The premise of the approach in the present paper is the interpretation of Japanese calligraphy as an artistic act and the reception of the calligraphic work of art as the object of the aesthetic relation. By combining the theoretical analysis of the main artistic functions of calligraphy –as both a representative and an expressive art – with the practice of calligraphic art, the present endeavour aims to identify the factual and artistic poetics of this visual (pictorial) and verbal art. As such, our study focuses on the particularities of the calligraphic work of art, given by its means of existence: its object of immanence is concurrently a physical and an ideal object (through its linguistic scriptural contents). In our analysis, the Japanese calligraphic art becomes the object of a reading that exploits the Western and Eastern aesthetic poetic theories, in an attempt to explore this art’s means of existence, functioning, and reception, by revealing its calligraphicity, or its artistic-aesthetic quality. As a reflection on the relation between the image and the word, and on the coherence of the vision triggered by it, based on the characteristics of the visible, our study is an original approach that analyses and interprets the vocabulary and the formal style of a unique artistic field that begins with a linguistic expression, as a means of representation, and culminates with an abstract form of expression, as a means of presentation.

Although Japan recorded no specific literary movement in the 1980s, in any classical sense of the term, we may say that today we are witnessing, in terms of our historical sensibility, a condensation of narrative viewpoints upon the present or, in other words, the transposition of the criteria of the present to another time, which is undoubtedly a consequence of the so-called “postmodern” will to reject grand narratives. This study aims to review and complete the inventory of the postmodern characteristics that specialisedliterature has identified in Haruki Murakami’s works, seen from the perspective of what the author of the present paper considers to be the “new postmodern humanism.”

The present study aims to analyse the novel The Sound of the Mountain (山の音・Yama no oto, 1949-1954, by Yasunari Kawabata (1899Kawabata ( -1972, beginning with a storytelling image, or an image that automatically produces a story. The image under scrutiny is auditory, an image of a mysterious, strongly affective intimacy, which sets the narrative tone and generates the function of the unreal (in the sense that follows Bachelard's view) and, implicitly, of the imagination (which truly stimulates the psyche), in an obvious opposition with the function of the real. By regarding the Japanese novel as an internal narration with a "limited" viewpoint, given by the actorial narrative type, since the centre for orientation coincides with the narrative perspective of an actor playing the role of a nucleus-character with a dynamic psychology, the present paper aims to explain, from a poetic and hermeneutic perspective, the meaning of the text beginning from the surface level that hides another view beneath. Moreover, in the case of the Japanese writer in question, the study highlights the search for the appropriate linguistic expression meant to depict the dual appearance of the perceptions, sensations, emotions and ideas that are, on the one hand, clear, precise, but impersonal and, on the other hand, confused, mobile and inexpressible, revealing the means by which Kawabata sometimes tries to extract the abstract from the concreteness of words, in order to give them a purer meaning. Furthermore, by contextualising within the field of Kawabata's literature, the narrative plot of the novel The Sound of the Mountain, which is seemingly devoid of intrigue, climax and denouement, I outlined a narrative technique that I would call a linked novel, an architectonic construction that covers Yasunari Kawabata's entire literary creation, through which the author simultaneously reveals and hides himself, while offering reading and interpretation keys for his works.

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By shifting the focus from Surrealism to the Surrealists, in addition to his previous research on the Romanian literary and artistic Avant-Garde (materialised into books, essays and articles), Michael Finkenthal recently published the volume Grupul Infra-Noir, o reuniune de singurătăți (Suprarealismul literar românesc, 1940(Suprarealismul literar românesc, -1947 [The Infra-Noir Group, a gathering of solitudes (The Romanian literary Surrealism, 1940Surrealism, -1947] at the Tracus Arte publishing house ( 2022). With a tripartite structure (I. Introduction, II. Dramatis Personae, III. Annex: On Sesto Pals and his connections to the Infra-Noir group), the volume containing the articles written by the author over the past years explores the (late) "explosive" surrealist manifestation in Bucharest, as it had been configured by