On 22 October 2003, with the initiative of Romania's president Ion Iliescu, the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania (ICSHR) was set up. Nobel laureate for peace and American writer of Romanian origin Elie Wiesel was appointed as its president. In spring 2006, with the initiative of Romania's president Traian Băsescu, the Presidential Commission for the Analysis of the Communist Dictatorship in Romania (CPADCR) was formed. Vladimir Tismăneanu, the American political scientist of Romanian origin, became its president. Both commissions were established with the purpose of producing a final report on the two forms of totalitarianism in Romania: the extreme right totalitarianism between 1940 and 1944, and the extreme left totalitarianism between 1944 and 1989. Both commissions rested on legal and ethical grounds and they addressed Romanians' expectations and dilemmas linked to their recent traumatic history.

Abstract:This study embarks on a definition of escape from prisons and camps in the twentieth century, referring strictly to prisoners of conscience (political prisoners, captive in any kind of totalitarian system) and prisoners of war, but not to common law offenders. In this regard, the study discusses the mystique of escape and its meanings: the legitimation of life, the therapy and rehabilitation of identity, pedagogy and morality, opposition to Power, punishment and vengeance.

"The present study analyses Roberto Bolaño’s engagement with marginality in the novels The Savage Detectives and 2666, via the conventions of the noir genre. The aesthetics of the peripheral, the poetics of triviality, vagrancy, bohemian wanderlust, and enigmatic rituals are performed in an inimitable personal style that problematizes issues pertaining to the theory of literature and the theory of the novel. Atomised, puzzle-like novels with deliberately obscure police procedural plots, The Savage Detectives and 2666 break several authorial and narrative architectural patterns, becoming major landmarks in today’s novelistic worldscape."

No abstract

No abstract