THE INTERRUPTED COMMUNITY: NEW IMAGES OF THE NATION IN POSTCOMMUNIST ROMANIAN LITERATURE
THE INTERRUPTED COMMUNITY: NEW IMAGES OF THE NATION IN POSTCOMMUNIST ROMANIAN LITERATURE

Summary/Abstract: This article aims to question the role that literature plays in the construction of a new, critical image of the nation after 1989. The communist regime was the catalyst for a particular type of interpretive community and also of particular figures of the collectivity and representations of interactions between individual and community. After 1989, these figures seemed to fade out in the public and literary discourse, and community itself, as a concept, met with crisis. However, even if the failure of communism definitively interrupted the myth of community, the idea of community could not simply disappear, and instead generated new representations of its fractured reality. Is there a particular stylistics at work in the Romanian novels after 2000 dealing with communitarian representations? If so, does it have an intrinsically political or ethical dimension? Finally, can literature be considered not only a space for imagi-nation, but also a medium of circulation for collective representations and, consequently, the space for establishing a new community connection?

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