Cosmin Borza’s research while affiliated with Alexandru Ioan Cuza University and other places

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE MEMORY NOVELS PUBLISHED IN THE ROMANIAN SPACE (1990–2022) This article offers the first bibliography of the memory novels published in the Romanian literary space between 1990–2022. The novel of memory is a literary genre with a global spread, and at the same time a prominent national (sub)genre, spanning from postcolonial societies to post-dictatorial and post-communist cultures. Using lexicographical sources, as well as catalogues and search engines developed by the most important libraries and publishing houses, we identified 230 memory novels released in Romania (and, incidentally, in the Republic of Moldova) during the last three decades. For each item we provide the full bibliographical reference. Additionally, we propose five labels covering the subgenres of the novel of memory: testimonial novel, post-testimonial novel, coming of age novel, transgenerational novel and historiographic metafiction. We use one of these five labels to annotate each item in our list, in order to provide a more nuanced understanding of the formal, thematic, and mnemonic diversity of the memory novels. Keywords: novel of memory, bibliography, post-communism, genre, subgenres.

This article argues for a rethinking of how we label the diversity of subgenres that have emerged in the postcolonial and post-Cold War world within the global genre of the novel, with the so-called memory turn and its aftermath. We identify the memory novel as one of the most important genres in contemporary global literature, and we zoom in on its forms and dynamics in post-communist Romania. Drawing on a corpus of over 200 novels published in Romania between 1990 and 2022, we propose a new set of subgenre labels that have the potential to more accurately capture the formal, thematic, and political characteristics of contemporary novels from Romania and beyond. These labels are: testimonial novel, post-testimonial novel, coming-of-age novel, transgenerational novel, and historiographical metafiction.

https://edituratact.ro/colectii/colectia-de-strada/alex-goldis-christian-moraru-andrei-terian-pentru-o-noua-cultura-critica-romaneasca/ „Pentru o nouă cultură critică românească” este o carte-manifest al cărei obiectiv prim este de a evalua și a transforma cultura critică naţională. Cum, în ce condiţii materiale și cu ce efecte cognitive și politice se produc critica literară și discursul intelectual românesc în ansamblul lui, care sunt metodele și valorile astfel puse în joc, cum navighează acestea de-a lungul și de-a latul diferitelor geografii disciplinare, în interesul cui o fac și ce impact au ele sunt doar câteva dintre întrebările la care acest volum își propune să răspundă. Tot ce se concepe, se scrie și se difuzează în materie de analiză critică și, mai larg, de intervenţie publică pe teme culturale și sociale – fie că e vorba de un nou roman sau de controversele pe marginea corectitudinii politice – presupune și perpetuează, afirmă autorii cărţii de faţă, un anume sistem critic. Acest sistem, mai susţin ei, este anacronic, ineficient și injust, dar este apărat cu obstinaţie pentru că servește un anumit establishment și statu quo cultural-politic. Pentru o nouă cultură critică românească pledează pentru schimbarea culturii critice dominante și pentru aducerea ei neîntârziată în secolul al XXI-lea.

Our article discusses one of the most challenging phenomena in the post-communist Romanian cultural field, which concerns the fictional depiction of childhood under communism. On the one hand, this prominent topic within Romanian literature and films of the 1990s and 2000s seems to develop a nostalgic viewpoint regarding the totalitarian regime. On the other hand, both the political views expressed publicly by the authors/film directors, and the markedly ideological parts of the novels/films that thematized the childhood of the 1970s and 1980s, expose explicitly anti-communist stances. Within these coordinates, our study argues that the nostalgia embedded in the respective fictional depictions does not concern the communist, but rather the capitalist Western society, which was regarded by cultures of the former Soviet bloc with desire and idealization. The so-called “Ostalgie” proves, in this respect, to be a “Westalgia”: in most post-1989 Romanian novels/films, children characters or narrators express longing not for communism, but for a Western world, which is idealized precisely as long as the totalitarian regime imposes a clear distance from it.

This study seeks to theorize the post-communist anti-communist novel as a distinct and productive genre in East-Central European literatures, which we describe – in polemic with the better-known ostalgie – as a narrative of ostodium. We argue that anti-communist fiction became a cohesive genre in post-communism owing to its rigid view of the past, which was kept alive and significant, while simultaneously being antagonized, even after communism had collapsed. To that end, we explain how the anti-communist mindset assumed by intellectuals from the region during communism (which had then been branded as ‘anti-politicsʼ) maintained monopoly over post-communist cultural production, and merged with ascending post-communist neoliberalism that promoted an anti-statist public mythology. We further outline the shifting shapes in which the ideological bias of the post-communist anti-communist novel was conveyed, and draw distinctions from proximate genres, such as the political novel, le roman á la thèse and historiographic metafiction. One crucial argument in this respect regards the postmodern entanglements of the post-communist anti-communist novel: in maintaining an univocal rejection of the communist metanarrative, they took on a stronger political thèse than in Western postmodernism, but also enhanced postmodernism’s anti-realist drive by failing to provide an understanding of the post-communist present.

Our article examines the narrative registers and forms adopted in the 1990s by the Romanian novelists, screenwriters and film directors in order to portray the phenomenon of economic migration to the West. Our focus is on the intriguing and paradoxical employment of tragicomic, melodramatic, burlesque-grotesque and sensational narrative techniques as the Romanian collective imaginary during the 1990s witnessed the peak idealization of emigration in Western Europe and in The United States of America. This process of idealization is also fueled by the fact that, despite the political ban has been lifted after 1989, legislative and economic constraints continued to limit the actual experience of the so-called “free world.” The corpus of our article comprises two cult films of the period, Asfalt tango (1996, Nae Caranfil) and Cristian Mungiuʼs Occident (2002), as well as two novels authored Grid Modorcea and S. Dinger, all of which share the struggle to depict the tensions between the uncritical embrace of Western story-world and the bleak, if not dramatic, reality of migration.

Our article conducts a critical reassessment of one of the most influential cultural myths in Eastern Europe throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: the nationalist definition of peasantry as embodying the quintessence of the nation. In order to evaluate the imagological scope and ideological implications engendered by this so-called ‘people-nation myth’, we focus on the Romanian culture, whom we consider fully representative for the Eastern European context. More exactly, our study employs a distant reading of the Romanian rural novel from the first half of the twentieth century, precisely the literary subgenre supposed to reflect the coalescence between the peasantry and the nation. By analysing the co-occurrences in these novels between words belonging to the vocabularies of nation and rurality, we aim at showing that – contrary to traditional historiographic consensus – nation building has less to do with language or ethnicity, and much more to do with social emancipation.

This article puts forward a quantitative account of the subgenres of the Romanian novel during the 1933-1947 period. It shows the massive domination of the social novel and the Bildungsroman and analyzes the dynamics of genre and popular literature – adventure novels, detective fiction, SF, etc. – within the first period of massive literary production in Romanian literature. The article is the result of the MDRR (Muzeul Digital al Romanului Românesc – The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel) projects, set out to archive the Romanian production of novels from 1845 (the year of the publication of the – arguably – first Romanian novel) to 1947, right before the establishment of the communist regime. The first part is a quantitative analysis of the novels according to DCRR (Dicționarul cronologic al romanului românesc – The Chronological Dictionary of the Romanian Novel). The second part analyzes the “dynamics of popular subgenres,” meaning adventure novels, policiers, SF novels, and children’s literature. The third part envisions “the social novel” as a predilect genre of the interwar period, the fourth occasions a reading of the “historical novel,” while the last two sections describe the evolution of sentimental and psychological novels.