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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My paper aims to present how the Romanian romance novel written between late 19th century and the Second World War fictionalized some of the gender codes active in that particular timeframe in social and familial contexts. A very popular subgenre amid the unprofessional readers, romance fiction rises a new kind of responsibility for literary critics and historians, that traditionally gave little to no attention to the matter of toxic gender codes found in these novels. This article attempts to analyse, by means of both close and distant reading tools, a few narrative aspects that encoded gender inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper "A Politico-Social Approach with Polemical Emphasis on the Hieroglyphic History" aims to point out Dimitrie Cantemir's contribution to the Romanian and European culture. I have chosen for this argumentation the cantemirian work "The Hieroglyphic History". I have identifiesd at least five themes the writer develops and clothe into an original form which comes from his life experience. Making use of satire, irony, polemical virulence, the writer portrays a picture of the social life, launches the theory of hereditary dynasty by means of cultivated and educated people, upholds the rising of the peasantry and admonishes the boyars' habits, exposes certain ethical principles and, last but not least, meditates on the human condition submitted to the Fortune's trials. The paper aims to highlight the fact that the writer criticizes the aspects/habits of his contemporaries, attempting, to a certain extent, their improvement. His critics represent a lesson of life. Everything reveals an enlighted scholar, concerned about the Romanian people's fate and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the question of literature represented as a system made of institutions such as writers, critics, literary generations, canonical battles and so on, functioning as a self-regulating mechanism. To put this question into perspective, two literary works are used which both have a metaliterary dimension and both borrow (for fiction) the form of a "serious" scholarly work: the bibliography and the monograph. In Mircea Horia Simionescu's "General Bibliography", the seemingly anarchistic representation of an infinite productivity of literature meets its boundaries when confronted with the actual writers making up the Romanian (Cantemir, Caragiale, Odobescu, Urmuz and especially G. Călinescu) or the European literary canon (Goethe, Ariosto, Dostoievski). Simionescu describes therefore not the apocalyptic disappearance of values and criteria for judging literature, but a necessary regeneration of stale old literary formulas by means of an ingenious and highly competent readership. In the Chilean Roberto Bolano's "Nazi Literature in the Americas", the idea of a "Nazi literature" serves as a metaphor for literature itself as a form of spiritual investigation of the darker inner regions of the human being. Bolano's representation of literature is also that of a "closed" literary system, not because of its alleged secrecy or "danger", but because it defines itself as an activity of thought, resorting to similar patterns in its search for originality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper discusses the ways in which concepts elaborated in the interwar period by critics like E. Lovinescu, G. Ibrăileanu and G. Călinescu were utilized by post-war Romanian critics. They took over these concepts, partially changed their meanings, and included in them the particularities of a wholly new historical and cultural context than their original one, thus making them functional. The paper comments the points of view on the nature and functions of literary criticism emitted by Eugen Simion, Nicolae Manolescu, Adrian Marino, Matei Călinescu, Nicolae Balotă, Virgil Ardeleanu, Mircea Martin, Cornel Regman, Toma Pavel and Mihai Ungheanu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though all the readers can depict great differences between the books of the two Romanian writers, I.D. Sîrbu and C.S. Nicolăescu-Plopşor, they can discover also one common feature at least - a specific way of fructifying the folkloric legends in their works. Both I.D. Sîrbu, in the novel De ce plânge mama?, and C.S. Nicolăescu-Plopşor, in his volume entitled Poveşti Olteneşti as well, utilized a rich series of myths and legends, managing to confer a kind of fairy tales atmosphere to their narrations. In the above mentioned novel De ce plânge mama?, I.D. Sîrbu used two folkloric legends and creates two distinct chapters - Povestea iezerului and Povestea Sălanelor. In Plopsor's volume a bundle of legends about different geographic places - Băile Herculane, the Retezat mountains, the Cerna river or the lake Bucura - formed a fairy tale, called “Iogovan”, as it was considered by many critics. This paper shows that almost any name of a geographic place has in parallel a legend that explains the genesis of that relief, being - in fact - a kind of popular explanation of the topic name. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a parallel insight into two key concepts of two pre-eminent, though antagonised Romanian literary critics from the first half of the 20th century: the literary selection, used by G. Ibrăileanu, and E. Lovinescu's theory concerning the mutation of aesthetic values. Both derived from post-Darwinian biology, the concepts mentioned above imply different yet complementary coherent methodological approaches, whose systemic similarities and differences have been currently missed or misinterpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the paper Reading, Re-reading G. Ibrăileanu's Adela in a Postmodernist Mirror we aim to follow this challenge opened by a reading which would start from postmodernity towards the text, taking into account the limits of interpretation imposed by our position as text lecturers, set between the freedom to interpret the text and the need to observe it. In the novel we will identify several aspects that approach Ibrăileanu's text to the condition of postmodern literature, despite the patterns of perception that place it in the traditional area of Romanian literature. This opens a new discussion that focuses on the issues generated by the reception of a literary text over time. As to the author's intention, who happens to be a literary critic as well, how much of it comes to the posterity's reader just like the author himself initiated it and how much metamorphoses over time? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A scholarly writer, with good knowledge of ancient philosophy and literature, of the Renaissance period, of modern philosophy- especially German- Ioan Slavici was also interested in the philosophy and culture of the Orient, in the French Enlightenment and moralists. All this knowledge will be reflected in the vocabulary he chose to use in his literary work. The presence of neologisms in I.Slavici's work has not been debated enough by literary critics and linguists. In the two hundred and forty pages of the novel looked after by D. Vatamaniuc, only fifteen neologisms have been identified. At a first glance, they seem to be insignificantly few, nevertheless the paper attempts to show the values these terms had in the language of a writer whose main tendency was mainly to use lexis of folk origin. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some literary critics (and they are many) say that a text is uninterpretable precisely because it carries many (excessively so) explanations and interpretations. In other words: a certain text is uninterpretable precisely because it is interpretable. This is one strange statement! Only under one circumstance, a text (a parable, a poem, a fable, etc.) is uninterpretable. With regard to this matter R. M. Albérès was right: Interpretation is possible when the text is "unbelievable and irrational". Only the irrational is truly uninterpretable. I'm not sure though whether an "unbelievable and irrational" writing has got any aesthetic value. I very much doubt it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]