Arleen Ionescu Bücher

This study makes Romania’s largely unknown Joycean heritage visible to an international readership. Reviewing Joyce’s critical reception and translations, as well as the writer’s influence on Romanian prose, it brings Derrida’s notion of «hostipitality» to comparative literary and translation studies in order to theorize the impact of politics and ideology on fiction. After an original survey of the links between Romanian modernism/postmodernism and Western literature, it focuses on alternate trends of hostility and hospitality towards Joyce, especially his techniques and style. It examines how translations dealt with themes prone to communist censorship (politics, sexuality, religion, food), before discussing Joyce’s impact on Romanian writers such as Eliade, Biberi, Bălăiţă and Oţoiu.

This book is a detailed critical study of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum in its historical, architectural and philosophical context. Emphasizing how the Holocaust changed our perception of history, memory, witnessing and representation, it develops the notion of ‘memorial ethics’ to explore the Museum’s difference from more conventional post-World War Two commemorative sites. The main focus is on the Museum as an experience of the materiality of trauma which engages the visitor in a performative duty to remember. Arleen Ionescu builds on Levinas’s idea of ‘ethics as optics’ to show how Libeskind’s Museum becomes a testimony to the unpresentable Other. Ionescu also extends the Museum’s experiential dimension by proposing her own subjective walk through Libeskind’s space reimagined as a ‘literary museum’. Featuring reflections on texts by Beckett, Celan, Derrida, Kafka, Blanchot, Wiesel and Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger (Celan’s cousin), this virtual tour concludes with a brief account of Libeskind’s analogous ‘healing project’ for Ground Zero.

Focusing on the evolution of English drama, this volume explores the Elizabethan era, highlighting the contributions of the University Wits and the dramatic works of Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare. It serves as a guidebook rather than a comprehensive study, offering curated historical facts and critical interpretations from notable Renaissance scholars. The latter section introduces modern theoretical approaches, including psychoanalysis and deconstruction, to reinterpret five of Shakespeare's plays, encouraging fresh perspectives on his work.

Drawing on extensive knowledge of Middle Ages and Renaissance literature, the author presents a comprehensive compilation of factual insights and critical interpretations rather than original research. Influenced by various scholars, the work acknowledges the challenges of attribution. A previous edition was published in 2008, and the author has chosen to separate the discussions of Shakespeare and Marlowe into a subsequent volume, recognizing the breadth of the subject matter.