The Rhetoric of Subversion: Strategies of ‘Aesopian Language’ in Romanian Literary Criticism under Late Communism

This paper analyses the subversive strategies of ‘Aesopian language’ with reference to the discourse of the Romanian literary criticism written under late communism (1971-1989). The first two sections of the paper signal certain gaps and inconstancies in defining Aesopian language and in delineating its forms of manifestation; at the same time, they explain the spread of this subversive practice in the political and cultural context of Romanian communism. The following three sections analyse the manner in which Aesopian language materialized in the writings of some of the most important contemporary Romanian critics: Mircea Iorgulescu, Nicolae Manolescu and Mircea Martin. The final section …

The Poetics of the Hypercycle in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid

This essay analyses the most recent novel of Romanian author Mircea Cartarescu (Solenoid, 2015). To this end, I will use a specific extension of career construction theory in the field of literary ...

Geografia romanului românesc (1901-1932): străinătatea

The Geography of the Romanian Novel (1901-1932): Spaces from Abroad This article charts the main cities mentioned in the Romanian novel published between 1901 and 1932 based on the corpus of novels created by the research project The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932 (around 370 digitized novels). The main discoveries that our distant reading of the geography in these novels revealed are that the planet is covered in the Romanian novel during the period in genre fiction (that has mentions of cities from Africa, Asia and South America), not in modernist highbrow literature, and that the dominance of Paris and Rome as spaces where the action takes place is atomized during this pe…

Genurile romanului românesc (1901-1932). O analiză cantitativă

Combining the instruments of quantitative analysis with those of genre theory, the present article studies the ratio, characteristics, and tendencies underpinning the most important subgenres of the Romanian novel between 1901 and 1932. Among these subgenres, we lay special emphasis on those of popular fiction, on the social, historical, sentimental, psychological, and philosophical novel, as well as on the so-called “event novel”. The conclusions of our inquiry illustrate the ever-growing divide between artistic literature and popular fiction, the recasting of the Romanian novelistic subgenres during the early 20th century, and the gradual relocation of the novelists’ focus from the unmedi…

Neoextractivism, or the birth of magical realism as world literature

In recent years, literary criticism has shown increased interest towards the manner in which fiction depicts (neo)extractivism as a set of practices whereby large quantities of natural resources ar...

Orthodoxy and the Cold War: Religion and Political Power in Romania, 1947–65