Comparatisms Compared: Stirring the Appetite

Comparative Literature in Europe: Challenges and Perspectives. Edited by Nikol Dziub and Frédérique Toudoire-Surlapierre. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019.             &nbsp

Exploring/Inventing East-European Noir. An Attempt to Modelling Historical Transformation

The essay proposes a common spectrum of noir detective fictions emerging in the countries of the former Soviet Bloc. Accordingly, it substantiates the assumption that similar political, social, cultural, economic threats and opportunities contributed to the preservation of a certain air de famille among the genre productions of the countries of the area even after the fall of Communism. The common Communist heritage of genre fiction, cinema, and television is synthesised in three main categories: Cold War “noir” and Socialist “grey”, alternative noir, and popular noir. The crime & detection dimensions of the EU phase of the evolution of East-European countries are equally organised in three clusters, called retrospective noir, introspective noir, and prospective noir

Failed Cultural Hybridity and Takeaways for the Euro-Noir in the American-Romanian Series Comrade Detective

Comrade Detective (Amazon, 2017) is a crime spoof that employs Romanian actors dubbed by famous Hollywood stars to pretend to recover a propaganda TV series produced in 1980s Communist Romania. The paper explores the huge asymmetry between the apparent cosmopolitan and glocal program of the show and its total failure in activating the meaning processes and circuits that generate cultural cross-fertilization. This failure is the result of an involuntary deconstruction of the very conditions of possibility for representing multicultural personalities: by creating a symbolic gap between the corporeal and the vocal performers, the series highlights a power relationship that denies the personalist essence of a cosmopolitan ethos. Hybridity is also absent from the series: the presumable networks of connexions activated by a Romanian versus an American ideal viewer are completely non-interfering

The Robotic Approach in Rectal Cancer

Since a robotic surgical system was developed in the early 1990s and the first robotic-assisted radical prostatectomy was reported in 2001, robotic surgery has spread in many surgical specialties, changing surgical management. Currently, compared to other colorectal procedures, robotic surgery appears to offer great benefits for total mesorectal excision for rectal cancer. Abdominal cavity other procedures such as right hemicolectomy and high anterior resection are relatively uncomplicated and can be performed easily by laparoscopic surgery. First reports have focused on the clinical benefits of robotic rectal cancer surgery compared with laparoscopic surgery. The indications for robotic and laparoscopic rectal cancer surgery are not different. The recently published results of the ROLARR trial, comparing robot-assisted TME to laparoscopic TME, show no advantages of robot assistance in terms of intraoperative complications, postoperative complications, plane of surgery, 30-day mortality, bladder dysfunction, and sexual dysfunction. A drawback of the study is the variability in experience of the participating surgeons in robotic surgery. After correction of this confounder, an advantage for robotic assistance was suggested in terms of risk of conversion to open surgery. For robotic rectal cancer surgery to become the preferred minimally invasive option, it must demonstrate that it does not have the technical difficulties and steep learning curve of laparoscopic surgery. Robotic surgery has several technical advantages over open and laparoscopic surgery. The system provides a stable operating platform, three-dimensional imaging, articulating instruments and a stable surgeon controlled camera which is mainly beneficial in areas where space and maneuverability is limited such as the pelvis

World Literatures and Romanian Literary Criticism

In his article World Literatures and Romanian Literary Criticism Caius Dobrescu argues that the notion Weltliteratur of Goethe posits the concept of world literature as the conveyor of universal (i.e., cosmopolitan) skills of socio-cultural adaptation. The influence of this form of Weltliteratur on Romanian literary criticism is traceable from Westernization in the nineteenth century to the cultural dissent of the post-Stalinist era. Based on Norbert Elias\u27s diffusionist theory of the civilizing process, Dobrescu contends that one of the role models of the Romanian literary scholar and critic in his/her capacity of intercultural mediator was the eighteenth-century philosophe in the tradition of cosmopolitan politess

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

The crime series Bron/Broen [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.

What Is It Like to Be a Compass Needle? The Cognitive Potential of Literary Criticism, the Pleasure of Thinking, and the Kantian Notion of “Mutual Assistance of the Faculties”

The Cognitive Potential of Literary Criticism, the Pleasure of Thinking, and the Kantian Notion of “Mutual Assistance of the Faculties"The Cognitive Potential of Literary Criticism, the Pleasure of Thinking, and the Kantian Notion of “Mutual Assistance of the Faculties

Latent Crusaders: Narrative Strategies of Survival in Early Modern Danubian Principalities, 1550-1750

The essay concentrates on a master narrative strategy presiding over the early emergence of modernity in the area in which contemporary Romania is situated. This narrative strategy richly illustrates the neoByzantine survival strategies of the Greek elites who ruled the Danubian Principalities (Moldova and Valahia) during the earlier stages of Romanian modernization (18th century). Early modem Romanian political and intellectual elites borrowed from the post-Byzantine political theology a set of Gnostic-inflected narrative strategies to explain their subordination to alien powers (Turkish, Ottoman, Russian, Austrian, or Hungarian). These strategies operated a reversal of real and unreal or of essential and fleeting attributes of social-historical situations. The aim of these strategies was to construct the local elites as the agents of a political ideology of national redemption that will ultimately put them above their temporary masters. The paper focuses mainly on the so-called Phanariot period (17th to 18th Centuries)