Description

The fact that, during the last half of century, European and North-American literary theory, criticism and historiography have undergone unprecedented development, diversity and complexity in their evolution is now one of the commonplace occurrences of international literary research. With the emergence and confirmation of French New Criticism during 1950s-1960, Western European – and, shortly after it, North-American – literary research was pepped up by a series of new methodological directions (structuralism, thematism, existentialism, psychocriticism, stylistic criticism, narratology, mythical and archetypal criticism, social criticism, textualism, deconstruction, post-structuralism in general, the aesthetics of reception and Reader-Response Criticism, New Historicism, etc.), which then acquired the position of patterns that would reform gradually the entire field of social-humanist sciences. On the other hand, the last 50 years have seen an increasingly active involvement of Occidental literary criticism in the ideological debates and in the social problems that had an impact on the structure and dynamics of their own communities: whether by relating one way or another to the dominant ideological paradigms of the epoch, or by developing a series of particular cultural policies, the most important directions in Occidental literary criticism, theory and historiography during the second half of the last century have influenced strongly not only their own disciplinary field or the intellectual tone of the time, but also the social existence of the communities within which they were present.

Conversely, it is equally known that in Romania, too, such fields have known an impetuous development during the last five decades, mainly because of the adoption of Western-origin methodological (and, within the terms of the epoch, ideological) patterns. The process of synchronization of Romanian literary research begins in 1965, the year we have selected as benchmark of our project precisely because it indicates the transfer from a single cultural model, totalitarian, founded on the dogma of socialist realism, to a cultural model that, even if not necessarily democratic, was at least plural, one in which the authoritarianism of the official doctrine would still allow a seemingly democratic polarization of cultural fields (leading to the thesis, to be closely examined during our research, that during Ceausescu’s communism literary criticism would be the most liberal sector in the social-humanist sciences). Despite such circumstances, the actual liberalization emerges, for the literary research as well as for the entire Romanian society, only after 1989, another benchmark-year, which marks out decisively the transition from totalitarianism to democracy, from socialism to market economy and from the national-communist ideological hybrid to an authentic European nature.

Nevertheless, a frequently discussed topic in the literature is the fact that total revolution will stay an illusion in the field of socio-cultural life and that, usually, regime or paradigm changes enable certain institutional or mind-set residues from the former epochs. This stays valid also for Romanian literary criticism and ideology, where there were often notes of realist-socialist expressions in the period following 1965 and the preservation of national-communist after-effects during the period following 1989. A series of questions concerning directly the theme of our project emerge: To what extent did the communist regime allow and to what extent did it prevent the synchronization of Romanian literary criticism, theory and historiography with the top methodological patterns of international (mainly occidental) literary research during 1965-1989? To what extent did Romanian literary research after 1990 manage to gain on the technological and ideological delay caused by the communist legacy? How did Romanian literary criticism, theory and historiography subscribe to the political and ideological field of Ceausescu’s totalitarianism? How did they redefine their ideological and institutional position during the two post-communist decades? In the current methodological and ideological context, best described by an increase of competitiveness in all fields of knowledge and, simultaneously, by a profound re-sizing of the place and function of social-humanist sciences in the global-type societies, such issues acquire capital importance. This takes place the more that until now there hasn’t been any attempt of systematic balance of the impact of Occidental methodological and ideological imports on Romanian literary theory, criticism and historiography during 1965-2010.

This leads to a series of important unsolved problems: the degree of impact made by the European and North-American methodological patterns on the Romanian literary research in the period 1965-2010; the main types of methods and ideologies selected by criticism, theory and literary historiography in the second phase of Romanian communism (1965-1989); the degree of comprehension and assimilation of the new methods of criticism in relation with the national-communist ideology and the autochthonous exegetic traditions (impressionism, Călinescu’s manner etc.); the concrete results (at text analysis level, at conceptual segmentation level, at historiographical description level) of the operationalization of import methodological patterns; the effects generated by the new critical and theoretical models of Occidental origin at ideological level; the methodological and ideological structure of the field of Romanian literary criticism from the Ceaușescu period; the relation between the mimetic acceptance and creative re-contextualization of the methods and ideologies borrowed by the Romanian literary research from the national-communist period; the nature of Occidental methods and ideologies adopted by the Romanian criticism, theory and literary historiography in postcommunism (1989-2010); the degree of creative comprehension, adjustment and recontextualization of the new methods imported after 1989; the methodological and ideological consequences of postmodernism on the Romanian literary research in the last two decades; the preoccupation of rewriting the national literary history in consequence of abolishing the totalitarianism, and the integration of Romanian criticism and literature in an international context in consequence of the globalization; the methodological and ideological polarization of the current field of Romanian criticism, theory and literary historiography and the status of the disciplines mentioned in Romania at the moment; the present relation between Romanian and international literary research: synchronized and dephazed; unexplored opportunities of emphasize Romanian criticism, theory and literary historiography at international level.

These unsolved problems represent the main motivation of our project: in the current epistemological context, one of accelerated globalization, of top research intensification, of inter-cultural changes and inter-disciplinary transfers, we need an evaluation of the status, level and potential of contemporary Romanian criticism, theory and literary historiography in relation with the international realizations from the respective domains. Due to the fact that the interest of international philological top research for the study material provided by the Romanian literature is still reduced, such an evaluation cannot be done yet in a relevant manner from the perspective of empirical/punctual acquisitions made on a common investigation area (such as Romanian literature) but only from the perspective of methodological and theoretical patterns theorised and/or instrumented by European, North-American and Romanian literary research.