This piece theorizes the myriad strange possibilities of “the inexistent night” – that is, a minor temporal-existential break in the after-dark that nevertheless enables both disastrous and euphoric transformations to take hold. To illustrate this subtle turn, the focus rests upon a close analysis of a text by the twentieth-century, avant-garde, Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata titled House of the Sleeping Beauties. This is a minimalist tale of enigmatic encounters in which characters embody different cyclical moods relating night to (...) anonymity, solitude, and impermanence. In the final stride, an entire conceptual edifice of the inexistent unfolds – amid radical disorientations of identity, desire, movement, and sensation – combining the architectonics of ghostliness with the atmospherics of shadow to suggest a more cryptic world beyond all existential centers. (shrink)

Since World War II Japanese artists have employed two seemingly contradictory ways of working, using aesthetics, materials, artistic methods technologies, and approaches that are either radically innovative and wildly experimental, or traditional/classical. Many other artists, however, in a move that seems paradoxical. have combined the two to explore the new themes of the post-atomic period. Three narrative works dealing with the effects of the World War II war effort and the atomic bombings that ended them, Yasunari Kawabata’s novel (...) The Sound of the Mountain (1952), Rio Kishida’s avant-garde play Thread Hell (1984), and the film Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen), directed by Mori Masaki and written by Keiji Nakazawa (Masaki and Nakazawa 1983), exemplify this third approach. Set in the pre-War textile industry that enabled the War, during the atomic bombings, and the post-War American Occupation, all three explore the experience not only of the horrific objective effects of war but of the Japanese experience of psychic numbing, which damages the person’s sense of self and their sense of agency—their ability to act effectively in the world. All three utilize classical aesthetics to provide aesthetic experiences, for their readers/viewers, to make the experience of the work tolerable, and for their characters—to demonstrate the roles of positive aesthetic experience in making life worth while and in grounding a renewed sense of personal identity and selfhood in a self that has been shattered through trauma. (shrink)

Cette étude repose sur deux textes qui ont pour sujet principal une partie de jeu de stratégie: les échecs (dans Le Joueur d’échecs) et le jeu de Go (dans Le Maître ou le tournoi de Go). Ce travail opère un dialogue entre ces deux œuvres qui toutes deux explorent la mécanique du plateau de jeu pour construire un récit complexe et polyphonique où le lecteur lui-même semble faire partie des pions.

El presente trabajo se propone estudiar las modalidades del aparecer de una imagen en el seno de una ficción, jugando sobre categorías tales como la substitución, la analogía, la permanencia o incluso la ausencia de lugar. Apoyándonos en la novela del escritor japonés Kawabata, titulada en su versión francesa Nuée d’oiseaux blancs (Nube de pájaras blancos), trataremos de mostrar cómo el deseo se encarna en determinadas huellas depositadas sobre objetos, y cómo la mirada del personaje masculino queda prendida en (...) ellas al extremo de perderse por entero en aquellas. (shrink)

Yasunari Kawabata’s 1952 novel The Sound of the Mountain is widely praised for its aesthetic qualities, from its adaptation of aesthetics from the Tale of Genji, through the beauty of its prose and the patterning of its images, to the references to arts and nature within the text. This article, by contrast, shows that Kawabata uses these features to demonstrate the effects of the mass trauma following the Second World War and the complicated grief it induced, on (...) the psychology of moral/ethical understanding, decision-making and action. The stream of consciousness traces the protagonist’s growing awareness of social changes and the ensuing difficulties of ethical decision-making. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that, with a few notable exceptions, Japanese literature, and especially the work of novelist Yasunari Kawabata, focuses on beauty, emotion, and psychology, and that this focus is at the expense of moral or ethical exploration.Kawabata was Japan’s first winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, so to misunderstand his work so fundamentally is not just a matter for aficionados of arcana. The mistake deprives the international reading public of an important philosophical resource for (...) understanding the modern world, the various phenomena of complicated grief, the effects of the atomic bombings and mass trauma more generally—and, yes, the postwar Japanese.1The Sound of the Mountain,2 serialized in.. (shrink)

This article explores the possible interpretations—and the implications of those interpretations—of a comment about the importance of art made by Yasunari Kawabata (1899–1972), later the first Japanese Nobel laureate for literature: that “looking at old works of art is a matter of life and death.” (In 1949, Kawabata visited Hiroshima in his capacity as president of the Japan literary society P.E.N. to inspect the damage caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that helped end World War II. (...) On his way back to his home in Kamakura, he stopped in Kyoto. He came under severe criticism for “sightseeing” at such a time. This comment was his response.) The introduction explains why we should take him seriously as a commentator on art. The body of the article examines why our looking at art might be more, not less, important after the post-War situation, the kinds of art Kawabata might have meant, why some possibilities are more likely than others, and how they differ in what they offer us and the value of art under conditions of trauma and mass trauma. (shrink)

CUPRINS CONTUR Re-Introducere sau: Dincolo de „teoria şi practica” informării şi documentării – Spre o hermeneutică posibilă şi necesară ......................................................... 11 Desfăşurătorul întâlnirilor Atelierului Hermeneutica Bibliohtecaria (Philobiblon) .................................................................................................... ......... 21 FOCUS Noul Program al revistei şi Politica ei Editorială: PHILOBIBLON – Transylvanian Journal of Multidisciplinary Research in Humanities .............. 29 Raluca TRIFU, István KIRÁLY V., Consideraţii filosofice, epistemologice şi scientometrice legate de sensurile ştiinţei şi profesiei bibliotecare – Pentru situarea proiectului unei cercetări ............................................................ 31 Valeria SALÁNKI, Cultura organizaţională şi comunicarea în (...) bibliotecă - Studiu asupra culturii organizaţionale în Biblioteca Centrală Universitară „Lucian Blaga” din Cluj ........................................................................................ 44 Raluca TRIFU, István KIRÁLY V., Globalizare şi Individualizare, sau: Marketingul ca metaforă pentru reasumarea şi reconturarea sensurilor serviciilor de bibliotecă – O iniţiativă şi o experienţă românească .................114 Claudiu GAIU, Gabriel Naudé (1600-1653 ) – în slujba Puterii şi a Cărţii ..... 128 Alin Mihai GHERMAN, Timpul scrierii – Manuscrisele .................................... 140 Dana Maria MĂRCUŞ, Sărbătoarea cărţii. Percepţia societăţii româneşti interbelice asupra cărţii şi lecturii ...................................................................... 148 Orsolya ANTAL,Taine în jurul unei satire în spirit voltairian în limbă maghiară de la sfârşitul secolului al XVIII-lea .................................................................... 197 Kinga PAPP, Colligatul Ms 354 şi dramele pierdute ale lui József Mártonfi ....213 Gabriela RUS, Roxana BĂLĂUCĂ, Venceslav Melka în colecţia Bibliotecii Centrale Universitare „Lucian Blaga” Cluj-Napoca ........................................ 222 5 Hermeneutica Bibliothecaria – Antologie Philobiblon - Volumul V Nicolina HALGAŞ, Dimensiunea educativă a bibliotecii publice prin servicii de animaţie pentru copii ....................................................................................... 249 Tünde JANKÓ, Alina NEALCOŞ, Maria CRIŞAN, Mariana GROS, Carmen GOGA, Biblioteca Filială de Ştiinţe Economice - Tradiţional versus modern ................271 Adriana MAN SZÉKELY, Emil SALAMON, Colaborarea Bibliotecii Centrale Universitare „Lucian Blaga” din Cluj-Napoca cu Banca Mondială ............. 290 ORIZONTURI Aurel Teodor CODOBAN, Mass-media şi filosofia – Filosoful ca jurnalist, sau sinteza unei ideologii ostensive ............................................................................. 301 Marian PETCU, Şcoala de ziaristică de la Bucureşti (1951-1989) – Istorii recente .................................................................................................... .. 314 Marcel BODEA S., Timpul matematic în mecanica clasică – o perspectivă epistemologică...................................................................................... ................... 332 Florina ILIS, Fenomenul science fiction şi feţele timpului ................................ 354 Rodica FRENŢIU, Yasunari Kawabata şi nostalgia timpului fără timp ......... 373 Rodica TRANDAFIR, Timpul şi muzica .............................................................. 390 István KIRÁLY V., Întemeierea filosofiei şi ateismul la tânărul Heidegger - Prolegomene la o perspectivă existenţial-ontologică ......................................423 Elena CHIABURU, Consideraţii privitoare la vînzarea la Cochii Vechi şi mezat .................................................................................................... ............... 437 Vlad POPOVICI, Istoriografia medicală românească (1813-2008) .................463 Gheorghe VAIS, Remodelări urbane în Clujul perioadei dualiste (1867-1918)..... 481 Cristina VIDRUŢIU, Ciuma – profilul unei recurenţe istorice supusă unui transplant artistic .................................................................................................. 497 Anna Emese VINCZE, Iluziile pozitive din perspectiva psihologiei evoluţioniste .................................................................................................... 506 6 Hermeneutica Bibliothecaria – Antologie Philobiblon - Volumul V REFLEXII Florentina RĂCĂTĂIANU, Irina Petraş, Literatura română contemporană - O panoramă - Recenzie ...................................................................................... 527 Raluca TRIFU, Filosofia informaţiei si cibernetica – Recenzie ......................... 530 Iulia GRAD, Tematizări în eticile aplicate – perspective feministe (Mihaela Frunză) - Recenzie ................................................................................534 Adrian GRĂNESCU, Biblioteca lui Hitler, cărţile care i-au format personalitatea, de Timothy W. Ryback – Recenzie ............................................. 537 În colecţia BIBLIOTHECA BIBLIOLOGICA au apărut ..............................551 Revista PHILOBIBLON – Volumele apărute ......................................... 556. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis piece theorizes the myriad strange possibilities of “the inexistent night” – that is, a minor temporal-existential break in the after-dark that nevertheless enables both disastrous and euphoric transformations to take hold. To illustrate this subtle turn, the focus rests upon a close analysis of a text by the twentieth-century, avant-garde, Japanese writer Yasunari Kawabata titled House of the Sleeping Beauties. This is a minimalist tale of enigmatic encounters in which characters embody different cyclical moods relating night to (...) anonymity, solitude, and impermanence. In the final stride, an entire conceptual edifice of the inexistent unfolds – amid radical disorientations of identity, desire, movement, and sensation – combining the architectonics of ghostliness with the atmospherics of shadow to suggest a more cryptic world beyond all existential centers. (shrink)

Nous avons trois objectifs dans cet article. Le premier est de montrer la pensée et le comportement de Yasuma Takata (1883-1972), auteur quasiment inconnu en Occident, mais qui donna pourtant au Japon ses premières théories sociologiques et socio-économiques générales. Le deuxième est d’examiner comment ces pensée et comportement sont liés à la responsabilité de la guerre dans la seconde guerre mondiale. Le troisième consiste à montrer que cette pensée est profondément connectée au courant de la pensée japonaise moderne à travers (...) la théorie de Maruyama et des opinions des Ôe et Kawabata. Classification JEL : B15, B31, N45. (shrink)

Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been recognized as a promising tool for investigating the causal relationship between specific brain areas of interest and behavior. However, the reproducibility of previous tDCS studies is often questioned because of failures in replication. This study focused on the effects of tDCS on one cognitive domain: beauty perception. To date, the modulation of beauty perception by tDCS has been shown in two studies:Cattaneo et al. (2014)andNakamura and Kawabata (2015). Here, we aimed at replicating (...) their studies and investigating the effects of tDCS on beauty perception using the following parameters: (1) cathodal stimulation over the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) (Nakamura and Kawabata, 2015); (2) anodal stimulation over the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (lDLPFC) (Cattaneo et al., 2014). We also performed a more focal stimulation targeting the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) to determine the optimal stimulation site for modulating beauty perception (3). Participants rated the subjectively-perceived beauty of the images before and after the tDCS administration. We divided images into four clusters according to the obtained scores in our preliminary study and examined changes in beauty ratings in each image cluster separately to exclude factors, such as stimuli attributions that may reduce tDCS effects. The results showed no strong effects of tDCS with the same parameters as in previous studies on beauty rating scores in any image cluster. Likewise, anodal stimulation over the OFC did not result in a change in rating scores. In contrast to previous studies, the current study did not corroborate the effects of tDCS on beauty perception. Our findings provide evidence regarding the recent reproducibility issue of tDCS effects and suggest the possible inflation of its effects on cognitive domains. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethos in Steig’s and Sendak’s Picture Books: The Connected and the Lonely ChildEllen Handler SpitzThere was the child, listening to everything...—Yasunari Kawabata1IntroductionPicture-book characters spring to life in both verbal and visual registers. Moving about the page before our eyes as well as speaking and acting in their respective stories, they often make a long-lasting impact on children. Pictures and words, moreover, may overlap but are never commensurate; like (...) the words and notes of a song, they mean and evoke differently even while being experienced together. This brief essay considers a small selection of works by two distinguished twentieth-century American authors-artists: William Steig (1907–2003) and Maurice Sendak (b. 1928). It argues that, with their artful words and pictures, Steig and Sendak construct very different—even contrasting—visions of childhood. By “ethos” in this context I mean to suggest a vision of what a child is, a sense of what it means both to be a child and to address one. Such visions differ not only through the ages and from one culture and locale to another but also from one author-artist of the same period and locale to another. Invited to speak on Sendak’s and Steig’s respective works at meetings scheduled just a week apart in New York City during the winter of 2007, I found in these paired invitations a fortuitous opportunity to juxtapose several of their works and thereby discover some arresting contrasts and formulate the following readings.2First, a word on the topic of methodology. Nearly one hundred years have elapsed since Freud published his celebrated-cum-notorious foray into psychobiography with Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,3 wherein shards of circumstantial biographical evidence were laid out in seductive mosaic patterns secured with a grout of ingenious speculation. Despite subsequent decades of critical reflection, Freud’s method soldiers on nonetheless as a modus operandi in the psychological interpretation of art and literature.4 By bracketing a small selection of Steig’s and Sendak’s works here and limiting myself to extracting a tentative underlying ethos from them, I am [End Page 64] taking the position that to write psychologically one need not mention or exploit a creator’s personal life. This essay points gently toward psychological approaches that ask what we can see when we look carefully at the pages of works. What can we find when we share children’s books with children? Why, for example, has Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are sold over seventeen million copies (and its Amazon rank last time I checked was around 145, which means that only 144 other books in the United States were selling more copies at that particular moment), whereas his later work Outside Over There—a book that apparently figures prominently in his personal life—comes nowhere close?5 While market figures do not correlate flawlessly with children’s actual preferences (adults, not children, are the buyers), I would aver that, in this case, they do reflect the success and beloved status of Where the Wild Things Are, since the figures tally with additional facts: the book continues to appeal in its fifth decade post publication; it is known and has been translated worldwide, dramatized, and set to music6; and its characters have been fashioned into ubiquitous stuffed toys. On the other hand, in my (limited) experience, young children seem to find Outside Over There unsettling, unintelligible, even “creepy” and often have trouble sitting still through a full rendition. Some adults, on the other hand, praise that book as poetic and admire its more complex art. Such discrepancies in reception deserve our attention; they hint at fallow fertile fields lying over the rainbow, far beyond the much-plowed tracts of authorial psychobiography. This essay gestures casually toward those fields.The Connected Child“My dear Deborah,” said Doctor De Soto, “you must have been reading my mind.7Let’s begin with William Steig, who is best known for his New Yorker cartoons. His work for children extends back to 1968,8 however, when he was already a man in his sixties. Setting aside the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethos in Steig’s and Sendak’s Picture Books: The Connected and the Lonely ChildEllen Handler SpitzThere was the child, listening to everything...—Yasunari Kawabata1IntroductionPicture-book characters spring to life in both verbal and visual registers. Moving about the page before our eyes as well as speaking and acting in their respective stories, they often make a long-lasting impact on children. Pictures and words, moreover, may overlap but are never commensurate; like (...) the words and notes of a song, they mean and evoke differently even while being experienced together. This brief essay considers a small selection of works by two distinguished twentieth-century American authors-artists: William Steig (1907–2003) and Maurice Sendak (b. 1928). It argues that, with their artful words and pictures, Steig and Sendak construct very different—even contrasting—visions of childhood. By “ethos” in this context I mean to suggest a vision of what a child is, a sense of what it means both to be a child and to address one. Such visions differ not only through the ages and from one culture and locale to another but also from one author-artist of the same period and locale to another. Invited to speak on Sendak’s and Steig’s respective works at meetings scheduled just a week apart in New York City during the winter of 2007, I found in these paired invitations a fortuitous opportunity to juxtapose several of their works and thereby discover some arresting contrasts and formulate the following readings.2First, a word on the topic of methodology. Nearly one hundred years have elapsed since Freud published his celebrated-cum-notorious foray into psychobiography with Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood,3 wherein shards of circumstantial biographical evidence were laid out in seductive mosaic patterns secured with a grout of ingenious speculation. Despite subsequent decades of critical reflection, Freud’s method soldiers on nonetheless as a modus operandi in the psychological interpretation of art and literature.4 By bracketing a small selection of Steig’s and Sendak’s works here and limiting myself to extracting a tentative underlying ethos from them, I am [End Page 64] taking the position that to write psychologically one need not mention or exploit a creator’s personal life. This essay points gently toward psychological approaches that ask what we can see when we look carefully at the pages of works. What can we find when we share children’s books with children? Why, for example, has Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are sold over seventeen million copies (and its Amazon rank last time I checked was around 145, which means that only 144 other books in the United States were selling more copies at that particular moment), whereas his later work Outside Over There—a book that apparently figures prominently in his personal life—comes nowhere close?5 While market figures do not correlate flawlessly with children’s actual preferences (adults, not children, are the buyers), I would aver that, in this case, they do reflect the success and beloved status of Where the Wild Things Are, since the figures tally with additional facts: the book continues to appeal in its fifth decade post publication; it is known and has been translated worldwide, dramatized, and set to music6; and its characters have been fashioned into ubiquitous stuffed toys. On the other hand, in my (limited) experience, young children seem to find Outside Over There unsettling, unintelligible, even “creepy” and often have trouble sitting still through a full rendition. Some adults, on the other hand, praise that book as poetic and admire its more complex art. Such discrepancies in reception deserve our attention; they hint at fallow fertile fields lying over the rainbow, far beyond the much-plowed tracts of authorial psychobiography. This essay gestures casually toward those fields.The Connected Child“My dear Deborah,” said Doctor De Soto, “you must have been reading my mind.7Let’s begin with William Steig, who is best known for his New Yorker cartoons. His work for children extends back to 1968,8 however, when he was already a man in his sixties. Setting aside the... (shrink)