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Departing from Hayden White's well-known assumptions on metahistory, we hypothesize that the anecdote--as microstructure, stock content, and as memorabilia--has played a fundamental role in die making of the Romanian literary histories. Certainly, one must look beyond the ideological and theoretical claims these histories bring in. Applying our analysis to the monumental history G. Calinescu delivered in 1941 and extending it to the following histories of the Romanian literature (I. Negoijescu's and Mihai Zamfir's), we shed light on the residual elements, which, although ignored by the academic readership, play a dramatic role in the way these histories have been read, interpreted, and eventually recycled afterwards. The main idea of our essay is that, more than on positive science, this historiographic tradition is counting on a type of "anecdotal theory" that enables abstractions to become figures, that is, to become dense focal points for the readers' attention and senses. Consequently, we would like to point at the fact that looking at the "petty things" (anecdotes on birth, death, love, sense of possession, manners of eating and living, etc.) scattered through the histories of Romanian literature written after 1940 does not necessarily obliterate their theoretical insights. On the contrary, this new focus can bring into the open the areas of real density, where the distinction form vs. content becomes useless and the true art of the literary historian resides in framing the moments--as portraits and as anecdotes--when the limitless potentialities of Life emerge as actual expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A "quasi-mystical" understanding ofour rural economy (which has always favored propagandist uses) is disseminated through a great number of literary works and political texts, which, before World War I, depict the Romanian village as a place of poverty, misery, abuse and crime. The peasants' habits oflabor and leisure get through to the readers as an architecture of infernal circles, while "rural" phsychologies are the epitome of unconscious pulsations, of extreme, seif-consuming and undetermined passions. In a nutshell, this literature enhances the view that the Romanian peasant can never be reasonable. A bulk of passions and a brutal body (so, a perfect subject ofphysical and spiritual toils), this type ofman is quite unable to cooperate, to rationalize his labor efforts, thus to integrate his household economy within a higher and more complex economical mechanism, as the doctrinarians of the National Peasants'Party claim. Invariably, we are introduced to an incessant and wearisome process oflabor, whose aims - highly predeterm ined by an Orthodox mindset - are not to be found or expressed here on Earth, but in the afterlife. Yet, in the context of war dynamics, which btings about demographic mobility, technical input and mentality changes, the Romanian rural economy is substantially changed by the new distribution oftând ownership. Observing pernicious phenomena such as property fragmentation and overcrowding of rural areas, economist Virgil Madgearu warns about issues such as labor efficiency and intensive exploitation of agr icul tur al fields. Extremely sensitive to the labor's ethic (which organizes both his biography and his characters' fictional biographies) and to the small household's economy, Ion Agârbiceanu is a writer who records, in a behaviorist fashion, the changes occurring in Transylvanian rural society after the great Union of 1918. His literature is extremely valuable for the way it catches the traits of Romania's rural areas, especially in Transylvanian villages that are now permeated not only by new habits developed after the war (leisure activities, new types of speculations), but also by a way of conceiving andpracticingpolitics that is coming from the new capital, Bucharest. As Ion Agârbiceanu attests, peasants have to understand not only the social function of land but also the importance of the new owners' mentality in an emerging rural market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Călinescu's method of critical inquiry is based on biography and psychoanalysis. Thus, in his capital work The History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present, portrayal techniques have an essential role in conveying ideas. Nevertheless, his interest in anecdote has usually been ignored because it has been considered only the residual, unserious part of his critical vocation. What I aim in the present article is to prove that the anecdote represents not only the very engine of Călinescu's ideas, but also the incentive of the creative process. Taking into consideration the anecdote's mediation and remediation role, I aim at analyzing the subtle exchanges between the book's "matters" (enchaining a series of monographs/ portraits) and the book's matter (Călinescu's choice of book illustrations and paper) in the process of building a monument of petty things. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]