Romanian Folk Mythology

Volumul propune o recitire critică a tradiţiei etnografice ca analiză antropologică a contextelor istorice în care s-a format această tradiție. Sunt interpretate dimensiunile ideologice ale societăţii şi culturii „prinse” în această istorie şi „surprinse” prin descrierile etnografice locale; sunt discutate, apoi, modalitățile de înnoire efectivă a etnografiei locale româneşti. Aceste „direcții” de înnoire sunt ilustrate prin trei proiecte personale: un studiu non-tradițional pe un teren tradițional („satul românesc”), un studiu non-tradițional pe un teren non-tradițional (într-o „cultură străină”) și un proiect de traducere din antropologia occidentală ca perspectivă non-tradițională asupra temelor antropologice românești. Principala contribuție teoretico-metodologică a volumului o constituie perspectiva meta-etnografică, de evaluare a acestei tradiții discursive și a acestor proiecte, ca analiză reflexivă, textuală, experimentală și critică (adică utilizând achiziţii ale „noilor teorii etnografice”), şi ca „punere la lucru a etnografiei” ca activitate nouă, atât ca cercetare cât şi ca scriere.

Obiectul acestui subcapitol – câteva expresii verbale – este pus în relație cu niște structuri de mentalitate care l-au produs și care, prin urmare, îi pot lămuri istoria și semantismul. În astfel de cazuri, verbalul este o reminiscență. S-a păstrat formula, dar originea ei este adesea obscură. Imaginarul mitologic din care provine se situează în afara orizontului mental al vorbitorilor de azi. Aceștia intuiesc totuși semnificația de context a expresiei. Așa se întâmplă cu structuri idiomatice precum „a se face frate cu dracul” sau „copil din flori”. Cea din urmă poate fi tradusă prin „né(e) sous un chou”, în franceză sau „born under a bush”, în engleză. (Grație unei paradigme universale a imaginarului mitic, ultimele trei sunt congenere expresiei „a ieși (ca) din pământ", așa cum vedea). Propunem, în continuare, două ipoteze privind originea acestor expresii în tipare arhaice ale imaginarului colectiv: în mituri dualiste despre „frăția” dintre Trickster și „bunul Dumnezeu” – (aproape) universal răspândite în mediul folcloric – și în mituri ale maternității htoniene, care apar, sub diferite forme, în mai toate cultùrile.

Disertația prezentă reprezintă o schemă comprehensivă a ceea ce înseamnă folclorul în contemporaneitate, modalitățile de percepție din perspectiva etnologilor și fenomenul democratizării definiției în ultimele decenii. Acesta oferă o perspectivă asupra cîtorva dintre caracteristicile și modurile de formare ale fenomenelor care țin de underground și mainstream (pînă în anul 2018) și demonstrarea apartenenței genurilor rock și metal la una dintre acestea, cu posibilitatea transferului acestei caracteristici în funcție de evoluția media.
Studiul urmărește în special evoluția în cazul folk rock, folk metal și variațiuni ale metalului care înglobează în sine elemente de folclor prin tematică, instrumentație și lexic, remarcînd un interes puternic în ceea ce privește recuperarea elementelor de mitologie și istorie, conținînd un număr de analize pe texte și o anexă cu interviuri acordate de muzicieni din domeniu.

The spear established itself as a unit of time measurement in Romania, becoming a synonym for the temporary hours used in antiquity. Thus, a spear would refer to one twelfth of the Sun’s solar arc while having a variable duration according to the season. In the absence of written evidence on the method used, we believe that the time of day was measured in spears either by sundials with equidistant divisions, or by equating the length of the shadows to temporary hours. Holding a spear the size of a person at one arm’s length away from the body and aiming the solar disk, although a seemingly more straightforward procedure, presents many practical problems.

In this paper, the author shall deal with the Hungarian variants of dualistic world creation myths. The aim of this paper is to shed some light on the nature of the connection between the Central‐East European Hungarian and South‐East European Romanian and Bulgarian myth variants. The Hungarian pieces are the westernmost variants of the dualistic creation myth‐group. Geographically, they stand close to the Romanian variants, but the serious motivational differences between the Romanian and Hungarian variants show that the descent of the two oral narrative groups are distinct. Both the Hungarian and the Romanian variants show similarities with the Bulgarian world creation myths, however, geographically they do not relate tightly. This is why a possible explanation of these correlations is, that the Hungarian and the Bulgarian myths have common Central Eurasian, South‐Eastern Siberian origins, upon which starting from the sixth to the seventh centuries the super strata of various gnostic influences have settled.

From "Weltschmerz" to Valentinian "Kakia": Eminescu's Dualistic-Gnostic Imaginary
Hans Jonas (2001) found striking similarities between Antique Gnosticism and Western Existentialism, foreshadowed since the late 19th century, but continued into the next. In our opinion, the historical parallelism identified by Hans Jonas (2001) may be extended over the relation between the Romantic generation and Gnostics (particularly Valentinians) who had preceded them by more than fifteen centuries. On the one hand, we may note the similitude between Weltschmerz, the “evil” of the Romantic century, and Kakia, used by Valentinian Gnostics to designate, in a way different from that of their contemporaries, followers of the Christian canon, “what is evil”:  “particularly emotional evils – fear, confusion, grief” (Irenaeus). On the other hand, for both Romantics and Gnostics, healing lies in inner truth: the hidden, luminous, extremely subjectivized God of the Gnostics; the absolute of the Romantics, also accessible through subjectivity, emotions and visionary imagination; or, that “truth” which, several centuries before the Romantics, but influencing them, was sought by alchemists, not so much “within ourselves”, but in an “image of the divine that lies within us” (Dorn). Our finding is that Eminescu assumes this subjectivized, Romantic and Gnostic-alchemic understanding of divinity in an explicit way. In a particular way, the characters – lyrical “voices” from Luceafărul (The Vesper) – are distributed precisely in the key-roles, as symptomatic actantial roles from the Gnostic mythology.

Keywords: Weltschmerz; Kakia; dualism; Gnosticism; Romanticism; Mihai Eminescu; Luceafărul (The Vesper).

YOUTH INSTITUTION IN THE ROMANIAN FAIRYTALE

A Romanian cultural reality of the fairy tale is the Youth institution. Deeply traditional epic logical level, this cultural reality is both structural and conceptual, significantly enriching the Romanian folk ethos. Bringing to the fore values, principles, instruments of traditional spiritual substance,Youth institution comes to speak through examples cited in this study, recurrence habits aimed feelings about participating in epic characters. Thus, I could detect a certain scheme of representation and signification expectations they have sentimental heroes of these tales. In this Youth institution
scheme (be it physical body, aesthetic or utopian dimension), It has an essential place, pivoting around its entire approach epic. I tried to find, in the rich material was available, qualities and limits, the focal point or equilibrium between Youth institution
imaginary object or topic. Especially of a corporality seen exclusively through the filter of traditional mentality! To what extent we succeeded, remains to be seen

Adevărată " instanţă " a alegerii, criteriul tinereţii este omniprezent la nivelul basmului românesc, putându-se afirma, pe baza bogăţiei de exemple, că tot epicul acestor basme se desfăşoară şi se consumă în acest scop 1. Expresie a unui anumit (dez)echilibru social, nevoia interioară a eroului de basm românesc care îşi doreşte erotico-marital o fiinţă feminină deosebită, vizează, de cele mai multe ori, o fiinţă feminină desăvârşită. Fără a fi un lucru comun (ne-o dovedeşte faptul că abia aflând de ea, din auzite sau la prima vedere, aceasta va duce la manifestarea, din partea eroului, a unui caracter instantaneu al alegerii, urmat de o uluitoare risipă de energie pe care el este dispus să o facă pentru a-şi apropia o astfel de fiinţă feminină!), aceasta vizează ceea ce noi am numit instituţia tinereţii 2. Or, reprezentarea carnalităţii desăvârşite (printr-un trup fără cusur, cum este cel " vânat " de eroul basmelor fantastice româneşti) are, ca fundament fenomenologic, însăşi esenţa vitalităţii. Dar, cum puritatea feminină nu este niciodată la îndemână nici măcar la nivelul imagologic al basmului fantastic românesc, eroul acestora trebuie să o caute, să o " vâneze " şi, după multe peripeţii, să şi-o apropie erotico-marital. Prin urmare, bun " conductor " metafizic, acest trup desăvârşit, dorit de eroul basmelor româneşti, va trasa şi condiţiona biopsihologia traiectului iniţiatic parcurs de erou pentru a-şi putea apropia erotico-marital un astfel de trup. Este ceea ce vom încerca să descoperim în rândurile de faţă. Dar, cum această " instituţie a tinereţii " presupune un cumul. 2 Din suprapunerea şi analiza basmelor în care este prezent acest motiv, instituţia tinereţii reprezintă un cumul de elemente şi principii, persoane şi/sau locuri, cu atribute speciale şi cu certă semnificaţie valorică (erotico-maritală şi catartică), care, " accesate " de către eroul de basm, îi determină, condiţionează sau deturnează acestuia destinul final, împingându-l sau ancorându-l, temporar sau definitiv, într-o altă dimensiune ontologică decât cea comun-cotidiană.

Die vorliegende Studie zeigt, in welchem Maße die Haltung des “modernen Menschen” in Siebenbürgen gegenüber dem Tod und der Trauer in der heutigen Gesellschaft noch die Züge der traditionellen rumänischen Gesellschaft trägt und inwieweit sich seine Grundhaltung dazu verändert hat. Die Studie ist das Ergebnis einer Feldforschung aufgrund von Interviews mit denen herausgearbeitet wurde, wie sich heute die Menschen in einem bestimmten Teil Siebenbürgens zu  Tod, Trauer und Rolle der Kirche in diesen Momenten stellen.

Aus der Untersuchung geht hervor, dass sich die Gesellschaft in einem Übergangsstadium befindet, dass sie einerseits fest an kirchlichen Ritualen hängt, sich aber andererseits mit den Herausforderungen der Postmoderne und der Globalisierung auseinandersetzt. Zur Bandbreite der Befragten gehören auch Personen mit traditionellen Auffassungen, doch diese sind i.d.R. älter. Die jüngeren und die gebildeten Befragten sehen den einen oder anderen Aspekt der Gestaltung der Beerdigungsfeier oder die Gestaltungsweise der Trauerzeit eher kritisch. Aus einigen Antworten klingt das Erbe des Kommunismus hervor, andere bezeugen eine echte Öffnung gegenüber dem Neuen in seinen verschiedenen Ausdrucksformen. Am schwersten findet die Idee einer professionellen Trauerbegleitung Akzeptanz. Mehr als die Hälfte der Befragten behaupten, dass sie solche Dienstleistungen nicht in Anspruch nehmen würden, wobei ersichtlich ist, dass sie sie auch nicht richtig verstehen.

The Interdiction to Look Back in Romanian Folktales:Imageries of an Interdiction


Cultural fictions about the topic of  imagery are numerous and diversein meaning. One such aspect of imagery can be found in Romanianfairytales whose figurative structures develop around specific traditionalmentalities. That is why, due to the presence of a prohibition in certainRomanian fairytales (not to look back)
, in the present study we restrictedthe scope of this traditional imagery to a particular aspect. We have triedthus to discover, from the perspective of phenomenology andhermeneutics, not only the function but also the meaning  of the traditionalimagery, the manifestation and symbolic representation of interdictionin Romanian fairytales. To what extent we have succeeded, it remainsto be seen.

In Ion Creangă’s Memories of my childhood we can find multiple connections to Romanian local folklore, such as oral songs and superstitions. In one of its most memorable chapters, the main character and narrator, Nică, explains how his mother used to avert inclement weather (rains, hail, winds) by insetting their axe into the ground or how she knew several spells and disenchantments against the evil-eye, widely spread in Romania and many other countries all over the world. Also, Nică uses a common belief in the strigoi when he needs to steal some milk; these creatures, always between good and evil, are very appealing in Romanian folklore. Many of these elements are not only known in Romania, but they are part of a larger heritage that connects regional beliefs to universal literature.

The opening sentence of an unofficial Romanian prayer (molitvă) to exorcise the năjit – a worm-like demon that invades the head in order to cause toothache, headache, etc. – contains obscure refences to the năjit emerging from a "dried sea" and to the divine intercessor's "food being ready." A Neo-Babylonian formula for treating a demonic tooth-worm has many similarities with the Romanian historiola. The Akkadian text mentions that the worm had emerged from a marshland, swamp or mudflat and describes how ripe fruits were initially offered to it for food. The problematic opening of the Romanian text may preserve a garbled and highly condensed memory of this generative marsh/mud and ready-to-eat food. In addition, the genre of the Babylonian text – a cosmogony set at the dawn of creation – makes sense of an otherwise opaque description of the năjit as "the beginning of the beginnings and of all the diseases."

The present article aims at a comparative analysis amongst four legends constructed around the
same myth i.e. the myth of construction that requires a sacrifice: the Romanian ballad about the
construction of the monastery in Argeș, Wallachia; the Hungarian ballad about the construction
of the fortress of Deva in Transylvania, Romania; the Welsh legend of Dynas Emrys; and the
Georgian legend about the construction of the Surami fortress. The legends represent the sacrifice
in different ways. In the Romanian ballad, a woman and her child are walled in a church;
in the Hungarian version, a woman is burnt and her ashes are walled in; in the Welsh legend,
the sacrifice is avoided, and in the Georgian one, it is transformed into self-sacrifice. Moreover,
through a comparative analysis of different versions of the Bible, we shall emphasise the importance
of the building of the city of Jericho, the significance of curse and sacrifice in both the
beginning and proliferation of the myth. For our research, we shall use the methodology devised
by Mircea Eliade in his book about the myth of sacrifice (Meșterul Manole. Studii de Etnologie
și Mitologie), as well as the works of Professor Trumbull, The Threshold Covenant and The Blood
Covenant. One of the main conclusions of our article is that nothing that is human-made has
a soul, and it can only last if it only acquires a soul. Hence the need for sacrifice that has been
part of human history since times immemorial. Any revisitation of this myth can only bring
people together and thus emphasise the things people and peoples have in common, and that
can only lead to a better understanding of the Other.

Our contribution attempts to respond to a gap in the investigation of the reminiscences of dualistic imaginary in modern literature and also in the Romanian reflection on the phenomenon. By approaching more thoroughly a theme that we have already discussed, from other perspectives, in our previous contributions, this article aims at identifying and analyzing, in the context of the history of mentality and the history of the imaginary, the persistence of certain dualist(oid) structures in the work of authors who are representative for Romanian classic and interwar literature, as well as for the postwar diaspora.

For a poetic of the imaginary: the women's clothes from the fantastic Romanian fairy tale

Rich in recurrent, full of mythical substances, female clothes from the Romanian tales lends itself to an analysis of semiotics imagology. In theory, Romanian traditional imagery was based, in the case of fantastic tales, on the real-fictional opposition. In practice, real and symbolic have always been juxtaposed, even matching, precisely in order to be efficient, credible (= own filters) to represent symbolic values of things to represent. The structure of this synthesis figurative imaginary, I find it very visible and evident in the clothes worn by beautiful female coming from another world / dimension in the hero world. Without being mere ornaments; representing, anagogic speaking, even their spiritual identity; always bearing tension conflict, female clothes from Romanian fairy tale condition or restructures epic narrative content. Moreover: very often, without counting immutable, their pivots around all those fairy tales symbolism. Enriching them with psychological experiences brought to the forefront, by force ontological struggle to keep or near these clothes, through the purpose of symbolic expression. However I tried to capture in this study, the subject deserving but more extensive treatment…

Completat:
Dr. Emil Țîrcomnicu, cercetător gradul I la Institutul de Etnografie și Folclor„Constantin Brăiloiu”, membru în Comisia Națională pentru SalvgardareaPatrimoniului Cultural Imaterial
La realizarea acestui raport a contribuit cu materiale științifice
- Irina Șerbănoiu, absolventă master „Etnologie, Antropologie culturală și Folclor”, Facultatea de Litere, Universitatea din București
- Lucia Brad Paraschivescu, etnolog, doctorand la Facultatea de Istorie, Universitatea din București
Data:
4 august 2021

Lucia Brad Paraschivescu - Crucea de Sânziene - pp. 9-10

Online resource: 
https://evt-as.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/b83xke9qyacbdo57pgklq9kkgsi2?response-content-disposition=inline%3B%20filename%3D%22sanzienele-dragaica.pdf%22%3B%20filename%2A%3DUTF-8%27%27sanzienele-dragaica.pdf&response-content-type=application%2Fpdf&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Credential=AKIAJSYHGRGV3SCK2MWA%2F20231022%2Feu-central-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Date=20231022T060656Z&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Signature=8ea1505852249fdb52ba559988e23ef3a795286cb4e737b9631e1f2875df6d9a

L'articolo descrive ed analizza alcuni aspetti retorici e stilistici degli incantesimi popolari romeni, con l'intento di ricostruire un quadro più preciso delle tecniche tradizionali dell’estasi e di tutte quelle pratiche magiche fondate sulla parola, in cui giocano un ruolo di primo piano la perdita o l’attenuazione della coscienza, la trance ipnotica, la dissociazione psichica.

Primordial element, dominated by mythological and mythofolklore connotations, air is a kernel by itself of collective imagination, which has generated story (epic as a species). Being in a limited spatio-temporality (given by the inaccessible nature to anyone and/or anyway), this archetypal element is reserved for a spiritual elite (God, Saints, fairies, astral elements), with a cosm(ogon)ic role, and it can be accessed only temporal and in virtue of some initiations done by someone already initiated. In this study, I tried to capture, from the perspective of hermeneutics, just the need of an upward imaginary of the Romanian traditional community, generating and/or consuming fairy tale, which has tried, through specific imagology means, to access this intangible space otherwise. At the same time, through the examples offered by the collection of fairy tales, I have tried to underline the contributions and the conditionings, which the technical progress has imposed on this field, the mythical (or magic) content of tale, being replaced with technical references (new means of aerial locomotion), which change the symbolic expression of these (imaginary) air travels to concrete, daily, easy.

This paper concerns the distribution of the motif “Your House is on Fire!”, which has been repeatedly discussed in comparative works on Balto-Slavic and Goidelic oral traditions. In our online database of world folklore and mythology (http://www.ruthenia.ru/folklore/berezkin), it is defined as follows: to get rid of a demonic woman or to make a bird or a ladybird fly away, they are told that the place where they live (house, hill, forest, etc.) and/or their children are burning up. The systematic processing of ca. 70,000 texts has allowed us to specify the distribution of this motif in Eurasia and to reveal its parallels in the New World (see map on p. 327). In Europe, “Your House is on Fire!” is spread at least among the Spaniards, Bretons, Irish, Gaels, English, Germans, Lithuanians, Sorbs, Czechs, Slovaks, Rusyns, Romanians, Western Ukrainians, Northern and Southern Russians, and Moksha Mordvins. In Siberia, the motif is shared in Northern Khanty and Mansi traditions. In America, it is attested in the Columbia Plateau among the Wishram, Sahaptin, and Nez Perce. Such a distribution, together with data concerning the peopling of the New World and on hundreds of other Eurasian-American folklore parallels, suggests that the motif in question has its roots in a time much older than the Proto-Indo-European era and was already known in northern Eurasia in the final Pleistocene.

The paper is a contribution to the researches of the Serb demonological system in the Danube Gorge, with an emphasis on its current functioning. The author analyses material related to demonic beings todorovci / todoronci / tudoronci, since it is one of the segments of demonology that has been found to be multiple paradigmatic: on the one hand, it is an indicator of the relations that the traditional culture of this community establishes with the ethnically and geo-culturally close ones (Serbs and Romanians in the Serbian part of Banat, Serbs and Vlachs in north-eastern Serbia) and directly contact, majority Romanian culture. Therefore, the presented material is placed in the Balkan and South Slavic contexts. On the other hand, the paradigm of the chosen example refers to the place of this demonic being in the subjective mental space of the interlocutors in a moment when the traditional culture of Serbs in the Danube Gorge can be seen as both relatively archaic and also as a culture undergoing transformation, which, as expected,  also brings down the elements of the demonological system, the instability in describing their attributes and functions, and the diversity of experiences at the individual level

Netămăduit la vreme, năravul de-a împlini şaptezeci de ani s-a înrădăcinat în românime; ba încă şi mai abitir în cea dezrădăcinată întru înflorire. Doamne, fireşte că acum i se întâmplă lui Dumitru Radu Popa, de vreme ce s-a născut în 1949! Şi în ce familie bună! Şi cum a perpetuat-o! Şi cum i se întâmplă pentru prima dată să sufere de sindromul LXX, ne-am strâns, prieteni de ici şi colo, să-l ajutăm să treacă, -n pas de vals, în septuagenariat. Scrisul lui, ca şi felul lui de-a fi, pune dimpreună râsul fin cu cel imens şi personajele imunde cu bonomii lui Creangă; iar ironia, anxietatea, ori spasmul meteorologic, cu de-ale lui Caragiale. Citindu-l, poţi să mori de râsu-plânsu; vorbind cu el, să mori de bucurie – ambele, soiuri de moarte nu mică, ci bună. Cine le încearcă nu poate să nu-i fie prieten.

TOWARDS A COSMIC ANTHROPOLOGY? PREMISE AND FOUNDATION OF
CHOICE IN THE ROMANIAN FAIRY TALE

In the present study I am trying to map out a phenomenology ofthe body at thelevel of Romanian fairy tales. Starting from the (classical) mythical fundament`s, mymyth-analysis seeks to underscore its symbolism implied by such an approach (with theerotic-marital substrate) at the level of the Romanian traditional mentality (generatorand/or consumer of fairy tales).The marriage of a mortal person, even the king`s son, with a (semi-)divinhuman being, from a different world/dimension that of the material of the hero, couldonly update the hierogamy theme. As such, and from the perspective of hermeneutics, Itried to capture how the hero`s actions undermine or violate the traditional rules, thefinal aim of the hero, assuming, in the alternative, infringement or cancellation of theserules.
The new “mode of operation” of the hero (in relation to the specific facts of a
traditional communities, such as generators, and/or consuming of fairy tale), brings inthe foreground the traditional thinking, still active, still perceptible, but which,inevitably, is subject to the inherent transformation, in which only the gestures, actionsor behaviors of the hero become significant, both in relation to the physical and materialworld, palpable, as well as with the world and non-material being accessedand covetedby the fairy tale hero.

This article proposes a new reading of the classic Romanian fairy tale "Everlasting Youth and Endless Life" ("Tinerețe fără bătrânețe și viață fără de moarte"), collected by Petre Ispirescu in 1862. A hermeneutics of this text was published in 1978, under the name "The fairy tale of the being", by Romanian philosopher Constantin Noica. His son-Hieromonk Rafail Noica, is an important contemporary theologian, following the teachings of Saint Sophrony Sakharov. The fairy tale will be analyzed through a tri-conceptual lens: the philosophy of Constantin Noica, the theology of his son-Hieromonk Rafail Noica, and a reinterpretation that critically integrates these visions.

" Those machines whose output was so great that all men might be clothed; those new methods of agriculture and new agricultural implements, which promised crops so big that all men might be fed—the very instruments that were to give the whole community the physical basis of a good life turned out, for the vast majority of people who possessed neither capital nor land, to be nothing short of instruments of torture. " (Mumford 1922, pp. 115-116, emphasis added) We grew corn at the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm gardens this year, and while the corn stalks grew to be over eight feet high they were barren. The corn grew tall, but it was unable to bear fruit because of the northerly environment it grew in. Similarly, we grew a strain of tobacco that was gifted to the gardens by a company from the US, and while the tobacco grew tall, had big, beautiful leaves, and even began to flower, it did not mature to the point of bearing its seed pods. The tobacco grew tall, but it was unable to bear fruit because of the northerly environment it grew in. Post-Industrial society can be likened to such a plant, which grew tall from the seed—from the utopian myth—of industrial society but failed to bear the fruits portended by these myths because of the environment (the Paternalist Worldview [Barnesmoore 2017a; Barnesmoore 2017b; Barnesmoore 2017c]) it grew in.

Dans la littérature européenne, il y a toute une lignée de la «folie» ambigüe, parfois lucide, censée de révéler la vérité, de faire justice, de corriger le réel. C'est la «folie» de Hamlet, du pirandellien Enrico IV, d'Alonso Quijano auto-proclamé Don Quichotte. Sous le masque, de tels héros agissent afin d'améliorer l'ordre moral du monde, et d'en tirer au jour une vérité essentielle, jalousement cachée ou malheureusement oubliée. Motif littéraire aux origines beaucoup plus anciennes que le Baroque qui l'a consacré, el gran teatro del mundo croise ainsi l'auto-fiction du fou, le plus lucide y compris, tel qu'en témoignent l'oeuvre de Shakespeare, de Cervantes, de Pirandello, et jusqu'à un certain point, de I.L. Caragiale. Chez ce dernier, il y a  tout un monde à l’envers, qui, à quelques exceptions près, reste comme tel après la fin du texte; l'anarchie d'une fête des fous s'y installe à la longue. Les personnages de I.L. Caragiale défient, presque tous, soit moralement «le raisonnable», soit pathologiquement «la rationalité». Le comique y découle non seulement «du mécanique plaqué sur le vivant», mais aussi d'un soupçon de folie «plaquée» sur la raison. Notre approche est donc une relecture de la dramaturgie de I.L. Caragiale, dans la perspective d'une archéologie de l'imaginaire, plus précisément d'une (arché)typologie de la folie comme dérapage ou (prémisse de) réparation, telle que l'a déjà consacrée une longue histoire des mentalités européennes.
Mots-clés: «monde à l’envers», «nef des fous» (stultifera navis), (dé)raisonnable, el gran teatro del mundo, I.L. Caragiale, Michel Foucault, Năpasta [Le Malheur], D'ale carnavalului [Du carnaval], O scrisoare pierdută [Une lettre perdue].

Using (and to some extent, “abusing”) Jacques Derrida’s concept of “decontextualisation”
(and “recontextualisation”), the broadest interest of my paper is the deliberate (and critical)
decontextualisation of stereotypes through literature. My study particularly focuses here on a fictional
strategy I will call “literary deflection”, i.e. the intentionally distorted reflection – having critical
deconstruction as its main intent – of a cultural stereotype. As a hands-on illustration of this fictional
policy, I have chosen Alexandru Mușina’s take on the profile of the vampire in his last novel Nepotul
lui Dracula [Dracula’s Nephew] (2012). Starting from a thorough observation of the hilarious
(ironical) “misuse” of the original romantic stereotype of the vampire in Mușina’s story, this
approach will eventually reveal the essentially ethical nature of such implied cultural identity
(re)negotiation and the pertinence of fictional discourse as an instrument for cultural analysis.

Linguistic and cultural image of Friday in Romanian folk calendar in the meeting of languages and cultures

The language – described by ethnologists as a part of the culture and as its product – is, at the same time, a means serving to preserve this culture and its transmission between generations. Ethnolingustic research which contributes to the description of the way of its expression, and which shows relations between the linguistic description and the view of the world, can be also a useful tool in the process of foreign language teaching in a situation, in which – as it was stated repeatedly – the only knowledge of a language turns out to be insufficient to an act of communication to be completely successful.

As a point of departure for the analyses presented in the article served different forms recorded in language (syntagmas, set expressions, proverbs), which contain the lexeme vineri (‘Friday’). Its review proves, that, in Romanian, the preservation of the vestiges of pre-Christian and Christian traditions related to this day.