INTERVIEW: ANDREI TERIAN Terian, Andrei
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia,
09/2022, Letnik:
67, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Q: Literary history, be it national, local, or regional, is perhaps the most conservative form of literary study, with many claiming that the method is outmoded. What can literary histories do to ...overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism?A: If by “literary history” we refer to the traditional—and hence somewhat canonical—form of literary historiography as genre, i.e., the study of literature from an evolutionary, teleological, and ethnocentric standpoint, for which works authored between 1830 and 1945 serve as models (from, let’s say, Georg Gottfried Gervinus to Albert Thibaudet), then this form has undoubtedly been one of the most conservative in the entire history of modern literary criticism, considering the fact that it has almost entirely refused to alter its goals, methodology, and rhetoric for over a century. But I do not consider this to hold true for the literary histories published after the Second World War as well. On the contrary, following a “crisis” lasting for nearly half a century, during which all its theoretical building blocks have been scrutinized and questioned, literary history seems to have made a powerful comeback in the past decades, both as discipline and as genre. Moreover, I tend to believe that it currently represents the most innovative segment in literary studies—, that it is in any case more innovative than individual articles, or monographs, the main source of critical innovation in the second half of the 20th century. And this fact is quite understandable: the very skepticism that had plagued it for decades on end made it so that literary history became one of the most experimental genres within literary studies after the year 2000. Past the threshold of the new millennium, it tested not only its object of study (extending the very definition of “literature” and offering numerous alternatives to the insistent predilection for the “national”) and its methodology beyond every conceivable limit (going through all contemporary theories, frameworks, and analytical procedures, from computational criticism and intermedial studies to feminism and postcolonial studies), but also what seemed to be its core determinant: the factor of time (thereby replacing chronology with other ways of arranging its material, such as the geographic/ spatial one). Therefore, in the 21st century, literary history is nothing short of a revolutionary genre—and this seems to be the most convincing retort the old discipline could have made to her detractors.
This article examines the predictors of gender-specific literature production in the field of social sciences and humanities (SSH). The research used bibliometric information on 1132 gender-related ...articles by authors with Romanian affiliations. Binary logistic regression shows the individual and institutional factors of a paper's likelihood of including gender-related words in its title. Weak institutionalisation of Gender Studies marks this national context, reflected in the marginal and discontinuous integration in the curriculum of higher-education institutions. Our findings suggest that the female gender of the first or a single author, as well as the authors' affiliation with Romanian universities running master's programmes in Gender Studies, are positively associated with the outcome variable. Likewise, single-author articles have greater odds than co-authored articles of including a reference to gender in their titles. Conversely, articles published in journals in the JIF third quartile of the JCR hierarchy have less chance of having a title that conveys an orientation towards gender-specific research. The implications of our findings suggest that the decision-makers at the level of faculties and research institutes in SSH must focus on creating a facilitating environment for scholarly interest in feminist research. We propose tackling the negative stereotypes regarding feminism's ideological underpinnings and its ostensible lack of epistemological foundation. Romania is a country still facing significant domestic violence and poor gender equality, so these findings have further implications at the societal level.
In recent years, literary criticism has shown increased interest towards the manner in which fiction depicts (neo)extractivism as a set of practices whereby large quantities of natural resources are ...exploited for export. However, scholars have overlooked the manifestation of this phenomenon in areas and epochs other than post-1945 Latin America. Based on a close reading of two Romanian interwar novels - Cezar Petrescu's Pământ și cer and Mihail Sadoveanu's Nopțile de Sânziene - this article aims to demonstrate that extractive fictions played a decisive role in the emergence of magical realism as a narrative mode whereby the peripheries have left a distinctive mark on the configuration of world literature. My argument follows three consecutive steps: first, I explore how the two novels represent neoextractivism as a mechanism for the destruction of the biocoenosis and the othering of natives; then, I show that the magical, mythical, and supernatural distinguish themselves in the two works as the only instruments able to stop capitalist commodification; lastly, I show that the particular mode of representation the two novels deploy (which I label 'proto-magical realism') turns them into the missing link, on a transnational scale, between interwar social and regional fictions and early postwar magical realist works.
This essay analyses the most recent novel of Romanian author Mircea Cărtărescu (Solenoid, 2015). To this end, I will use a specific extension of career construction theory in the field of literary ...research that focuses on the notion of a 'late-career novel'. After a short presentation of the theoretical framework and the evolution of Cărtărescu's career, my approach turns to the hybrid nature of Solenoid, which reveals the complex (meta)narrative strategy its author deploys in order to attain an ever more prestigious position within the international literary canon. On the one hand, through the continuous interplay of his roles as Teacher, Writer, and Seeker, alternatively regarded as profession and vocation, Cărtărescu rewrites his own biography in order to dispose of any trace of institutionalised 'literature' in his discourse; on the other hand, the Romanian author ostentatiously exhibits his own marginal geo-cultural status, implying that it would grant him access to a more authentic and substantial understanding of life. These actions are part of a broader metanarrative pattern, which I denominate 'hypercycle' and whose conceptual background could not only offer a better understanding of Cărtărescu's career, but also pave the way for further development of career construction theory.
ANDREI TERIAN Terian, Andrei
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia,
09/2022
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
An interview with Andrei Terian, professor of Romanian literature in the Department of Romance Studies at the Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, is presented. Among other things, he talks about the ...role of literary histories to overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism, whether intellectual enterprises can become a culture in and of themselves, and why periodization matters beyond preserving the authority of periodization itself.
This article aims to explore the meanings and functions of temperature in Liviu Rebreanu’s novel Ion. The conclusions of my research are paradoxical from at least two points of view: first, the ...Romanian writer uses a language that is at once rudimentary and subtle, encoding a small number of meanings, but in a discreet manner; then, Rebreanu creates a genuine scale of passions arranged on the axis cold (death) – warmth (life), but at the same time he regards the boiling passions as forebodings of death.
This study advocates the analytical and historiographic usefulness of the concept of "socialist modernism" in denominating and describing the paradigm that prevailed in Romanian and other Eastern ...European literatures between 1960/1965 and 1980. In doing so, the article follows a three-pronged line of reasoning. Firstly, I provide a diachronic overview of this period unraveling the motives behind writers and communist politicians' conviction that modernism was a trend whereby they could effectively express their interests following the fall of socialist realism. Secondly, I define the concept of "socialist modernism" and explain how its usefulness in characterizing this period supersedes that of well-established Romanian concepts such as "neomodernism" and "socialist aestheticism." Finally, I aim to uncover whether socialist modernism can be successfully integrated in a transnational modernist network (if, for instance, it aligns with the so-called "late modernism") or if, conversely, it is limited to a local or, at the most, regional level.
This article highlights the heuristic usefulness of “cultural triangulation”, a concept attempting to exceed the dominant schemata for the analysis of intercultural relations in current comparative ...cultural studies, which are generally limited to binary mechanisms of the type (culture)A “sees”/constructs/influences/dominates (culture) B. In contrast to this reductionist tendency,I argue that all (inter)cultural processes have an ideologically filtered nature and consequently imply the mediation of the relationship between A and B via an intermediary C, to which various roles are assigned (e. g., to hide/alter/compensate/reverse various power relations, which are under no circumstances obvious or inevitable). My study explores the dynamics of this mechanism of cultural triangulation by analyzing some of the most representative travelogues to China written by Romanian authors during the communist era: G. Călinescu’s Am fost în China Nouă (I’ve Been to New China, 1955), Eugen Barbu’s Jurnal în China (Chinese Diary,1970), and Paul Anghel’s O clipă în China (One Moment in China, 1978).
The presentarticle proposes a quantitative analysis of the evolution of the novel in Romania. The study de factocompares, based on the data provided by Dicþionarul cronologic al romanului ...românesc(Chronological dictionary of the Romanian novel, abbr. DCRR) and by Dicþionarul cronologic al romanului tradus în România(Chronological dictionary of the translated novel in Romania, abbr. DCRT) for the period between 1845 and 2000, the evolution of the number of domestic novels and that of the number of translated novels in Romania, as well as the ratio between these values, which, dubbed the “index of literary autonomy” (ILA), serves as a measure of the degree of (in)dependence of the Romanian literary system. Starting from the aforementioned data and concepts, the present research delimits four phases in the development of the novel in Romania (1845–1917; 1918–1947; 1948–1989; 1990–2019) and attempts explanations of the diverse variations in novelistic production—especially its “rises” and “falls”—based on the various political, economic and cultural factors which caused them.
In his article "National Literature, World Literatures, and Universality in Romanian Cultural Criticism 1867-1947" Andrei Terian analyzes the relevance of systematizing international literary ...relationships in current theories of world literatures. Terian criticizes the "naturalist" reductionism that still dominates many contemporary studies in the field of world literatures and asserts that a particular feature of the interliterary processes is that they occur not only at the level of mere "facts," but also at the level of cultural "representations" thus supporting various strategies through which national literatures attempt to acquire more favorable positions within world literatures. Terian presents a systemic classification of these strategies and tests the efficiency of the proposed concepts through an analysis of the politics of universality undertaken in Romanian cultural criticism of the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century.
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