0000000000194983
AUTHOR
ȘTefan Baghiu
On W.E.B. Du Bois, Double Consciousness, and Racialized Modernity. An Interview with José Itzigsohn
The February issue of Transilvania journal hosts an interview with professor José Itzigsohn focusing on his activity within the field of sociology and his latest book with Karida L. Brown, on The Sociology of W. E. B. Du Bois. Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line (New York University Press, 2020). It delves into Du Boisian sociology, “double consciousness” and racialized modernity, alongside contemporary decolonial perspectives and new studies and researchers in the field.
Geografia romanului românesc (1901-1932): arealul național
This article is part of a series that investigates through quantitative and geocritical means the corpus of novels created by the research project Astra Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932 (around 370 novels digitized). One of the many foci of our analyses delves into the internal geography of the Romanian novel as it manifests itself through geolocated metadata that reveal the spatial diversity of the corpus, concerning not only plot setting, but also relating to the main topographical nodes underpinning the novelists’ consciousness. Because of such geolocational diversity, the following study will only deal with the national setting of the Romanian novel.
Diversitate identitară în romanul românesc (1844-1932)
This study explores, using intersectionality and quantitative analysis, several axes that help shape the identity of the characters in the fictional worlds from a corpus of approximately 500 Romanian novels published between 1844 and 1932. They are gender, ethnicity/nationality, and class/work. It also briefly analyzes the gender gap in the production of the novel and examines the dynamics between the gender of the authors and the gender of the main character(s) and the person of the narration, by using metadata compiled by our research team and complex searches in the digital corpus.
W.E.B. Du Bois în studiile contemporane: conștiința dublă și modernitatea rasializată
This article outlines W.E.B. Du Bois’s general sociological theory and literary activity in connection to the recent study of Jose Itzigsohn and Karida L. Brown, The Sociology of W.E.B. Du Bois. Racialized Modernity and the Global Color Line. It describes the role of Double Consciousness and Racialized Modernity within postcolonial and decolonial theory and explains how postcolonial Romanian studies have engaged with postcolonial theory by avoiding these concepts.
The Sickle and the Piano. A Distant Reading of Work in the Nineteenth Century Romanian Novel
This article conducts a semantic search of The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: The 19th Century (MDRR), through which the authors attempt to identify the occurrences of several key concepts for class and labour imagery in the nineteenth-century Romanian novel, such as “muncă” [labour/work], “muncitor” [labourer/worker], “țăran” [peasant], “funcționar” [civil servant], alongside two main words that strikingly point out to a dissemblance of representation of work: “seceră” [sickle] and “pian” [piano]. The authors show that physical work is underrepresented in the Romanian novel between 1844 and 1900, and that novelists prefer to participate to the rise of the novel through representing …
Geografia romanului românesc (1901-1932): străinătatea
The Geography of the Romanian Novel (1901-1932): Spaces from Abroad This article charts the main cities mentioned in the Romanian novel published between 1901 and 1932 based on the corpus of novels created by the research project The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932 (around 370 digitized novels). The main discoveries that our distant reading of the geography in these novels revealed are that the planet is covered in the Romanian novel during the period in genre fiction (that has mentions of cities from Africa, Asia and South America), not in modernist highbrow literature, and that the dominance of Paris and Rome as spaces where the action takes place is atomized during this pe…
Critica ideologică în epoca limbajului administrativ de stânga: o istorie New Left a literaturii române contemporane
As Teodora Dumitru (2016) has convincingly argued in the case of Romanian literary critic Eugen Lovinescu, the evaluation of literature he proposed along his History of Contemporary Romanian Literature (1926-1929) was guided by a solid liberal and bourgeois drive. Claiming the autonomy of the aesthetics, Lovinescu actually built an urban bourgeois literary canon in his effort to systematize the local literary material. Almost 100 years later, Mihai Iovănel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 (2021) proceeds to a similar effort, but through the lens of New Left critical theory. Both Lovinescu and Iovănel use what I call the administrative language of their time: Lovinesc…
Temporalitatea internă a romanului românesc (1844-1932)
The present article follows the relationship of the Romanian novelistic output between 1901 and 1932 with time and temporal distribution. Its emphasis falls on the degree of correlation between the time of publication and the time during which the events unfold for each corresponding novel, expressed through a variable coined “distance”. By making use of this variable, the temporal distribution of the novelistic corpus in the article clearly shows that the novelists’ focus gradually shifts towards contemporary events; while during the period between 1900 up until the outbreak of World War One, novelists were inclined to place the events of their works in the past, the War seems to have trig…
Translations of Novels in the Romanian Culture During the Long Nineteenth Century (1794-1914): A Quantitative Perspective
This article uses quantitative methods to provide a macro perspective on translations of novels in Romanian culture during the long nineteenth century, by modifying Eric Hobsbawm’s 1789-1914 period, and using it as spanning from 1794 (the first registered local publishing of a translated novel) to 1918 (the end of the First World War). The article discusses the predominance of the French novel (almost 70% of the total of translated novels), the case of four other main competitors in the second line of translations (or the golden circle, as named in the article: German, English, Russian, and Italian), the strange case of the American novel as a transition zone, and the situation of five othe…