FIVE FACES OF THE LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY TRANSCULTURAL WRITER: MATEI CALINESCU (1934-2009) AND THE DRAMA OF MODERNITY
FIVE FACES OF THE LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY TRANSCULTURAL WRITER: MATEI CALINESCU (1934-2009) AND THE DRAMA OF MODERNITY

Summary/Abstract: When “Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism Avant-Garde Decadence Kitsch Postmodernism”, was published in 1987, critics identified in it an effort of imaginative “revision," expanding an earlier version of the book, “Faces of Modernity” (1977). In turn this 1977 book drew on Matei Călinescu’s Romanian publications before his emigration to the United States, including a book-length essay on the modern concept of poetry as it developed from Romanticism to the Avant-Garde (1972). By including a new section on postmodernism, his 1987 book submitted the previous sections on modernism, decadence, avant-garde and kitsch, to a critical rereading that revised and amplified the arguments in the previous chapters. I argue in this article that the same recreative impulse underlies Călinescu’s own intellectual career as a Romanian expatriate who had to reinvent himself successively as an analyst of modernity, a literary and cultural comparativist, a theorist of rereading, a poet and a novelist. In his “adventure” and “drama” of reinvention, that retraces for us the ethos of modernism, Călinescu’s faithful ally was his own prodigious imagination.

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