The democratic environment in Romania after 1989 witnessed the emergence of an unprecedented number of public discourses engaged with the re-evaluation of communism. In line with recent contributions ...to cultural memory studies (Aleida Assmann, Astrid Erll), this essay tries to assess the role that fiction played in reshaping the communist past and engaging with the post-communist present. Narratives written by Dan Lungu, Radu Pavel Gheo and Vasile Ernu, some of the most representative writers of the Romanian post-1989 era, are examined against the backdrop of public debates regarding the opposition between democracy and totalitarianism, progression and nostalgia, the ʻcivilized Westʼ and the ʻprovincialʼ East. In reaction to the pressure of ideological discourses, this article argues that literature remains a privileged site where alternative versions of memory can intertwine and negotiate their claims. Literary texts that reshape cultural perceptions fulfil the ʻmnemonic multiperspectivityʼ function of the public discourse with particular focus on recovering the marginal voices that are often disregarded by classic historiography.
This paper explores Romanian literary histories in the light of the theoretical acknowledgements of "World Literature". Its foremost representatives define the international literary space as a ...competition for universal acknowledgment among nations. The complex dynamic between culture and socioeconomic power is responsible for the hierarchical distinction between (semi)peripheral and core literatures. The case of Romanian literature is significant for the East-European struggle to overcome the socio-political delay by manufacturing "great narratives". The discourse of literary histories, seen, since Herder, as a privileged reflection of the nation's soul, is contaminated by legitimizing strategies meant to re-locate the (semi)peripheral literatures on the map of world literature. This paper analyzes Nicolae Iorga's first literary histories at the edge of the twentieth-century, the literary history of Eugen Lovinescu, Istoria literaturii române contemporane, Istoria literaturii române de la începuturi până în prezent by G. Călinescu, emphasizing the compensation strategies meant to surpass the distance between the symbolic prestige of Romanian literature and core literatures.
This paper delineates the conditions of theoretical transformations in the works of Lubomír
Doležel and Thomas G. Pavel, starting from the assumption that their cultural evolution has
been similar. ...Not only did they share the same ideological background, common to the East
and Central European countries under the Soviet regime, but their theoretical options were
coloured by the same dilemmas. Originally promoters of the structuralist linguistic methods,
they both embraced linguistic approaches to literature in their first books only to depart from
them later in favour of the possible worlds theory. That’s why a comparative focus on the
stages of their evolution from the linguistic turn to the referential turn is needed. The study
emphasizes both the specificities of this evolution – indebted to the autochthonous tradition
of the two authors – and its paradigmatic aspect: the mobility of their theoretical reflection
enacts the metamorphosis of the literary studies throughout the last half century.
Lavinia Sabou: Moretti starts from the point that it is necessary to have a more rational history of literature. ...I read Moretti, I was not in need of a higher degree of rationality regarding the ...history of literature, because I was accustomed, by graduating Letters, to apply hermeneutics, text interpretation, and not to find anything incomplete in this approach. Why should one broaden the sphere of application of analysis? Because such a broadening of the canon is necessary and, according to him, it is in no way possible to operate with a less narrow understanding of the canon just by reading more extensively, like the comparatists of the previous generations hoped: we won't read 10 books, we'll go read 100, even 1000, 100 000. ...a stress, let's say, ethic and highly commendable would be that of the collaborative research and I would salute all the more what the authors of today's proposal did... Because it is, surely, a pioneering act, but others should emerge as well in order to take over certain aspects and knots for analyzing, presented by their graphics. ...later on to alter something in the mental of the woman who lets herself abused because jealousy is supposedly a proof of love or who thinks that it is normal to be beaten by her husband from time to time. ...intervening in the studying of the predictability of some cultural behaviors or other sort, literary interpretation has a very visible "social impact". Ştefan Baghiu: Part of the difficulties that Moretti comes with are given by the fact that we don't understand yet why forms intermingle at a certain point, why they intrude one upon the other.
The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general ...framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms.
The paper looks at the tension between ruralism and urbanism and between foreign models and autochthonous engagement in Marin Predaʼs literary evolution. Although Preda is seen as the most ...representative rural novelist of the post-war Romanian literature, the aim of the paper is to demonstrate that, starting with the 1962 Risipitorii, his career can be described as a systematic attempt to de-emphasize this framing. The study also tries to pinpoint some of the ideological or cultural aspects responsible for the writerʼs growing internalization of the skepticism toward rural literature.
Drawing from recent developments in the field of World Literature, but also earlier attempts at mapping local cultural traditions, contexts, and affinities, our proposal attempts to investigate the ...dominant patterns of cultural criticism within the literary publications active during the interwar period. Using an exhaustive resource of metadata related to the relations between Romanian literature and foreign literatures developed over the span of twenty years, we plot a network abstraction focused on revealing patterns and trends of reception within Romanian cultural magazines. This process of “topic modeling” cultural criticism will serve to illustrate the dominant subject matters present in the Romanian cultural press. Following our data analysis, we will attempt to provide an explanatory model of “theory production” in Romanian literary culture that accounts for the seemingly “ahistorical” nature of autochthonous localizations.
Two literary critics respond to a questionnaire regarding the sociology of the contemporary Romanian novel, in both meanings of the expression: the sociology of the literary camp and of its social ...and institutional milieu, but also the sociology of the literature, i.e. the social function and social representation in the contemporary Romanian novels.
The article explores the hypothesis of enrolling „Moromeții” novel into the realistic socialist canon that can be hardly admitted because the novel obviously leaves the dogma of the literary thesis ...and the fundamental difference is to be found first in the formal aspect of the prose.
The breakdown of the epic wholeness specific to the Thaw novel enables writers to undermine the politics of Stalinism. Influenced by Vincent Jouveʼs analysis of the mise-en-texte of values, the paper ...emphasizes on undermining rhetorical strategies such as ellipsis, narrative focus or sympathy towards certain characters. One of the first occurrences of the ephemeral genre known as “the novel of the obsessive decade”, Marin Predaʼs Risipitorii (1962) is used as a case study for the defending a poetics of subversion.
