Identity Dilemmas in the Post-totalitarian Romanian Critique
Identity Dilemmas in the Post-totalitarian Romanian Critique

Summary/Abstract: The Eastern-European cultural space registers an acute and deliberate separation from the communist political system, which leads to a conscious quest for a self lead by the literatures that are reborn after the mechanism of ideological oppression disappeared. The result is a permanent re-definition of the national cultural positions with reference to the European centre, joined by a revision of aesthetic criteria that allow peripheral cultural ‘voices’ to interact on the Western scene. The stated aim is for ‘marginal literature’ to actively participate to the European circulation of cultural production, which entails the necessity of invoking studies focused on European interferences, as well as comparative analyses of the status of other marginal post-communist literatures, which found a solution for their identity problem by supporting a national cultural voice already heard in a European context. The underlying development of the pluriethnic multiplicity is conditioned, from a globalizing perspective, by the promotion of the undergoing re-discussion and re-evaluation of the national canon in regard to the European one, which gives way, on the Romanian stage, to different validation/ invalidation strategies for the concept of identity through literature. Therefore, the arguments for and against the Eurocentric position of Romanian literature motivate several significant directions within the larger concept of ‘Romanian cultural identity’, organized around certain minimal cultural items which define dichotomies that are sometimes excessively artificial, such as basic ruralism vs. urbanism, cultural following vs. European vocation, cultural-identity non-value vs. cult of the national writer, overbid ‘cultural patriotism’ vs. the acute consciousness of the marginal location.

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