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This article aims to discuss two literary representations of postcommunist Romanian emigration to the United States, one of the most understudied routes of migration, in sociological and literary studies alike. Relying on Carine M. Mardorossian’s (2002) research, I understand exile and migrant literature not as taxonomic but as paradigmatic categories. As I show, the paradigmatic difference between them plays out at the level of critical representation, which reveals a subtle, implicit, and rather involuntary critique of North American capitalism and its labor market. My argument is that any critique of capitalism and the labor market is closely connected to downward social mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present essay aims at discussing the recent volume Creolizing the Modern: Transylvania across Empires (2022) by Anca Parvulescu and Manuela Boatcă as a significant contribution to the recent attempts at rethinking Romanian literature. In this regard, the examination of the volume is constantly reckoned in dialogue with some of the previously undertaken projects. The dialogic approach highlights two significant aspects, related to both the volume and the context in which it is received. On the one hand, it shows that the theoretical and methodological framework deployed in the volume can constitute the ground for future studies. On the other hand, it draws attention to the fact the rethinking of Romanian literature has been a collective and gradual endeavor. [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]

The present study aims at a thorough examination of the neo-expressionist direction within the general poetics of the Generation 80. In his landmarking book Romanian Postmodernism, Mircea Cărtărescu discussed the neoexpressionism of his generation as the only direction in which one can still find the high topics of the modernity: madness, pain, death. In this study, the author observes that there are two different types of expressionism, converging both towards this high modern topics, unified by the grand topic of the body and its relation with death and nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article sets out to establish the ways in which the Romanian novelistic production between 1845 and 1947 reflects the challenges and accomplishments of successive efforts at modernising the educational system. Therefore, the case-studies we discuss are focused on some of the major implications of Romanian education: the shifts in the literal spaces in which the educational process is being conducted, the access to books and the social prestige accrued through reading, the link between education and the abroad – including the ambivalent status of foreign language education as platform on which the conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism is played out –, the opportunities opened by scientific progress, but also the anxieties it generates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the ways in which the Romanian novel published between 1933-1947 represents foreign cities, towns, peripheries, and villages in the fictional worlds. It asserts the democratization of the narrative universe through the planetary perspective of the novels and discusses the birth of the Global South imagery. The search was conducted on a corpus of 700 novels in the MDRR archive. The data is disposed through quantifying recurrences (the number of novels in which a city appears) and occurrences (the number of times a city appears) of foreign cities. This article deals with representations of Europe and the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Australia in the 1933-1947 Romanian novel. It separates three main categories (main cities, consolidation cities, and secondary cities) and shows the planetary distribution of space within the Romanian novel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]