The Romanian Novel and World Literature (1800-1947)
Editors: Ștefan Baghiu, Mihaela Ursa, Andrei Terian
Call for Papers for Conference & Collective Volume
It is our privilege to invite scholars specialized in Romanian literature, literary theory, comparative literature, cultural studies, quantitative analysis, Digital Humanities, World Literature, and others to contribute to our forthcoming volume. We aim to chart the evolution of the novel in local literary production and translation starting from several recent studies in World Literature and Romanian literature. We would like to put the rise of the novel in Romania and its pre-WW2 development in connection to the “transnational network” that the genre created worldwide in the 19th century and the first half of the last century.
In order to give a more coherent structure to the collective volume we invite the contributors to an Academic Conference within TRANOV in order to present and get feedback on their work in Sibiu, Romania (details to be announced in March, after the Abstract submission).
Abstracts (400 words or less): November 20, 2021 (REVISED)
Complete articles (6-8000 words): February 15, 2022 (REVISED)
Topics:
- Translations and the role they play within the Romanian polysystem (quantitative analysis, translation theory, comparative approaches).
- Comparative analysis of translation programs in Eastern European literatures (differences between the development of the genre between regional cultures).
- The novel and the World System: close-ups on the center-periphery dynamic and microanalysis.
- Networks of translations and transnational agents of the novel.
- Authors who “traveled” (migration, displacement, cultural communication with foreign places) and their role within the development of Romanian literature and the novel.
- Imitations & original outputs of the genre in Romanian context.
- Intercultural exchanges and minorities.
- Worlding the novel in Romania through fictional depictions of the planet: class, race, gender.
- Ideological and methodological imports regarding a theory of the novel within the specified network.
Main References:
Baghiu, Ștefan, Vlad Pojoga, and Maria Sass (eds.). Ruralism and Literature in Romania. Peter Lang, 2019.
Casanova, Pascale. The World Republic of Letters. Harvard University Press, 2004.
Cornis-Pope, Marcel, and John Neubauer (eds.). History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe. Junctures and Disjuncture in the 19th and 20th Centuries, vol. I-IV. John Benjamins, 2004-2010.
Cotter, Sean. Literary Translation and the Idea of a Minor Romania. Rochester: Boydell & Brewer, University of Rochester Press, 2014.
Martin, Mircea, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian. Romanian Literature as World Literature. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
Moraru, Christian. Reading for the Planet. Toward a Geomethodology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015.
Moretti, Franco (ed.). The Novel, volume 1: History, Geography, and Culture. Princeton University Press, 2006.
Moretti, Franco. Atlas of The European Novel: 1800-1900. Verso, 1998.
Moretti, Franco. Canon/Archive. New York: N+1 Foundation, 2017.
Sass, Maria, Ștefan Baghiu, and Vlad Pojoga. The Culture of Translation in Romania. Peter Lang, 2018.
Sassoon, Donald. The Culture of the Europeans. From 1800 to the Present. Harper Collins, 2011.
Tally Jr., Robert T. (ed.). Literary Cartographies: Spatiality, Representation, and Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Tally Jr., Robert T. ed. Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place, and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Terian, Andrei. “National Literature, World Literatures, and Universality in Romanian Cultural Criticism 1867–1947.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, 5 (2013). https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.2344.
Tihanov, Galin. The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond. Stanford University Press, 2019.
Ursa, Mihaela. “Made in Translation: A National Poetics for the Transnational World.” In Romanian Literature as World Literature, edited by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian, 309-325. New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).
Westphal, Bertrand. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Translated by Robert T. Tally Jr. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
Westphal, Bertrand. The Plausible World. A Geocritical Approach to Space, Place, and Maps. Translated by Amy D. Wells. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
WReC. Combined and Uneven Development. Towards a New Theory of World-Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015.
Archives & Corpuses:
Baghiu, Ștefan, Vlad Pojoga, Cosmin Borza, Andreea Coroian Goldiș, Daiana Gârdan, Emanuel Modoc, David Morariu, Teodora Susarenco, Radu Vancu, and Dragoș Varga. Muzeul Digital al Romanului Românesc: secolul al XIX-lea [The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: The 19th Century]. Sibiu: Complexul Național Muzeal ASTRA, 2019. https://revistatransilvania.ro/mdrr. Accessed November 15, 2020. (MDRR)
Baghiu, Ștefan, Vlad Pojoga, Cosmin Borza, Andreea Coroian Goldiș, Denisa Frătean, Daiana Gârdan, Alex Goldiș, Emanuel Modoc, Iunis Minculete, David Morariu, Ovio Olaru, Teodora Susarenco, Andrei Terian, Radu Vancu, and Dragoș Varga. Muzeul Digital al Romanului Românesc: 1901-1932 [The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: 1901-1932]. Sibiu: Complexul Național Muzeal ASTRA, 2020. https://revistatransilvania.ro/mdrr1901-1932. Available December 15, 2020. (MDRR2)
Patras, Roxana. Romanian Novel Corpus (ELTeC-rom): Release with 80 novels encoded at level 1. (Version v0.7.0) [Data set]. Zenodo (2020). In European Literary Text Collection (ELTeC), version 1.0.0, November 2020, edited by Carolin Odebrecht, Lou Burnard and Christof Schöch. COST Action Distant Reading for European Literary History (CA16204). DOI: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4274954.
The Editors:
Ştefan Baghiu is a PhD and Assistant Professor of Romanian Literature and Literary Theory with the Department of Romance Studies at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu. He co-edited The Culture of Translation in Romania (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2018) and Ruralism and Literature in Romania (Berlin: Peter Lang, 2019). Secretary of Transilvania journal in Sibiu, coordinator of Astra Data Mining: The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: https://revistatransilvania.ro/mdrr/.
Mihaela Ursa is Professor of comparative literature and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Letters, Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania. Editor-in-chief of Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory: https://www.metacriticjournal.com. She has authored books, articles, studies and chapters on comparative literature, cultural studies, intermediality, gender studies and critical theory. Present in series such as Literatures as World Literature, at Bloomsbury USA (2018), and Palgrave Studies in Life Writing at Palgrave Macmillan (2019).
Andrei Terian is Vice Rector and Professor of Romanian literature at the Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu, Romania. His most recent book is the co-edited volume Romanian Literature as World Literature (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). His specialties are twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury Romanian literature, cultural theory, the history of modern criticism, and comparative and world literature. His latest books include the monographs G. Călinescu: The Fifth Essence (2009) and Exporting Criticism: Theories, Contexts, Ideologies (2013).