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Advances in Politics and Economic 
ISSN 2576-1382 (Print) ISSN 2576-1390 (Online) 

Vol. 2, No. 2, 2019 
www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/ape 

73 
 

Original Papers 

New Literary Genres—An Insight in the Creativity Optimization 

PhD student Coculiana ACĂR1* 
1 Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași, 

Romania 
* PhD student Coculiana ACĂR, Faculty of Philosophy and Social-Political Sciences, “Alexandru Ioan 

Cuza” University of Iași, Romania 

 

Received: February 26, 2019     Accepted: March 18, 2019     Online Published: March 21, 2019 

doi:10.22158/ape.v2n2p73                URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/ape.v2n2p73 

 

Abstract 

The theory of literary genres, developed from antiquity to the present day, has been differently 

approached, more or less convincingly. The philosophical insight of the genders definition appears at 

Hegel, A.W. Schlegel, Schelling, each of them trying to follow the particularities of each genre 

depending on the way to report consciousness to reality and to the issue of the time taken as a reference. 

In the following, we are going to refer to the value and utility of genres for the cultural and social 

history of humanity, by stopping to the genres characteristic to the postmodern era. In this regard, we 

intend to follow the impact of the digital epistolary in the context of the media globalization, the 

advantages and disadvantages of the technological progress, the changes in form and content suffered 

by the “letter” sequence to this evolution. 

Another genre that comes to our attention is the comic magazine that can appear to some as an 

insignificant object, a part of a communist world, invoked in the news debates, only. The original 

mobility of the comics is situated in its very nature at the intersection of visual and narrative, which 

gives it the chance to weave bridges over the fields of the folk culture and literature. This may illustrate 

an alternative, from a cultural insight, where the aesthetic and sociological values coexist. The comics 

are intellectual challenges for different categories of readers through the new postmodern setting of the 

values expressed by text and image. 

Keyword 

letter, comics, sociolinguistics, postmodernism  

 

 

 

 



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1. Introduction 

Recognized as ontological data, essences and angles of the universe perception, the literary genres have 

been defined from a “social, historical, functional, auctorial, political, stylistic, arbitrary point of view, 

or by a combination of what has already been said” (Stockwell, 2002, p. 28), taking into account 

classification principles with a relative value. The concept of literary genre appeared in a latent form 

from Antiquity, in Platon and Aristotle’s works, with influences in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 

being considered a special type of text with proper rules and norms. It has a considerable influence on 

the European Romanticism, especially treated in the descendancy of the German Romanticism Theories, 

on the Schlegel-Schelling-Hegel line, of which “two genres have first differentiated: the epic and the 

lyric” (Rusu, 2011, p. 17), followed by the dramatic one. Referring to postmodernism, some critics 

discuss the dissolution of the genre, and others about the transformation of genres into ways. In other 

terms, postmodernism is recognized because it made the notion of gender seem irrelevant, outdated, a 

“parody lacking content” (Jameson, 1999, pp. 16-17). But as society evolves and the literary genre 

suffers an evolution, more “in postmodernism, the concept of gender passes through an epistemological 

revolution that makes it necessary to re-conceptualize it” (Earnshaw, 1997, p. 223). The Trinitarian 

Insight on the literary genders is underlined by L. Rusu in the Aesthetics of the Lyrical Poetry, as 

follows: “it is a mistake to believe that the division into three lyrical, epic and dramatic literary genres 

is at random or corresponds to arbitrarily established categories [...] The three literary genres are in fact 

original categories of spirituality, they represent forms of life in which an existential sense is achieved. 

For this reason it is completely in vain to reduce the different genres to a fundamental one [...] because 

the spiritual activity, by its very nature, is not uniform, but rather multiple oriented” (Rusu, 2011, p. 

15).  

In the following, our attention is focused on a major phenomenon of political, social and 

cultural-aesthetic nature, corresponding to post modernity, which embraces the intellectual, cultural, 

artistic and philosophical interpretations of the new conditions. Post modernity refers to the historical 

period following modernity, that is to the new reality installed in the 70s of the last century, to its new 

sociological, technological, economic conditions, etc. In this context, the present paper is an attempt to 

highlight the characteristics of two of the literary genres specific to post modernity: the digital 

epistolary and the comics and their historical and cultural role. It is known that the 20th century is 

marked by two totalitarianisms—Communism and Nazism—which have led to major human 

catastrophes, so that the socialist and capitalist countries have a different trajectory, reflected in the two 

configurations of the postmodern consciousness. In the West, the post-war period is one of a 

post-industrial society that marks the state of mind circumscribed to the relativizing values, and post 

modernity is a world of reversed values, where knowledge becomes merchandise, science is served to 

the technique, power and wealth condition the truth, and the simulacrums created by the mass-media 

take the place of reality. The model towards post modernity tends is the American society, free and 

prosperous, with a life of comfort, with a democratic and tolerant administration, offering equal 



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opportunities to all its citizens. 

 

2. From the Letter to the Digital Epistolary  

Throughout the human civilization, man searched for and developed writing media to transmit 

information starting from the Mesopotamian clay tablets to e-readers and performing tablets, available 

today in all civilized countries. A complex and pervasive phenomenon, “communication can be treated 

from a psychological point of view as a special type of behavior, by the sociologists as a decisive factor 

of socialization, by anthropologists as a tool for the formation and spread of culture, by semioticians as a 

process of configuring and reconfiguring the signs significance” (Fârte, 2004, p. 10). From the 

methodological point of view, the communication can be transposed into a discursive linearity by 

enumerating elementary communicative sequences, consisting of six interactions: 

emitter-receiver-message-code-channel-context. Ontologically, it is a continuous process, where the 

individuals’ actions sometimes alternate, sometimes they take place simultaneously. The psychological 

and social concerns lead to the epistolary practice. 

Because the epistolary text implies a direction towards literature, being both an appropriate form of 

expression of feelings or dialogue between writers (Eminescu-Creangă) or between the writers and their 

lovers (Eminescu-Veronica Micle), the epistolary correspondence has a spontaneous and personal 

flexibility, that can receive a wide variety of themes that will be the theme of some literary works. The 

letter is textualized through a series of mechanisms: social, psychological and rhetorical, forming a 

double line of projection and production. It is well known that the love between Mihai Eminescu and 

Veronica Micle determined an original correspondence defining the epistolary genre of that time and 

constituted for the literary historians a material of an inestimable value, contributing to the completion of 

the poet’s biography, and for the critics, establishing some connections with Eminescu’s literary, erotic 

creation reaching the highest tops in the Romanian poetics. It is not the first of its kind and, of course, not 

the last one. A correspondence, but this time between fourteen Romanian intellectuals (Radu Bogdan, 

Emil Cioran, Petru Cretia, Stefan Augustin Doinaş, Ion Ianoşi, Thomas Kleiniger, Gabriel Liiceanu, 

Constantin Noica, Alexandru Paleologu, Andrei Pippidi, Andrei Pleşu, Mariana Şora, Marin Tarangul 

and Sorin Vieru), captives of one of the most horrible moments of history, is the Journal of Păltiniş, a 

philosophical journal. 

The book captures a world in the world, a philosophical state amid a totalitarian state; an existence where 

the ideas are censored, the thoughts are truncated, and the realities are alienated. What singles out is that 

“the central character of this unusual book is neither the Journal that gave birth to it, neither its author nor 

the one who occasioned the diary itself. The central character of the Epistolary is the postman” (Liiceanu, 

2008, pp. 7-8). The postman here is an invisible messenger from Hermes’, a bearer not of the missives 

exchanged for two years between characters endowed with a civil status, but of the spirit they all share. 

He is also due to the wonderful match of thoughts, and the presence of the historical moment, and 

ultimately the transfiguration of all resentments. So, the correspondence maintained by the great 



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personalities has a special documentary, historical, psychological, moral and aesthetic value. Whole 

epochs in the history of humanity, biographies of illustrious personalities, writers and artists, are more 

fully known from letters. 

Beginning with the 19th-20th centuries, as technology and telecommunication (the telegraph, the Internet 

in particular) gained increasing importance in everyday life, the cultural and rhetorical character of the 

letter diminished in almost everyday manifestation. The new aspect of maintaining contact between 

individuals is the virtual network that reinvents the epistolary style, with a role of communication and 

socialization. Digital technologies have created a new approach of reality through various elements that 

make up our everyday framework: sound, image, information that has had a direct impact not only on 

how we interact, but has led to changes related to our way of representation and the creation of the world. 

We can observe that there is an extension of the epistolary subject, because “all new progress implies an 

expansion of the human body and the psyche” (McLuhan, 2009, p. 37).  

The digitization of the letter has contributed to the qualitative improvement of the epistolary genre, 

which can be considered a new literary phenomenon by the extension tendency of the multicode 

communication, combining the written text with the use of icons called “emoticons, representing 

suggestive images of tiny sizes of a size close to the capital letters” and aiming to “facilitate the 

description of the emotions we live through during our communication and to make the online 

communication faster” (Ungureanu, 2014, p. 10). The technology development made it possible for 

“everybody to be connected” via mobile phones and computers, so that everyone’s area of life has 

expanded considerably. Anxiety, the desire to build one’s own identity, the interlocutor’s search, the 

personal or strategic communication in time and space has been solved through the virtual environment. 

All the circumstances of the epistolary are rationalized by the cybernetic channel. A model to 

correspond to is the e-mail, which is among the first forms of network writing; it was born in the 60s, 

with the first computer networks, and precedes the emergence of the web, which took place in the first 

half of the ‘90s. It does not replace the letter, but it offers a number of inconceivable facilities for a 

nineteenth-century epistograph. 

Although some believed that with the advent of telecommunications, the epistolary age declines (e.g., 

Jacques Derrida), but with the development of technology, the virtual epistolary text evolves from the 

need for specular and polyphonic communication without space-time constraints. We can not say that 

the e-mail describes the value of a letter’s content. However, the farewell, love, informative, personal, 

work and other messages are accompanied by virtual gifts attached. Any epistolary content fits into an 

e-mail. Those who started their epistolary work with the digital format, despite their origin, the e-mail 

is often considered an informal and daily exchange of expressive signs of oral communication. In this 

sense, it is considered by some to be a lower form of the letter, the e-mail being good for information, 

to transmit a purely technical message, but not a means of approaching people. At the media level we 

have different textual forms, characterized by different registers and language uses, so we can talk 

about four forms of digital text: e-mail, blog, short messages and social networks (facebook and twiter). 



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In general, the electronic mail/e-mail system has a character of immediate correspondence that uses a 

common language, almost orally, but still retains some typical aspects of the epistolary writing. First of 

all, its asynchronous character, which distinguishes the e-mail from the forms of the network even 

closer to oral, such as chat language. The persistence of messages, which can be stored, saved, quoted 

and transformed into something very similar to a questionable textual body that can also be searched, is 

another factor of similarity with the tradition of correspondence. From this point of view the electronic 

mail also remains an intrinsic writing form. The reference point for the e-mail is certainly epistolary. 

The digital correspondence is done both online and offline, the latter being primarily represented by the 

e-mail and the blog, as well as other virtual access ways such as skype, facebook, etc. “The offline 

communication is represented by e-mail and the discussion groups or the spiral letter. The e-mail is the 

most common way of communication because it is the easiest to use” (Amza, 2005, p. 437) and it has 

similarities with the older letter, when the issuer is waiting for the answer, sometimes long-lasting. 

However, the length of expectation here does not depend on objective factors (such as mail, in the old 

epistolary way of communication), but strictly on the subjective ones (the availability/lack of 

availability of the receiver). Referring to the virtual communication and the oral expression, we can 

distinguish two types of digital “oral”: written (e-mail, phone SMS, chat, public comments posted on 

different sites) and the video chat conversation. The social networks, such as Facebook, are becoming 

more widespread and are a tool for managing interpersonal relationships, allowing the individual user 

to build a network of contacts and to use it fundamentally for two purposes: on the one hand, to create a 

flow of information about their activities, collected in an accessible and viewable format from those in 

contact with the system, and on the other hand, to view similar information flows from personal 

contacts. 

So, we can consider the Facebook network as an “outbreak of experience” as a device of great 

complexity or a “normalization” device, but also as a privileged place nowadays for self-digital writing. 

With regard to SMS and, more recently, the hybrid messages between chat or Messenger, SMS and 

e-mail, depending on the extent and functionality required at every moment, popularized in formats 

such as WhatsApp, they maintain certain elements of the epistolary structure. On the other hand, the 

e-mail is not a replacement of the letter, but a letter in another format that meets the expectations. The 

social blogs and networks have stimulated a type of mass communication at the moment and, 

sometimes without a specific recipient, such as Twitter, where the Sender sends a message to the entire 

aggregate community. It is a complete popularization of the textual message. The cyberspace has been 

seen as a space of communication whose specificity lies exclusively in the support, magnitude and 

rhythm of these communications, which form a context where the communicative and aesthetic 

relationships of the subject with the text change. In this way, the computers become machines to 

produce and communicate massive texts, a space where they keep all these texts away from memory. 

The digital memory becomes “a global database that, like the human memory, organizes the material 

that receives discarding and updating data” (Hayles, 2004, p. 37).  



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Textuality and digital communication imply instantaneity, simultaneity, speed and globalization at the 

maximum. Before, the telegraph took a step forward in the epistolary speed, appealing to the message. 

The digital communication can change the mentalities and content of the textual forms, resulting in the 

emergence of new forms that are the result of an inevitable evolution after a long series of causes and 

effects. It is about an informational era and the computer science, from which the attributes of 

humanism disappear.  

1.2 Echoes of Digital Correspondence in Literature 

Starting from the idea that depending on the needs of communication, the world creates and recreates 

signs and symbols, “one of the symbols that unites the electronic era is @, which, together with the 

electronic letter has become a symbol of online communication” (Ungureanu, 2012, p. 63). The e-mail 

has led to the revival of the epistolary genre, enriched today with all the multimedia innovations (audio, 

video, smiley, links, etc.) indicating the ability to create the image of the concepts condensation. The 

compact text is a mixed text, composed of two non-homogeneous components: verbal/linguistic and 

non-verbal, belonging to systems other than the natural language, with special effects in 

communication, meaning that “the transversal language is the future universal language in germ. Only 

it could unite people. Because the rational languages already divide them” (Hlebnikov, 2003, p. 111). 

We can say that multimedia has not led to a weakening of the written communication, but rather to the 

recognition of its central role as an instrument of integration and connection between different 

communication codes. 

Referring to writing blogs, we see that it has deep roots in the previous textual tradition, especially in 

two widely textual forms: diary and newspaper or magazine article. The diary format is as a reference 

for many bloggers, especially those with a strong narrative approach, which are at the center of their 

interest, the author and his reflections on the events of today, personal and public. In the blog there are 

no frequent abbreviations and colloquial forms, the model is usually argumentative rather than oral. 

They are probably the form of network writing where the likeness of traditional writing is closer and 

more articulate at the same time. It is no coincidence that the world of the blog interacts directly and 

continuously with the traditional media (and especially with the world of written press and radio and 

television journalism). 

 

3. Comics—Highlights & History Evolution 

Every historical age prefers certain genres that better fit its affinities, aspirations and conventions. Over 

the time, “a whole series of genres decay and disappear irreparably, in order to maintain ourselves in 

the same biological perspective: birth, maturity, aging and disappearance” (Marino, 1970, pp. 101-102). 

So, we can say that there would be an increase and a decrease of genres in a curving curve. A refined 

and unique expression of the modern sensibility, through the power to unite the word and image in its 

narrative frameworks, the comics have become the subject of an academic study and research for its 

cultural heritage, but also because of the significant impact on a segment of the contemporary society. 



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In the comics book collections, one can observe the concerns, mentalities, lifestyles of the people of 

that era, or even the political propaganda messages that have been camouflaged in drawings or 

caricatures. By acting on the society and mirroring it at the same time, we can see a critical-acid 

perspective on the current world. The comics book combines two codes, that is, two modes of 

expression: the word and the image, which interfere in many ways. In this sense, we encounter comics 

without words that use only individual, mimetic scenes that describe art and resemble pantomime. A 

complementary role is played by the background and the props that can make a significant contribution 

to the transmission of the message. We could mention in this context two important albums: Arzak by 

Moebius in 1976 and The Arrival by Shaun Tan in 2006. 

The comics and the caricatures in the newspapers of the times can represent an important source of 

study of the two totalitarianisms: Communism and Nazism. Not only old manuscripts and archive 

documents are historical sources, but also the comics books can be understood after a while as a 

witness to history. Written in thick books, or mounted in documentary films or feature films, the history 

can also be laid in conquering comics, not just for children, but also for adults. Although we’ve got 

used to the comics to be considered as a consumer literature, but the comics genre from the Holocaust 

can make a contribution to the work of the historical and social-political memory. The American 

comics artist, Art Spiegelman published in Germany, Maus, The Story of a Survivor, a comics book of 

the Holocaust that is portrayed through the eyes of a survivor, but also of those who did not live it 

directly, giving the book a metabiographic appearance, highlighting the fact that “I need to show events 

and the memory of the Holocaust [...] I want to show the masking of the synthesis, events in their 

representation” (Schwarz, 1993, p. 110). By doing so, the author performs an intelligent parody. The 

volume is profoundly metaphorical, the tragism of the situation being played not only by the story, but 

also by the shocking images. The characters have animal faces, so humanity becomes animal, animals 

seem to be more human than humans. Although the use of animals in the graphic novel may seem 

displaced, the author does not create stereotypes, but ridicules them by showing how stupid it is to 

classify people by nationality or ethnicity. The symbols are not his: “they are borrowed from the 

Germans ... Ultimately, the book is essential about what all human beings have in common. It’s a 

madness to divide them by nationalistic, racial or religious criteria ... These metaphors, which are 

meant to self-destruct in my book—and I think they can do it—they still have a residual force that 

moves people” (Schwarz, 1993, p. 113).  

Taking advantage of the specific, multidimensional possibilities of the comics, “the comics drawn by 

the inherent narrative strategy of simultaneity offers the opportunity to unite the past, the present and 

the future, and thus to offer a unique perspective” (Palandt, 2011, pp. 208-201). Of course, any form of 

artistic and literary analysis of the Jews’ genocide in Europe will eventually reach their limits. But this 

applies not only to the history of the image, but also to the film, the theater, the novel or even the 

autobiography. We can say that the comics create a fantasy by focusing differently on the film, in the 

figurative sense of a short circuit between the conscious and the unconscious through the imagistic and 



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semantic percussion, using processes close to the surrealistic pictorial ones, and by the extreme 

condensation of descriptive and narrative techniques (by means of a significant shortcut). In the 

postmodern era, the interpenetration and development of various aesthetic and sociological scales such 

as: cult/trivial, elitist/popular, disciplinary/interdisciplinary have led to a dynamic and open hybrid 

concept that includes the notion of paraliterarture, centered on the analysis of the comic strips and the 

technical and cultural character of the literature focused on the study of visual forms. That is why, we 

can say that a characteristic of postmodernism would be the paraliterature that is imposed by the 

images of folk culture followed by the comic stripes and the postmodern chronicles. The interaction 

between the open artistic tensions and irradiating flows of the socio-aesthetic value could define the 

comics book author. From the point of view of possible interdisciplinary associations, the comics book 

is close not only to the literature regarded as narrative, but also to the film by the sequential 

discontinuity of the story, in the sense that “the reader must mentally configure the ensemble by filling 

the margins between two boxes, both scenes and pauses are visually thought and imagined” 

(Manolescu, 2011, p. 13).  

3.1 The Comics Paradigm in Romania 

The Comics represented an important aspect in the Romanians’ cultural history. It has a cultural and 

civilization past as far away as solid. The origins can be found in prehistoric cave paintings such as 

those in the Lascaux cave in France, in the Egyptian hieroglyphs containing a combination of 

logographic, alphabetic and ideographic elements, the Trajan’s column (where a story is told in carved 

images), the votive paintings, the tapestry from Bayeux or in popular satirical drawings. If we talk 

about the Romanian space, the researchers establish “the roots of the comics in the frescoes of the 16th 

century of the Moldavian monasteries from Sucevita, Moldoviţa, Voroneţ” (Manolescu, 2011, 15), 

which by “the power and dynamism of the images that tell the lives of the saints, the presence of the 

small houses, the chaining of the action make them true comics” (Niță 2008, 76). When printing 

appeared, the beginnings of the comics can be sought in the religious writing. Various illustrated 

versions of the Bible came to the aid of those who did not know how to read and understand 

Christianity. Then, the center of interest moves from religion to politics and social life. Feeling the need 

for entertainment “the satire and caricature take hold of the publications of the time. Then, a basic 

element of the comics book/text bubble, later on used by Richard F. Outcault for the dialogue between 

characters” (www.motanov.ro), was born. The first magazine in Romania that publishes comics, but 

which were taken from foreign magazines, Germany and Austria, is the Children’s Friend and appears 

in 1891. The comics developed at that time for the press was developed and, in parallel, the 

publications for children. 

In the interwar period there is a Romanian comics book layout. In this respect, the Children’s Magazine 

in 1924 hosted, starting with the second issue, the adventures of the most famous Romanian character 

of the comics, namely Haplea, who will become a real hero of the Romanian comics, as Adrian 

Ciubotariu noted: “The Great Romania had, since 1924, its own quasi-superhero Haplea, a superhero 



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in the Romanians’ image and likeness (since then and now). It did not resemble to Superman, the 

American Superhero or other superheroes drawn, belonging to other cultural spaces ... Haplea is 

nothing more than a follower of the traditional Pacala and an illustrious predecessor of the more 

modern Bulla” (Niță, 2010, p. 27). It’s not far from the playful character played by Charlie Chaplin, 

naive and slick, meanwhile compassionate by what he does to things. Haplea is a fictional character of 

the Romanian humor, the prototype of the stupid man. Unlike Pacala (another comics book character of 

those years), a character taken from the Romanian folklore, the character Haplea entered the folklore 

due to the popularity of the comics and his naive contemporary figure. As a character in caricatures, 

Haplea and his friends (Coana Frosa, Hăplina and Hăplişor) appeared in several magazines, such as the 

Children’s Morning, from 1924 to 1970. In 1927, based on these characters, the first Romanian comics 

book was recorded in the National Films’ Archive, entitled Haplea, on Nicolae Batzaria’s scenarios. 

After walking over 100 kilometers on foot with his bag on a stick, Haplea arrives in the village of 

Hăpleşti. Here he meets near a fountain, Coana Frosa, Niţă Chioru’s widow, who is almost dead 

crashed in a crowd on charity, falls in love and get married. It is Happa that has crossed the age to the 

present day. It is a satire of the period in which we live, where the main character is Haplea, the one 

who struggles with trickery, thievery, hypocrisy. From Haplea to a modern Harap-Alb, the Romanian 

comics characters have traveled over 100 years of history, being drawn over time by many artists. 

During the Communist era, the Romanian comics focused very much on historical subjects, at least in 

magazines such as Licurici, Cutezatori, Luminiţa, Arici Pogonici, Șoimii Patriei that succeeded in 

imposing new characters or successfully resumed other older ones. An important echo in the era was 

the magazine Pif, “probably the best product of the European Communism” (Palandt, 2011, p. 270). 

Although many people have the impression that Pif’s comics was an exponent of the Western capitalist 

market, in fact its main sponsor was the French Communist Party. For many cultured people, the 

comics and the anticipation literature during the communist era was one of the only ways to escape 

from the claws of Ceauşescu’s regime. Thus, Pif, Tintin, are in fact, original stories, 

fantastic-melancholic prose, revived in another narrative context. The author’s passion for comics 

comes from a social, cultural and political paradox, which in fact explained the explosion of a new epic 

genre. Although the Pif magazine belonged to the most intransigent Western Communist Party, the 

French one, its broadcasting (in Romania and not only) led exactly to the opposite effect. Through 

comics, it has penetrated into the country of Ceauşescu’s socialism and among the communist 

sympathizers of “beyond” the consumer culture, so rejected and ideologically criticized, including in 

the intrigues of the comics drawn with sympathetic animals and politically correct heroes. Pif 

constituted, in other words, the “gate of the wall”, “the road to a territory of freedom”, in a 

monochrome country and full of forbidden objects. 

After 1989, the Romanian comics have a new period, there appear many genre magazines, which then 

disappear after only a few numbers. Among the most important, I mention: The Children’s Universe, 

The Children’s Joy, Start 2001, Carousel. In 1990, the first issue of the Children’s Universe, the 



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follow-up of the Cutezatorii, a magazine that, at least in the beginning, enjoyed some success. Among 

the Romanian authors who have attested by their approaches, the seriousness of the genre, we can 

mention Ion Manolescu and Mircea Mihaies. We can also add Ioan Stanomir, a literary critic, a 

historian of ideas and a political scientist, who has embodied his passion from childhood and 

adolescence in an excellent essay called the Camera obscură (Darkroom), Dream, imagination and 

comics. He explores with interdisciplinary tools some of the most important European and South 

American series of comics (with the conscious exclusion of their sources—the genre productions in the 

country of Hollywood). The history of the comics began in Europe, it continued in America, but it had 

another course in Japan (Asia). The Japanese tried to give the band the form of a movie, inspired by 

Disney’s animations. The most famous films are Dragon Ball and One Piece. Many of the movies we 

see today have as a starting point the comics: Superman, Spiderman, Justice League, Asterisc and 

Obelix and others. 

3.2 The Comics and Their Role in Education 

From the above previously presented, we can note that one of the themes of comics books is history, a 

segment to which not only the Romanian authors have paid great attention, but also the authors from 

Europe and America. Therefore, the comics books can be a new way of learning history, more 

attractive and intelligent. The comics are intellectual challenges for different categories of readers 

through the new postmodern setting of the values expressed by text and image. Holographs in comics 

are an important component of the modern memory and media education, particularly fitted for 

children and teenagers as access to the Shoah theme. It would therefore be desirable for schools, 

libraries, colleges and adult education to be more daring to enter new places and increase the use of 

comics. 

Another theme is the adventure, where the “Maniheist scheme in the encounter of the Good, 

represented by teachers, engineers, geologists, researchers, with the Evil like: spies, malevolent 

individuals belonging to the great capitalist concerts” (Teampău, 2012, p. 180) is found. An important 

type of comics is the S.F., initiated in 1964 in Cravata Roșie (Red Tie) followed by Galbar, Carusel, 

Valentin Tănase’s series, Întâlnire în spațiu (Meeting in Space) (1981-1988), etc. As a general feature 

of the comics, it can be said that it exploits two typological variants of violence, namely: the elastic 

violence of the comics has another stylistic justification than the realistic one. The obstacles imposed 

by the rational censorship are circumvented by the fantasy camouflage and the iconic materialization. 

Emptied by its perishable content, reality appears eternally in a graph-reality without ages and 

consequences. The heroes become elastic and self-regenerate into fluid molecular structures that make 

them immune at the passing of time. From such an insight, the violence of the dramatic comics no 

longer puts the equal sign between natural and unnatural, under the emblem of immortality, but it 

brings Good and Evil closer to suffering. 

 

 



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83 
Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

4. Conclusions 

Referring to the literary genres specific to the postmodern period, we can say that the communication 

bridges between the fields of pop culture, literature and paralitery can be constituted by the epic that 

can be manifested in the form of the super-technological actions of the future. The digital era brings 

opportunities that profoundly change the framework of people’s lives, but the interactions with the 

others that involve certain aspects that we live in society: freedom, equality, justice, etc., can not be 

solved by communication technologies. The epistolary genre has recently known an adaptation to the 

new technologies. In this way, the letter is submerged into a space where the social relationships and 

the construction of the subject differ from the previous eras. In other words, the letter adapts to new 

communication identity parameters specific to media that imprint the speed, simultaneity and 

instantness. Not only the texts we communicate, but also those we produce as literature, are 

impregnated with the typical features for this era of rapidity and fragmentation, especially if they pass 

through digital formats. The concept about oneself and about the others influences all the textual 

manifestations, so that the physical supports are reduced by the changes operated by the virtual 

environments, both in form and in content. We are witnessess to a culmination of the epistolary through 

the new parameters offered by the digital era subjects and instruments.  

Thanks to the inclusion of the digital culture, the contemporary world challenges us to rethink the 

notion of textuality by new types of text or new practices of reading and writing. As Roger Chartier 

said, the current changes overturn the foundation of writing, its reproduction and dissemination 

techniques, and the way it is read. We know that the psychological and social preoccupations leading to 

an epistolary practice are satisfied by the virtual environment to a greater extent than through the 

traditional system. Another literary genre referred to in this article is represented by the comics, which 

is appreciated by some as being a new art, aesthetically independent, but which, through the forms of 

expression and the techniques used, by its support and format, is very close to literature. It gains a 

socio-aesthetic value and a world canonical identity because “it has conquered all media and it is the 

subject of theses, seminars, coloquies ... Moreover, it is preferred in schools and it benefits from the 

official recognition” (Moliterni, 1994, pp. 20-25). Others are against to their inclusion in the literature 

for graphic reasons. In fact, the comics could be included in literature just because of the reasons that 

seem to remove it from it, namely the graphic nature of the genre. By naming the procedures used in 

literature (intertextual, metatext), and also in the comics (the significant shortcut, the focus in bubble or 

box), the readers are given a paraliteral mini-history of the paraliterature. On the other hand, the 

definition of the comics as a new art remains a valid theoretical point, whose acceptance can relativize 

the literary status. Even though in Romania comics have never had too many fans, being labeled as an 

entertainment for children, this form of communication has been and is very popular not only in the 

Anglo-Saxon and Germanic countries, but especially in the French-speaking countries such as France, 

Asterix’s country, and Belgium, where Hergé created Tintin. 

 



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Published by SCHOLINK INC. 

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