Schneider DiscourseSelfRepresentationLiterary 2016

The Discourse of Self-Representation in Literary Studies in 1980s Romania
Author(s): Ana-Karina Schneider

Source: Journal of Narrative Theory, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Fall 2016), pp. 339-365
Published by: Journal of Narrative Theory
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The Discourse of Self-Representation in
Literary Studies in 1 980s Romania
Ana-Karina Schneider
Romania's relationship to literatures in the English language has been in-

terestingly complex. Traditionally, Romania has had an affinity to French
and German, not English; nevertheless, Transylvanian collectors pur-
chased books in English as early as the 18th century,1 and the first transla-
tion to be published after Romania adopted Latin script in the mid- 19th
century was Lord Byron's Don Juan, albeit rendered from a French trans-
lation. These early instances give us a good indication of the ambivalence
that has pervaded Romanian-Anglophone literary relations. Literary trans-
lations of English literature through French, German, and even Greek re-
mained common well into the 20th century, long after English became an
academic discipline.2 Moreover, before the 1980s the influence of Anglo-
American literature on Romanian productions was sporadic at best and re-
mains inadequately investigated. That decade however marked a seminal
shift: a new generation of writers engendered a unique and eminently well
adapted brand of postmodernism, whose models were postmodern Ameri-
can fiction and poetry (Petrescu 148). The work of this generation of writ-
ers set a trend that continued after the 1989 uprising and was crucially
aided and encouraged by the lingua franca status of English in the global-
ized world, such that by now Romanian translations from the English ap-
pear almost concomitantly with their originals and young poets speak
JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 46.3 (Fall 2016): 339-365. Copyright © 2016 by JNT:
Journal of Narrative Theory.
340 J N T
openly about having been influenced by John Berryman, William S. Bur-
roughs, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, or Anne Sexton.
In what follows I shall analyze various narrativizations of the overde-
termined relationship between Romanian and Anglophone literatures,
foregrounding the particular kind of postmodernism that enabled Roman-
ian literature in the 1980s and beyond to establish a closer relation with
Anglophone, particularly American, fiction and poetry (Cärtärescu 202;
Cälinescu, Cele ciuci 287). I focus specifically on the novel, despite the
general consensus that the Romanian poetry of the early 1980s is the more
representative work of Romanian postmodernism. My interest in prose
fiction stems from the fact that, as a genre, it is more openly referential
than poetry, and, like the criticism devoted to it, was under greater pressure
to conform to doctrinal notions of realism and political correctness (Spiri-
don 68). The communist regime's intention to turn literature into an agent
of conformity rather than a stimulant of individuality contravened the very
definition of the novel. Furthermore, the attempt to impose a single, state-
sanctioned worldview ran counter to the novel's democratic heteroglossia,
i.e., the orchestration of divergent and often conflicting discourses. Em-
bracing textualism and formal experimentation in opposition to party-line
social realism, the most enduring fiction of the 1980s remained westward
looking, introspective, and adamantly resistant to communist ideology, and
therefore a good illustration of the epistemological conflicts that domi-
nated that decade and shaped the distinctive definition and periodization
of postmodernism in Romania.
A comparative study such as this inevitably encounters three sources of
difficulty. First, it is difficult to determine in what manner and to what ex-
tent the aesthetic and ideological controversies that animated Romanian
literature and critical theory informed the reception of foreign literary pro-
ductions. Translation was conditioned by institutional restrictions which
did not apply to the same degree to original works of literature; processes
of selection were motivated as much by governmental policies as by the
image the communist regime wanted to project of itself internationally. At
the same time, the reception of translated work tended to be more open to
the foreign fashions that had shaped a novel's reception in its source cul-
ture. Second, Romanian postmodernism had to come to terms with the fact
that western postmodernism was by and large left-wing. In previous
decades, such political leanings had been effectively invoked by critics and
The Discourse of Self-Representation in Literary Studies in 1 980s Romania 341
reviewers to render certain western writers palatable to the communist

regime. By the 1970s, however, Romanian literature had achieved a hard-
won institutional autonomy from the political, which it still lay claim to in
the 1980s, when political opinion was becoming increasingly radicalized,
even as open dissidence was virtually suicidal. Third, unlike western cul-
tures in which the proliferation of media resulted in a radical pluralization
of discourse, Romania had to contend with the monolithic discourse and
worldview propagated by its meager, party-controlled press. The very def-
inition of postmodernism differs in Romania as a consequence of these
circumstances.
My analysis therefore proceeds by historicizing discursive practices in
literature and literary studies. One way of narrativizing the relationship be-
tween Romanian and Anglophone literatures in the 1980s is by comparing
metacritical accounts of the Romanian cultural and political climate writ-
ten during or after that decade, with an eye to the efforts of Romanian crit-
ical discourse to assimilate current western trends and tendencies. Another
is by investigating both the degree to which certain books were allowed to
penetrate and influence the Romanian literary scene, and the rationaliza-
tions of their relevance circulating within Romanian criticism. In addition,
the ways in which the critical reception of foreign literature converged
with and diverged discursively, methodologically, and even formally from
criticism of local literature also make for a productive investigation. Ro-
mania's preference for modernism in both literary works and critical meth-
ods and its distinct brand of postmodernism have determined many of its
cultural interchanges. An account of the interconnections between Roman-
ian and Anglo-American literatures, therefore, cannot be merely periodiz-
ing, associating postmodernism in Romania with the 1980s, but must indi-
cate the slippages that inevitably occur between the descriptive and
normative connotations of periodizing terms (Cälinescu, Cele cinci
94-95).
A small country in the Eastern bloc, Romania's literary market was
only selectively permeable to western productions during the four decades
of communism. Gradations of permeability varied over time. Thus, after
the complete isolationism of the "obsessive decade" (roughly, 1948-1959)
and its relentless Stalinist indoctrination, Romania adopted a more permis-
sive policy, which resulted in the professionalization of literary translation,
the fostering of structuralism as a critical method, and, most importantly,
342 J N T
an enthusiastic return to modernist literary modes that had formerly been
forbidden territory. In the 1960s a critical discourse emerged which pro-
claimed the primacy of the aesthetic and thus made possible a measure of
autonomy from doctrinal fetters, displacing the socialist realism that, dur-
ing the early years of the communist regime, had been the compulsory
mainstream mode. A throwback to modernism, this discourse is an im-
plicit celebration of the freedom to return to an artistic tradition that had
been curtailed abruptly when the communist republic was established in
Romania in December 1947. As such, long after modernism had run its
course in western countries, the Romanian literary world clung to the no-
tion of aesthetic autonomy, frequently using it as a smokescreen to throw
off the watchdogs of ideological correctness. This neomodernist discourse,
"inward-looking, metaphorical and symbolic," contributed to innovation in
art forms such as poetry and painting (Leiter, "Romanian Literature" 869);
by contrast, more referential, narrative genres such as the novel, drama,
and film were kept under tight state control, as were all cultural institu-
tions (867-868). Moreover, after 1971, in the wake of then president,
Nicolae Ceau§escu's seventeen North-Korea inspired edicts, known as the
"July Theses" and designed to strengthen the Communist Party through
youth indoctrination, the censure system gradually tightened its hold on
the publishing industry. During the 1980s, a decade of increasingly para-
noid repression of intellectuals, Romanian postmodernism succeeded -
though it did not completely displace - neomodernism, and poets adopted
the moniker "Generation Eighties" to distinguish themselves from the
doctrinally controlled literature of earlier decades. Neo and postmod-
ernism resisted the official discourse which continued to promote proletar-
ian art and ideologically-driven social realism, yet by privileging formal
experimentalism and representational modes such as irony and indirection,
both movements frequently evaded censorship (870).
The decade of the 1980s is conventionally said to begin in 1979 with
Romanian novelists publishing a number of theoretical essays signaling a
drastic shift in literary preferences, and to end with the uprising of De-
cember 1989, which ousted the communist regime (Mu§at, Strategiile 82).
This alternation of literary and political landmarks is symptomatic of that
decade's politicization of culture. Retrospectively, writer Mircea Zaciu
speaks of "the omnipotent evil of this satanic decade" (7, my trans.) and
Radu Jeposu titles an earlier volume of criticism "The tragic and
The Discourse of Self-Representation in Literary Studies in 1980s Romania 343
grotesque history of the dark literary decade nine" (my trans.).3 Nobel
Prize-winner Herta Müller frequently describes the historical conditions of
the communist regime as a disruption of any sense of security and stabil-
ity, leading to the extreme isolation of the individual within the isolated
entity of the entire country. Retrospective narratives such as these, many
of them written by dissidents, emphasize the efforts to overcome the isola-
tionism produced by rigid state policy and an obsolete elitist aesthetic. Re-
vealingly, the authorities' suspicion was aroused, more often than not, by
the fact that artists worked in groups, formed associations, and published
collective volumes, rather than by the aesthetic agendas they proposed
(Negrici 176). As critic Monica Spiridon shows, the fact that writers'
"transgression of the Romanian modernist tradition [was] en bloc " sug-
gested to the authorities that their "literature could not legitimize any offi-
cial metanarrative" (69). As a result, the experimentalists "were accused of
being decadent, hypertechnical, caught in textualist games, but the unspo-
ken real reason for putting them on trial (and several representatives of this
group, including some German minority writers, were literally put on trial)
was the subversive anti-totalitarian drive of their literature" (Spiridon 69).
Carmen Muçat explains that their "sin" was to have spurned "proletarian
art" which, according to the reigning doctrine, was meant to "free art."
These writers recognized the injunction to "free art" for what it was, "an
empty formula whose sole meaning is that [proletarian art] 'freed' art of
the 'prejudice' of aesthetic value, which was considered bourgeois, elitist,
reactionary and obsolete" (Strategiile 73, my trans.). Instead of such al-
legedly "free art," the postmoderns privileged strategies of deflection and
subversion. This choice evinced ethical scruples, a refusal to compromise
one's art in the name of political doctrine and Party machinations.
The collective effort to overcome cultural insularity sparked much of
the innovative literature and literary studies of the 1980s. Early on, novel-
ist Gheorghe Cräciun noted a "change of attitude and mentality in con-
ceiving the relationships reality-text, author-character," while Mircea
Nedelciu emphasized the dialogic and semiotic nature of fiction (qtd. in
Mu§at, Strategiile 82). The novelists theorizing this shift in literary taste
included Nedelciu, Cräciun, Gheorghe lova, §tefan Agopian among many
others (Mu§at, Strategiile 82). However, fiction that instantiated these
changing relationships between reality and language or between author
and reader was met with baffled hostility by the censurers and often had to
344 J N T
wait until the 1990s to be published; many young writers' debut was thus
postponed until they wrote something that censors found more difficult to
object to. Novelists were frequently confronted with one form or another
of obstruction from the state-controlled publishing industry, even when
their fiction was less openly concerned with politics, as was the case of
Agopian's erudite historical fantasies. Paradoxically, it was the last novel
by one of Romania's most respected writers, Marin Preda, that acquired
iconic status as a work of resistance: Cel mai iubit dintre pâmânteni (The
Most Beloved of Earthlings), although far from being postmodern, was
published early in 1980 to immediate public and critical acclaim. The
novel dramatizes in starkly realist detail the excesses of the communist
party dining the 1950s and 1960s, and was allowed to appear because the
Ceausescu regime, in its attempt to seem more liberal, now adopted simi-
lar views of those decades. The novel depicts early communism as a dehu-
manizing system, in which ignorance and cruelty are allowed to flourish at
the expense of intellectual refinement and moral justice. Once the full
force of the novel's critique became clear, the authorities banned it and its
author soon died in suspect circumstances (§tefänescu 2002). The case of
Cel mai iubit dintre pâmânteni reveals the dangers of realism and its ulti-
mate powerlessness under the communist dictatorship. Novelists of the
1980s sought a different kind of authenticity thereafter, one that relied on
textual games and self-reflexivity, even as it drew on personal experience
to claim the legitimizing seal of autobiography.
South-African author J.M. Coetzee, writing in similarly oppressive cir-
cumstances, proposed that in "times of intense ideological pressure" writ-
ers face the question whether the novel should engage in a relationship of
rivalry or supplementarity with history (qtd. in Head, Cambridge Introduc-
tion 11). While poststructuralist theory foregrounded the shared textuality
and narrative strategies of fiction and history, the regime demanded a kind
of fiction which was, if not openly propagandists, then at the very least
documentary. Neither attitude was unambiguously embraced by Romanian
novelists, most of whom took refuge in the autonomy of the aesthetic, it-
self an attitude regarded with much suspicion by the regime, but more dif-
ficult to disapprove of. Crāciun describes formal experiment as an asser-
tion of "a kind of liberty of the spirit," or, paraphrasing the title of a 1973
book by Gheorghe lova, a quest for "the syntax of the freedom of saying
things" (in Spiridon et al. 60, 76). Essentially, postmodern Romanian writ-
ers sought to circumvent the socialist realism that the authorities recom-
mended as a supplement to history, to use Coetzee's term.
Political resistance among writers took many forms during that decade,
not all of them divorced from realism, thus making it difficult to classify
the novelists of the 1980s or to speak about literary schools. Sometimes
resistance was undertaken in the name of a broader authenticity (see for
instance the work of novelists Mircea Nedelciu and Gabriela
Adame§teanu) or of cosmopolitanism (e.g. Mircea Cärtärescu). At times,
writers embraced magical realism and allegory (e.g. §tefan Agopian) or
more explicit ontological interrogations of representation itself (e.g.
Gheorghe Crāciun, Mircea Mihäieg), or produced a hyper-lucid, hyper-
realistic fiction bearing witness to the operations of the state - in other
words, a form of critical realism that foregrounded the dialectical relation-
ship between historical process and individual development (e.g. Marin
Preda). The writers who engaged with social and historical realities did so
in a critical, revisionist way, rather than by recording the "agreed history,"
to borrow Dominic Head's phrase ( Cambridge Introduction 11). The oth-
ers, more intent on formal experimentation, play, and polymorphism,
claimed for themselves a western name, that of postmoderns, in popular
parlance "Generation Eighties" or "the Blue-Jeans Generation." Cutting
across these different types of novels were shared attitudes, above all a
nostalgia for an abandoned humanist tradition which, for all its inherent
essentialism, would foster an ethical awareness of culture's complicity in
politics and of the need to interrogate the social and epistemological role
of fictions. This nostalgic attitude is typical of narrativizations of a sense
of Romania's victimization by history, whereas the cosmopolitan stance,
like the revisionary realism, assumes a measure of autonomous agency.
The either/or logic of classifications into cosmopolitan, experimental
metafiction and hyper-lucid, critical realism which applies elsewhere (see
Elias 9) is therefore not as clear cut in the fiction that is recognizably the
work of this generation.
Despite the spectacular advances in Romanian literary theory, literary
thinking in the 1980s remained indebted to formalist and structuralist
methods (Cärtärescu 202, Negrici 174). Cärtärescu detects a
(neo)modernist tendency surviving at the very heart of 1980s theory, in the
shape of an excessive textualism (146-147). Yet he notes that this obses-
sion with textualism served as a point of insertion for more typically post-
346 J N T
modern preoccupations such as intertextuality, metafiction, and page lay-
out, which became inextricably linked with "social hyperrealism" to con-
stitute the defining feature of 1980s Romanian prose fiction (159). Mugat
explains the resilience of such retrograde tendencies and the enduring ap-
peal of realism and humanism in oppositional terms: to the world emptied
of reality by communist propaganda, East-European postmodern fiction
and criticism opposed a quest to recuperate a sense of the authenticity of
daily life ( Strategiile 243-244). Under the impact of an increasing dose of
poststructuralist theory, an awareness coagulated in the 1980s of the con-
structedness of reality and of language's constitutive role. Writers in com-
munist cultures did not celebrate this awareness as enabling; after all, it
did not derive from a proliferation of discursive possibilities, as in the
West, but in response to an enforced monoglot discourse. Instead, they op-
posed the ideological manipulation of reality with a barrage of essences,
whether aesthetic (form), humanist (morality), or anthropological (empiri-
cal experience). Far from being an innocent return to an idealized past, this
was a flight from ideology - itself a political gesture - via familiar terri-
tory in search of a way out of the dominant discourse. Apparently innocu-
ous categories such as formalism, neomodernism, humanism, or experi-
mentalism thus became invested with political meanings which they did
not have in western countries.
Inevitably, the formalism of the 1980s was attacked by many dissident
writers for its escapism and refusal to acknowledge literature's complicity
in social and political developments in the country and to internalize the
guilt (Negrici 174); alternatively, it was accused of being a kind of serial
novelty rather than a programmatic force for innovation, as Cräciun re-
counts (in Spiridon et al. 63-64). Such critiques, however, tend to take
things out of context: given the circumstances, the modicum of artistic and
intellectual autonomy achieved by the postmoderns was no mean achieve-
ment, and they used it to usher in a kind of discourse that aspired to be
synchronous with western developments. The controversies surrounding
this autonomy illustrate the difficulty of narrativizing the 1980s: what to
some appeared as aesthetic autonomy, to others looked like isolation; iso-
lation, in turn, could be alienating or productive; experimenting with
modes of representation could be interpreted as an exclusively formal ob-
session or as ontological interrogation. Far from being merely terminolog-
ical, this ambiguity was a game with ideological stakes in communist Ro-
mania. As a result of these controversies, by the 1990s, modernism and

postmodernism were threatening to become normative rather than descrip-
tive terms, while realism, when acknowledged at all, remained a fraught
issue because of its involvement with the social.
In fact, even today the most hotly debated aspect continues to be the
apparent failure of Romanian novelists to engage the issue of realism as
other than a set of formal conventions. Writing in the mid-1990s, theoreti-
cian Marcel Corni§-Pope emphasized the extent to which "the mimetic
bias" persisted in criticism: "Romanian poeticians . . . preferred ... to
elude the term realism, compromised by the dogma of 'socialist realism,'
or to use half-qualified versions of it ('magic realism,' 'dissociative real-
ism,' 'textual realism')" ( Unfinished 20). However, he disagrees with those
commentators who allege that the deconstructions proposed by the litera-
ture and criticism of the 1980s raised no serious challenges to the episte-
mology and ideology of the age (21). On the contrary, he avers,
"[literature and criticism provided for a while the only available forms of
oppositional discourse," not only in Romania, but in Czechoslovakia, East
Germany, and the Soviet Union as well (9). Since before 1989 that chal-
lenge was practically impossible to articulate, it had to take such indirect
forms as the rejection of certain genres or representational modes, particu-
larly social realism and the historical novel. This reticence to confront the
realist paradigm is one of the crucial ways in which Romanian postmod-
ernism diverges from the western model. It also provides an alternative ex-
planation for the widespread perception of the 1980s as a late avatar of
modernism, in that, like modernism, it defined itself against the social re-
alism of an earlier age.
According to the narrative most widely circulated therefore, Romanian
postmodernism emerged in relative isolation from western influences, not
as "the cultural logic of late capitalism," in Jameson's scathing account,
but as the last bastion of modernism, or even, as Spiridon suggests, of a
kind of "trans-modernism," i.e. a literary movement that sought to tran-
scend modernism, without however becoming postmodern (66). Mihaela
Ursa enumerates some of the ways in which Romanian postmodernism di-
verged from its western antecedent: an overemphasis on textualism; a new
anthropocentrism and humanism that privileged an integrative view of
subjectivity as an interconnected, biologic, psychological, moral, cogni-
tive, and experiential system4; and the comparative absence of hyperreal-
348 J N T
ity and the media (10, 34-38). Writers and theoreticians undertook to clar-
ify the conceptual underpinnings of postmodernism throughout the
decade, although the term was not used with any regularity before the pub-
lication, in early 1986, of a double special issue of the literary journal
Caiete critice. In retrospect, Cärtärescu shows that many of the theoreti-
cians contributing to that volume remained indebted to neomodernism,
which in his rather more radical taxonomy encompasses all preoccupa-
tions with formal issues. Mugat, on the other hand, celebrates the simul-
taneity of such theorizations with the publication of similar studies by Ihab
Hassan, for instance, and emphasizes those features - the fascination with
authorship, metafiction, and reader-involvement - for which the Romanian
context was propitious, rather than lament the absence of those for which it
was not ( Strategiile 81-99). Nonetheless, criticism that acknowledges Ro-
manian postmodernism's kinship to neomodernism and the avant-gardes is
seminal, as indeed much of the innovative critical discourse of subsequent
years remains essentially form-bound and humanist in purport.
Magda Cârneci draws a useful distinction between two acceptations of
postmodernism in Romania to help solve this polemic regarding the litera-
ture of the 1980s. Her interest is primarily in the visual arts but she dwells
on literature as well, and, like Corni§-Pope, her expertise extends to the
whole of Eastern Europe. According to Cârneci, there is a generational
gap between the meanings of postmodernism appropriated nostalgically
by writers who had seen the best efforts of the modernists cut short by
Stalinist implementation of socialist realism, and those preferred by a
younger generation who endorsed a more radical acceptation of the term.
For the latter, postmodernism represented
... a reaction against "politically-integrated" forms of classi-

cal modernism, a rejection of the purely aesthetic, metaphori-
cal, politically "neutral" modernism, so convenient for totali-
tarian regimes (see the literary generation of the eighties in
Romania, or the neo-expressionism and multimedia in the vi-
sual arts of the 1980s all over Eastern Europe). (Cârneci
10-1 1, italics in the original)
Indeed, for the younger writers the very fact that the earlier generation's
formal experiments had been tolerated by the authorities was suspect.
Their own updated, westernized definition of postmodernism emphasized

self-reflexivity, hybridity, and more technologized forms of representation.
Cärtärescu provides a good example of the younger generation's radical-
ism when he enumerates the "true philosophical premises" of postmodern
literature as "constructive nihilism, the disappearance of metaphysics, the
sense of derealization, the end of historicity, perspectivism, and indetermi-
nacy" (182, my trans.).
Whichever acceptation of postmodernism writers embraced, a certain
positioning vis-à-vis authoritative discourses was unavoidable:
. . . having to adapt itself to the communist context, East Eu-

ropean postmodernism presents a significant double-articu-
lated difference in comparison to the Western phenomenon: it
resists and intends to undermine the official discourse, on the
one hand; but it also challenges Western theoretical "ortho-
doxies " (Jameson, etc.), which have so far ignored such local
"dissidences." (Cârneci 1 1, italics in the original)
Câraeci diagnoses very accurately the double challenge that postmod-

ernism had to face throughout Eastern Europe. Romanian postmodernism
was not the product of late capitalism, there was, moreover, considerably
less pop culture to assimilate, and a much stronger sense of fronde and, if
not of the agency of art, at least of the possibility of opposing art to the
leveling propensities of the dominant discourse. In this, again, Romanian
postmodernism comes closer to modernism and the avant-gardes as de-
scribed by Matei Cälinescu in Cele cinci fefe ale modernitäfii than it does
to western postmodernism, although the enemy in this case was no longer
bourgeois taste or the lack thereof.
These local complications resulted in a differentiated correlation with
the genres and terminologies of western postmodernism. Mujat's taxon-
omy of the postmodern novel, drawn in terms of representational modes,
for instance, distinguishes between a "predominantly ludic, self-ironic and
parodie postmodernism" and an "imagistic or anthropocentric postmod-
ernism" ( Strategiile 121-122, my trans., italics in the original). Mu§at
goes on to associate what she takes to be the characteristic postmodern
preference for description rather than narrative with the ontological domi-
nant of postmodernism as described by Brian McHale, while associating
350 J N T
narrative and temporality with the pursuit and modes of knowledge, and
therefore with the epistemological dominant of the modernist code (128).
Although her account of postmodern fiction, which takes theories of the
French nouveau roman as its point of departure, diverges significantly
from McHale's, she finds his use of the "dominant," or focusing trait of a
period code, informative since even as description is more typical of post-
modernism, the plot re-emerges in the form of a quest for narrative coher-
ence, which the reader is invited to participate in ( Strategiile 123). For
Mu§at, the reader's dialogic involvement with the text is a ubiquitous fea-
ture of postmodern fiction (134-136).
Although, like Cärtärescu, Mu§at finds western taxonomies and termi-
nologies helpful, discussing the Romanian scene she becomes aware of
their limitations. Like Corni§-Pope, Ion Bogdan Leiter, and others, she
veers into broad and sometimes defensive contextualizations in order to
account for Romanian fiction's specific difference. She shows, for in-
stance, that the communist regime emptied the world of reality by using
means similar to those of literary utopia to create a widening gap between
experience and representation ( Strategiile 55 passim). Consequently, writ-
ers "defected into writing" (Paul Ricoeur qtd. in Mugat, Strategiile 55, my
trans.); they did so by either "resisting ideology through culture" (a phrase
much circulated after 1989), i.e. retreating behind a discourse of aesthetic
autonomy, or by portraying a world weighed down by anomie, in which
nothing could be done - a defeatism embraced by many Romanians as
"the heroism of silence" (Mu§at, Perspective 177, my trans.).5 Like those
of Letter and of many others in the revisionist 1990s, Mugat's recuperation
of such formulae, particularly in the earlier version of her study, indicates
her concern to claim for Romanian postmodernism an ethical dimension
which is not central to western postmodernism. This preoccupation is also
in evidence in the subtle distinctions that she draws between Romanian
and western attitudes towards the idea of reality ( Strategiile 241-248).6
Comparative approaches such as Cârneci's and Mu§at's are extremely
useful for contextualizing the cultural phenomena of 1980s Romania. Like
most other studies, however, they circumvent the filiations and influences
that may have contributed to these evolutions in the relatively isolated Ro-
mania. Such evasions betray a residual exceptionalism, the conviction that
the seminal changes generating the "reversed innovatorism" of the 1960s
and 1970s (Leiter in Spiridon et al. 36) and the postmodernism of the
1980s originated within Romanian artistic and critical thinking.7 Roman-

ian culture likes to think of itself as fundamentally autochthonous: al-
though there were deep filiations with western cultures and under-the-
board influences that penetrated the Iron Curtain throughout the
communist period, efforts to reassess the cultural heritage and renew its
values stem from an inner self-consciousness and an inherent will to
progress. This conviction, which is not conducive to systematic investiga-
tions of outside influences, was partly supported by the paranoia and iso-
lationism of the communist regime. It is, moreover, amenable to rational-
izations such as Cärtärescu's (207), which resembles writer Steve Katz's
quip: "I don't think the ideas were 'in the air' . . . rather, all of us found
ourselves at the same stoplights in different cities at the same time. When
the lights changed, we all crossed the streets" (qtd. in McHale 3). Both
Cärtärescu and Katz describe postmodernism in terms of an interruption
of the modernist project brought about by changes in western civilization
taking place simultaneously in all the major cities of Europe and North
America, irrespective of their relation to late capitalism. Indeed, Cräciun
bears witness to an almost intuitive awareness of how the new information
technologies would inflect people's perception of their existence in a coun-
try in which access to such technologies was very limited in the early
1980s, when he was writing (qtd. in Mu§at, Strategiile 242). His intuition
is a good instance of the "stoplights," as Katz calls them, that changed al-
most concurrently, and therefore an eloquent argument in favor of compar-
ative accounts that focus on correspondences and intertextuality rather
than influences.
A similar kind of exceptionalism is evident in the nonchalance with
which Romanian critics adopted terms without much concern for the pre-
cise definitions and contexts within which these operated in western criti-
cal discourse. Ursa shows how the fact that the terminology, though ea-
gerly deployed by writers and critics of the day, remained largely
undefined obscured the discrepancies between Romanian and western ac-
ceptations of critical concepts (20-32). For instance, experimentalism and
realism, two categories central to British criticism in the 1980s, make for
an interesting case study of terminology. Although deployed in the critical
reception of British fiction during that decade, they did not translate, as a
taxonomy, into criticism of Romanian literature: the latter, as we have
seen, remained wary of the political implications of realism. At any rate,
352 J N T
Romanian critics deployed these terms differently even in relation to
British fiction, resulting in curious taxonomie divergences. While British
criticism typically lists Iris Murdoch among realists and John Fowles
among postmodern experimentalist writers (Elias 9), Cälinescu counts
Murdoch and Fowles, along with Samuel Beckett, Alasdair Gray, Christine
Brooke-Rose and D.M. Thomas, among the British postmodernists ( Cele
cinci 291). More minute in her classifications, Mu§at sorts both Murdoch
and Fowles on the side of "image-centric or anthropocentric," rather than
metafictional, postmodernism (Strategiile 121). Cärtärescu mentions only
Fowles, yet ascribes his textualist experiments to neomodernism, and lists
Anthony Burgess, Ian McEwan, Andrew Sinclair, and Julian Mitchell as
representatives of postmodernism (112). Cärtärescu hesitates to subdivide
the Anglo-American prose writers, although he recognizes the heterogene-
ity of the American postmoderns; his classification of postmodern Ro-
manian writers is explicitly drawn along the lines of what he calls
"(hyper)realism" and "(meta)textualism" (159).
American taxonomies, however, are simultaneously more rife and less
clear-cut than even Cärtärescu suspects: what to the Romanian postmod-
erns had appeared as an almost homogenous appetence for metafiction
among American writers increasingly diversified after 1980, such that
Robert Rebein, writing retrospectively, notes a re-emergence of realism (in
Duvall 30-43) and Arthur Redding parses the political engagement of
gothics written during that decade. 8 To this must be added the diversity of
ethnicity-specific experiences and voices that achieved wider circulation,
as discussed by Sam Girgus. Admittedly, the novelists covered by Girgus,
Rebein, and Redding - such as Raymond Carver, Patricia Highsmith, Toni
Morrison, Louise Erdrich, or Leslie Marmon Silko - were largely un-
known to the Romanian postmoderns, an unfamiliarity indicative of the
rather one-sided perception circulating in Romania concerning contempo-
rary American literature. Comparing where authors fit in various tax-
onomies tends to reveal divergences between categories that bear cognate
names, rather than between interpretations of specific authors' work.
Although Romanian culture was effectively sealed off from most
things capitalist, the ideological thaw of 1964 resulted in a measure of for-
mal synchronization with western literary and artistic fashions. The rea-
sons behind this permissiveness can only be speculated about. I argue else-
where that Ceau§escu's totalitarian regime (1965-1989) was invested in
projecting a self-image of progressive, open-minded appreciation of the

valuable productions of the human spirit; after the "July Theses" of 1971,
greater openness toward the west became one of the regime's insidious
strategies of providing a safety valve for pent-up disenchantment and dis-
content among Romanians with current conditions, but also a perverse
means of justifying the policing of minds and engineering of mentalities
directed against the alleged corruptions of capitalism (Schneider, "William
Faulkner" 99-118). Cälinescu confirms the safety-valve theory in a suc-
cinct and pertinent account of the cultural legacy of the communist
regime. He describes the relative facility with which intellectuals could
defect - indeed, were often encouraged to defect to the west - and the fact
that, in spite of the humiliations of censorship, public opprobrium, or bla-
tant neglect, good literature continued to find a publisher ("Romanian Lit-
erature" 245-246). For their part, writers had learned how to devise styles
and modes of representation that were meant to circumvent censorship.
The so-called Aesopian style, marked by indirection, play, irony, pastiche,
flights of fantasy, and at times sheer glossolalia, served postmodern writ-
ers of the 1980s well in navigating heightened communist repression. Crit-
ics have discussed these as strategies of subversion, a matter of preserving
a measure of sanity, dignity, and distance amidst the wreckage of all rec-
ognizable values (Corni§-Pope, Unfinished 89; Muçat, Strategiile ; Terian).
From a more radical, poststructuralist perspective, they were ideologized
modes of cultural and moral resistance which shook the ontological foun-
dations of representation itself (Corniç-Pope, Unfinished 8-10, 21-22),
and as such were perfectly synchronous with western postmodernism.
The safety-valve phenomenon mentioned above was facilitated by the
professionalization of literary translation during the communist regime. It
is verified, moreover, by the curious fact that, despite the intensification of
cultural suppression during the 1980s, the majority of literary works trans-
lated into Romanian were from western, rather than Soviet or East-Euro-
pean, literatures. According to the Romanian Academy's 2005 Dicfionar
cronologie al romanului tradus in Romania, de la origini pârià la 1989
(Chronological dictionary of novels translated in Romania, from the be-
ginnings to 1989), only around one hundred novels and fragments were
translated every year throughout the 1980s; yet of these many were by
Anglo-American writers ranging, eclectically, from Arnold Bennett, James
Clavell, Joseph Conrad, and Lawrence Durrell, to Graham Greene,
354 J N T
Thomas Hardy, Henry James, James Joyce, Iris Murdoch, Jean Rhys,
Mark Twain, RG. Wodehouse, etc.; from such younger writers as Kingsley
Amis, Paul Bailey, John Barth, J.M. Coetzee, Nadine Gordimer, Joseph
Heller and Salman Rushdie the odd fragment was included in periodicals.
There are few discernible patterns in the selection of the novels, with
the exception of a distinct appetite for the science fiction of Isaac Asimov
and Kurt Vonnegut, the detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha
Christie, and Raymond Chandler, and the late eighteenth-century gothics
and romances of Frances Burney, Benjamin Disraeli, Maria Edgeworth,
Ann Radcliffe, and Horace Walpole. Whether their popularity was trig-
gered by popular demand or imposed top-down remains a moot point.
There was, moreover, an attempt to introduce contemporary women writ-
ers such as Margaret Drabble, Margaret Anne Doody, and Doris Lessing,
from whose fiction short fragments appeared in Romanian literary maga-
zines. Modernist writers for whom adroit criticism had secured the seal of
ideological approval, such as Truman Capote, John Dos Passos, William
Faulkner, Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, or John Steinbeck, had
been translated widely in previous decades; the fact that, along with
beloved classics such as Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters or James Fenni-
more Cooper, they were no longer translated in the 1980s testifies to the
shift in cultural tastes and priorities. A more interesting case is that of Saul
Bellow, several of whose works had been translated in the 1970s, but who
became a persona non grata after fictionalizing his 1977 visit to
Bucharest in the bleakest terms in his novel The Dean 's December (1982).
Contemporary novelists such as Peter Ackroyd, John Banville, Barth, or
Burgess received the odd citation in critical essays, but their novels were
not translated. Writers such as Martin Amis, Paul Auster, Julian Barnes,
Don DeLillo, John Fowles, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth are conspic-
uously absent. Occasionally, such absences are due to the oversight of the
dictionary makers, as in the case of John Fowles, several of whose novels
were in fact translated prior to 1989, and so the holdings of the National
Library of Romania and much Romanian criticism confirm. By and large
however, the works of a younger generation of Anglo-American novelists
were not available until the late 1990s, when the critical revision of Ro-
manian postmodernism set in motion a wave of translations that effec-
tively bridged the time gap between the receptions of Anglo-American
novels in their source cultures and in Romania.
Other popular source languages include French and German, followed

closely by Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and Polish; through some
of these, East- Asian and African works were also translated in the 1980s.
At a glance, the translation projects from these languages appear to focus
on the fiction of Miguel de Cervantes, Honoré de Balzac, Jules Verne, and
Henryk Sienkiewicz. This pattern indicates a propensity for the ideologi-
cally safe adventure tale, although literary worth is never far out of sight.
Moreover, there was a surprising number of translations from contempo-
rary authors whose works had received international recognition or would
do so in the next decades, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Yasunari
Kawabata, Naguib Mahfuz, Czesław Miłosz, Yukio Mishima, Amos Oz,
José Saramago, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The motivations behind these se-
lections were complex (see Schneider, "Literary Translation" 104-118).
Primarily, an awareness of the contemporary international scene transpires
despite the very limited means at the disposal of cultural stakeholders. At
the same time, there was a decided cultural affinity for the magical realism
of South- American novelists, as evidenced by the work of novelist §tefan
Agopian. Yet, although it served Romania's interests to have world litera-
ture translated, the texts were as carefully vetted and severely censored as
anything written by Romanian writers, and the same self-preservation in-
stinct that made writers cautious also motivated the translators' self-cen-
sorship.
A catalogue such as the Academy's Dictionary is itself a way of narra-
tivizing a period, however fragmentarily.9 It bears witness to the important
role acquired by literary translation during the 1980s, when there was an
unofficial ban on the private ownership of books in languages other than
Romanian.10 The very limited number of critical references to untranslated
books listed by the Dictionary testifies to the fact that literary criticism
was often restricted to books which the censurers themselves could read.
Despite the ban, books circulated in the original or in foreign translations
through networks of trust. Adina Ciugureanu notes, for instance, that al-
though George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 were silently banned, they
were circulated and read on the sly in French translations, and this is far
from being a singular case (49). Additionally, university libraries would
hold the classics of world literature in the original for language-learning
purposes. As many of the novelists and critics were graduates of the for-
eign languages programs at universities throughout the country, the impact
356 J N T
of international fiction was much stronger and more pervasive than the
hundred-odd yearly quota of translations might suggest. The Dictionary
nonetheless reveals interesting trends and raises seminal questions con-
cerning the absence of certain writers, especially when corroborated by
accounts of reading during the 1980s.
In terms of writers whose influence Romanian literary critics acknowl-
edge, there seems to be a consensus that the American authors customarily
associated with postmodernism, among them Donald Barthelme, Barth,
Robert Coover, William H. Gass, Heller, Vladimir Nabokov, Pynchon, and
Vonnegut, had the greatest impact on postmodernism worldwide. Among
British writers, Beckett and Fowles are the names most frequently men-
tioned (Grigorescu, Postfatä 554; Cärtärescu 112). Cälinescu enumerates
Borges, Nabokov, and Beckett as precursors who then took their places in
the main corpus of postmodern literature, followed by the Americans
Barth, Pynchon, Barthelme etc., and the British Christine Brooke-Rose,
Fowles, and D.M. Thomas, alongside an assortment of international post-
modernists (Cele cinci 287-291). Although listed as representatives of
postmodernism known to the Romanian readership, these writers have
only sporadically been discussed in terms of their impact on specific Ro-
manian novelists; William Faulkner, by contrast, is much more likely to
crop up as an explicit influence during the 1970s and 80s, for instance on
the novels of the realist Preda and the magical realist Agopian (see for in-
stance Cristea-Enache; §tefänescu). Cärtärescu, in his detailed monograph
dedicated to Romanian postmodernism, acknowledges the impact of the
French TelQuel and Oulipo, the American San Francisco poets and Beat
Generation on the Romanian poetry of the 1980s (150-154), and of the
French nouveau roman on Romanian prose (146)11; yet he is careful not to
claim more than correspondences and similarities between the postmodern
fiction of the U.S. and Romania (160, 170 etc.). Paul Cornea, in the After-
word to Cärtärescu's book, alludes to one of the reasons for this hesitation
to speak about direct influences: the Romanian prose writers of the 1980s
were neoliberal, occasionally even libertarian or anarchist in orientation,
whereas many of the American novelists were left-leaning, if not openly
Marxist (in Cärtärescu 5 14-5 15). 12 Such distinctions mattered greatly to
Romanians' self-presentation, especially at a time when political opinion
was radicalized and referential genres like the novel were under greater
pressure to conform. Hence the preference for a discourse of correspon-

dences rather than direct influences.
Another way of narrativizing the reception and impact of Anglophone
fiction in the 1980s is by analyzing the literary criticism that was written
about it. The Academy's Dictionary helpfully lists citations of translations
in critical texts, drawing on a generous corpus of literary criticism pub-
lished in the 1980s. By far the most frequently referenced translation is
Mircea Ivänescu's superb 1984 rendition of Joyce's Ulysses. These lists of
citations confirm that, at the time, reviews and the occasional collection of
essays, rather than comparative scholarship or monographs, drove the crit-
ical reception of foreign texts in Romania. Literary magazines were the
main means of introducing the Romanian reading public to the latest pub-
lications, and translators, academics, and journalists alike made efforts to
overcome the time-lag inherent in state-sponsored translation by including
references to as yet untranslated contemporary fiction. Translator Felicia
Antip, for instance, in her column, "I've read that they're reading," appear-
ing in the prestigious literary magazine Romania literārā, wrote brief re-
views of the latest award-winning and best-selling western literature. An-
other prolific translator, Antoaneta Ralian, similarly promoted
contemporary fiction by including translated excerpts in her reviews, pub-
lished in Romania literārā as well. As Leiter shows, the book review was a
revenant of interwar modernism. In the mid-1960s, it became an institu-
tion committed to promoting aesthetic excellence and gradually, an em-
blem of autonomy from political pressures. Regrettably, by the late 1980s
the latter function had displaced the former almost entirely, and reviews, in
their preference for a manneristic, opaque style and indiscriminate enthu-
siasm for novelty, failed to provide an account of literary value (Anii
'60-'90 494-496). Interpreted by some as yet another instance of Roman-
ian criticism's reluctance to leave modernism behind (Leiter, Anii '60-'90
503-504), the review's hard-earned autonomy enabled incisive changes in
critical discourse: most conspicuously, it displaced the ritualized praise of
communism and social realism that had been the sine qua non for publish-
ing in the 1950s and the 1960s. Moreover, reviewers rarely felt compelled
to (mis)represent western authors as crypto-socialists in order to ensure
their acceptance by the authorities, as had been common practice with the
novels of Faulkner, Hemingway, and many others in the 1960s and 1970s.
The changes brought about by the fall of the communist regime have
358 J N T
been described as paradigmatic; indeed, Catherine Nichols speaks about
the year 1989 as a "historical caesura" not only in the former communist
bloc, but in the discourse of the "world" that had previously organized the
northern hemisphere into east and west (413). In Romania, the revision of
discursive practices in the 1990s turned critical thinking upon itself, re-
sulting in a self-censored new idiom which avoided references to commu-
nism, Marxism, realism, or any other "-ism" that might connote nostalgia
for the previous regime. Yet the effort to distinguish viable literature from
productions whose standing had been deliberately inflated for propagan-
distu: purposes soon degenerated into a witch hunt with moral stakes, tar-
geting all writers who had in any way been involved with the communist
power structures. Throughout the 1990s, this revisionism obstructed liter-
ary comparatism and current evolutions in critical theory in favor of self-
defensive accounts of literature's resistance to and autonomy from the po-
litical under communism. Analysts have described this anachronic return
to a discourse of aesthetic and humanist values as the symptom of an epis-
temologica! crisis of Romanian criticism (Letter, Anii '60-'90 504). It was
not until the turn of the century that issues such as poststructuralism and
cultural politics were addressed, and, predictably, the revaluation started
with the postmodernism of the 1980s.
That a decade of political extremes should result in divergent notions
of innovation and aesthetic value is not surprising. Literary studies is one
of the sites where the discrepancies between dominant discourses and dis-
sident voices become evident, if not explicit. Barred from viable political
power, western dissidents typically chose academia as a platform for their
ideas.13 In communist countries, the very freedom to dissent was at stake,
so much so that it determined the meaning and value of artistic experi-
ment. Writing after the turn of the century, critic Eugen Negrici, in his
iconoclastic revision of the myths and illusions of Romanian literary his-
tory, expresses a common suspicion when he challenges the assimilation
of the Generation Eighties to postmodernism along the lines of their non-
involvement with ontology. He suggests that, since much of the fascination
of the appellation "postmodern" resided in its ability to codify resistance
to ideological fetters during the communist regime, the current hesitation
to speak about that generation as postmodern stems primarily from the
"loss of the political motivation" (169, my trans.). Most scholars, however,
accept that, given the adverse political circumstances, the poetics of 1980s
Romanian fiction shared remarkable correspondences with western post-

modernism, particularly in its fostering of self-reflexivity, irony, and dis-
ruptive discursive strategies.
These evolutions testify to the enduring relationship between literature
and politics, long after literature and literary studies freed themselves from
ideological strictures; and, as well, to the tenuous relationship between in-
stitutional infrastructure and discursive practice. Once literary studies
began critically to examine the issue of Romanian postmodernism, pub-
lishing houses followed suit and commissioned translations from novelists
who had come into their own in the 1970s and 1980s: Ackroyd, Auster,
Barnes, McEwan, Roth, Rushdie, and Graham Swift had their first book-
length works translated into Romanian between 1998 and 2002; Coetzee
and Martin Amis in 2005, Morrison, Pynchon, and Thomas not until 2006,
Barthelme in 2007 ( UNESCO Index Translationum ). Moreover, widening
access to higher education has resulted in an increasing number of doc-
toral dissertations and monographs dedicated to recent fiction. However,
developments in English studies were slow to have an impact on the pub-
lishing industry before the late-2000s. Thereafter, indeed, Anglicists be-
came involved in translating and prefacing contemporary literary produc-
tions, and engaged critically with the practice of literary translation.
Concomitantly, scholarly journals, despite fairly limited circulation, began
to compete with the cultural press in terms of authoritativeness. As both
the isolationism of the 1980s and the revisionism of the 1990s were com-
ing to an end, contemporary culture was gaining a progressively more cos-
mopolitan appearance.
The attempt to historicize Romanian fiction's relation to Anglophone
postmodernism and to what Pascale Casanova calls the "world republic of
letters" in the 1980s thus needs to consider several aspects: 1) Romanian
literature was undergoing its most daring, cosmopolitan, systematic, and
theoretically grounded debate in post- War times, involving by far the
largest number of artists and theoreticians and reaching well into the fol-
lowing decades; 2) unlike the American novelists of the 1960s and 1970s,
who had been unequivocal in their rejection of modernism, Romanian
writers of the 1980s remained ambivalent towards the canonization of
modernist experimentalism: they took advantage of the autonomy and
sanctuary it afforded them, even as they sought to depart from it; 3) pop
culture and the media were slow to be assimilated to the realm of the aes-
360 J N T
thetic, given that they were state controlled; consequently, the constructed-
ness of subjectivity was understood in terms of the ideological manipula-
tion of discourse rather than the proliferation of media and discourses; 4)
political opinion became radicalized throughout Eastern Europe, such that
artists felt compelled to take a stand, if not openly against communism,
then at least against the politicization of art; 5) while the influence of
French and American literature on the Romanian literature of the 1980s
has been acknowledged, the residual myth of Romanian culture as self-
made, autochthonous, and autonomous survived well into the 1990s and
beyond.14 While it remains the task of Romanian studies to investigate the
bases of this exceptionalism, diasporic comparatists and Romanian-based
Anglicists have challenged the claim of literature's and literary studies' au-
tonomy from ideology. This however is a fraught undertaking, in view of
the ideological stakes attached to the idea of autonomy during the 1980s,
as discussed above, but also in view of recent comparatist theories such as
Casanova's, which point out that the geography and history of intellectual
politics never quite overlap with those of economic politics (10-11). One
of postmodernism's most vocal claims is disbelief in macropolitics and the
grand narratives that legitimize it. It is therefore one of the most produc-
tive paradoxes of postmodernism that macropolitics remains a definitive
factor determining postmodernism's evolution and therefore a leitmotif of
its narrativizations, particularly in the countries of the former communist
bloc, where the postmodern turn was a political gesture.
Notes
1 . See the Brukenthal Library collections in Sibiu.
2. English departments were first established at the universities of Ia§i (1917), Cluj-
Napoca (1921), and Bucharest (1936).
3. Jeposu's volume was written in 1985 and then repeatedly rejected by publishers, re-
vised, and updated by the author over the next few years, until it was eventually pub-
lished in 1993. Its case is representative of much valuable scholarship which fell vic-
tim to the narrow-minded censorship in the 1980s.
4. This new humanism has been widely theorized by Alexandru Mucina, Liviu Petrescu,
and Magda Cârneci, among others, as a staple of Romanian postmodernism.
5. See Leiter, Anii '60- '90 (497-498) for further examples of this "heroism of silence."
6. The heavily revised 2008 edition of her 1998 study focuses more narrowly on litera-
ture.
7. Political scientist Vladimir Tismäneanu has written repeatedly about the "Romanian
exceptionalism," by which he means not only Ceau§escu's unique brand of nationalist
socialism and non-intervention, but also Ion Iliescu's neo-communist "Third Way" in
the early to mid-1990s. I use the term in a sense that comes closer to "American ex-
ceptionalism," which includes both history and cultural identity. Self-described as an
"oasis of Latinity" in a predominantly Slavic part of Europe, Romanian culture re-
mains permanently marked by a sense of its own idiosyncrasy revalorized as "salvation
through poverty" and the "providence of discrepancy," to use Gianni Vattimo 's words
(qtd. in Cârneci 109).
8. Mu§at lists William Styron under "anthropocentric postmodernism," categorizing all

other American postmodernists as experimentalists (Strategiile 121). Many American
scholars during the 1960s and 70s shared the view of American fiction as homoge-
neously metafictional (see Elias in Duvall 16-17).
9. A similar chronological dictionary of theory translated into Romanian is unfortunately

not yet available. Cártãrescu, Corni§-Pope, Terian, and others testify that contemporary
theory was being translated and read to great effect, but such a dictionary would help
consolidate the understanding of its impact on Romanian critical thinking.
10. Such bans were not officially acknowledged, but became evident as censorship re-
flected party-line policies and the political police confiscated and destroyed privately
owned foreign books. Stakeholders in the publishing industry thus became aware of
what was politically unacceptable, and self-censorship became a more efficient ideo-
logical instrument than overt repression.
11. He is careful however to agree with John Barth who considers it "a more up-to-date
kind of psychological realism" (qtd. in Cärtärescu 146).
12. The Marxist component is not absent from the French trends mentioned above and
Cärtärescu does not deny it, but he associates French influences with the excessive tex-
tualism of what he calls the " tardo-modernism " of the 1970s rather than with Marxism
(145-146).
13. In many western countries, notably the U.S., Britain, and France, positions were simi-
larly polarized, although there artists typically took a stand against the current conser-
vatism. See for instance Francois Cusseťs book on "/e cauchemar des années 1980"
362 J N T
or much that has been written recently about Thatcherism by way of obituary on the
former prime minister's death.
14. The most extreme form of this myth was "protochronism," a theory, devised by writer
Edgar Papu in the early 1970s and picked up by Ceau§escu's communist regime, ac-
cording to which Romanian culture took precedence, both chronologically and qualita-
tively, over western cultures with which it might share certain trends and features.
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The Discourse of Self-Representation in Literary Studies in 1980s Romania

Author(s): Ana-Karina Schneider

Romania's relationship to literatures in the English language has been in-

reviewers to render certain western writers palatable to the communist

mania. As a result of these controversies, by the 1990s, modernism and

... a reaction against "politically-integrated" forms of classi-

Their own updated, westernized definition of postmodernism emphasized

. . . having to adapt itself to the communist context, East Eu-

Câraeci diagnoses very accurately the double challenge that postmod-

1980s originated within Romanian artistic and critical thinking.7 Roman-

projecting a self-image of progressive, open-minded appreciation of the

Other popular source languages include French and German, followed

pressure to conform. Hence the preference for a discourse of correspon-

Romanian fiction shared remarkable correspondences with western post-

1 . See the Brukenthal Library collections in Sibiu.

8. Mu§at lists William Styron under "anthropocentric postmodernism," categorizing all

9. A similar chronological dictionary of theory translated into Romanian is unfortunately

Balotā, Nicolae. Euphorion. 2nd ed. Bucure§ti: Cartea româneascâ, 1999.

Burlacu, Doru et al. Dicļionar cronologie al romanului tradus in Romania, de la origini

Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quiñones and Albert Wachtel. Urbana: U of Illinois P,

Cärtärescu, Mircea. Postmodernismul románese. Bucure§ti: Humanitas, 1999.

York: Palgrave, 2001.

Cristea-Enache, Daniel. "Intâmplâri de mâine." Ziarul Financiar 7 Oct. 2011. Web. 15

Dimitriu, Gheorghiļa. "Polaritatea: monolog autonom / discursul naratorului confient de

Head, Dominic. The Cambridge Introduction to J. M. Coetzee. Cambridge UP, 2009.

Iosifescu, Silvian. De-a lungul unui secol. Bucure§ti: Eminescu, 1983.

Foundation, 2009. Web. 8 July 2012.

Mu§ina, Alexandru. "Sintaxa singurātājii în proza lui Gheorghe Crāciun." Observatorul

Negrici, Eugen. Iluziile literaturii romàne. Bucure§ti: Cartea Româneascà, 2008.

Postmodernismul. Spec, issue of Caiete entice 1-2, 1986.

Redding, Arthur. "Abandoning Hope in American Fiction of the 1980s: Catalogues of

Schneider, Ana-Karina. "Literary Translation: Between Mediation and Interpretation."

nal 24.1 (Summer 2009): 99-118.

Spiridon, Monica. "Models of Literary and Cultural Identity on the Margins of

Stanchi, Virgil. Râzboiul gândului cu literele. Eseuri de literatūrā americanà ąi englezà.

erārā 10 (2004). Web. 17 Sept. 2015.

Terian, Andrei. "The Rhetoric of Subversion: Strategies of 'Aesopian Language' in Roman-

UNESCO. Index Translationum: World Bibliography of Translation 26 Feb. 2003. Web. 12

Ursa, Mihaela. Optzecismul §i promisiunile postmodernismului. Pite§ti: Paralela 45, 1999.

Vlad, loan. In labirintul lecturii. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1999.

Zaciu, Mircea. Jurnal. Vol. 1. Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1993.

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