ABSTRACTS 1. Anemona

2ND CEMS INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE – ABSTRACTS 1. Anemona Alb (University of Oradea, Romania): Chronotope and Theory: temporality revisited in (late) modernist fiction What this paper looks at is the configuration that time - as crystallized events - takes in urban versus rural settings, as represented in modernist and postmodern literature. Indeed, the representational mechanisms of time, informed by poststructuralist theories, are deemed as potentially yielding an insight into the abovementioned parallelism. In terms of analytical frameworks I shall use, inter alia, mechanistic theories, relative time, Bergsonian time, redundant time, mechanical hours (Deleuze and Parnet 1996) and what I term hegemonic time (the all- devouring time of late capitalism). The illustrative texts under scrutiny here belong to Modernist and Postmodern authors, such as W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot on the one hand, and Helen Fielding, Sophie Kinsella (chick lit) on the other hand. Urban time, the relentless rhythms of the city as opposed to seasonal time in the country, the chronophagous pressures of consumerism , the frenzy of efficiency that urbanites engage in mindlessly versus the innocuous tranquility of the countryside are part and parcel of the eclecticism of theories of temporality. 2. Ştefan Baghiu (Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu): The Socialist Realism Need for Modernism: A Theoretical Framework for Romania’s Novel Translation Process Evgheny Dobrenko concludes his latest collective volume with the reiteration of Hannah Arendt’s well-known paradox of totalitarian regimes, according to which “on the one hand, their professed veneration of transformation induces in them a deep-seated fear of stability and permanence, but on the other hand, for these regimes to function, their institutions require a certain degree of predictability and continuity” (Dobrenko, Jonsson-Skradol, Socialist Realism in Central and Eastern European Literatures Under Stalin, 2018). This can be an addition to the statement of Brian James Baer who, in his discussion on the importance of translations for the communist regimes, introduces another paradox: “the tension between internationalism and xenophobia” (Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts. Literary translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, 2011). This, in turn, unearths a third paradox, that this paper seeks to underline: the tension between condemning modernism and the inevitable acceptance of modernist formulae within socialist realism via translation and in the latter part of socialist realism, via translation and local production. Romanian studies have mostly underlined the latter role of modernism (of surpassing socialist realism), yet by emphasizing this aspect, the modernist dimension of socialist realism has been occulted. Some theorists, however, have gone as far as to argue that “socialist realism both reflected and consummated avant-garde demiurgism” (Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism, 1992). A quick survey of what Catherine Clark understood by “socialist realism canonical figures” in the 80s reveals distinct figures of different writing styles, which are, however, generally viewed as a compact group: Gorky, Gladkov, Fadeev, etc. To this day, this remains the manner in which most scholars perceive socialist realism: as a canonical group of Russian and Soviet writers belonging to a trend of working-class dogmatic fiction. Yet, there is another dimension of socialist realism: as I argued in 2016, socialist realism in Romania has built by means of translation an international network, and its most preeminent feature lies at the intersection of European, American, Latin American, African and Asian novels—the international connection of progressive writing. The large canonical international profile of writers (see Michael Denning’s The Novelists’ International, in Franco Moretti (ed.), The novel. Volume I. History, Geography and Culture, 2006) includes figures such as H.G. Wells, Jaroslav Hasek, Theodore Dreiser, John Dos Passos, to name a few. Not only does the international canon of socialist realism draw heavily on modern fiction, but it also implies a series of acceptations of modernist writing, although it publicly and officially contends it. “American proletarian literary movements developed in the early 1930 […] helped to constitute a national imaginary of the ‘people’ by importing European modernisms,” writes Denning (Moretti, p.615). He implies that writers such as Dos Passos and Hemingway or as Richard Wright turned modernism into narrations on progress (i.e. critical) and infiltrated, through socialist realism, international canonical figures with European modernisms. If we look at the importance of modern fiction within socialist realism (from Balzac and Zola to Tolstoy and Gorky) and the returns to modernism that marked the late 50s and the 60s in the Soviet Union, the question then arises as to the manner in which socialist realism interacts with modernism through translation. At large, this is a question lying at the foundation of discussions on avant-garde writers and their role in enforcing communism in Russia and Eastern Europe, but it can be also a question of how socialist realism deals with the literary legacy of the bourgeois culture of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century and its modernist tensions translation caused. Because, through delaying most modernist techniques, socialist realism became responsible for the modernist halo of the Romanian 60s and the 70s. Yet, at the same time, through its international dimension, it became the propagator of modernist features—progressive writing and global connections. 3. Imre József BALÁZS: Déry, Németh and the Hungarian alternating modernisms The works of Tibor Déry (1897–1977) and Andor/André Németh (1891–1953) written during the interwar period are intriguing because of their special relationship to the currents of avant-garde and to aestheticist modernism. Both authors share a formative background that connected them to the circle of the review „Nyugat” that pioneered the cause of modernism in Hungarian literature, but was nonetheless cautios about promoting avant-garde poetics. Both authors lived abroad (Vienna, Berlin, Italy etc.) between 1919 and 1926 and returned to Hungary to become editors of the major Hungarian Surrealist review Dokumentum (1926–1927). I call their individual approaches to modernism „alternating modernisms” because of their fluctuating relationship to the avant-garde: while being convinced modernists during all their career, their avant-garde poetry and theoretical writings show a specific bricolage of early modernist and avant- garde techniques and influences. Both authors having also an important amount of texts written in other languages than in Hungarian (German in Déry’s case, French in Németh’s case) it is even more important than in other Eastern European authors’ case to analyse these “dialects” of modernism as results of a transcultural circulation of ideas. 4. Olha Bandrovska (Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine): The London text of the twentieth-century English literature: Problematizing the city in Ford Madox Ford’a The Soul of London The theoretical framework of the study involves the theories of the text, primarily, of Roland Barthes who interpreted the text as an aesthetic enterprise which is “experienced only in an activity of production”, and of Y. Lotman’s idea of a text as a “complex device, which contains a variety of codes”. Proceeding from the notion of a city-text, used in V. Toporov’s reconstruction of St. Petersburg Text of Russian literature, the concept of London Text of English literature is introduced. For centuries, London, one of the most influential capitals of the world, has consistently been creating its urban text that preserves the memory of the major events of city’s and the state’s history. Fictional narratives as well as historical documents or essays dynamically shape the London Text and embody the most important topics of city life. At the turn of the twentieth century, when urbanization had become synonymous with modernity and modernization, the London text recorded complex and essential novelties in the London cityscape and the lifestyle of Londoners. The essayistic book The Soul of London, a Survey of a Modern City (1905) by F.M. Ford actualizes new motifs of the life in a modern metropolis and demonstrates the subjective perception of the cityscape intrinsic to modernist writing. The article examines how the writer reproduces an open wholeness of modern London – “with its sense of immensity” – that is built on the intersections of the past and the present, Nature and Culture, as well as on the interrelation of place and time, individual and general perception, and its internal and external manifestations. 5. Julie Bates (Trinity College Dublin, Ireland): ‘The boldest jump-cut – the most daring time-shift, the most outrageous deduction – ever’: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon These are the terms in which Geoff Dyer praised West’s 1941 book, written in response to her travels in Yugoslavia. Despite its elevated reputation, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is more often named than read, something undoubtedly bound up with the text’s sheer size; extravagant form; intimidating aesthetic and ethical scope; and its staggering historical, cultural and political sweep, as vast spans of time and space are bridged by the bold jump-cuts Dyer identified. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon has been most often addressed as a travel book, a flawed historical

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