Florina Ilis’s research while affiliated with Babeș-Bolyai University and other places

The present essay analyses the evolution of the Japanese literature considering the dynamics of the influences exerted in the modern age by two major cultures, namely the Chinese and the European cultures, placed in confluence with the Japanese culture. T

Modern poetics imposed the image of Nietzsche’s split Subject, with the disaggregated self-emerging as dilemmatic subjectivity and its aesthetic culmination in the “dehumanisation of art.” Nietzsche’s philosophy provided postmodern poetics with the Subject as “fiction,” subjected to a complex process of self-multiplication and self-reflection (Ihab Hassan). The loss of the autonomy of the Subject as a “fashionable theme” (Frederic Jameson), combined with its multiplication into simulacra (Jean Baudrillard) and the abolition of reference, allow the Object to storm the places of its absence. The multiplicitous nature under which the image of subjectivity is formed is a possible solution for the issue of the Subject. Another solution would be inflicting violence upon the Subject, replaced by the corporeality of the Object, by the body, to the point of its destruction, or to the ultimate point of abjectness. My essay will use Murakami Ryū’s novel Coin Locker Babies to examine its author’s views on the Object-Subject relation, on the Subject as an Object (corporeality) and on the forms through which the Object inflicts violence upon the Subject.

The premise of the approach in the present paper is the interpretation of Japanese calligraphy as an artistic act and the reception of the calligraphic work of art as the object of the aesthetic relation. By combining the theoretical analysis of the main artistic functions of calligraphy –as both a representative and an expressive art – with the practice of calligraphic art, the present endeavour aims to identify the factual and artistic poetics of this visual (pictorial) and verbal art. As such, our study focuses on the particularities of the calligraphic work of art, given by its means of existence: its object of immanence is concurrently a physical and an ideal object (through its linguistic scriptural contents). In our analysis, the Japanese calligraphic art becomes the object of a reading that exploits the Western and Eastern aesthetic poetic theories, in an attempt to explore this art’s means of existence, functioning, and reception, by revealing its calligraphicity, or its artistic-aesthetic quality. As a reflection on the relation between the image and the word, and on the coherence of the vision triggered by it, based on the characteristics of the visible, our study is an original approach that analyses and interprets the vocabulary and the formal style of a unique artistic field that begins with a linguistic expression, as a means of representation, and culminates with an abstract form of expression, as a means of presentation.