Memory, ethics and (post)critique. A triangular reading of Simona Sora’s novel Complaisance
Memory, ethics and (post)critique. A triangular reading of Simona Sora’s novel Complaisance

Summary/Abstract: This article offers a triangular reading of a contemporary Romanian novel, namely Simona Sora’s Complaisance. Ascension in the orthopaedics ward/A guest for life (2020), in the frame of epistemological pluralism. To this end, each of the three co-authors opted for different epistemological perspectives, spanning memory studies, ethics, and literary aesthetics. In the first section, Simona Mitroiu uses a “memory-work method” and applying narrative analysis she reads Sora’s novel in relation to several cultural productions dealing with Romanian women’s experience in relationships of power. In the same context-dependent framework, Laura Pricop embraces, in the second section, an ethical perspective and retraces the steps taken by a woman to free herself from a conscience educated in the spirit of complaisance and obedience under the communist regime. Finally, Andreea Mironescu deciphers in Sora’s novel the allegorisation of two antagonic, although co-existent, ways of reading and interpreting, arguing that such antagonism between a suspicious and affective reading has a wide cultural relevance, especially on how we read the past. The three analyses make a stronger case for how epistemological pluralism works in practice.

• Details
• Contents