ROMANIAN LITERARY HISTORY AT A CROSSROADS: MIHAI IOVĂNEL’S “HISTORY OF CONTEMPORARY ROMANIAN LITERATURE: 1990-2020” AND THE CULTURAL-MATERIALIST AND TRANSNATIONAL TURN IN LITERARY STUDIES

Abstract

As intellectual projects, literary histories hold a particular significance in Romanian culture; they recover authors and relegate them to anonymity, make and break canons, and promote and undermine ideologies and political agendas that reach far beyond literature and the aesthetic. “Literaturocentric,” as has been described by some, this culture has treasured literary historiography. To this very day, the greatest aspiration of most Romanian critics is to write a history of national literature—of entire Romanian literature. In certain quarters, literary histories published during the first half of the previous century are still subject to a cult of sorts. The genre, its illustrations, and the reactions to them appear to suggest that in Romania, perhaps more so than elsewhere, literary history speaks to the country’s ongoing wrestling with self-representation, to fantasies and anxieties of collective identity. This accounts for the remarkable proliferation of this critical mode and for its survival into a century that has otherwise witnessed the crisis and dearth of this form of literary scholarship. Be that as it may, one thing is clear: Romanian literary histories do not just describe a segment of culture; they are culturally descriptive and performative. They are a culture in and of themselves. They serve both as efforts to explain complex intersections between language, ideologies, and literary change and as self-referential tools for accumulating cultural capital in the interrelated fields of literature and its study.