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This paper makes a case for analyzing the way in which the novel of Communism is approached by Mihai Iovănel in his History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020. This is a topic that was intensely discussed by Romanian literary criticism in Post-communism and represents the weakness of Romanian literature, either by it not being able to give a sufficiently convincing novel, or by not being able to agree upon how this novel should look. Accordingly, the critics had difficulties in labeling any novel that had been published after ‘89s as “the novel of communism.” The first part of the article is a panning of recent discussions about this term in relation to the analysis made by Iovănel in his History. The second part aims to trace out a network of this type of novel in the literatures of Central and Eastern Europe and to try to identify its particularities through a comparative analysis. The last part consists of a study case of the novels Acasă, pe câmpia Armaghedonului [At home, on the Field of Armageddon] by Marta Petreu and Bureți de Fag [Oyster Mushrooms] by Mihai Duțescu. The latter has been published after the History and both novels are analyzed from the perspective of the novel of communism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to demonstrate that two previously unknown manuscript folios from Mircea Eliade’s youth, which emerged in 2022, are the drafted summaries of his unfinished editorial project Valkyries in the Library. The two folios are, in fact, two lists of article titles Eliade published in Cuvântul (22), Gândirea (2), and Sinteza (1), in 1926-1928. Arranged differently, the feuilletons address topics such the Romanian intellectual, the dependance towards French culture and literature, philology and synthesis, the lack of heroism in Romanian literature, Beatrice and Don Quixote, young writers, literary criticism, philosophy. The tone is polemical and radical, condemning the current state of Romanian literature, advancing the author's views, and urging his contemporaries to take action in order to create fundamental and authentic works. Just as Eliade recalls in his diary, the articles from Cuvântul mentioned in the two folios were a whirlwind, a cavalcade meant to take local culture and erudition by surprise and to change it forever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 rethought 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). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era in which literary histories are written by collective of academics trying to transcend the national paradigm in which these works were once wrote, The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 by Mihai Iovănel is an intellectual effort that may seem obsolete. Nevertheless, Mihai Iovănel’s book proposes new ways of understanding the contemporary Romanian literary field that were not taken into consideration by previous similar critical endeavours. This paper aims to investigate how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature constructs an overview of the Romanian fiction wrote in the last three decades and the critical approaches deployed for this purpose. The main interest of this article will be how does Mihai Iovănel discusses Romanian contemporary fiction and how does he instrumentalizes the concept of realism. We will look more closely at the third part of the book, “The Evolution of Fiction,” but the discussion will not omit the relation of this chapter with others. The paper will concentrate on the concepts put forward by Mihai Iovănel to systematize the complex subfield of contemporary Romanian fiction, like capitalist realism, the famous term coined by Mark Fisher. Also, we will try to see how The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature relate to previous literary histories or books of literary criticism that resembles Mihai Iovănel’s work in some respects or that have similar goals but different methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Employed in the study of national or transnational literatures, the relevance of digital humanities, computational analyses, and quantitative sociology can no longer be ignored. In this paper, we aim to argue that, in spite of it still being seen as a niche endeavor, the digital or quantitative study of literature generates paradigmatic shifts in literary scholarship, both in literary criticism and comparative studies. In order to demonstrate this statement, the following study will illustrate how three core principles of digital humanities are actively shaping humanities as we know it. These principles – openness, replicability, and collaboration – challenge the way we understand the role of the literary historian and their „traditional” tasks. To consolidate this argumentation further, we will briefly present an example of how digital humanities start changing the dominant narrative in Romania. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The members of the Sibiu Literary Circle coined and disseminated the rather abusive term “pășunism” (from the Romanian word “pășune,” meaning pasture) in order to combat the confusion between ethnic, ethical and aesthetic. In the spirit of Eugen Lovinescu’s literary ideology, this was considered by the Literary Circle as an urgent mission in the context of Romanian literature in the 1940s. Originally intended to ironize (neo)“sămănătorist” or “fascist-sămănătorist” literature, the term “pășunism,” given the thematic aspect which it implies, gained a lax usage. Therefore, rural literature and folklore-inspired literature among others fit in the satirical term’s category. The aim of the following paper is to investigate the origins and manifestations of the anti-ruralist tendencies of the Sibiu Literary Circle in its earlier days, starting from, but not limited to the writings of I. Negoițescu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A post-anthropocentric epistemological assemblage becomes indispensable in the investigation of the ecology of the Romanian novel. We examine the interactive relationship of various dynamic systems, such as 1) the evolution of the Romanian novel, 2) the modes of representation of the environment, and 3) the social-political history of the autochthonous space. Using a wide range of methodological perspectives, this paper also examines the relationship between literature and the Earth sciences, thus envisioning a new type of literary history where the Romanian novel should be thought as existing within hyper-objects, such as the climate, agriculture, wilderness, pollution, biosphere, cultural politics, capitalism, or geology. The article finally addresses the issue of zoopoetics both as an object of study in the MDRR digital archive (1845-1947) and as a reading strategy, thus, favoring the relationship between animality and narrativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper disscusses the literary-historiographical enterprise of Mihai Iovănel’s History of the Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2000 as a turning point in respect with the twofold aesthetic and ethnocentric dominant of this genre in Romania, whose tradition that is traceable back to the pos-Thaw period prolongs into postcommunism. Iovănel’s self-claimed ”postmarxist” approach puts under a deconstructive lens the ideological embededness of the Romanian literary space, whose postcommunist avatar still owes largely to its communist heritage by its indebtment to dominantly conservative and right ideologies. It also switches the analytical focus of the literary history towards the material (i.e. social, institutional, and so forth) conditions of the literary production per se. My essays develops two basic critical points derived from the above-mentioned premises. One concerns the topicality of the literary historian’s leftist vantage point in the view of deciphering long-engrained myths of the national literature and of its criticism, thus providing a clearer, more realist picture of its concrete phenomena. The other debates the utility and eventual drawbacks of the retrospective analysis the historian is forced to assume in order to achieve his deconstructive task, a retrospection that pushes his investigation way behind the confines of ”contemporaneity”. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the strategies enacted by Mihai Iovănelʼs History in order to map the transnational interactions of contemporary Romanian literature. Since Iovănel emphasizes that, starting with the 2000s, the Romanian writers define themselves mainly through the global networks in which they try to integrate, this article aims to analyse: a) the canonical function acquired by the local references to World Literature; b) their explanatory role compared to the one played by the closed circuit of the so-called “intra-national” comparisons; c) the theoretical legitimacy of the “transnational canon” projected by Iovănel in the epilogue of his History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literary history is still the most successful strategy of systematizing knowledge in Romanian academe and, although the theoretical revolution that took place in literary studies between 1960-1990 did not leave it unscathed, it remains the methodological anchor of every attempt at trying to make sense of the entirety of a specific culture. In this paper I analyze Mihai Iovănel’s new History of Contemporary Romanian Literature and whether it succeeds in revolutionizing (methodologically or in terms of cultural analysis) an old and robust genre of explanation, in an intellectual culture that is otherwise enamored with dictionaries, encyclopedias and all-encompassing narratives of the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Premised on the pervasiveness of generic categories within literary historiography, the present analysis attempts to delineate the generic idioms present within three histories of Romanian literature (authored by G. Călinescu, Nicolae Manolescu and Mihai Iovănel, respectively). Engaging a descriptively historical, rather than theoretical, approach to genre and its metadiscourses, the paper begins with an abridged version of the cardinal disputes of genre criticism. Subsequently, it comparatively addresses the presence of genre within the three volumes, aiming to locate them within recognizable frameworks of genericity and to establish the overlapping territories of their generic landscapes. Thus, it distinguishes G. Călinescu as a practitioner of post-Romantic genre theory, further showcasing how some of his central aestheticist positions survive in Nicolae Manolescu’s moderately formalist account of the issue. Against the backdrop of their more conservative, teleological historiographical projects, Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 Istoria Literaturii Române Contemporane 1990-2020 [The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature 1990-2020] displays a distinct methodological apparatus, predicated on the author’s rejection of the paradigmatic autonomy of the aesthetic. His employment of materialist theories of art is corelative to a conception of genre as a contingent, empirically determined instrument of analysis, which, far from being a rhetorically stable, abstract category, actively mediates the relationship between social and aesthetic history. This shift engenders substantial amendments to the physiognomy of literary history as genre, enabling it to encompass extra-literary (and noncanonical) phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main objective of the present paper is to highlight the relevance of translation in the scholarly endeavour of placing and firmly setting national literature in a wider context, i.e. planetary literature. Moreover, due to its complexity, long tradition, noble endeavour, worldwide mission and overarching goal, translation – as a fourfold process encompassing the linguistic, cultural, interpretive, comparative dimensions, according to Christian Moraru – serves as a most effective connector between words and worlds, in addition to overcoming successive waves regarding the state of “translatability” as Emily Apter scholarly theorized it, from her first thesis “nothing is translatable” to the twentieth thesis “everything is translatable”, where all the intermediary stages, hypotheses, and other theoretical assumptions further investigated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]