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FROM PARTICIPATORY AND ‘STRIKE ART’ TO THE POSTDIGITAL
The article examines the concept of contemporary community as commoning, at the intersection of action, performance or participatory art, place, site-specific, and (post)digital poetry. This involves a brief review of traditional avant-gardes, 20th century engaged art, and recent political-art movements. In the process of this analysis, the participatory emerges as a subtler, more nuanced, and less predictable phenomenon than usually accepted. Also, performative subjectivity is traced as either the source of anticommunal community (in French theory), or mere Christian-capitalist construct (in communist philosophy). Agamben’s theory of the coming community is therefore examined as possible response to both these stances, with its relevance to contemporary movements, including post-Occupy. Commoning – paralleled to placing in poetry – turns out to be of critical importance in present-day community especially with correlatives such as displacement and undecidablility. Place, space, and map(ping) are therefore radically redefined in the context, and contemporary poetry appears to be indissolubly related to the process: the poem of place is the place, and poetry becomes the site of the com(mon)ing community. Site (and discourse)-specificity in poetry occasions a shift in focus to digital space, its sonic economy, and the communities and floating locations/ sites thereof. Site and discourse fluidity have brought about a paradigm in which the poem and its related apps tend to expand and turn into digital space itself, while in more recent postdigital evolutions, a new political concern for the ‘real’ reshape community, site, and performance/ participatory art or poetry in a continuous interactivity and interdependence.
More...BETWEEN SUBMISSION AND SUBVERSION
The present article is dedicated to the guiding theme of “Collective Authorship” in its diverse contexts and notional meanings. Mapping the intellectual stakes and conceptual propositions of recent scholarship represents one of the main aims of the paper. Focusing on two important junctures, the historical perspective is complemented by a state of the art review covering several disciplinary fields. Finally, I will define two types of authorship: submissive and subversive. Authorship studies are undergoing major changes today, marking the shift from the romantic understanding of the author towards the construction of what I’ve called an authorial ecosystem which, in its turn, can be understood as being part of a larger (and circular) dynamic entity.
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Online literary communities have similar traits to traditional forms of literary sociability, although their characterization with the aid of traditional taxonomy remains problematic. Unlike traditional literary groups, that are defined primarily by a well determined aesthetic and ideological ideal (or purpose), online communities are rather defined by the orientation of their interest and their practice, forming technologically supported platforms in which users can develop conversations around specific interests, or engage in collaborative practices. In the Romanian context, the online literary communities appeared around the early 2000s. The majority of these communities were characterized by open access and a high degree of democratization. The interest for them slowly faded after the apparition of social media (Facebook, Twitter), but some of them are still functioning today. In the short history of Romanian digital communities, www.clubliterar.com occupied a special position, the most important difference from the other communities being that a great part of its members were already involved in the traditional literary circuit. What at first appeared to be just an elitist movement breaking out of the giant platform www.agonia.ro, transformed in short time in a digital platform for the young generation of Romanian writers, called “Generation 2000”.
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Contrary to its origins and areas of applicability, always “very” local and localized, literary theory aimed at reaching the status of a universal discourse on literature, a discourse that would identify and showcase in a display box the invariants beyond the cultural, historical, and geographical variables. As the anthropologist James Clifford ironically acknowledged in his manifesto “Notes on Travel and Theory” (Inscriptions, 5), “Localization undermines a discourse’s claim to ‘theoretical’ status”. The very history of literary theory as a (still) recent human science has incorporated and disguised local heritages while also highlighting in the process their transferable virtue, their mobile and generalizing capacity. The various narratives that accounted for theory’s beginnings, from the organicist ones such as R. Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism to those that value the breaking point as the constitutive motive of evolution (such as the introductions signed by Jonathan Culler, Terry Eagleton, or Antoine Compagnon, to name but a few), they all discreetly unify the variables of theoretical reflection into the apparently glorious perspective of a knowledge that makes its way through accumulating and filtering its data; a knowledge that is dubiously similar to the “hard” scientific one.
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Theory, in the broad field of the Humanities, Literature and the Arts, should be understood as both an intensive examination and a travelling, comparative point of view. It is akin to parody, due to its displaced, ironical and re-creative character, that it shares with interlinguistic and transmedial translation. It cannot and should not be firmly rooted in a particular place or historical moment without dying in the form of doctrine or dogma. But the exercise of theoretical power also depends on the relative stability of its institutions. From the 1980s onwards, the Centre called ‘Paris’ lost this power because it ignored both the de-centred appropriations it unwillingly made possible and the exotic origins of its own emergence. This de-theorization is nevertheless dangerous, because the place it leaves vacant is managed by the brainless and insensitive law of ‘the market’. Theory is not ideology, it is the responsible self-consciousness of the interests involved in comparing and linking. Formerly marginalized cultures, such as those of Eastern Europe, India, China or Latin America have the need and appetite for theory that should allow them to build an alternative network of theoretical shuttles able to re-think the functions of the local in a globalized world.
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The term “thing theory” was coined in 2001 by the American Bill Brown who was trying to speak out in favor of things as a possible alternative to endless abstraction. This essay claims that thing theory not only opens up the possibility of a fresh approach to literature but also to some extent accounts for why literature is attractive. After briefly exploring the roots of thing theory in the work of Viktor Shklovsky and Martin Heidegger, I propose that readers are drawn to literature not just because literary texts are character- or plot-driven but also because they are thing-driven. I claim that Shklovsky’s long-standing emphasis on plot (inextricably intertwined with character) is at odds with the Russian Formalist’s own famous statement about art allowing us to feel the stoniness of the stone, and I suggest a parallel between Shklovsky’s contention that literature makes the stone stoney and Heidegger’s celebration of literature as guarding against the loss of “thingness.” The contention that works of literature provide a platform on which things may be allowed to speak their own “being” is then traced through three works of fiction by Gustave Flaubert, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and José Saramago.
More...MODERNITY AS A TRAVELING SPHERE OF OPTIONS
There are two dominant explanations for the global reach of modernization processes. On the one hand, we have the representation of a vast network of mainly economic interests, centered in the highly developed Western world that gradually covers the whole planet. On the other hand, the global span of modernization is seen as the gradual imitation and internalization by marginal cultures and civilizations of a consistent system of emancipatory values that emerged in Western Europe and North America. Even if severely opposed, these two doctrines share an essential assumption: modernity and modernization derive from a set of positive, non-conflictual beliefs. But modernity can be understood, in complete opposition to „consistency-theories”, as a social and cultural process which essentially expands at a global scale the intellectual contradictions of modernity: liberty versus equality, responsibility versus solidarity, cooperation versus competition, innovation versus conservation, historical teleology versus historical skepticism, moral absolutism versus moral relativism. At the same time, modernity is the process of elaborating ways of coping with structural social and cognitive indetermination, and the virtual sphere that contains all possible patterns of response. Once we re-draw the picture of modernity as a global process along these lines, the distinction center-periphery, at least for intellectual processes, loses much of its grip. My main argument is that irrespective of its place of insertion in a presumed hierarchical network of civilizational influences, the theoretical mind is confronted with, and responsible for, finding plausible, even if vulnerable and transitory answers to essentially the same cognitive and ethical conundrums.
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The paper focuses on several conceptual nuances which I consider that could enter into a hermeneutical dialogue and, thus, they could become complementary modes of reinterpreting certain topics of literary and aesthetic theory. These dynamic concepts are to be analyzed from the viewpoint of certain theoretical narratives, around which they seem to gather and to nourish a few epistemological instruments and perspectives: the secondary (a concept proposed by a “travelling theorist”, situated in-between cultures, Virgil Nemoianu), the political and historical turn in the literary studies (in this respect, New Historicism being a main critical perspective and direction of thought) and, conversely, the “literary turn” in political and social thought. Such comprehensive syntagms, which coagulate around important hermeneutical narratives of the 20th century and of the first decade of the 21st century, might prove relevant for reassessing the social and anthropological influence of literary theory and of aesthetic epistemology. My argument will follow some critical reenactments of the seconday – and the dialogue, either subtle or radically polemical, or the rupture between the secondary and the principal – within the literary turn of the nineties and then within the “digital turn” and the approaches indebted to “distant reading” (Franco Moretti) in the years 2000.
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While reconstructing the history of the socio-psychological and aesthetic theory of social roles, a thing that is striking is the subtle dialectics between continuities and discontinuities of a highly important theoretical canon, one of the most prolific resources of today's human sciences. When we talk about discontinuities, we mean that the explanatory patterns of the Chicago School, the one that endowed this theory with its contemporary magnitude, have been aesthetically intermediated by the reception of the thought tradition represented by Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey – a tradition that, at its turn, descended up to the model of the role plurality of the early Romanticism. These connections between the representatives of the Chicago School and German sociology, between Robert E. Park or H.R. Mead and G. Simmel or W. Dilthey have been obliterated in the proper sociological research. The role theory was reimported and reinvented in Europe thanks to Ralf Dahrendorf and Bernard Lahire, inspired by the literary works of Robert Musil, Ernst Mach and Marcel Proust. The paths to conceptual transformation from the incipient aesthetic role theory and up to the sociological theories of role behavior, partly redeemed by sociology, have, however, been “forgotten” by the field of aesthetics, by the theories of fiction or the theory of the novel. Surprisingly so, the new French and German novel of the 1960s and 1970s seems to independently rediscover the initial meanings of the theoretical concepts of “role” and “social play”. The continuity of the theoretical canon considers this scattered redemption of certain theoretical literary ideas, a phenomenon constantly dealt with by the history of ideas. Therefore, the fall of such patterns from thought systems that are rigorously conceptualized in the public discourse and from here, in literature is not always fatal. This paper follows this parallelism between what is happening with the idea of role and identity in human sciences, fiction and literary theory.
More...THE BOUNDARIES OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
The post-1989 transition of East-Central Europe to capitalist democracy has focused much scholarly attention on the political, economic, social, and cultural trajectories of the countries in the former Soviet bloc and on the fostering of new identities within a wider, European or global, context. Yet the ‘transitologists’ attempts to establish transregional comparisons that would tackle the similarities and differences between postcommunist territories and former colonies were met with deflection and silence among the proponents of postcolonial studies. With very few exceptions, Western scholars were rather reluctant to count the USSR among other, mostly European, “modern empires”. Still, the postcolonial sensibility of people in the Soviet sphere – as documented by oral history, sociological investigation, and cultural analyses – is hard to ignore. In the last few years, the postcolonial- postcommunist connection gained momentum in East-Central European studies, as part of the reflective attempts to translate a specific historical and cultural experience into one of the most widespread theoretical idioms in current academia. In doing so, East-Central European scholars interrogate the limits of an increasingly canonical discipline and join in its critical revaluations by measuring colonialism against other systems of domination.
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For the last two decades, the postcolonial theory has become one of the most dominant perspectives in the study of literature and culture in the Western Academia. Together with its increasingly more authoritarian voice, the postcolonial theory has also become able to influence peripheral scholar communities, including those coming from cultures with no direct link with the historical phenomenon of colonialisation. This influence seems to be of two distinct types. The first one is a mimetic one (i.e. unintermediated by local experiences) which has generated an imitative postcolonial discourse in local academia, mostly used by members of English language departments. The second one, which I can call particularizing (i.e. intermediated by local cultural experiences), has tried to adapt (to various degrees of intensity) the postcolonial perspective to local conditions. This second type of influence can be seen, for example, in the adaptation of the postcolonial theory to the analysis of the postcommunist cultural phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe. The same thing has happened in Romanian literary studies, although at a low degree of intensity. In this paper, I will try to analyze the impact of postcolonial theoretic speculation on the Romanian literary studies of the last two decades.
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The paper is an attempt to approach postcommunist identity scholarship to postcolonial and poststructuralist theory by focusing on hyphenation as an identity mark traceable in both harder and softer disciplinary approaches – and in poetry or fiction. In the first part, the theoretical scaffolding is constructed in a narrative about the origin of the hyphenation terms. They are shown to derive from postcolonial and poststructuralist theory as advanced in The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature (2006) by Emily Apter, a text which ties into Jacques Derrida’s Monolingualism of the Other: or, The Prosthesis of Origin (1998). Both of these are read in conjunction with the history of nationalism in Joep Leersen’s National Thought in Europe. A Cultural History (2006), where the hyphen indicates structuralist fusions, suppressions and adjonctions. The second, comparative part of the paper debates and demonstrates the applicability of the hyphenated identity terms in several collective identity discourses and texts. After documenting the Irish postcolonial identity still segregated between the typical mentalities developed in a colony of occupation (nationalist) and the successful settler colony one, by referring to poems by Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, to scathing satires from James Joyce’s “Oxen of the Sun” episode in Ulysses, and to the elegiac metropolitan essays by Hubert Butler, the following hypothesis can be advanced. That there is an analogy between the postcolonial case of British white colonialism in Ireland, a country still torn between two centres, and the postcommunist hyphenation due to the confrontation with eastern and western hegemony and discourses. On the postcommunist side, Romanian hyphenation is followed in Professor Sorin Alexandrescu’s imagological essay Paradoxul român (1998), which is compared to Joep Leersen’s history of European national thought, and to a more recent intellectual history anthology, Anti-Modernism – Radical Revisions of Collective Identity (2014). Because it documents several radical statements deployed until 1945 in Central and Southeast Europe, the latter book helps reconstruct the horizon of pre-communist identity to which postcommunist discourses prevailingly refer. The similarities and differences between European imagological and postcolonial studies, the latter developing under the sign of critical theory, are highlighted. They are put to work in the paper’s third part. Future directions for the analysis of meso-European regional hyphenation in relation to the poststructuralist and postcolonial paradigms are suggested.
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The interest in a contextualizing approach to literature is getting shape over the 1960s as a means of overcoming the dominant textual (and aesthetical) methodology or emphasis, of breaking away “from the formalist and New Critical emphasis on the autonomy of ‘the text itself’ toward a recognition (or a re- recognition) of the relevance of context, whether the latter be defined in terms of historical, cultural, ideological, or psychoanalytic categories.” (Suleiman – Crosman 1980: 5). In this paper I will consider exclusively the dynamics of reception theories between roughly 1970-1990. The reasons for which it seemed necessary to re-open this ‘case’ are twofold: firstly, to my knowledge Romanian literary culture still lacks a detailed introduction to the so-called ‘golden age’ of reception studies, an introduction that would cover both historical and theoretical aspects; secondly, and more important in my view: as we shall see in the final section of this paper, Romanian literary research, by its nature very prone, even obsessed to synchronize itself with Western theory, was not quite eager to absorb reception studies, especially in their German versions. After 1990, missing out certain stages suddenly brought our literary research to other topics of interest, very political ones, as for instance, cultural, gender, or postcolonial studies, etc. I strongly believe that a reassessment of this kind is still useful and necessary.
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The essay endeavors to apply Edward Said’s remarks on traveling theory by sketching a three-stage model, grounded on the evolution of critical consciousness from locality (specialization and selection of theory), to localization (loan and adaptation of theory) and creative localism (resistance to theory). Our analysis addresses Codrin-Liviu Cuţitaru’s books, from The Depersonalized History (1997) to The Present Discontinuous (2014), which contain pertinent illustrations of traveling theories, mainly localizations of Derrida’s “dissemination”, Fineman’s “historeme”, and Fukuyama’s “post-history”. Cuţitaru’s reflection on the subject’s displacement from history grows into a more nuanced vision, enhanced by a bitter awareness of literature’s role as a discipline within the changing curricula experimented by the Romanian universities after the fall of Communism. Experiencing both the locality of his own specialization (Professor of English/ American Studies), and the localization of foreign theories in a provincialized academic center (“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, established in the capital of the former Principality of Moldavia), the Romanian scholar arrives at a very original theory of creative localism. This provides the critic not only with arguments for resisting foreign theory, but also for opening himself towards the tradition of previous schools of criticism from Iaşi.
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This paper discusses Blecher’s prose, especially his last book, The Illuminated Burrow (1971, written in 1937-1938), which brings forth a (comparatively) new conception of literature as the space where fiction and autobiography meet, pursuing a deeper commitment to the “truth” of confession and, in the process, elaborating a new vision of the human psyche. Blecher’s critique of the autobiographical discourse is presented in its main aspects and the type of narration it produces is analysed. Blecher’s autobiographic writing is then compared to other groundbreaking contemporary works (André Breton’s Nadja and Michel Leiris’s L’Âge d’homme), in an attempt to see how these autobiographies from the proximity of surrealism transformed the genre.
More...QUAND LES ÉCRIVAINS DEVIENNENT PERSONNAGES DE ROMAN
Given as observational material the corpus of fictional texts offered by Sburătorul, the longest running literary circle within the Romanian space, which has functioned in Bucharest between 1919 and 1943 around the critic E. Lovinescu, we propose a reflection on how the writers become characters in the prose of their contemporaries. More specifically, we will take an interest on how the existence within the group – and the shared existential experience undertaken within it – influences the practice of the fictionalization as far as the biographies of the writers themselves are concerned. The Romanian case upon which we stopped proves an instrumentalization of these fictional biographies within the group. The "lives" are of no interest here as exemplary models; the construction doesn’t start from a myth; the means are not those of fictionalized biography. The presence of the writer is reduced to a few stuporous gestures, to several rigid and repetitive body postures, all of which are to be found in the scenography of the literary circle (attitudes of authority, manners of intervening in the discussion, voice quality and so on). Thus the presence of the writers seems to be a mere decoration – illustrations of the myths circulating within the community.
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Based on Tzvetan Todorov’s book, La littérature en péril [Literature in Peril] (2007), this study briefly examines the relationship between literary and philosophical reflection today. The anti- metaphysical strand of modern thought has naturally also permeated literary works and criticism, in the sense that the emphasis has shifted from meaning onto structure and from the author onto the reader. The disallowance of biographism ranks among the consequences of the modern cultural paradigms. The return to meaning advocated by the critics of “new criticism”, such as Tzvetan Todorov or the Romanian Eugen Simion, also involves, however, a return of the author, even if merely as a constituent of the text.
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The paper analyzes Vladimir Nabokov’s self-construction as an English prose writer in his novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Borrowing formal structures from other epic genres, Nabokov reflects upon the relationship between ‘the real’ and its fictional representation. The description of Sebastian Knight’s novels plays an important part in this complex literary game, especially when read against Nabokov’s autobiography and his later career. The main analytical concept is that of writerly posture, as theorized by J. Meizoz (2007). Indirectly represented through both the characters of Sebastian and V., his biographer (who becomes a writer himself), Nabokov’s posture as displayed in the novel is that of an innovative though still misinterpreted exile writer, who further explores and extends the aesthetic stakes of modernism.
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