ArticlePDF Available

Regimuri de relevanță, puncte de rezistență: literatura română în postcomunism

Authors:

Abstract

The article discusses the condition of literary history at a time of disciplinary crisis, when literary studies appear, globally, to renegotiate their connection to the social and to social sciences. In trying to articulate ways for literary history to incorporate more socially aware concepts in its practice, I turn to two recent proposals by Galin Tihanov (“regimes of relevance”) and Mihai Iovănel (“resistance points”). Finally, the article applies the finds of both concepts to postcommunist Romanian literature in an attempt to reach a more supple and at the same time comprehensive angle.
107



Doris MIRONESCU
Institutul de Filologie Română „A. Philippide”, Iași
A. Philippide Institute of Romanian Philology, Iași

        
      

        



e Birth and Death of Literary eory 
Istoria literaturii
române contemporane      
        


Criza studiilor literare contemporane
 
      



      

        
           1
      

       


     
 a studiilor literare pe

        
      
        

Abstract      


                

Keywords
Citation suggestion           
Transilvania

108
TRANSILVANIA 7-8/2021

       
   
     
       
     

       
        



         
   
      
         





        
    
 3
 5    








        

      
         
          

    7      
     
       

       
        


      
        
       
         
     
      
      
   
      
         
        
     
        
    
         
      
     

Concepte pentru o nouă istorie literară
  e Birth and Death of Literary eory. Regimes
of Relevance in Russia and Beyond   

           
        

         
         




 



        


       
          

    
        
       



     
 
     
   10  
       
        
  




       
         


       
109

         
 


       


     
      

11
Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 
 
Ideologii
ale literaturii în postcomunismul românesc12
13



„ideologia literaturii” pune accent pe „utilizarea” literaturii
    
      
        
        
     
       
      Istoria literaturii române
contemporane (1990-2020)    
      
       

        
         
       

   
    

        
       
     
     
      
        
      Istoriei literaturii
române contemporane (1990-2020)


15
        
      

        
  
        
       
        
   

        
       



        
       









  17    
           

       


       




      

       
         

      Istoria literaturii române
contemporane (1990-2020)   




        

Regimuri de relevanță a literaturii
în postcomunismul românesc
        
        
    


          
      
      
110
TRANSILVANIA 7-8/2021
         
        
        
        
        

         
    
       
         
       
         


politic


      

     
       
        
      

       
       


        

  
    



       
        


       
       
        

     



  
        


           
        





    

        


        



inclusiv cantitativ     

         
       
      

        personal  


   

      
         
          
       
  

        
  
      
      
       

   
       
     
persona 
      

        
     
 
      

 
      
       


       
       
       



111

         
Istoria
literaturii române contemporane (1990-2020) asupra succesiunii


literare”

         
       

       
 
          

 sociograc29
         
        
         

     
       
       
        
  

      

      
        
30


        

         
 31       


         
     
      



       
autori ca parte a unui „proletariat intelectual”  




     
33 literar un grup
  

      





etic 
      
   
         
      
       
         
   
      
      

       
       
      

     
animalthing studies35
       
   Scotch  
  
  
      

 
         

 
   
        
 


       

cool
       




     
    


 


        

 autonomist      
       
112
TRANSILVANIA 7-8/2021
         
     




       

37    

       
        
        

      

reset al
esteticii
       
           
         
     
 
          

         

   







      

  
      

      

       
      

            

   

Concluzii
    
      
      
       
        
       
         



       
        
       
        
          
        
   
      
     


       

       
        


         
        

       
       


  
         
        
  


Note:
Istoria literaturii române de azi pe mâine
Istoria literaturii române contemporane (1941-2000)  
Istoria critică a literaturii române      Scurtă istorie. Panorama alternativă a literaturii române
 Dicționarul general al literaturii române  
Dicționarul analitice de opere literare românești
Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc  
113
Dicționarul cronologic al romanului tradus în România de la origini până la 1989
 Enciclopedia literaturii române vechi           
Enciclopedia Scrierilor Memorialistice Românești

 Internaționala periferiilor. Rețeaua avangardelor din Europa Centrală și de Est    

Studiile literare în litigiu.
Literatura de după „moartea literaturii”
   Comunități imaginate. Reecții asupra originii și răspândirii naționalismului     

Comunitatea absentă, 
Regimes of historicity. Presentism and experiences of time
What Is an Apparatus? And other essays

Transilvania
Postcommunist Nostalgia 
Remaining Relevant after Communism. e Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe
e Birth and Death of Literary eory. Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond,
e Birth
Ideologii ale literaturii în postcomunismul românesc

Common Knowledge 
Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020
Istoria,

Poetics Today       





               
  
     





 Istoria  
Familia

Istoria

Istoria
Literatura română în postceaușism 
Istoria


Philologica Jassyensia, 

Istoria
 
 

Philologica Jassyensia,   
114
TRANSILVANIA 7-8/2021
     
Istoria
 Dacoromania Litteraria

Istoria



Postures littéraires
                 
Istoria
            

Istoria
Istoria
Istoria
Istoria 
Istoria
Istoria
Istoria

e Birth
Studiile literare
Styles. Critiques de nos formes de vie
e Birth
Bibliography:
What Is an Apparatus? And other essays
Comunități imaginate. Reecții asupra originii și răspândirii naționalismului

Studiile literare în litigiu. Literatura de după „moartea literaturii”

Poetics Today
Regimes of historicity. Presentism and experiences of time
Ideologii ale literaturii în postcomunismul românesc

Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020
Istoria History
Familia
Styles. Critiques de nos formes de vie
Postures littéraires
Philologica Jassyensia 
Literatura română în postceaușism

Transilvania
 Dacoromania Litteraria
Comunitatea absentă. 
Transilvania

Common Knowledge

e Birth and Death of Literary eory. Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond
Postcommunist Nostalgia. 
Remaining Relevant after Communism. e Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe
Article
Full-text available
The Post-Communist Novel of Transition as Realism of Transition. Thematic Precedents in Romanian and East-Central European Literature. The present study aims to analyze how certain narrative formulas circulate within the world literary system – one but unequal (Moretti 2004, WReC 2015) – starting from the case of the novel of post-communist transition, specific to many Eastern European literatures. The Romanian literature abounds in such novels, which take various forms according to the different literary paradigms from which they have emerged. Thus, we consider that post-communist Romanian literature, or at least its social-political regime of relevance, is a symptomatic case of what the authors of Combined and uneven development: Towards a new theory of world-literature (WReC) call “(semi-)peripheral irrealism”. According to this study, the literature produced in peripheries and semi-peripheries is often formally dominated by a series of practices identified as specific to modernism, which arise, determined by the condition of the semi-periphery, in the unique and uneven system of world-literature, in which fiction becomes the narration that mediates lived experience in the “palimpsestic, combinatory and contradictory ‘order’ of peripheral experience.” (WReC). Nevertheless, a new direction of contemporary prose is being traced recently in order to rethink/ reproblematize the past and the way it can be reflected in literature. A series of recent novels such as Bogdan Coșa’s How Close the Cold Rains Are (2020) and Mihai Duțescu’s Beech Sponges (2021), as well as others, give rise to a new aesthetic formula of the post-communist novel of transition through the ways in which they operate with realism. We therefore propose to investigate the recent history of the phenomenon of fictional representation of the Romanian transition in relation to similar phenomena in East-Central Europe, while also analyzing the specifics of “the realism of transition” (as we will call this new literary category, in the footsteps of Mihnea Bâlici). Keywords: the novel of transition, (semi-)peripheral literature, peripheral realism, post-communism, the realism of transition
Article
The present research aims to bring into discussion the complex figure of Norman Manea, representative of the studies concerned with the analysis of the globalization strategies of Romanian literature. Relevant in this sense is the process of “reinvention” of a Romanian writer in an American context, through which one can understand the efforts of cultural and literary transplantation, of a constant, non-euphoric revisionism – according to Claudiu Turcuș’s formula –, as an alternative to the necessary political scale of aesthetics, but also the confrontation of clichés coming from the American continent. Throughout this endeavor, attention will be paid to the manner in which Romanian literature allows itself to be shaped, from its (semi)peripheral position, by the effects of a quintessentially transnational culture, such as the American one. What does the integration of Norman Manea entail, formed as an identity in the Eastern European context and as a survivor of some totalitarian regimes, how much of this identity is “saved” or diminished to ensure integration, how is a successful dialogue between the margin and the center formed, remain pillar questions for a profitable discussion for current Romanian studies, concerned with the status of Romanian literature as world literature. Norman Manea’s writings thus facilitate the updating of other themes, in addition to that of dislocation and relocation that migration produces: the contrast between the representation of communism in Eastern European prose and the representations of the West or the international reception of contemporary Romanian literature, subjects through which we aspire to overcome the proposed framework discussion.
Article
Full-text available
Romanian criticism has tended to use generational framing to delineate the boundaries of local poetic paradigms, which has also been the case for the Generation 2000 and Generation post-2000. If in the 1980’s a discussion about a Romanian postmodernism was put into debate, in 2018 the question regarding the emergence of a Romanian poetry metamodernism arises. In this context, I intend to trace in this paper the nuances of generational debates in order to outline to what extent this methodology succeeds in describing the mutations and the characteristics of recent poetry. With the posthuman turn and the possibilities for the emergence of metamodernism being debated, my paper addresses, on the one hand, the viability of metamodernism in recent poetry, and, on the other, possible points of conjunctions of posthumanism and metamodernism. The posthuman turn encompasses the post-2000 generation, while local discussions have also proposed metamodernism as a label for the post-2000 generation. The question I start from is to what extent, theoretically, is our local poetry metamodernist in its sensibility and specificity, and to what extent does posthumanism fit into a metamodernist heuristic label. Although the debate remains open insofar as the Romanian theoretical field seems rather refractory to transnational theoretical fictions, what I observe in this article is that metamodernism, as theoretically proposed, can be a viable alternative to the crisis of critical discourse.
Article
Full-text available
Cultural globalisation, made possible by the enhancement of digital infrastructure, has led some scholars to reconsider the dynamics of core-periphery transfers, stressing the immediacy with which popular culture crosses national and linguistic borders. This is the case of Theory in the ‘Post’ Era: A Vocabulary for the 21st-Century Conceptual Commons, which in its preface proposes an epidemiological model of the transfer of cultural capital. In my paper, I want to relate “the contagion theory” to the import of Posthumanism in Eastern Europe and contemporary Romanian literature. The links between Posthumanism and contemporary literature have provoked sometimes productive, sometimes controversial local debates. The way in which this philosophy/theory is naturalised calls into question the instantaneity with which ideas circulate, since there are cases in which its core meanings are hijacked in Romanian culture. This cultural dysmorphia (along with other cultural products considered self-colonial) demonstrates how the unequal relations between centre and periphery are not completely dissolved by the digital turn but generate a new paradox of asymmetrical instantaneity. The aim of my article is to see how the theory of posthumanism travels from the centre of Anglo-American cultural studies to the semi-periphery of the Romanian literary field, where several mutations can be noticed: first of all, the shift from SF literature to poetry, which has a greater symbolic capital in Romania. I will analyse the contexts of the “regimes of relevance,” the transformations brought about by Romania’s accession to the European Union, and the mechanisms of diffusion of posthuman theory in the local space.
Article
Full-text available
Metamodernism is a Eurocentric theoretical fiction, with no adherence to the social and cultural realities of post-communist Romania. This article provides a critique of the theory of metamodernism proposed by Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker and used by Alex Ciorogar to describe the post-2010 Romanian poetry system. Even if the concept is inoperative for Romanian literature, it is a symptom of the overcoming of the postmodernist framework, felt by writers as anti-essentialist, light-hearted, and unconcerned with the problems of today's society (climate crisis, immigrants, marginalized communities, economic inequalities between classes, etc.). What I notice in the footsteps of Jeffrey Nealon & Galin Tihanov is that the focus shifts from an autonomist "regime of relevance" to one that is socially, politically, and identity-building oriented. My analysis will propose a number of criticisms of the internal contradictions generated by the two Dutchmen's theory: firstly, that the "Yo-yo effect" of metamodernism-a metaphor I coined to better understand the basic concept-does not fully explain the cultural landscape of the Romanian literary system. In addition, it is built on a sum of generalizations of modernism and postmodernism, which have not been unanimously accepted by the theorists. A second criticism of Vermeulen and van den Akker's study is its Western-centric stance, which ignores the (semi-)peripheral specificity of cultures. If we absurdly accept the existence of metamodernism, it is only a combination of ideologies and styles of historical currents subsumable to modernity. Therefore, I will propose, following in the footsteps of Fredric Jameson and the Warwick Research Collective, the concept of singular modernity, and I argue why there cannot yet be a postmodernity in Eastern Europe. Discussing post-communist Romanian literature in terms of unfinished, combined, and unevenly developed modernity is much more productive because it takes into account both the material-social conditions of Romania and the cultural-artistic acquisitions thanks to the transfer of symbolic capital between central and (semi)peripheral systems.
Article
Full-text available
"Ramifications of Ideology: Mapping Contemporary Romanian Literature. After outlining the mutations occurring in the background of literary histories, the analysis that follows shows, by focusing on the relevance of periodization in literary history, that, covering several decades as it does, Mihai Iovǎnel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 works out open filiations and parallelisms that extend a time interval of contrasts and continuities. In his effort to assign another dimension to literary history through alliances with disciplines that cross a critically structured and metacritically developed literary area, Iovănel attempts to make literary history more permeable. Thus, a section of his work investigates how The History… reacts, from the post-Marxist materialism viewpoint, to the particularities determined by the transition from one cultural pattern to another. That segment examines conceptual and methodological ramifications, identifies lineages or vulnerabilities, and shows that the existence of an area of intersection between literary history and memory transforms The History… into a narrative. Finally, another part of the book is dedicated to demonstrating that what Benga-Țuțuianu calls an “objectifying” approach can meet blind spots that prove relevant for the recontextualization of literary production and for sketching out a type of cosmopolitan imagery—a springboard to the discussion about world literature. Nevertheless, the arguments summed up in the last segment of the book prove unequivocally that Iovǎnel’s History is a turning point in Romanian literary historiography. Keywords: materialism, temporality, transfer, periphery, world literature"
Article
New Perspective on Romanian Post-Communist Literature. Mihai Iovănel, History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990–2020 The article addresses Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990–2020, the first history of Romanian literature that presents the development of Romanian post-communist prose and poetry. Iovănel’s book sparked a heated debate among literary critics, historians and writers, because it discusses and redefines prevalent concepts in Romanian literary theory and criticism, focusing on the extraliterary (political, social, economic) conditioning of literary production and inscribing Romanian literature into the system of transnational literary interactions. The paper shows thus the most important assumptions of Iovănel’s work and discusses the critical reception of the volume among Romanian intellectuals.
Article
The present article addresses Mihai Iovănel’s recently published History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 while pursuing a series of similarities with other contributions to postcommunist national literatures in the Central and Eastern European cultural space, on the one hand, and with previous ways of understanding the concept of literary history, on the other. The article argues that Iovănel’s History is one of the first to assess the importance of the social in the production, study, and national, as well as transnational dissemination of Romanian literature, an emphasis without which the study of literary phenomena risks falling into the blindness of aesthetic autonomy, whose shortcomings are well documented in the book. Lastly, I will argue that Iovănel unwillingly describes several of the most notable shifts in the “regimes of relevance” (Galin Tihanov) that literature has undergone from the communist period to contemporary times.
Article
It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is re-thought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015).
Article
Full-text available
In the last four decades, the novel of memory has gained momentum on the world scene, taking advantage of the collapse of colonial and/or dictatorial regimes around the globe. Romania was not an exception, so after the fall of Communism in 1989, and more prominently at the beginning of the new millennium, this subgenre blossomed. Based on quantitative and qualitative research of a selection of fifty novels published in the Romanian space both before and after the fall of the communist regime, this article is the first attempt to map the Romanian novel of memory from a genre-based perspective. Our approach follows the evolution of the novel of memory in the course of four decades, from a thematic, formal, and generational perspective. Relying on these operators, as well as on the culturalist approach to literature in memory studies, we distinguish between a traumatic, a (n)ostalgic and an agonistic novel of memory.
Book
This book explores crucial moments of change in society's “regimes of historicity,” or its ways of relating to the past, present, and future. Deriving inspiration from Hannah Arendt, Reinhart Koselleck, and Paul Ricoeur, the book analyzes a broad range of texts, positioning The Odyssey as a work on the threshold of historical consciousness and contrasting it with an investigation of the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's concept of “heroic history.” The text tracks changing perspectives on time in Chateaubriand's Historical Essay and Travels in America and sets them alongside other writings from the French Revolution. The book revisits the insights of the French Annales School and situates Pierre Nora's Realms of Memory within a history of heritage and today's presentism, from which it addresses Jonas's notion of our responsibility for the future. Our presentist present is by no means uniform or clear-cut, and it is experienced very differently depending on the position we occupy in society. We are caught up in global movement and accelerated flows, or else condemned to the life of casual workers, living from hand to mouth in a stagnant present, with no recognized past, and no real future either (since the temporality of plans and projects is inaccessible). The present is therefore experienced as emancipation or enclosure, and the perspective of the future is no longer reassuring, since it is perceived not as a promise, but as a threat. The book shows how the motor of history(-writing) has stalled and helps the reader understand the contradictory qualities of contemporary presentist relation to time.
Article
The present article addresses Mihai Iovănel’s recently published History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 while pursuing a series of similarities with other contributions to postcommunist national literatures in the Central and Eastern European cultural space, on the one hand, and with previous ways of understanding the concept of literary history, on the other. The article argues that Iovănel’s History is one of the first to assess the importance of the social in the production, study, and national, as well as transnational dissemination of Romanian literature, an emphasis without which the study of literary phenomena risks falling into the blindness of aesthetic autonomy, whose shortcomings are well documented in the book. Lastly, I will argue that Iovănel unwillingly describes several of the most notable shifts in the “regimes of relevance” (Galin Tihanov) that literature has undergone from the communist period to contemporary times.
Article
On the verge of the 21 st century, we are supposed to acknowledge the diagnosis of death of theory of literature as a separate scientific discipline. At any rate, it is more or less eighty years old-from its birth date of, say, around 1910, to the last decade of 20th century. In a flashback view, its origins would fall on the period of activity of Russian formalists, the end line being drawn by Wolfgang Iser's turn, in the late eighties, from a theory of reception and phenomenology of reading into what he himself called a 'literary anthropology'; this end point was only sealed by Yuri Lotman's death in 1993. It was namely Lotman who was to consistently transform semiotics into a general theory of culture, which finally replaced theory of literature as a narrow concept. Resulting from a coincidence of historical circumstances, the practice of literary avant-garde (not specific, as it was, to the Central/Eastern Europe) demanded a justification on the grounds of theory of literature and started it up as a process.
Article
In this essay I submit that modern literary theory was born in the decades between World War I and World War II in Eastern and Central Europe due to the disintegration of philosophical discourses and to changes in literature itself. I also examine the uniquely heteroglot environment in which intellectual life in these parts of Europe proceeded at the time.
Article
The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben's recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of the apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on contemporariness, or the singular relation one may have to one's own time. "Apparatus" (dispositif in French) is at once a most ubiquitous and nebulous concept in Foucault's later thought. In a text bearing the same name ("What is a dispositif?") Deleuze managed to contribute its mystification, but Agamben's leading essay illuminates the notion: "I will call an apparatus," he writes, "literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings." Seen from this perspective, Agamben's work, like Foucault's, may be described as the identification and investigation of apparatuses, together with incessant attempts to find new ways to dismantle them. Though philosophy contains the notion of philos, or friend, in its very name, philosophers tend to be very skeptical about friendship. In his second essay, Agamben tries to dispel this skepticism by showing that at the heart of friendship and philosophy, but also at the core of politics, lies the same experience: the shared sensation of being. Guided by the question, "What does it mean to be contemporary?" Agamben begins the third essay with a reading of Nietzsche's philosophy and Mandelstam's poetry, proceeding from these to an exploration of such diverse fields as fashion, neurophysiology, messianism and astrophysics.