Arleen Ionescu

Shanghai Jiao Tong University | SJTU · School of Foreign Languages

In this article I will focus on three major intersections between Samuel Beckett’s and E. M. Cioran’s works, irrespective of the fact that Beckett chose mainly the medium of prose and theatre, while Cioran chose the philosophical essay. Starting from several biographical encounters mentioned in Beckett’s Letters and Cioran’s Cahiers and the section...

This interview with contemporary poet and historian Cristina A. Bejan, conducted over email, examines several contemporary meanings of 21st-century poetry through a personal lens. The interview starts from Bejan’s academic work and continues with her creative work, focusing on her ‘spoken word’ in the volume Green Horses on the Wall, published in 2...

This is a review article that discusses Timothy Yu (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Twenty-First-Century American Poetry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

My article endeavours to investigate playwright Eugène Ionesco’s irony, following two critical debates: the first was mainly conducted by Roland Barthes and Bernard Dort, in the pages of the polemical journal Théâtre Populaire, which found Ionesco’s ironic response not only in numerous interviews and theoretical texts, but also in the play Improvis...

This article examines two memoirs of authors who indirectly witnessed the horrendous crimes committed by Nazi Einsatzgruppen squads in Babi Yar where more than 33,000 of the Jewish inhabitants of Kiev were brutally murdered on 29–30 September 1941: Anatoli Kuznetsov’s Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel and Ziama Trubakov’s The Riddle of Ba...

This is my part in a Book Review Symposium in which 5 different authors analysed the three main sections of Theory in the “Post” Era. A vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons, edited by Alexandru MATEI, Christian MORARU, Andrei TERIAN (eds), New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, 361 p. My part analysed the second section which dealt with...

Starting with a recall of the overwhelming feeling, voiced by many thinkers, that the post-WWII era brought about the ‘sense of an ending’ of history as Mitsein (being-in-common), the essay explores the renewed necessity to re-learn to be together in the wake of the worst modern pandemic by appealing to Jean-Luc Nancy’s imagination of a community w...

This article explores the world of theatre from within and beyond the stage and brings together Roland Barthes as a critic and Samuel Beckett as a playwright via a third character, the Romanian-born playwright Eugène Ionesco, who anathematized the former and admired the latter. The article starts from Martin Esslin’s The Theatre of the Absurd (1961...

Starting from the concept of “literary interference,” which was conceived by the pioneer of polysystem theory, Itamar Even-Zohar, and expanded by other scholars, as well as several interpretations of intertextuality, this article compares two 20th century thinkers: the French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist Maurice Blanchot and the Roman...

This article is anexploration of three exile memoirs belonging to Eastern European Jewishrefugees that document a notable world history event: during WW2 when 6 millionEuropean Jews perished in the Nazis’ concentration and death camps, Shanghaiwas the city where more than 20,000 Jews were saved. Through mainly aconceptual framework inspired by Emma...

This article debunks a myth that has linked for more than thirty years two political projects of forming the New Man in the Soviet Union and Romania: Anton Semyonovich Makarenko’s re-education of delinquents in self-supporting orphanages (1917–1936) and a re-education program from a Romanian prison, engineered by a legionary inmate, Eugen Ţurcanu’s...

This is a reflection on the condition of the Humanities in the 21st century academia (or, more precisely, Bologna-system academia) that includes also my story as a self-exiled academic who moved to another continent to find the Humanities back in a form that resembles more my idea of how things should be done.

This chapter deals with memory and trauma studies, focusing on Kathy Kacer’s Shanghai Escape, in an attempt to look for the traces of the protagonist’s memories of the Shanghai Ghetto during WW2. The chapter is divided in two major parts: the first section, “Shanghai Ghetto: A Safe Heaven for Jewish Refugees during WW2” presents the historical acco...

This volume, focusing on the recovery of some forgotten facts about a very painful period of our history, addresses major concerns and problems. Stories dealing with life of surviving Jews after Holocaust are as important as the stories of the Holocaust itself. These are the stories of surviving Jews after the Holocaust, living memories of fear and...

This is the Introduction to our new volume of Word and Text (2020) which I co-edited with Ioana Galleron and Lanlan Du. For the ones interested, here is the link to the whole issue: http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/site_engleza/No_1_2020.html Contents: Arleen Ionescu The New Humanities in the ‘Post-University’: Introduction THE STATE OF PLAY Marc Va...

This article explores several intersections between Virginia Woolf's creation and that of a famous Romanian modernist writer, Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu. Since these intersections are at the border between adaptation and intertextuality but also can be placed within the larger context of Zeitgeist, the introductory section carefully makes distincti...

Covering a diverse range of writers and thinkers across literature, film, architecture, philosophy and psychoanalysis, this collection of essays by prominent scholars of the theoretical humanities is a fascinating contribution to the study of the relation between culture and trauma. The diversity of historical and cultural phenomena explored, as we...

Forgiving the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis in the name of ‘the final solution’ has been and remains one of the most ethically contentious issues resulting from WW2. Reading Forgiving Dr Mengele (2006) written by Eva Mozes Kor, one of the children twins on whom the ‘Angel of Death’ had experimented in Auschwitz and who, fifty yea...

This is the Introduction to volume 9 (2009) of Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics that I co-edited with Laurent Milesi and Biwu Shang. The articles included in this issue can be accessed at http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/site_engleza/No_1_2019.html. The issue includes: Arleen Ionescu: Postclassical Narratology: Twenty Yea...

Faced with the incommensurable task of representing the enormity of the crimes against Jewish people during WW2, human and especially artistic imagination had hardly any other figural resource than allusive metonymies (shoes, chimneys, smoke, barbed wire, tattoos, trains, train tracks, striped uniforms, the Judenstern) to bridge the wide gulf betwe...

This article presents an irrational, sadistic experiment based on cruelty and complete disregard of human values, carried out between 1949 and 1952 in Romania and known under the infamous name of the Piteşti experiment. Its agenda was based on ‘re-education’, metaphorically presented as a sort of ‘healing’, supposedly performed to eliminate the ‘ro...

Call for Articles, vol. 9 (2019): Word and Text - A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics

This is an Introduction to our co-edited issue entitled Encounters between Disability Studies and Critical Trauma Studies

The article reviews in great detail Mircea Mihăieş’s “Ulysses,” 732: The Novel of the Novel, which was one of the most acclaimed books in 2016 in Romania, receiving numerous prizes: the “book of the year”, written by the “writer of the year”. The review makes an in-depth analysis of some of the best parts of the book as well as of those less felici...

This chapter will look at Romanian Antisemitism and Holocaust denial. The theoretical framework relies on Ricoeur’s definitions of the abuses of memory. In its second and third part, the chapter focuses on the historical truth and on the censure of memory during communism in different books of history. The last section illustrates how Ceauşescu’s h...

This book is a detailed critical study of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum in its historical, architectural and philosophical context. Emphasizing how the Holocaust changed our perception of history, memory, witnessing and representation, it develops the notion of ‘memorial ethics’ to explore the Museum’s difference from more conventional post-Worl...

This chapter will explore how memory works in relation to history and representation in the aftermath of any catastrophe that disrupts the linearity of time and the integrity of a community; specifically, for the purpose of this study, the death of millions of Jewish people in concentration camps and ghettos during the Second World War. The Holocau...

On 11 September 2001, watching the news of the terrorist attack against the World Trade Center, dumbfounded like so many millions of viewers, I was struck by the apocalyptic spectacle, which reminded me of Emil Cioran’s invocation of ‘smoke and dust as after a great cataclysm’.1 On what became universally known henceforth as ‘9/11’, New York City,...

On my first visit to the Berlin Jewish Museum in August 2011, after walking along the zigzags and through the voids, I felt the need ‘to link’ and, like the Museum’s so many physical bridges, to re-establish connections between the fragmented realities that had been displayed in front of my eyes. When exiting from the Holocaust Tower, thinking of D...

In a lecture on Bauhaus delivered in Weimar in 1998, Daniel Libeskind compared the work of memory with ‘a light we forgot to turn off at night’ which ‘reminds us the next day by its very own faintness of the forgotten events of the night’ (SE 21). He also expressed his belief that ‘the ethic is indeed an optic since it makes visible our own relatio...

Of all arts, architecture in particular proves to be a medium most readily suited to provide viewers with an exceptional experience of the materiality of trauma as the purpose of commemorative buildings is to exhibit and embody the imperative to remember in spatial, physical representation. The Latin word monumentum is derived from monere: to warn,...

This monograph was born from a 2011 trip to Germany, in which my family and I were touring sights associated with the Second World War, including Holocaust memorials and monuments erected in the 1990s, such as Daniel Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum. There were so many reasons to feel overwhelmed in Libeskind’s ‘experiential’1 museum that we hardly...

Word and Text, 5.1 (2015): 5-16.

My essay began from Derrida’s propaedeutic “Letter to a Japanese Friend” venturing the famous formula ça se déconstruit to emphasize the “structural” inevitability of an event which need not await conscious deliberation, a letter that asserted quite directly that “Deconstruction takes place”. (58) I attempted to “give place” to three thinkers and/o...

This study makes Romania's largely unknown Joycean heritage visible to an international readership. Reviewing Joyce's critical reception and translations, as well as the writer's influence on Romanian prose, it brings Derrida's notion of «hostipitality» to comparative literary and translation studies in order to theorize the impact of politics and...

In The Uncanny Nicholas Royle defined Freud's Unheimlichkeit and the experience of an "unreal reality" as "another thinking of beginning". But if we are to take him at his word, "the beginning is already haunted" and we may wish to interpret his debut novel Quilt as spectrally haunted by the critic's earlier theory. The essay, which is structured t...

Waiting and expecting structurally presuppose a futurity conditioned by doubt and uncertainty about the object of the wait. But what can waiting signify when one no longer waits for something/someone to come in a determinable future or when the horizon of such a traditional form of waiting starts receding? This paper attempts to frame this problem...

Waiting and expecting structurally presuppose a futurity conditioned by doubt and uncertainty about the object of the wait. But what can waiting signify when one no longer waits for something/someone to come in a determinable future or when the horizon of such a traditional form of waiting starts receding? This paper attempts to frame this problem...

This section, which does not fall within the remit of a conventional scholarly paper, is built to bring together several academics and decision makers involved in the field of higher education, and gathers accounts of both personal and professional opinions on the state of mediocrity in the 21st century, with a particular emphasis on the present Ro...

Starting from the ambivalent notion of hospitality, combining both the guest to be welcomed and the host, and Derrida‘s coinage of 'hostipitality', a concept which recaptured the inimical alterity between hospitality and hostility, the article explores a very specific host: the Romanian translator, whose house is the Joycean text and whose guest is...

In spite of Derrida’s timely Specters of Marx and of the critical activity that it generated, as well as Stéphane Courtois’s The Black Book of Communism, whose responses varied from highly enthusiastic support to bitter criticism, out of all post’s, post(-)communism1 as such has not received the theoretical attention it should have otherwise deserv...

In the 1930s, the Romanian elite either promoted James Joyce to the point of adulation or, much more often, deprecated his work to the point of travestying its contents. The long, enduring history of misinterpretations includes the names of well-known critics and Anglicists who based their opinions either on a preconceived rejection of new aestheti...

The article explores Adrian Oţoiu's attempt to push further the limits of expression and representation in his novel The Skin of the Matter or Dancing with the Flayed, as well as his renegotiation of what Maurice Blanchot called 'the space of literature', which opens up towards architecture and choreography, to name the main two other arts engaging...

Recalling the homograph plus de as the minimal definition of deconstruction, the article examines the problematic of names in several Derridian contexts referring to the doubled, divided gift of names. It focuses more specifically on Derrida's essay "Pas", dealing with Blanchot's récit, in which Blanchot's pas au-delà (step/not beyond) is analysed...

Normal 0 21 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/1980-4237.2010n8p237 The essay reviews Mircea Ivănescu’s Romanian translation of Ulysses, in particular the last chapter, “Penelope”, by placing its achievement within its historical context. After outlining the ideological climate during which the translation was be...

The article analyses a few texts from Romanian textbooks, which seem not to have adapted at all even to the simple fact that Romania has become part of the European Union. Romanian history, unlike other European ones, gave birth to a certain type of patriotic discourse with a certain degree of chauvinism, which was practiced even by a few Romanian...

Recalling the homograph plus de as the minimal definition of deconstruction, the article examines the problematic of names in several Derridian contexts referring to the doubled, divided gift of names. It focuses more specifically on Derrida's essay "Pas", dealing with Blanchot's récit, in which Blanchot's pas au-delà (step/not beyond) is analysed...

The aim of the paper is to explore the apparitions of what Derrida called the "unnameable" or "almost unnameable thing", whose visor effect haunts our imagination. The article attempts to trace a path through different canonical interpretations of the significance of Hamlet's addressing the ghost in a familiar tone, as "old mole", before the ghost...