<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The crime series <italic>Bron/Broen</italic> [The Bridge], co-produced in 2011 by the public televisions of Denmark and Sweden, located at the centre of the bridge over the Øresund/Öresund maritime strait which represents the border between the two states, offers one of the most prolific thematizations of in-between-ness in the popular culture of the last decade. The fact that it struck a chord of global collective imagination is revealed in its quick transformation into a highly successful international TV format, relocated on various other state borders. More than a theme, the series proposes an entire aesthetics of the in-between organized around the symbolic constellation of the bridge. A bridge simultaneously divides and reunites, generates empathetic fusion but also ushers in reflexive distancing. But, above all, as it is narratively and poetically framed in the series, it transgresses its common understanding as a connective interspace and tends to become a world to itself. A rather dangerous one, for that matter, since within its confines the usual distinctions between right and wrong are seriously called into doubt. From a space of transit, the bridge becomes – the distinction is essential – a space of transition, of change, of becoming. A space replete with risks but, essentially, a space of freedom. The essay attempts to unpack political implications less explored until now of this core symbolism.1</abstract>

The Limit as Centre: Some Considerations on the Political Imagination of the In-Between, Starting from the Central Symbol of the Crime Series <italic>Bron/Broen</italic> – The Bridge

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Crime fiction is currently evolving towards a literary genre which encompasses the intertwining of several textual practices, rhetorical modes, cultural identities, and topoi. Multiculturalism and the relation to alterity are gradually conquering the realm of detective fiction, thus rendering the crime enigma or suspense only secondary in comparison to other intellectual “enjeux” of the text. Transgressing the national horizon, contemporary detective fiction in Romanian literature can be thus considered as “world literature” (Nilsson–Damrosch–D’haen 2017) not only because it does not engage representations of Romanian spaces alone but also due to its translatability, its transnational range of cultural values and practices. This article aims to discuss several categories of examples for this fresh diversity that Romanian crime fiction has encountered. Novels written recently by authors such as Petru Berteanu, Caius Dobrescu, Mihaela Apetrei, Alex Leo Şerban, or Eugen Ovidiu Chirovici employ variations such as either alternative narrators or cosmopolitan characters, or contribute to anthologies, writing directly in English in order to gain access to a more complex audience. The paper sets out to analyse the literary or rhetorical devices at work in these transgressional phenomena as well as their effects on contemporary Romanian crime narratives and their possible correlations to transnational phenomena.1</abstract>

Genre Transgression in Contemporary Romanian Crime Fiction

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">This article is an attempt to delineate a new paradigm in the literary arts (including print literature and song poetry). According to the author’s hypothesis, this paradigm cannot be attributed simply to the onset of “digital culture.” The primary reason for the emergence of the new paradigm is the transition from the modernist-postmodernist text to the non-linear text. The transition began in print literature, continued in song poetry, and found its ultimate expression in cyberliterature. The second reason was a change in the artistic paradigm. According to Roland Barthes, in literature, the era of authorial intent (with the author’s mind as the focus) had given way to the period of textuality before reception (which focused on consciousness) became dominant. In this article, the author hypothesizes that at the end of the twentieth century the active postmodernist reception of literary texts was replaced by interactive nonlinear reception.</abstract>

Nonlinearism: The Paradigm That Replaced Postmodernism. On the Materials of Song Poetry and Cyberliterature

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">David Mitchell’s <italic>Cloud Atlas</italic> (2004) presents its readers with a “borderless world.” This borderlessness concerns space and time, with complex and interweaving spatiotemporal planes. In this fictional world, the subject will serve as an entity that brings together disparate spatialities and temporalities through an intricate symbolic web that connects the subject’s body to the world it inhabits. Numerous versions of past, present, and future run in parallel, the actual and the virtual coexist, and the text folds upon itself. The novel operates a constant state of liminality, a state that will be embodied by the subject. Seemingly in a paradoxical way, the multiple liminal states identifiable in the novel convey the ultimate sense of borderlessness. It is exactly the work’s heterogeneity, its jumps through time and space, its interrupted chapter structure that lend it a special unity and coherence that erases both geographical and temporal borders. The novel’s structure goes into thematic depths and creates a bridge, a constant interplay between form and content, captured in the metaphor of the concertina. Consequently, <italic>Cloud Atlas</italic> creates a constantly shifting world where the only fixed entity is the subject and its comet-shaped birthmark.</abstract>

“A Multitude of Drops.” David Mitchell’s <italic>Cloud Atlas</italic> and the Subject between Space and Time

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The traditional way of representing animals was either by a metaphor or by anthropomorphization. In parallel with the slowly growing ecological sensitivity of our times, in contemporary literature, animals are depicted as specific subjects. The study surveys a selection of representative works from world literature and groups them into thematic, motivic groups, tracking the route of animal motifs from the Antiquity to the present, with special focus on a set of Hungarian literary works that deserve a place in the “animal canon” of world literature. The survey is aimed at providing the background against which two contemporary Hungarian novels, Zsolt Láng’s <italic>Bestiarium Transylvaniae IV</italic> and Zsuzsa Selyem’s <italic>Moszkvában esik</italic> [<italic>It’s Raining in Moscow</italic>] will be discussed. These novels organically grow out of, but also displace, the outlined literary tradition, basing their aesthetics upon the subversive perceptual, narrative potential of the animal subject.</abstract>

Between Human and Animal

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Within the larger context of metamorphoses into plants in Greek and Roman mythology, the paper aims to analyse the myth of Myrrha and her metamorphosis into a tree, focusing on the triggering cause of the transformation as well as the response given to her newly-acquired form of life. Myrrha’s transformation into a myrrh tree takes place as a consequence of her transgressive incestuous act of love with her father, Cinyras. Her metamorphosis occurs as a consequence of sinful passion – passion <italic>in extremis</italic> –, and she sacrifices her body (and human life/existence) in her escape. I will look at Ovid’s version of the myth as well as Ted Hughes’s adaptation of the story from his <italic>Tales from Ovid</italic>. My discussion of the transformation into tree starts out from the consideration that metamorphosis is the par excellence place and space of in-betweenness implying an inherent hybridity and blurred, converging subjectivities, a state of being that allows for passages, overlaps, crossings, and simultaneities. I am interested to see in what ways Myrrha’s incestuous desire for her father as well as her metamorphosis into a tree can be “rooted” back to her great-grandfather Pygmalion’s transgressive love for the ivory statue Galatea.</abstract>

Spaces in Between in the Myth of Myrrha: A Metamorphosis into Tree

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The primary aim of the present paper is to define <italic>residual narratives</italic> based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s works. Our approach is comparative and interdisciplinary since we take a close look at how the term <italic>residual</italic> is used in different fields, such as sociology or cultural studies, and try to render the meaning of the new literary term by comparing it to and differentiating it from other similar concepts. Thus, on the one hand, the study is theoretical, based, for example, on Raymond Williams’s “residual culture”’ theory. On the other hand, there is the practical part of the research that analyses Tolkien’s <italic>The Lord of the Rings</italic>, highlighting the main aspects of residual narratives. In the concluding part, we shall also examine to what extent these residual narratives can be regarded as spaces in between.</abstract>

Aspects of Residual Narratives as Spaces in Between Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fantasies

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The narrative theory of history that studies historical works from the viewpoint of their narrative, rhetorical devices, and ideological strategies highly emphasized the necessity of renewing historiography. In his early essays, the trend’s founding father, Hayden White, positioned history between art and science or fiction and reality and defined the role of historical theory as a kind of “critical historiography” that is both a criticism of actual historical works and a prescriptive theoretical approach with which the contemporary historical discipline can reform itself. This renewal basically meant a formal reorganization with which the historical works and the historical discipline itself could come closer to literature by using narrative methods and rhetorical devices of recent literary works and films. However, after the 1990s, White and his followers had to face some radical problems that compelled them to rethink the role of recent historiography and their theoretical positions as well. Firstly, the so-called “new” historiography did not actually come into existence, or at least not in a way they suggested. Secondly, new forms of “unofficial” history, from varieties of public history through conspiracy theories to contemporary historical fictions, forced to reconceptualize the task of historical theory and its approach to the social and ideological functions of “official” history. Analysing some recently published works of this trend (above all, Hayden White’s concept of “modernist event” and his distinction between two forms of the past, theoretical and practical), my essay tries to define the situation of historical theory among the forms of contemporary historical experience.</abstract>

The Practical Past as a Field of Metahistorical Approach. Some Remarks on the Contemporary Situation of Historical Theory

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Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica

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Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica

Volume 11 (2019): Issue 1 (November 2019)

The Limit as Centre: Some Considerations on the Political Imagination of the In-Between, Starting from the Central Symbol of the Crime Series Bron/Broen – The Bridge

Genre Transgression in Contemporary Romanian Crime Fiction

Nonlinearism: The Paradigm That Replaced Postmodernism. On the Materials of Song Poetry and Cyberliterature

“A Multitude of Drops.” David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas and the Subject between Space and Time

Between Human and Animal

Spaces in Between in the Myth of Myrrha: A Metamorphosis into Tree

Aspects of Residual Narratives as Spaces in Between Based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Fantasies

The Practical Past as a Field of Metahistorical Approach. Some Remarks on the Contemporary Situation of Historical Theory

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