Media and Literary Space in the Metropolis: Immigrant Writings in London across Centuries”. Synthesis, 3 / 2024: 125-145.Pages: 125-145Language: EnglishURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2024/3/8_Chen.pdf Abstract This article analyses how elements of mass media in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Guo Xiaolu’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) reinforce and challenge London’s position as “literary capital” and also transform its language, value system, and hierarchy. This system of values absorbs people into a “monolingual paradigm” which reinforces the dominant position of the language. However, Selvon’s novel challenges the city mediascape, the standardized English language, and even English literary tradition. Fifty years later, although Guo Xiaolu fails to transform the position of English in the metropolis, she still adopts elements of mass media and uses formal innovations to challenge the hierarchy established by mass media and English literary traditions, pointing to the immigrants’ new life experience and relationship to the metropolis in the 21st century. Key-words: immigrant writing, mass media, metropolis, immigration experiences, English literature Bibliography APPADURAI, Arjun, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization,  Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ASHCROFT, Bill, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial…

👤Author Name: Marjan MOHAMMADIAffiliation: Bilkent University, TurkeyContact: marjan.mohammadi@bilkent.edu.tr 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Mohammadi, Marjan. ‟Weltliteratur and the Figure of Author-Translator in The Adventures Of Hajji Baba ”. Synthesis, 3 / 2024: 81-99.Pages: 81-99Language: EnglishURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2024/3/23_Mohammadi2.pdf Abstract This paper focuses on the problem of “translatability” and the encounter of English as the medium of exchange with Persian in James J. Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba (1824) and its sequel (1828). It approaches the question of translatability from two vantage points: First, it considers how the economic assumption of “equivalences”, where words and referents enter a relationship of commensurability, paradoxically creates a pseudo-discourse to uphold the validity of the travelogue as an “authentic” account of the “Orient” and a commodity that once rendered in English can circulate the book on a worldwide scale. Second, it considers the split in the figure of the narrator, the author-translator who swings between the axes of “assimilation” and “foreignization.” The hybrid positioning of the narrator in the intertext of a travelogue that oscillates between fiction and translation ultimately undermines the hallmark desire of capital, i.e., a total transfer of meaning (value) via the voice of an authentic teller to the extent that a self-same identity can neither be imagined for the narrated (the…

👤Author Name: Alina BAKOAffiliation: „Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, RomaniaContact: alina.bako@ulbsibiu.ro 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Bako, Alina. “Balkan World Literature: A Romanian Perspective”. Synthesis, 3 / 2024: 100-114.Pages: 100-114Language: EnglishURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2024/3/6_Bako.pdf Abstract David Damrosch discusses the relevance of what he calls Balkan world literature in a recent essay (2023) which includes two Romanian authors. The Balkan world literature paradigm serves to construct a discourse through which Romanian literature generates, in a global context, an added knowledge of the space from which it originates. The binder used by Damrosch is linked to the Balkan space, a source of inspiration for literature. The main thesis of the present essay, articulated as a complement to Damrosch’s method, is around a historical figure from the Eastern space who influenced Central literatures. We proceed to a twofold movement, from the centre – to the Oriental (the adoption of the model), but also from the periphery to the centre. We consider case studies which have as protagonist a historical character, Sultana Roxelana, and we will discuss the fiction of Mihail Sadoveanu and Marguerite Yourcenar to see if “Balkan world literature” model works from this perspective as well. Key-words: Balkan world literature, novel, historical figure, Marguerite Yourcenar, Mihail Sadoveanu, nereids Bibliography…

👤Author Name: Sergio Das NEVESAffiliation: Institute for the Study of Traditional Literature (IELT), School of Social and Human Sciences of the NOVA University of Lisbon, PortugalContact: sergioneves@campus.ul.pt 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Das Neves, Sérgio. ‟The Literatures of the World in Herberto Helder”. Synthesis, 3 / 2024: 68-80.Pages: 68-80Language: EnglishURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2024/3/4_das_Neves.pdf Abstract The essay reflects on the translations crafted by the Portuguese poet Herberto Helder, exploring potential relations and reconfigurations of the Goethean concept of Weltliteratur. The study will primarily focus on the preface of the book O bebedor nocturno, the poet’s first book devoted to translating texts from various times, spaces, and cultures into Portuguese. The poet, unfamiliar with the original languages of these texts, modifies his mother tongue in order to translate the essence of the poem, in a gesture of love towards it. By examining his creation of a poetic language through translation and his somewhat unsystematized idea of translation, we aim to contrast the image of the polyglot translator with that of the poet translator, akin to a circus acrobat. In this way, we advance that Helder’s approach to altering poems enhances the Goethean concept, extracting vitality from the ancestral literatures of the world. Thus, he reveals the unity of everything, erasing…

👤Author Name: Dan SHAOAffiliation: : Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, JapanContact: danaeshao@tufs.ac.jp 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Shao, Dan. ‟Cultural Transfer and the Re-representation of Reality: Barn Burning in Faulkner, Murakami, and Lee Chang-dong’s Film”. Synthesis, 3 / 2024: 25-49.Pages: 25-49Language: EnglishURL:https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2024/3/2_Shao.pdf Abstract This paper examines the cultural transpositions and shifts in symbolic meaning of the “barn burning” motif through William Faulkner’s Barn Burning (1939), Haruki Murakami’s Barn Burning (1983), and Lee Chang-dong’s film adaptation Burning (버닝, 2018). Through a comparative analysis, the study delves into the socio-economic underpinnings and contextual metamorphoses that transform the barn from a productive manorial setting of the American South to an emblem of urban marginalization in Murakami’s work, culminating in a signifier of agricultural decline in Lee’s narrative. Interweaving the theoretical framework of world literature, this paper spotlights the divergent realities these texts embody and propagate. It investigates how the notion of “reality” is translated and recontextualized across cultural borders, and how meanings are variously appropriated and reimagined in the realm of world literature. The intertextual study thus emphasizes the complexities in the transmission of symbolic cultural assets, shedding light on the varied interpretations and implications of the barn burning motif as it transcends and evolves through time and space. Key-words: Cultural Transpositions, Barn Burning, William Faulkner, Haruki…

👤Author Name: Sylvia GARCIA-PALUROAffiliation: University of Houston, USAContact: sgarcia3@uh.edu 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Garcia-Paluro, Sylvia. ‟Proximity and Dis/placement. Interrogating Space in Roza Tumba Quema by Claudia Hernández and Dreaming in Cuban by Cristina García”. Synthesis, 3 / 2024: 50-67.Pages: 50-76Language: EnglishURL: https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2024/3/3_Garcia-Paluro.pdf Abstract Recent Latin American history (I refer approximately to the period between 1950 and 1990) has had a significant influence on the literature produced by writers in Latin America and abroad since 1950. Even books published within the last fifteen years show a preoccupation with this historical period, such as Claudia Hernández’s Roza tumba quema (published in Spanish in 2017 and in English in 2020 [Slash and Burn]), which makes the Salvadoran Civil War its central event. Books published by Latinx writers in the United States show similar concerns, though they must also contend with the role diaspora has played in shaping how these events are understood or processed. What role, then, do proximity and placement (or displacement) play in shaping the relationship of writers to a history that still impacts Latin American politics and U.S. immigration policy? This paper aims to address this question by comparing the two post-war novels, Roza tumba quema and Dreaming in Cuban, a diasporic novel by Cristina García, and their relationship to space….

👤Author Name: Anthony TELLOAffiliation: : Rutgers University, USAContact: art153@english.rutgers.edu 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Tello, Anthony. “The Literary Machine”. The Victorian Case for World Literature”. Synthesis, 3 / 2024: 7-24Pages: 7-24Language: EnglishURL: https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2024/3/1_Tello.pdf Abstract Victorian Literature as World (building) Literature grants a privileged view of the often-violent linkages across space and time characteristic of empire and its aftermath, as well as the struggle to create new worlds out of it. Expanding Pheng Cheah’s conception of World Literature, I argue that Victorian Literature not only world-ed extractive capitalism, which came to dominate the globe, but simultaneously attempted to re-world alternatives through characterization and the realist mode. Indeed, many Victorian characters were themselves deeply critical of and unsatisfied with the world-system of capitalist extraction being created. The novels I choose to focus on, George Gissing’s New Grub Street and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, support this claim by demonstrating critiques and resonances in their attempts to expose and break free from the extractive capitalist constraints of the imperial and neo-imperial period, making both an archive to study the conflicts entailed in the ongoing process of worlding extractive capitalism. Thus, I will claim a space for the study of the 19th Century as mid-wife to globalized extractive capitalism that links,…

👤Author Name: Daniela VIZIREANUAffiliation: University of BucharestContact: d.vizireanu@yahoo.com 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Political Hegemony Over the Public Intellectual in Communist Romania: Monica Lovinescu and Her Misrepresented Portrayal in the Print Press”. Synthesis, XLII (2023): 94-100.Title: POLITICAL HEGEMONY OVER THE PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL IN COMMUNIST ROMANIA: MONICA LOVINESCU AND HER MISREPRESENTED PORTRAYAL IN THE PRINT PRESSPages: 94-100Language: EnglishURL: https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2022-2023/1-2/9_D_Vizireanu.pdf Abstract In the last decades of the Romanian communist regime, a few leading propaganda newspapers and publications such as Luceafărul and Săptămîna violently targeted Monica Lovinescu. This article aims to briefly explore several texts written against her by nationalist supporters of the regime between 1979 and 1989. For example, Artur Silvestri and Eugen Barbu wrote a tremendous number of articles against Monica Lovinescu, brought together in the series “Pseudo-culture on Short Waves” and “The Strategies and Tactics of Radio Free Europe”. Also, various articles from Romanian newspapers would become topics for discussion in the Parisian broadcasts of Radio Free Europe. The Communist Party paid attention to Lovinescu’s criticism of the Romanian regime in her weekly radiophonic program. Press campaigns, particularly in the 1980s, forcibly misinterpreted her journalistic and literary career, portraying her as an enemy of Romania from the West. Key-words: print press, Monica Lovinescu, Radio Free Europe,…

👤Author Name: Andrada PUȘCOCIAffiliation: University of BucharestContact: puscoci_andra@yahoo.com 📄Article Citation Recommendation: Pușcoci, Andra-Ioana. “The Veils of the Eternal Exile in the Hooligan’s Return”. Synthesis, XLII (2023): 82-93.Title: THE VEILS OF THE ETERNAL EXILE IN THE HOOLIGAN’S RETURNPages: 82-93Language: EnglishURL: https://synthesis.ro/pdf/2022-2023/1-2/8_A_I_Puscoci.pdf Abstract In The Hooligan’s Return, Norman Manea tackles a series of defining themes for post-war European novels, namely exile, memory, self-delusion, the impossibility of return and life under totalitarian regimes. Manea uses the mythical figure of Ulysses to highlight the attempts of the exile to return to his native country in order to reshape the identity that was fragmented by the totalitarian political regime but also to show the inadequacy that the wanderer feels at the end of the journey to his origins. The long peregrinations deprive the exile of landmarks, as he ends up living on the recollection of events from his nightmarish past. The return to Romania and the confrontation with the past do not induce any emotion but prove to Manea that everything that was familiar to him had faded to the point of being emptied of meaning. Not only Jormania has changed, but so has he, and that is why he ends up feeling alienated from his old existence. The reader becomes…