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There is much to be said about the Nobel Prizes. Numerous pages are written each year to promote, describe, analyze and criticize the prizes, their initiator and their evolution since 1901. The purpose of this study is to bring back to light from the dust of the archives information about those Romanians who were ahead of their times through their outstanding thinking and understanding of the world. Little has been written about those nominated, since it has been considered more relevant to focus on the winners. There were plentiful creative minds who only needed an opportunity to be known to the world. Famous Romanian names show up from the archives and the nomination database provided by the Nobel Institution and enable us to get a broad perspective of the nominators and the nominees. Ironically, as in the case of the Nobel Peace Prize, most of those who genuinely had a chance to win were never nominated.

The article discusses the status of literature in teaching geography. Like cartography, literature maps the space and assigns proper names which allow us to see the places of "condensed, multiplied time" (Claudio Magris). Literary maps bind topography with history and thus realise a geopolitical project of "thinking of place, time and action as coherent unity" (Karl Schlögel). Such literary names as Conrad's "heart of darkness" or mare nostrum, mare monstrum from Dariusz Czaja's essay, in geography didactics can reveal the drama of "building up of land and history" (Magris) and thanks to this, a map used in the didactic process can lead to cathartic experience, i.e. it can sharpen, activate and sensitize the pupils' eye.

AbstractIan Duncan's Human Forms and Devin Griffiths's Age of Analogy attempt to illuminate inter­actions between evolutionary theories and literature from the late eighteenth century up through the nineteenth century. They do not advance knowledge about this subject. Both authors treat evolution as a semi-fictional construction that owes more to literary inspiration than to the scientific method, and they reduce literature to a battleground for ideological forces. They write using dense terminology, shifting rhetoric, and flights of verbal performance that obscure their claims. In all these respects, they are representative of the field "science and literature"-and particularly of the subfield that studies evolution and literature. I analyze the history of this subfield of literary scholarship and attempt to explain how it developed into its present form. The subfield was founded in the 1980s on the basis of poststructuralist theory and has never escaped the core assumptions of that theory: our minds cannot reach outside culture; our thoughts, behaviors, and ideas about the world are primarily the result of our culture; some cultural traditions are oppressive while others are liberating; and the meaning of texts cannot be determined. Though Duncan and Griffiths represent the highest level of schol­arship on evolution and literature, I argue that they fail their fascinating subject by offering very little that is new within their own field, and nothing that is of value to other fields.