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Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 439-441 The General Assembly and Annual Entitled "Literature at the Confluence of the Arts" (Literatura la confluenţa artelor), the Annual Colloquium of Romanian Association for General and Comparative Literature was held in Bucharest, 9-11 July 2004, at New Europe College. Its sessions included the following: "Literature and Other Arts in Contemporary World: Competition or Collaboration?", chaired by Paul Cornea, who championed the idea that the element that overarched the relationships between literature and television and cinema is the collaborative one, while self-referentiality and experimentalism are regarded as prominent marks of artistic expression. Here Mihaela Irimia (Bucharest U.) discussed the artistic confluences cultivated by the Church from the 12th century on, Gabriel Coşoveanu (Craiova U.) submitted that contemporary artistic syncretism is to be analyzed from the perspective of integrative approaches in this age of post-theory, while Ion Bogdan Lefter (Bucharest U.) dwelt on the synthetic drive characteristic of postmodern approaches to literature. The second section, "Literature and Other Languages of Artistic Creation: Theory and Practice," chaired by Mihai Zamfir (Bucharest U.), discussed from its outset the semiotic understanding of literature. As a semantic entity, the latter was considered by Cătălin Constantinescu (Jassy U.) in its double conditioning, to be dealt with by both a "theory of codes" and one of "sign production." Paul Cornea stressed that, all works of art being symbolic units, semiotics, in spite of its reductive procedures and partial potential, offers a transverse approach to literature and models of interpretation — a requisite for science. Caius Dobrescu (Braşov U.) espoused the history of ideas as an integrative theory of literature, which outlines the confluence of artistic languages. Mihaela Cernăuţi-Gorodeţchi (Jassy U.) emphasized that contemporary syncretism, as different from the one described by Walter Ong, does not dwell on a competition among arts. The analysis discussed the image as commentary and analyzed illustrations by John Tenniel to Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Rudyard Kipling to Just So Stories, the image interlaced with text in Thackeray's The Rose and the Ring, Saint-Exupéry Le Petit prince, Maurice Sendak's Kenny's Window, and in Tudor Banuş's [end page 439] illustrations to Mircea Cărtărescu's Enciclopedia zmeilor; and the image-facing text in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, and Jon Scieszka-Lane Smith's The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Stories. The competition among arts was regarded by Romaniţa Constantinescu (Bucharest U.) as essentially reconciliatory: as no medium is pure, the hypermedia are an inter-medium where arts do not compete. An interesting study of how educational systems may contribute to the decodification of artistic expressions was presented by George Ardeleanu (Bucharest U.), who investigated alternative handbooks for ninth-grade students. Finally, Lefter suggested that the investigation of relationships between artistic languages/expressions must generate a new articulation of multi-artistic cultural fields. Chaired by Alexandru Călinescu, "Literature and Audio-Visual Media — Cinema, Television, Radio" featured Andrei Bodiu's (Braşov U.) analysis of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction and Natural Born Killers, which focused on the Stone's manipulation of Tarantino's script to epitomize cultural conjectures, and concluded that mass production and consumerism generate mass violence and crime. In the session chaired by Liviu Papadima, "Text and Image in 'Marginal' Forms of Artistic Creation: from Graffiti to Comics," Ion Manolescu (Bucharest U.), presented a most dynamic lecture on the status of the French comics magazine Pif during the communist regime. The freedom of distribution of this Western magazine allowed by the regime, contended Manolescu, was ideologically justified: Pif was produced by a communist publishing house and spread a soft version of leftism, ranking with cartoons, movies, visual arts, pop music, which contrasted, in a good-cop-bad-cop game, with the hard channels of official ideology (party congresses, official media, gulags, psychiatric hospitals, etc.). Other sessions included papers by Ioana Both (Babeş-Bolyai U. of Cluj-Napoca) on Eminescu, Marian Popescu (UNITER & Sibiu U.) on a new Hamlet performance and Mircea Tiberian (Bucharest National U. of Music) on the history of improvisation. On July 10 the General Assembly of RAGCL was held. Liviu Papadima, General Secretary of Romanian Association presented the Annual Report and noted an increase in number of members — the Association counts 45 members, of which 31 are new. The new General Secretary was elected Carmen Muşat (Bucharest U.). The main topic of discussion of the General Assembly concerned the position of Comparative Literature as an academic discipline in Romanian universities, and concluded with the proposal to set a commission to improve the weigh of our discipline in preparation of implementation of the Bologna Declaration in Romanian higher education system in 2005. A national survey, "What does a student read?" is to be initiated in universities across the country in the academic year 2004-05. [end page 440] Finally, a committee composed by Paul Cornea (President), Mircea Anghelescu, Alexandru Călinescu, Adriana Babeţi, Liviu Papadima, Carmen Muşat, and Mihai Zamfir awarded the annual prizes on 2003 of RAGCL for literary theory to Ion Manolescu, Videologia. O teorie tehno-culturală a imaginii globale (Videology. A technocultural theory of the global image; Jassy: Polirom), and for comparative literature to Carmen Andraş, România şi imaginile ei în literatura de călătorie britanică (Romania and Its Image in British Travel Literature; Cluj: Dacia). A new multilingual, yearly academic journal was launched, Acta Yassiensia Comparationis, edited in the Department of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics from "Al. I. Cuza" University of Jassy (Viorica S. Constantinescu, Editor).
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