Search

In spite of its alleged outdatedness, recent enquiries in World Literature Studies have not completely neglected the concept of postmodernism. On the contrary, they emphasized its "worldedness" and transnational characteristics. Building on this perspective, I approach postmodernism through Mieke Bal's Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide, framing it as a "traveling concept" whose diffusion in East-Central European culture -- precisely the Romanian context -- merits closer examination. This investigation focuses on its interactions with coeval literary concepts within the world-literary system. Using this framework, the article argues that Romanian postmodernism, a category discussed by Mircea Cărtărescu among others, served as a legitimizing theorization. In this regard, it was pragmatically employed to counter the (semi-)peripheral condition, and to act as a heuristic battleground between two fields of knowledge production on literary postmodernism: French and American. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study deals with the issue of communist censorship as applied in the 1980s, especially to young postmodern writers. The example detailed in the current study refers to the conditions in which Mircea Cărtărescu's volume, Poeme de amor, was published in 1983. A post-communist (unexcised) version of one of his poems is used for comparison with the two variants (censored and uncensored) with a view to observing the elements eliminated by the censorship. Generally speaking, the mechanisms of censorship prove to be complex and fluid (sometimes an ideological story was added to the rejection of a volume) and sometimes, a closer look reveals their flaws and oscillations (as it is obvious in the case of a poem signed Alexandru Musina, which was censored twice, in two different manners). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]