On Romanian Topicality: Caragiale and the Distrustful Citizen
On Romanian Topicality: Caragiale and the Distrustful Citizen

Summary/Abstract: If the current crisis is in large part a cultural crisis what is the role of culture in an attempt to stimulate a step further of Europe, repairing and following the path of sustainability? The classical texts, a gift, a cultural legacy of the past that you can take or refuse, are not immobile assets or a trap of the past, but, paradoxically, agents of an active movement between freedom and responsibility and from a rich subjectivity to an exteriority framed by the symbolic figure of the community, which a text itself can take or refuse, in order to renew in different contexts, to update and become universal. The result could be defined as a change in the distance between the text, “the ideal spectator”, and the networks of human and nonhuman actors that contribute to its circulation, to the encoding/decoding in the discourse, producing a variation of sense, a process that reveals the ties that connect texts, individuals, and societies during cultural cycles at different levels of space and complexity. The vivid sensation that Caragiale’s dramatic world is similar to an “augmented reality” (an intense virtual-and-real exchange), generating a dynamic information, breaks out of fiction to enter and disseminate in the new realities of the present times, relating to the capacity of the classical text to connect worlds, contexts and societies, to overcome the deep crisis that we face. Currently visiting Caragiale’s models of urban space and sociability, or of distorted public life, raises the awareness – throughout the carousel mechanism of the comical – of a false movement of the establishment, enables us to understand why his work continues to be a valuable source of substantial knowledge, rewarding us with the return of laugh and irony as place of wellbeing and a retrieved community.

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