tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-79253376235055398692024-03-13T02:25:26.025+02:00STRATEGIES FOR DECOLONIZATION IN POSTCOMMUNISMA Postcolonial Perspective on National Identity Discourses by Romanian Public Intellectuals after 1989Bogdan Stefanescuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15820818392812450434noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925337623505539869.post-15699729278938820072013-03-27T09:41:00.002+02:002013-03-27T09:53:23.335+02:00Reluctant Siblings: Postcommunism and Postcolonialism<a href="http://www.blogger.com/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span style="font-size: xx-small;"></span><br />
<div align="LEFT">
<span style="font-size: xx-small;">Published in <em>Word and Text. </em></span><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,Times New Roman; font-size: xx-small;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman,Times New Roman; font-size: xx-small;"><em>A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics.</em> II. 1 (June 2012): 13–26. <a href="http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/documente/documente/Arhiva/Wordandtextno3/01Stefanescu.pdf">http://jlsl.upg-ploiesti.ro/documente/documente/Arhiva/Wordandtextno3/01Stefanescu.pdf</a></span></span></div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHDAIL2JuP5LOSKOXx_MycU3UCUBj4x9dOdYBmWdtpk8jr57bWpYNzIpyWX8W-tIUxUugtav2sH-2j4mDTJd8YmNoviSqJyOagDeLE7vMKDTojcZWxSBzHxa71Log67OiLko_j33kAVfN6/s1600/Reluctant+Siblings+First+Page.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgHDAIL2JuP5LOSKOXx_MycU3UCUBj4x9dOdYBmWdtpk8jr57bWpYNzIpyWX8W-tIUxUugtav2sH-2j4mDTJd8YmNoviSqJyOagDeLE7vMKDTojcZWxSBzHxa71Log67OiLko_j33kAVfN6/s1600/Reluctant+Siblings+First+Page.jpg" /></a><br />
<!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600"
o:spt="75" o:preferrelative="t" path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f"
stroked="f">
<v:stroke joinstyle="miter"/>
<v:formulas>
<v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"/>
<v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"/>
</v:formulas>
<v:path o:extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect"/>
<o:lock v:ext="edit" aspectratio="t"/>
</v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_i1025" type="#_x0000_t75" style='width:446.25pt;
height:631.5pt' o:ole="">
<v:imagedata src="file:///C:/Users/boxy/AppData/Local/Temp/msoclip1/01/clip_image001.png"
o:title=""/>
</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OLEObject Type="Embed" ProgID="AcroExch.Document.11" ShapeID="_x0000_i1025"
DrawAspect="Content" ObjectID="_1425882369">
</o:OLEObject>
</xml><![endif]--><a href="http://www.blogger.com/" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.1pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype
id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" o:spt="75" o:preferrelative="t"
path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f">
<v:stroke joinstyle="miter"/>
<v:formulas>
<v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"/>
<v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"/>
</v:formulas>
<v:path o:extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect"/>
<o:lock v:ext="edit" aspectratio="t"/>
</v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_i1025" type="#_x0000_t75" style='width:446.25pt;
height:631.5pt' o:ole="">
<v:imagedata src="file:///C:/Users/boxy/AppData/Local/Temp/msoclip1/01/clip_image001.png"
o:title=""/>
</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OLEObject Type="Embed" ProgID="AcroExch.Document.11" ShapeID="_x0000_i1025"
DrawAspect="Content" ObjectID="_1425882571">
</o:OLEObject>
</xml><![endif]--><span lang="EN-US" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; letter-spacing: 0.1pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;"><!--[if gte vml 1]><v:shapetype
id="_x0000_t75" coordsize="21600,21600" o:spt="75" o:preferrelative="t"
path="m@4@5l@4@11@9@11@9@5xe" filled="f" stroked="f">
<v:stroke joinstyle="miter"/>
<v:formulas>
<v:f eqn="if lineDrawn pixelLineWidth 0"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @0 1 0"/>
<v:f eqn="sum 0 0 @1"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @2 1 2"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelWidth"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @3 21600 pixelHeight"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @0 0 1"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @6 1 2"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelWidth"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @8 21600 0"/>
<v:f eqn="prod @7 21600 pixelHeight"/>
<v:f eqn="sum @10 21600 0"/>
</v:formulas>
<v:path o:extrusionok="f" gradientshapeok="t" o:connecttype="rect"/>
<o:lock v:ext="edit" aspectratio="t"/>
</v:shapetype><v:shape id="_x0000_i1025" type="#_x0000_t75" style='width:446.25pt;
height:631.5pt' o:ole="">
<v:imagedata src="file:///C:/Users/boxy/AppData/Local/Temp/msoclip1/01/clip_image001.png"
o:title=""/>
</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><!--[endif]--><!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
<o:OLEObject Type="Embed" ProgID="AcroExch.Document.11" ShapeID="_x0000_i1025"
DrawAspect="Content" ObjectID="_1425882615">
</o:OLEObject>
</xml><![endif]--></span></span><br />Bogdan Stefanescuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15820818392812450434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925337623505539869.post-77651800264978841032013-03-27T08:56:00.000+02:002013-03-27T08:56:44.720+02:00Romania's Post-totalitarian Cinema<span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">“Narratives of the
Emerging Self: Romania's First Years of Post-totalitarian Cinema” </span><br />
<span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">(co-author
Sanda Foamete)</span><br />
<span>Published in <em>Cinemas
in Transition in Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. </em>E</span><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">ds. Catherine Portuges and Peter Hames. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
University Press, 2013.</span><br />
<span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">EAN: 978-1-59213-265-2<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"></span><br />
<span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><a href="http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1747_reg.html">http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/1747_reg.html</a>
</span>
<br />
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 10pt;">
</div>
</div>
</div>
Bogdan Stefanescuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15820818392812450434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925337623505539869.post-11639391525095107982011-06-29T23:14:00.001+03:002011-09-30T10:02:11.509+03:001. OUTLINE OF THE PROJECT<h2 style="margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-size: small;">1.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">PRELIMINARY REMARKS: THE SCOPE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE PROJECT<o:p></o:p></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 17.75pt 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The current economic and financial crisis has made it more difficult for countries of the former communist block to exit their transition from a state-controlled to a market economy and from a totalitarian to a democratic political regime. The national reconstruction in these countries has become increasingly awkward. Against this insecurity, the public intellectuals in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place> once more are playing an important role in shaping public opinion, as they did in the first years that followed the fall of communism. Arguably, the voice of opinion shapers conditions the public representations of the present and future of the country, as well as the sway of political sympathies. The discourse of public intellectuals can often outline the immediate course for the nation by certain discursive tactics which go hand in hand with distinct ideological stances. These varied discourses generate alternative portraits and narratives of the nation whose interplay generates such a country’s historical and political dynamics. It remains for ordinary citizens to choose their favorite account of the nation and to empower the political figures who claim to be able to translate these stories into reality. And so today’s words are tomorrow’s deeds. It, then, becomes imperative for us to understand the mechanics of public discourse on reconfiguring the nation that we may evaluate and predict its impact on society.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h3 style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><em>Study Object<o:p></o:p></em></span></h3><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 17.75pt 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Given the premise that the discourse of public intellectuals is one of the most significant shapers of the collective self, this study undertakes to classify and analyze the most noticeable national self-imaging discourse types from public intellectuals in post-1989 Romanian cultural periodicals.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt 47.75pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I am using <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">discourse</i> in the pragmatic and post-Foucauldian sense of the term to implicate the relationships between thought, speech and action, between the various domains and instances of discourse in society, between communication and disputes for power, status and legitimacy. Precedence is given to one particular interdependency, that between modes of enunciating and ideological stances as suggested by Hayden White (see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Methodology</i> section below).<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt 47.75pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I take the phrase ‘public intellectuals’ to refer to educated personalities who are well-known outside their own specialism who undertake to discuss issues of general interest for a lay yet relatively educated audience through the channels of the public media (Richard Posner, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Public Intellectuals</i>, Harvard University Press, 2001).<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt 47.75pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The analytical instruments (detailed below) come from postcolonial, subaltern, and cultural studies, falling largely within the poststructuralist paradigm. The methodological transfer is grounded in the relative compatibility between the postcolonial and the postcommunist situation. In both cases, we are dealing with victimized cultures whose identities suffered the aggression of a foreign oppressor and are experiencing a post-traumatic historical interval.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt 47.75pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Accounts of postcommunism usually come from historians, economists, sociologists, and political scientists. By contrast, the contribution of discourse scholars to this subject is rather modest. And postcolonial analyses are even scantier, although this is a repository of exemplary accounts of historically traumatized cultures, which were occupied and mutilated by foreign powers, and which eventually gained their freedom and faced the surprisingly difficult task of recovering their cultural identity—which is precisely the condition of former communist countries. This project sets out to compare the two situations and to associate them methodologically for a better understanding of the two hypostases and of the dynamic of post-1989 Romanian culture. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-size: small;">2.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">THE AIMS OF THE STUDY<o:p></o:p></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l7 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To identify and classify the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ideological discourses on national identity</i> by which public intellectuals secure their legitimacy in the reconstruction of post-1989 Romanian society and shape the public imaginary. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l7 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To analyze <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rhetorical alternatives </i>for the reconstruction of postcommunist national identity.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l7 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To catalog the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prevalent themes and images of the discourse of decolonization</i> and scrutinize how they are inflected in the homologous context of decommunization. This will implicitly validate the methodological transfer between postcolonial and postcommunist studies.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l7 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To document how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ideological matrices operate in relative autonomy from historical conjunctures </i>and how <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doctrines operate differently in dissimilar contexts</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l7 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To compare the inventory and behavior of national identity discourses with those of postcolonial cultures.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">By following these routes I hope to evince certain discursive ideological types, that is, an arsenal of categories of self-representation, which function differently in unlike cultural contexts.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-size: small;">3.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">THE METHODOLOGY: THE THEORETICAL BASIS, CRITICAL INSTRUMENTS, AND INTERPRETIVE FRAMEWORK<o:p></o:p></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The premises of my study are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">constructivist</i> along the line of such studies as B. Anderson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Imagined Communities</i>, E. Hobsbawm’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Invention of Tradition</i>, or E. Gellner’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nations and Nationalism</i>. Like these scholars, I take national identity to be imagined or invented, rather than given. I will be working with a modified version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hayden White’s tropology</i> (developed in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Metahistory</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tropics of Discourse</i>) in conjunction with the theoretical positioning and the analytical instruments provided by poststructuralist postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The corpus will consist of samples of national identity discourse from the cultural postcommunist press where public intellectuals discuss the repositioning of Romanian culture in relation to the West. Such texts will be compared with their pre-1989 genealogies and with their (post)colonial equivalents.</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Adopting the methodology commonly used in accounts of postcolonial emancipation in order to analyze postcommunism will ensure <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a contrastive study of</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">post-traumatic cultures whose shared genus, I argue, is postimperialism.</i> I aim to document both the structural discursive homologies and the different historical conjunctures that define the role of public intellectuals in postcommunism and postcolonialism. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-size: small;">4.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">ORIGINAL CONTRIBUTION OF THE RESEARCH<o:p></o:p></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Nationalism and national consciousness are usually tackled by ‘hard’ approaches that focus on economic, political, and social contexts. I am proposing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a new soft approach that is concerned with discursive modalities of expressing subjectivity</i>. The quaternary analytical grid I employ (the modified White model) is instrumental in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">avoiding the simplifying bipolar typologies like civic/liberal/good/Western nationalism vs. ethnic/bad/Eastern European nationalism, or traditional humanism vs. radicalism</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Though I support Anderson’s thesis regarding the imaginary construction of national identity, I am reserved as to his dealing mostly with objective, hard, material aspects (print capitalism, Protestantism, the lay state and its institutions etc.) and with the instruments of identity construction, while ignoring the constructing/constructed subject and the manner in which such a human subject conceives his/her identity. I, therefore, propose to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bring back to the fore of constructivist interpretations</i> their long disregarded protagonist, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">human subjectivity and discourse as the medium of its expression</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l9 level1 lfo4; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I am <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">modifying Hayden White’s explanatory scheme</i> by introducing new and more appropriate master tropes like simile and antithesis (along the lines of François Hartog’s study of the representations of otherness in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Mirror of Herodotus</i>), as well as by reconfiguring the correspondences between the master tropes and the ideological archetypes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo5; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There is almost unanimous opposition to associating postcolonialism and postcommunism coming from traditional historians, or historians of the imaginary, postcolonial critics, and postcommunist scholars. My research articulates a plea for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">inclusion of the two hypostases under the same category or genus</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and a demonstration of the viability of a conceptual and methodological transfer between the two fields</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-size: small;">5.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">TOPICALITY AND EXPECTED IMPACT OF THE PROJECT<o:p></o:p></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I believe the alternative perspective that my study proposes will generate a fresh understanding of the postcommunist phenomenon and it may also trigger revisions of postcolonial theory. The discourse of public intellectuals has been analyzed so far from the perspective offered by media and communication studies or by political science. Submitting this subject to a tropological examination would be a first. The present research aims to generate an interdisciplinary field at the crossroads between rhetoric and discourse analysis, narratology, the study of ideology, history, nationalism studies, postcolonialism, and postcommunism.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In order to fully grasp the importance of such a novel critical site, one must size the current difficulties. The understanding of postcommunism has been hindered by the parochialism of the case studies presented by critics and the desire to work within confined and outdated models. Moreover, communication between the various postcommunist cultures has been scarce in the absence of a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lingua franca</i> and of translations between these vernaculars. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Perhaps the language is the very key to a solution. My project suggests there are common deep structures of the discourses of national reconstruction whatever the domain, topic or political allegiance. Ignoring the discursive mechanisms which shape political, economic, spiritual or any other representations might preclude a genuine understanding of the postcommunist phenomenon. Discourse analysis might offer the suggestion of a common conceptual idiom for converging the various disciplinary angles.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">An additional problem for the study of postcommunism is the belief in a single ultimate truth entertained by social and human scientists, as well as by political contenders. Being impervious to alternative discourses and interpretations obstructs the dialog and the ability to conjugate explanatory efforts. In the West, cultural studies with their poststructuralist take on self-imaging discourses have generated new knowledge and a change of mentality that led to a reorganization of society. Postcolonial cultural studies focus on the power of discourse in self-representations with the aid of a rich and multidisciplinary analytical arsenal. They have given up all universalist claims and have called for tolerance.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It is in this spirit that I propose to approach my topic. I hope that by striving for a non-partisan treatment of apparently irreconcilable theories and ideologies I may foster new insights and a pluralist climate. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;"><span style="font-size: small;">6.</span><span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span><span style="font-size: small;">PRIOR EXPERIENCE AND RESEARCH<o:p></o:p></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Publications:<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l10 level1 lfo6; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">‘On the Discrimination of Nationalisms’, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Krytyka</i>, no. 11/Nov. 1999, Kiew, <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Ukraine</st1:place></st1:country-region>. (The article sketches the principles of tropologism and suggests ways in which it can be used in the study of nationalism.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo7; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Review of R. Brubaker et al., </span><i><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town</span></i><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bloomsbury Review</i> vol. 28/No. 1/</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Jan-Feb 2008.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo8; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">‘On the Inconvenience of Being Born a Romanian, or A Third Discourse from the <st1:place w:st="on">Second World</st1:place>: Postcommunist Dilemmas in the Age of Postimperialist Emancipation’.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> A chapter on the theoretical and ideological relationship between postcommunism and postcolonialism in <i><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Transatlantic Dialogues. Eastern Europe, The <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> and Post-Cold War Cultural Spaces.</span></i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> Eds. Rodica Mihaila and Roxana</span></span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> Oltean, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2009.</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l6 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Dictionary items/articles on ‘colonization’, ‘colonialism’, and ‘postcolonial studies’ in </span><i><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Dicționarul de termeni culturali</span></i><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;"> (A Dictionary of Cultural Terms). Ed. Mircea Martin (to be </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">published by Paralela 45 in 2011).</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo10; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">‘Narratives of the Emerging Self: <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Romania</st1:place></st1:country-region>’s First Years of Post-Totalitarian Cinema.’ Chapter on postcommunist Romanian cinematography in </span><i><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Cinema in Transition</span></i><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">. Eds. Catherine Portuges and Peter Hames (to be published by Temple University Press, Philadelphia in 2011).</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><b><i><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">Scholarships:</span></i></b><b><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Guest of the Rector grant by <st1:placename w:st="on">New</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Europe</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">College</st1:placetype> in 2003-2004 with a research project on the contribution of public intellectuals to nationalist discourse in post-1989 <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><b><i><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Taught classes:<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo10; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Joint MA course on <i>The Rhetorical Construction of National Identity</i> at the <st1:placename w:st="on">British</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Cultural</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Studies</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Center</st1:placetype>, the <st1:placename w:st="on">American</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Studies</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Center</st1:placetype>, and the <st1:placename w:st="on">Canadian</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Studies</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Center</st1:placetype>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:placename></st1:place>. <a href="http://stefanescu-nationalism.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: blue;">http://stefanescu-nationalism.blogspot.com/</span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo10; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">MA course on Postcommunism/Postcolonialism. Siblings of Subalter(n)ity at the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">British</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Cultural</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Studies</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Center</st1:placetype></st1:place>. <a href="http://postcommunism-postcolonialism.blogspot.com/"><span style="color: blue;">http://postcommunism-postcolonialism.blogspot.com/</span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Conference organizer and contributor:</span></i></b><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo11; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Co-organizer of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postcolonialism-Postcommunism</i> joint conference of the Romanian Institute for Recent History and the <st1:placename w:st="on">British</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Cultural</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Studies</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Center</st1:placetype> at the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:placename></st1:place> held on 29 June 2004. Contribution: one of three keynote speeches on ‘The relevance of postcolonial studies for research on Romanian postcommunism’.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo11; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt; text-indent: 30pt;"><span style="font-family: Wingdings; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: Wingdings; mso-fareast-font-family: Wingdings;"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">v<span style="font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 7pt/normal "Times New Roman";"> </span></span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Co-organizer of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Postcolonialism/Postcommunism: Intersections and Overlaps</i> international conference of the <st1:placename w:st="on">Canadian</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Studies</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">Center</st1:placetype> at the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:placename></st1:place> held on 23-24 April 2010. Contribution: ‘</span><span lang="RO" style="color: black; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">Noica's Nook, or How the Marginalized Intellectuals May Use Reverse Philosophy in a Communist Country’</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 12pt; tab-stops: list 30.0pt 42.0pt;"><br />
</div>Bogdan Stefanescuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15820818392812450434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925337623505539869.post-84162280828592965542011-06-28T07:29:00.002+03:002011-09-30T09:51:05.424+03:00Hayden White in Bucharest<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: right; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Published in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dilema veche</i>, no. 357, 16-22 Dec. 2010<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: right; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://www.dilemaveche.ro/sectiune/polul-plus/articol/onoarea-dezonora-istoria"><span style="color: #541b12;">http://www.dilemaveche.ro/sectiune/polul-plus/articol/onoarea-dezonora-istoria</span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: right; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Bogdan </span><span lang="RO" style="mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Ș</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">tefănescu<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">On the Honor of Dishonoring History.<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Hayden White in <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:place></st1:city><o:p></o:p></span></i></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">This may well be the first time that the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:placename></st1:place> grants a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">doctor honoris causa</i> to a troublemaker. For that is what Professor Hayden White is, an eternal troublemaker.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Many questioned the merits and accomplishments of this sparkle-eyed, prestigious 82-year-old critic with a teenager’s appetite for inflammation, yet none has been able to shake the stature of this provocative and renowned personality of postmodern theory.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">In the conferences and roundtables he has attended in <st1:city w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:city> at the Central University Library and the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">New</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Europe</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">College</st1:placetype></st1:place>, the voice of the venerable Professor White picked up in scherzando the staid ideas of the greenhorn White, the young critic who, almost half a century ago, looked back in anger at the tradition of historiography. After all, he owes his fame to his pioneering work in the late 60s and early 70s when Hayden White started causing havoc among historians. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The door was opened by ‘The Burden of History’, his revolutionary 1966 article in <em><span style="color: black;">History and Theory</span></em><span style="color: black;">, vol. 5, no 2, 1966, pp. 111-134 (later included in <em>Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism</em>. <st1:city w:st="on">Baltimore</st1:city> and <st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city>: The <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Johns</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Hopkins</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place> Press, 1978). Here is a brief and plain list of his claims in that legendary text.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">First, that historians are rigid, yet lacking rigor, that they are impressionistic, yet devoid of sensitivity, that history has become a second-hand art and a third-hand science (after the exact and the natural sciences). Here White scratches open old scars by recollecting scornful portraits of historians by Nietzsche’ (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Birth of Tragedy </i>and ‘On the <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Uses</span> and Disadvantages of <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">History</span> for Life’), George Eliot, Ibsen, Gide, Th. Mann, Camus, Sartre etc.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Then, that historians are hypocrites and theoretically infantile when they profess to be exempt from both the requirements of experimental science and the standards of stylistic excellence and artistic intuition, while claiming that theirs is both a scientific and an artistic endeavor. In fact, historians insist on operating within an outdated Romantic schism between artists who despise science and scientists who ignore art. White demands of historians that they acknowledge history to be no more than a nineteenth-century historical accident which needs to be radically reconsidered in the middle of the twentieth century.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Not the least of White’s accusations in ‘The Burden of History’ is that historians are content to mouth governmental slogans and patriotic platitudes while failing to prepare us for historical catastrophes (much less foresee them), as the world wars demonstrate. He proclaims that history has become a morbid burden for his contemporaries as it merely perpetuates and legitimizes anachronistic institutions by means of an antiquarian discourse replete with necrophiliac fixations.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">White offers that historians should adopt the emancipated stance of the modern art critic. Unlike the traditional historian, the art critic acknowledges several versions of reality. Constable’s representation of life is neither more ‘correct’ nor less than that of <span style="color: black;">Cézanne, it simply relies on a different figurative principle of internal cohesion. For history, the dominant <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">metaphor</i> of a text selects and organizes the historical material in accordance with a certain <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">style</i> of representing the past. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">It may well be that ‘The Burden of History’ was the germinating prelude of an emerging work. The article put forth the main themes of a philosophical path that was unfolding.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Metahistory</span></i></b><span style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The next and carefully prepared stride for White was the take-off step for his legendary jump into posterity. History recorded the event as </span><em><span lang="RO" style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe</span></em><span lang="RO" style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> (Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Here the American theorist tackles an illusionist’s act as spectacular and scandalous as the magic of the old alchemists. Under the suspicious eyes of the experts, White materialized a convict whose sentence had been life transparency: the language of history. Hitherto, historians had cried treason whenever the manner of narrating would distract the reader’s attention and had deported the culprits to the realm of belletrism. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">White dares us embrace a doctrine as shocking as alchemic transmutation, to wit, that any history is at heart a poetic text. That narrating fact or fiction is no more than story-telling and, like any story, it can be told in various ways. He instructs us that there are four styles of historical thought grafted on four master tropes produced by a tradition that yokes together such improbable peers as Vico and Kenneth Burke, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. White is not talking of mere decorative embellishments, but of organizing principles of our representations of the past. When touched by the magic wand of one of these four modes of discourse coagulation, the narrative assumes one of the corresponding archetypes of emplotment taken from Northrop Frye: romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire. An initiate into the mysteries of the universe of discourse, White summons a table of correspondences invisible to the profane. Behind the four master tropes and the four narrative archetypes, loom Stephen C. Pepper’s four epistemological modes (formism, organicism, mechanism, and contextualism) and Karl Mannheim’s four ideological utopias (anarchism, radicalism, liberalism, and conservatism). <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The theoretical groundwork is then followed by seductive accounts of the historical narratives of Michelet, </span><span lang="RO" style="color: black; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Ranke, Tocqueville şi Burkhardt and of the tropical manners of philosophers of history like Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, and Croce. All of these surveys rest on the intuition that the style of these diverse authors consists in the tension between the tropological, narrative, epistemological, and ideological choices.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Most of his critics and fans have been smitten by Hayden White’s pioneering courage: he was a neo-historicist a decade before Stephen Greenblatt, he assumed a postmodern condition before Lyotard described it, he practiced poststructuralist discourse analysis before the Derrida and Foucault craze hit America, and he proposed the pluralism of interpretations and ironic perspectivism a few years before Rorty did.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>White has done more than swim against the traditional tides. He has remained the opponent of any form of theoretical monotheism, of any inflexible critical jargon, even the revolutionary ones. An ironist through and through, White pushes irony to an act of ultimate lucidity by turning it on itself. Whenever he seemed to be an advocate of relativism, he proclaimed the need of moral imperatives, and whenever he seemed the champion of historiographic variations, he invoked transhistorical archetypes. This explains how he has managed to irritate the traditionalists and disappoint the postmodern. Free from any dogma, White holds that antidogmatic freedom is sacred. He is still eager to break the windows of any museum of ideas and allow the latter to breathe the open air again—live and grow once more.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">A maverick of the interpretation of history, Hayden White has made history even outside his discipline. In 1972, one year before the publication of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Metahistory</i>, White helped inaugurate the age of academic autonomy and freedom of conscience when he won a Supreme Court lawsuit against the LA police, whom he accused of having undercover officers register for classes to infiltrate the campuses and spy on academics and students. Forty years later, White talked in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:city></st1:place> about the illegal nature of certain laws and about historians who learn nothing from history. Once again, he did what he has always been good at, scandalize and galvanize his public in the name of the freedom of thought and of human dignity.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">This is most likely how Hayden White will always be remembered in postmodern culture, as a seducer and a subtle debater—and as an eternal troublemaker.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 29.75pt;"><em><b><span lang="RO" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">Bogdan Ştefănescu</span></b></em><em><span lang="RO" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> </span></em><em><span lang="RO" style="color: black; font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">is </span></em><em><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; font-style: normal; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">associate professor at the Department of English, University of Bucharest, editor-in-chief of </span></em><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><a href="http://ubr.rev.unibuc.ro/" target="_blank"><span style="color: #541b12;">University of Bucharest Review. Literary and Cultural Studies Series</span></a></span></i><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">, and literary translator.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Bogdan Stefanescuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15820818392812450434noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925337623505539869.post-51174096895247667692011-06-28T07:22:00.001+03:002011-09-30T10:03:24.317+03:00The Regenerative Void: Avatars of a Foundational Metaphor in Romanian Identity Construction<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Published in </span></i><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 11pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Philologica Jassyensia<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> no. 1/2011<o:p></o:p></i></span><br />
<br />
<br />
<h1 style="margin: 12pt 0cm 3pt; text-indent: 0cm;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="DE"><span style="font-size: large;">The Regenerative Void: Avatars of a Foundational Metaphor in Romanian Identity Construction</span></span></b><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO; mso-font-kerning: 14.0pt;">[1]</span></b></span></span></span></b></span></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="DE"><o:p></o:p></span></b></h1><br />
<br />
<div align="right" class="MsoBodyText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: right;"><span lang="DE">Bogdan ŞTEFĂNESCU</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Key-words</span></b><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Romanian cultural identity, nationalist rhetoric, tropes, metaphor, resistance, void,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>dissenting discourse</i><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There is an ultimate "paradox of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>" (such a frequent phrase) which has to do with how the Romanians have constructed their personality by refusing to construct their personality. The palpitating core of this paradox is probably one of the most recurrent and meaningful tropes used by Romanians in speaking about themselves, that of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">void</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In the fateful December of 1989, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place> became identified with a new image, its revolutionary emblem was the old tricolor flag with a hole at its center. The gap was the result of the exuberant removal of what used to be the communist coat of arms. A photograph in <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Le Nouvel Observateur</i></b> showed in its empty stead the faces of two young boys, their hands fingering a V sign: a symbol of rejuvenation, the rebirth of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWcCuKY6TgZO5Bbk5I41OwprMJeEQp3P77rUUbNTmVo9QIj2KFpSyJ9NIr6MSff_dx7Y6Jwf0Ico1unfgi-LJ_Mzc4V8UgAS6tyQc63sCGjnoU1X_tVLv1J8bMEjnBWp6Otxo6O4cTXFRf/s1600/void+image+cropped_1_3_1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhWcCuKY6TgZO5Bbk5I41OwprMJeEQp3P77rUUbNTmVo9QIj2KFpSyJ9NIr6MSff_dx7Y6Jwf0Ico1unfgi-LJ_Mzc4V8UgAS6tyQc63sCGjnoU1X_tVLv1J8bMEjnBWp6Otxo6O4cTXFRf/s320/void+image+cropped_1_3_1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">By the end of the year, the Romanian exile Andrei Codrescu, an American academic, a popular NPR personality and a surrealist poet, returned to his native country after twenty five years. The book he wrote to narrate this more than surrealist experience is called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hole in the Flag</i>. On his crossing the border between <st1:country-region w:st="on">Hungary</st1:country-region> and <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>, he notes: <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[...] suddenly there, under the cold moon, there it was, the Romanian flag with the socialist emblem cut right out of the middle. It fluttered over a square brick building marking the frontier. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It's through that hole</i>, I thought, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that I am returning to my birthplace</i>. (Codrescu 1991: 67 ) </span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But Codrescu’s book makes it plain that the hole in the flag is more than a fleeting eye-catcher for the media. It is an "objective correlative" for something that lies deep in his frustrated soul, somethings that pops up whenever he confronts the past. On visiting the old synagogue of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Budapest</st1:city>, <st1:country-region w:st="on">Hungary</st1:country-region></st1:place>, with its "deserted yard", Codrescu, a Jewish ethnic, ponders how "a once-full world [...] was now <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">empty, a deserted center that was also somehow at the center of my being</i>. Something lost, gone, irretrievable." (Codrescu 1991: 59) Nor is it a mere idiosynchrasy, evidence of early personal drama. This is the echoing of an entire tradition that places emptiness and absence at the core of Romanian identity, a tradition that starts with Codrescu’s favorite writers, Blaga and Cioran, as I have shown elsewhere (Ștefănescu 2008).</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This paper catalogs a number of Romanian self-images of the regenerative void—probably one of the most persistent tropes to have helped shape Romanian identity—and their variations. There is, however, an unsettled significance of this founding figure of nationalist discourse which may be caused both by its intrinsic paradoxical nature and by the host of textual and ideological strategies it has helped articulate.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I am making it my aim here to show that the empty, deserted center is not, however, just any kind of void, but rather a paradoxical one because full of meaning: a creative, (re)generative void. This is why the void is not a mere emblem; it is a central and recurring prefigurative metaphor in one type of discourse on Romanian cultural identity. The metaphor of the regenerating void may take several guises and the few images and themes with which I will be dealing in the following pages are such avatars of this one fundamental metaphor. Resting on constructivist premises, my effort is part of a category of cultural studies that operates in the framework of discourse analysis and cultural rhetoric. The premise of this study, which I have derived from Hayden White’s analysis of historiographic discourse, is that accounts of our past and of our communal selves are informed by a structural trope which conditions the way in which we construct these representations and that these tropes are consistent with certain ideological and narrative patterns. The present critical effort details how different tropical structures dictate various inflections of one and the same overarching image, the void, to fabricate one of the most interesting, most versatile, and most prolific versions of Romanian national identity. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 12pt 0cm 6pt 45pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="DE"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.</span></span><span lang="DE">A-voiding Trauma</span></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The process of "inventing" a modern national identity in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place> was painful and had to run against immeasurable hardships. The feeble flower of national self-consciousness experienced few and short-lived genial seasons, and was most of the times besieged by historical cataclysms and adversities. In order to survive, it had to study the devious art of resistance, which is another form of dissimulation. In the process, the regenerative void became one of the most popular compensating strategies for the traumatic self-imaging of a marginal culture. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The obsessive recurrence of images of absence in national self-representations seems to be symptomatic for marginal cultures. Cultural historian Alexander Kiossev claims that the absence of a civilizational model plays a central part in grounding Bulgarian identity in a traumatic sense of lacking:<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Thus, in the genealogical knot of the Bulgarian national culture there exists the morbid consciousness of an absence - a total, structural, non-empirical absence. The Others - i.e. the neighbors, <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>, the civilized World, etc. possess all that we lack; they are all that we are not. The identity of this culture is initially marked, and even constituted by, the pain, the shame - and to formulate it more generally - by the trauma of this global absence. The origin of this culture arises as a painful presence of absences and its history could be narrated, in short, as centuries-old efforts to make up for and eliminate the traumatic lacks. (Kiossev 1999: 114)</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">He explains that, whenever Bulgarians think of who or what they are, one of the most frequent answers is “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we are not </i>European (enough)” or “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">we are not</i> like the Others”. The image often translates as “we are neither this (identity), nor that” and in this part of the world, it means neither Eastern, nor Western. Falling in between the more secure and stable identities of Western and Eastern cultures engenders a traumatic ambiguity as Bosnian writer Ivo Andric suggested in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in 1961:<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">My homeland is truly ‘a small country between worlds’ as one of our writers has put it, and it’s a country which is trying in all fields, including culture, at the price of great sacrifices and exceptional energy to compensate rapidly for all that its unusual stormy and difficult past has denied it. (Hawksworth 1984: 6)</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Unsurprisingly, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place> also has an entire lineage in its traditional construction of cultural identity that seems is lodged in the archetypal image of absence. What is worthy of note, though, is how significant voices in Romanian culture invest this founding trope with duplicitous meaning and treat it both as a painful paucity and as a nurturing nook. Such treatment turns this symbolic void into an ambiguous image that indicates both the inability to construct a viable collective identity and the compensating mechanism to turn this failure into an unexpected success. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The topos has been carried over historical boundaries from interwar through communist and into postcommunist literature. In a different article to which I have previously alluded, I have submitted a brief survey and a discursive typology for this tradition that spans no less than three consecutive periods in modern Romanian culture (from pre- to post-communism). My analysis there documents a discursive affiliation between negative versions of the void in the Radical-Antithetical mode from Tristan Tzara, Urmuz, Eugen Ionescu, Emil Cioran, Petre </span><span lang="RO">Țuțea, and </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Horia-Roman Patapievici. Similarly, I find positive reversals of the void by Lucian Blaga, Gh. I. Br</span><span lang="RO">ă</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">tianu, Mircea Vulcanescu, Mircea Eliade, Constatin Noica, and Andrei Codrescu are related within the same Metaphoric-Anarchist discursive paradigm (Ștefănescu 2008: 14-9). <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In the following sections of this paper, I will register some of the thematic variations of the founding trope of the void used as a compensating mechanism.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 12pt 0cm 6pt 45pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="DE"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.</span></span><span lang="DE">The Void of Historical Action and Diction</span></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">One of the most traumatic and debated instances of the symbolic void appears in the notorious theme of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>'s absence from history. This means that the Romanians seem incapable of making their own history, either in terms of asserting themselves through a remarkable destiny or in recording their historical exploits, although there seem to be plenty of memorable things in <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>'s past. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Modern Romanian historiographers were confounded by the absence of historical records for much of the country’s premodern development. This historical scandal was signaled, among others, by Petar Mutafciev in his 1932 overview, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bulgares et Roumains dans l'histoire des pays danubiens</i></b>, who protested that Romanians are "the only European people which has no history of its own until the end of the Middle Ages" (apud Brătianu 1996: 25). The embarrassment is, however, cleverly turned into a cause for pride by some historians and cultural philosophers. It takes Gh. I. Br</span><span lang="RO">ă</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">tianu only a few years to come up with a clever response and to see in absence the opportunity to speak of a “miracle of history”. Four years later, in 1943, Mircea Eliade echoes Br</span><span lang="RO">ă</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">tianu in his own version of the birth of a nation:<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">and when the first Romanian principalities emerged during the eleventh century, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">miracle</i> had already taken place; the Slavs had been assimilated, and the people living in the territory of Dacia was the Romanian people, who had preserved all the characteristic features of their forefathers, the Dacians, and were speaking a Latin language: the Romanian (Eliade 1992: 19).</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In his contemporary meditation on the birth of Romanian culture, Lucian Blaga acknowledges the infamous “historiographical void” and responds by projecting it on a spatial level. In the absence of historical records, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place> is left as “blank spot” on the map of the region, but this blank spot lies at the very center of the Thracian and Arian space. (Blaga 1992: 32-33)<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Metaphors of emptiness, waste, and the void that refer to absence from historiography are equally employed to account for an absence from history itself, that is, for the unimpressive stature of Romanian civilization in world history. In apologetic discourses, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">evacuation</i> has been presented as the main strategy of Romanian resistance throughout its history. The Romanian military doctrine of defense, devised in the milennary confrontation with sweeping migrations and oversized empires, consisted in scorching the lands and the crops, poisoning the wells and the springs, burning our own houses and retreating into the central regions of <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>, filled with mountains and forests.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The backbone of this strategy was the mental reflex of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">vacating</i> the external or peripheral and withdrawing towards an elusive center. With many Romanian writers this also meant a retreat into the spiritual core of Romanianness. Blaga spoke of Romanians “boycotting history”, Eliade embraced the notion and spoke of the “terror of history” in his own mythopoeic account of the origins of the Romanian people. Interestingly, the same strategy was chosen by Romanians to withstand a more ruthless and tenacious invader: communism. For a while, the anticommunist resistance fighters used the mountainous and woody retreats to launch occasional guerilla attacks on the communist authorities. When that eventually failed, Romanian cultural personalities switched to a more sophisticated defense: “resistance through culture”. They abandoned the marginal and superficial aspects of material civilization into the hands of the communist colonizer and withdrew into an ungraspable and immaterial spiritual center of their being.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The most successful and popular example of cultural resistance was performed by Constantin Noica. Noica (1909-1987) was imprisoned for 6 years, was confined to a forced domicile for another 9 years, and was denied for most of this time the right to publish. Rather than defect and live in exile abroad, Noica chose a different kind of exile. He withdrew in a remote village in the center of the country and into the world of culture.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Gabriel Liiceanu, Noica's disciple, recorded in a journal his apprenticeship at Noica's secluded abode in Paltinis, up in the mountains of central <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>, and his fascination with Noica's self-inflicted exile: <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In Cimpulung he was found in his room, dressed in his overcoat, his rubber galoshes on, reading from <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">St. Augustine</st1:city></st1:place>; the water in the pot had frozen. “The God of culture”... had no doubt blinded him, turned him into a medium, rather than a man, and gave him the right (as with all those who intrigued their contemporaries, prompting a community forward) to be measured by different standards. (Liiceanu 1991: 263)</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span></span></span></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Noica became a model for the younger generations and each of his books was a secret revolution of the Romanian mind. His books sold out immediately and circulated in clandestine photocopies at twenty times their market price. At a time when Romanians were famished by Ceausescu and butter (like almost all basic food) was an almost unattainable rarity, Noica's books were exchanged for four bars of butter. This probably indicates what type of survival Romanians cherished most. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Noica's strategy of a spiritual resistence to history was entirely cultural. He was accused of many things and some of his critics have claimed he indirectly endorsed the official totalitarian doctrine of national-communism. On the other hand, even the uncompromising opposers of communism acknowledged Noica as "the principle proof of a nucleus of live thinking in the ocean of dead thought" (Lovinescu 1994: 351 referring to Marxism-Leninism). <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Paraphrasing Noica (and recycling the topos inaugurated by Blaga and Eliade), Liiceanu talks of a "will to culture" that prompts <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[…] a lateral, discreet and unspectacular liberation, maybe even guilty in its intellectual egotism, but which always has been the form in which the best of the Romanian spirit survived to the present day... If by history we understand the series of events happening to us, but also without and beyond us, then culture for Noica meant, no doubt, a withdrawal from history [...] (Liiceanu 1991: 271)</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Noica’s ideal of cultural resistance was a type of “subsistence without consistency” that lacked material substantiality. It was his way, one of many in the Romanian tradition, to turn the void of absence from history into a successful instrument of cultural survival and regeneration. Its relevance for domestic intellectual tradition is perpetuated after the fall of communism by a rising cultural personality who has joined the ranks of the P</span><span lang="RO">ăltiniș</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> group after the death of its founding figure and after the fall of communism. Horia-Roman Patapievici carries on the topos of the historical void in his meditations of the Romanian condition. "The void is evidence of presence, since fulness itself is an inflamation of absence," he glosses on canonical conversions of nothingness into being from Brătianu to Noica (Patapievici 1995: 118).<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 12pt 0cm 6pt 45pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="DE"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.</span></span><span lang="DE">The Void of Personality</span></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Absenting oneself from history results in a different kind of shortage, a lack of personality. In their self-portrayal, Romanians often resort to the topos of the personality void, either as anonymity, or as endemic modesty—something Romanians traditionally cherish.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In the 1980s, a U.S. Fulbright lecturer at the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:placename></st1:place> liked to tell a joke that narrated his personal shock in confronting Romanian students. He claimed there was one great difference between American and Romanian students. When you walk into an American class and say “Good morning”, half of the class jumps up and shouts “What do you mean by ‘good’?” and the other half protests just as loudly “What do you mean by ‘morning’?” When you walk into a Romanian class and say “Good morning”, the whole class conscienciously makes a note of that in their books.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">There is a whole tradition behind the anecdotal modesty of the Romanian student. Modesty is one of the most treasured virtues in the Romanian tradition. Many folk tales praise humbleness and moderation. Andrei Codrescu feels the greatest shock produced by the 1989 Revolution was when Romanians realized that in his baudy luxury, so indecent when compared with the famine and unimaginable hardship forced on the masses, "Ceausescu had betrayed a quality Romanian people value very highly: modesty." (Codrescu 1991: 73)<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The cult of anonymity is yet another guise for the personality void. Romanian critics insist that the anonymous folk poems and ballads of the oral tradition are among the most accomplished masterpieces of Romanian literature. Many a cultivated writer in the Romanian pantheon has been concerned with preserving the wisdom of modesty. Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889), <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region></st1:place>’s cultural Superman and a late Romantic, surprisingly cultivated in some of his texts the image of the modest creator that relinquishes his pride and subjectivity in order to attain artistic perfection. The reason: “we are not the masters of language, rather language is mistress of us all” (Eminescu 1993: 98).<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[3]</span></span></span></span></a> One of Eminescu’s romantic heroes dares think in the middle of his cosmic vision that he may be God himself, but never gets to finish the sentence because he is struck by God’s wrathful thunder. In many of his poems Eminescu resonates with the anonymous folk artists and he paraphrases or finds inspiration in folk poems and narratives.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Nurtured by nineteenth-century canonical examples, Lucian Blaga’s cosmogonic philosophy conceives of the Maker as the Great Anonym. In his acceptance speech on joining the Romanian Academy in 1937, Blaga acknowledges the “anonymous powers” of his home village in shaping the stylistic determinants of his soul and repeats a thesis from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spa</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO">țiul mioritic</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> that the Romanian village is exemplary in its self-sufficient boycotting of history to retain its anonymous authenticity (Blaga 1994a: 4, 11). <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A few years later, Mircea Eliade would also gloss admiringly on the cult of anonymous art and claim that Romanian classical culture (especially Ion Creang</span><span lang="RO">ă</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">) has the unique quality of being accessible even to an uneducated peasant, which is inconceivable in the case of a Dante, Shakespeare or Racine. He does not stop there, but tops it by professing that “a significant part of modern Romanian literature developed along the lines of folk creativity” (Eliade 1995: 24-5). <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The topos was carried over into communist totalitarianism, as demonstrated by poet Marin Sorescu (1936-1996), a leader of the "generation of the 1960s", who picks up the trope of the peasant’s personality void and develops it in a savory postmodern parody of the myth of the flood, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO">It’s Gonna Rain</span></i><span lang="RO">,</span><span lang="RO" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">with God featuring as a wise yet modest peasant who is not really the initiator of the deluge:<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citatepoezie" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">It’s gonna rain, God thought/Yawning and looking up at the cloudless sky,/This rheumatism of mine’s been testing me/For fourty days and fourty nights./Well, we’re in for some bad weather.//Noah—hey, Noah!/Come over to the fence: I’ll have a word with you.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Another leading poet of the same generation, Nichita Stănescu (1933-1983), though short-listed for the Nobel Prize for literature and awarded numerous distinctions, and although reputed for his highly innovative and idiosyncratic poetic style, was a champion of artistic modesty. For him, the poet was an anonymous presence, an absence of personality that engendered and made possible the self- generation of poetry. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In his acceptance speech for the Struga Prize for Poetry, he declared:<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The critique of poetry—poetry being in our view a new frontier of the human soul—is something that we perform not as a star who issues brilliant pronouncements, but as a country midwife who helps the woman in the field give birth, yet never warrants a confusion between the merits of the housewifing business and the miracle of birth. We believe there are really no poets, but simply poetry midwives contrary to the sad and confused belief in the merit of poets, rather than in the miracle of poetry. (St<span lang="RO" style="mso-ansi-language: RO;">ă</span>nescu 1981: 251-2)</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[5]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> <span style="mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">He elaborates on the same theme of anonymity, or void of personality in a number of poems, such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Poet Like the Soldier</i> (“</span><span lang="RO">The poet like the soldier<br />
has no private life. / His private life is ashes and dust. [...] // Never believe the poet when he weeps. / His tear is never his tear. / He squeezes tears out of things. / He sheds the tear of things.”) or </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Self-portrait</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> (</span><span lang="RO">I am none other than / a bloodstain / that speaks).</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It is small wonder that even modern artists share in this cult of anonymity. Though Romanian modernity helped shape the art of the 20th century, much of it stemmed from an anonymous culture. Such is the case, for instance, of Constantin Brâncusi (1876-1956), seen by many art critics as the father of modern sculpture. He was successful in his own time and, though no more than a Romanian peasant who was poor enough to have to cross Europe on foot to reach <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Paris</st1:city></st1:place>, he was a very proud individual. He left the studio of his master and friend, the great Auguste Rodin, saying: “Nothing grows in the shade of great oaks” and did not hesitate to sue the U.S. Customs Office for their bureaucratic disregard of his art. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Despite all that, he preserved his peasant modesty and discreetly withdrew his subjectivity from his work in order to allow the quintessential shape of things talk for itself. His only monumental works were destined for his home town of <st1:city w:st="on">Tirgu-Jiu</st1:city>, close to </span><span class="MsoPageNumber"><span lang="RO">his birth-place <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">village</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Hobiț<span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">a</span></st1:placename></st1:place><span lang="EN-US" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">.</span></span></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn6" name="_ftnref6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[6]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> </span><span style="font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 12pt 0cm 6pt 45pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="DE"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.</span></span><span lang="DE">The Void of Vitality</span></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Finally, this monumental vacancy in Romanian culture seems to amount to an overall refusal of vitality. The forms of this type of generative void are mortification, symbolic suicide, abstinence, and ascesis.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The masterpieces of folk literature and the fundamental myths of the Romanians are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miori</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO">ț</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">a </span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ewe Lamb</i>) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Meșterul Manole </i>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Master Manole</i>). <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miorita</i> is the story of a shepherd whose life is threatened by his two envious companions plotting to kill him. Though warned by his miraculous ewe-lamb, rather than prepare his defense or flee, the shepherd launches on an allegorical description of his death as the ewe-lamb is to report it to the shepherd’s mother: a cosmic wedding. The ballad was read by many as another <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jacques le fataliste</i>, and the Rom anian anonymous creator was charged once more with defeatism. Yet, if read in the company of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Master Manole</i> ballad, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miori</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO">ț</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">a</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> betrays a different significance: it is no less than a preparation for battle, an ascetic concentration to encounter one’s destiny such that everything negative may be converted into spiritual victory. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The beneficial effect of death becomes apparent in<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Master Manole</i>, the story of a master builder whose construction (a monastery) fails to stand. In a dream, he realises the need for a human sacrifice and makes an agreement with his team that whoever should visit them first is to be sacrificed. Chance has it that it is Manole’s own wife. She is buried in the wall of the monastery, and the building is animated, it comes to life. In Mircea Eliade’s interpretation, these two ballads evince a Romanian tradition of “valorizing death”. He deftly connects the syndrome of cultural and historical trauma of south-east European nations with the topos of “creative death” which upturns what may seem like diminished vitality (Eliade 2004: 124).<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn7" name="_ftnref7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[7]</span></span></span></span></a><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A popular poem by Eminescu, </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO">Ode (In Ancient Metre)</span></i><span lang="RO">, </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">reiterates the concept of fertile death:<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citatepoezie" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Never did I think I would learn to die,/Forever young, wrapped in my cloak,/I would raise my dreamy eyes to the star/Of solitude.//When suddenly you rose in my way,/Suffering, you, painfully sweet,/To the drains I drank the voluptuousness of death/The merciless.//[…] Let the troubling eyes vanish from my path,/Come back into my bossom, sorrowful indifference;/That I may die with a peaceful mind, to me/Restore myself!</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn8" name="_ftnref8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[8]</span></span></span></span></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Constaintin Noica has helped perhaps more than many of his peers turn this nineteenth-century topos of apathy and longing for self-annihilation into a cultural tradition which he upheld both before and after the</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> advent of communism. Noica developed Eminescu’s somber <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ode </i>to death as self-fulfillment into a self-standing philosophical doctrine of beneficial apathy and mortification. From his debut book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mathesis</i> (1938), Noica was fascinated by the virtues of non-being and non-action. There he claims one has to abstract from progress and change, avoid all things “consummate/consumable” (Rom. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">se consum</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO" style="mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">ă</span></i><span lang="RO" style="mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">)</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">. He explains: “I have no need for the world that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i>. Life is only possible in the world that might be.”<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn9" name="_ftnref9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 11pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[9]</span></span></span></span></a> (Noica 1992: 57, 67)<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In the late 1970s, Noica was still elaborating an apologetic philosophy that redeemed Romanians’ lack of civilizational drive. Starting from the Hegelian triad of the general, the individual and the determinations, Noica submits there are six “creative maladies” of the human spirit, of which the one whereby man refuses his worldly determinations and withdraws from the world, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ahoretia</i> (a term coined by Noica from the Greek <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">horoi</i>), appears to him as closest to the Romanian heart. In describing the Indian tradition of asceticism and passive resistance, he echoes the apologetic vocabulary of the birth and resilience of the nation typical of Romanian historiography: <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The miracle of ahoretia, as of any spiritual malady, is that it yields the positive in the extreme form of the negative and that it acts efficiently through total pasiveness. <span lang="RO" style="mso-ansi-language: RO;">(Noica 1978: 83)<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn10" name="_ftnref10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[10]</span></span></span></span></a> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">His description of ahoretia as the waning of animal energies to be compensated by the wisdom of old age reveals, as in the case of Eliade’s comments on the founding ballads of “creative death”, the structural homology between the topos of the void of vitality and that of the historical void:<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ahoretia is</i>] conducive to a sudden illumination or lucidity of conscience which forces the subject to reject participation,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to dominate his determinations, to perceive the positive in non-action and negativity, accepting defeat, assimilating it, and entering indifference, placing life and history under the order of reason, which annihilates novelty and proclaims the fruitfulness of non-travel.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn11" name="_ftnref11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[11]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (Noica 1978: 103)</span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Noica’s guidance to his disciples is no different. He encourages them “to tame their animality [...] to</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> teach them how to pass from the individual to the larger self [...] to forget ourselves”. Self-annihilation is the path to communing with the larger spirit. Relinquishing oneself is an act of ultimate rejoicing in a fulfilled love as well as in successful self-knowledge. A good student, Gabriel Liiceanu notes at the end of his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Journal</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">In the world of the spirit, ‘crime’ - desired by both parties and stipulated as a compulsory act in any paidetic scenario - becomes the highest form of affirmation and confers a moment of supreme beatitude to the victim who is granted through this new embodiment the occasion of a new life.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn12" name="_ftnref12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[12]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"> (Liiceanu 1991: 277-8)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">In Noica’s didactic scenario, the disciple has to finally kill his master, to assimilate and transcend him, only to realize that he has killed and transcended himself, his old self, as Cioran points out in a letter to Liiceanu:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="Citate" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Par là, le Journal dépasse les limites forcément discrètes d'un texte philosophique et révèle son dessein véritable: la recherche de soi-même. Le crime qui le couronne concerne moins le Maître que le Disciple: celui que vous venez de tuer en vous... (Liiceanu 1987: 13).</span></div><br />
<h2 style="margin: 12pt 0cm 6pt 45pt;"><span style="font-size: small;"><span lang="DE"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5. </span></span><span lang="DE">Conclusions</span></span></h2><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The tropical conversion of the void into something beneficial and revitalizing is a compensating mechanism for traumatized cultural identities. It is a species of diversionist discourse which generates unexpected power for the weak. Other researchers have been aware of the rhetoric of resistance. James C. Scott investigated certain strategies of dissent in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Domination and the Arts of Resistance</i>, but he is mainly interested in class relations and ideology as he lists <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pragmatic and immediate</i> forms of "disguised popular aggression" such as anonymity and gossip, euphemisms, grumbling, oral culture, symbolic inversion, carnivals (Scott 1990: 142 passim). <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">But in Romanian culture the reversed symbolism of the void is both culturally <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">comprehensive</i> and historically <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">consistent</i>, it works at all levels of social life and it spans several historical periods. Unlike Scott's study object, it is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">persistent</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">metaphysics</i> that constructs and preserves national identity, rather than a cautious subversive strategy of individuals or subnational groups. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">A comparison of Romanian as opposed to East European (or any other anti-authoritarian) concept of anonymity should be edifying. In the Romanian tradition, the void of personality is the condition for any creation; in anti-authoritarian societies anonymity is just a hide out, a means of getting away with dissent. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Though it may be triggered by particular situations of oppression and denied alternatives, the Romanian strategy of converting voids into centers of regenerated meaning spills across historical and social boundaries to become a “tradition”. This rhetorical reflex is ubiquous and it has been invoked starting with the nineteenth century as a response to the traumas caused by ethnic, national, social, political or cultural discriminations. The remarkable result of this recurring founding trope is that it tends to create a continuum between a fundamental world view and the ensuing cultural practices, between the conceptual and the formal aspects of collective identity. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">The Romanian monumentalizing of vacancy is rich in symbolic and ideological possibilities. The trope of the regenerative void displays an impressive rhetorical complexity and it can be viewed as a knot of potential ideological and textual scenarios that may include anarchist metaphorizations and lyrical scripting, radically-minded heroic narratives or conservative parables and ironic fables (</span><span lang="RO">Ștefănescu 2008 and 2010)</span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Analyses as the one performed here may also present methodological opportunities. Such studies help uncover the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">internal, discursive mechanisms of identity formation</i>, which are more resilient and more basic then the economic and political contexts, the social and institutional frameworks commonly investigated by nationalism scholars. Instead of the instrumental and objective concerns of constructivist approaches to nation-building, my research hopes to promote a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">subjective constructivism</i> whose focus is cultural discourse seen as a prefigurative field for the actual policies of instantiating the nation. A better understading of traditional discursive scenarios for Romanian identity such as that of fruitful withdrawals from history and of passive resistance may help explain the apathy and reserve of Romanians when confronted with external impositions whether from menacing empires or strategic Euro-Atlantic allies. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<h3 style="margin: 12pt 0cm;"><span lang="DE" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Works Cited</span></h3><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Blaga 1994a: Lucian Blaga, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Elogiul satului rom</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">â</span></i><span class="MsoPageNumber"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 9pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">nesc</span></i></span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">, reprinted as “Supliment al revistei <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Transilvania</i>”, nr. 3-4 / 1994.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Blaga 1992: Lucian Blaga, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Getica</i> in Iordan Chimet,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Dreptul la memorie</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>vol. 4, <st1:city w:st="on">Cluj-Napoca</st1:city>, Editura <st1:state w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Dacia</st1:place></st1:state>, pages 23-39.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Blaga 1994b: Lucian Blaga, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spatiul Mioritic,</i> Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Brătianu 1996: <st1:place w:st="on"><st2:sn w:st="on">Gheorghe</st2:sn> <st2:sn w:st="on">I.</st2:sn></st1:place> Brătianu, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An Engima and a Miracle of History: The Romanian People,</i> transl. Patricia H. Georgescu, Bucureşti, Editura Enciclopedica.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Cioran 1990: Emil Cioran, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Schimbarea la faţă a României,</i> Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Codrescu 1991: Andrei Codrescu, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Disappearance of the Outside. A Manifesto for Escape</i>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:city w:st="on">Reading</st1:city></st1:place>, Addison-Wesley (1990). <o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Codrescu 1991: Andrei Codrescu, The Hole in the Flag: A Romanian Exile’s Story of Return and Revolution, New York, W. Morrow & Co., Inc.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Eliade 1992: Mircea Eliade, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Romanians. A Concise History, </i>Trans. Rodica Mihaela Scafeş, Bucureşti, Roza Vînturilor.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Eliade 1995: Mircea Eliade, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Fate of Romanian Culture</i>,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>Trans. Bogdan </span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">Ștefănescu</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">, Bucureşti, Editura Athena.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Eliade 2004: Mircea Eliade, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Comentarii la la Legenda Me</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">ș</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">terului Manole</span></i><span style="font-size: 10pt;">, Bucure</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">ș</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">ti, Humanitas.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Eminescu 1993: Mihai Eminescu, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Opere</i>, vol. XV, Buc</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">urești</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">, Editura Academiei Rom</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">â</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">ne.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Hawksworth 1984: Celia Hawksworth, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ivo Andric: Bridge Between East and West</i>, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">London</st1:place></st1:city>, Athlona Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Kiossev 1999: Alexander Kiossev, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Notes on Self-colonising Cultures</i>, in B. Pejic. & D. Elliott (eds.), <i>Art and Culture in Post-communist Europe</i>, <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Stockholm</st1:place></st1:city>, Moderna Museet, pages 114-8.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Liiceanu 1991: Gabriel Liiceanu, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jurnalul de la Păltiniş. </i>Bucureşti, Humanitas.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Liiceanu 1987: Gabriel Liiceanu, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Epistolar</i>, Bucuresti, Cartea rom</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">â</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">nească.</span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Lovinescu 1994: Monica Lovinescu, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Est-etice. Unde scurte IV</i>, Bucure</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">ș</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">ti, Humanitas.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Noica 1978: Constantin Noica, Spiritul românesc în cumpătul vremii. Şase maladii ale spiritului contemporan. Bucureşti, Univers.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Noica 1992: Constantin Noica, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mathesis sau bucuriile simple</i>, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas.</span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Patapievici 1995: Horia-Roman Patapievici, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cerul v</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">ăzut prin lentilă</span></i><span style="font-size: 10pt;">, Bucure</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">ș</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">ti, Humanitas.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Scott 1990: James C. Scott, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Domination and the Arts of Resistance</i>, <st1:city w:st="on">New Haven</st1:city> and <st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city>, <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Yale</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place> Press.</span><span style="color: windowtext; font-size: 10pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">St</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">ă</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">nescu 1981: Nichita St</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">ă</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">nescu, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ars poetica</i>, in “Secolul 20”, nr. 11-12 / 1981.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Stolojan 1996: Sanda Stolojan, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nori peste balcoane. Jurnal din exilul parizian</i>, Bucureşti, Editura Humanitas.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Ștefănescu 2008: Bogdan Ștefănescu, Voices Of The Void: Andrei Codrescu’s Tropical Rediscovery of Romanian Culture in The Hole In The Flag, in “University of Bucharest Review “, vol. X, no. 2/2008.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">Ștefănescu 2010: Bogdan Ștefănescu, Noica’s Nook, or How the Marginalized May Use Reverse Philosphy, paper presented at the international conference of the Canadian Studies Center, University of Bucharest, 23-24 April 2010 (to be published in the proceedings volume Postcolonialism / Postcommunism: Intersections and Overlaps, Bucure</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">ș</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;">ti, Editura Universit</span><span lang="RO" style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: RO;">ății din București, 2011).<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="UBRWorksCited" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 36pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;">White 1973: Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, <st1:city w:st="on">Baltimore</st1:city> & <st1:city w:st="on">London</st1:city>, The <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placename w:st="on">Johns</st1:placename> <st1:placename w:st="on">Hopkins</st1:placename> <st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype></st1:place> Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Abstract</span></b><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">: This paper catalogs a number of Romanian self-images of the regenerative void as a tropical conversion of the void into something beneficial and revitalizing is a compensating mechanism for traumatized cultural identities. It aims to illustrate how in Romanian culture the reversed symbolism of the void is both culturally <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">comprehensive</i> and historically <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">consistent</i>, spanning several historical periods. Though it may be triggered by particular situations of oppression and denied alternatives, the Romanian rhetorical strategy of converting voids into centers of regenerated meaning spills across historical and social boundaries to become a “tradition”. This rhetorical reflex is ubiquous and it has been invoked starting with the nineteenth century as a response to the traumas caused by ethnic, national, social, political or cultural discriminations. Resting on subjective constructivist premises, my effort is part of a category of cultural studies that operates in the framework of discourse analysis and cultural rhetoric. It documents how the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">internal, discursive mechanisms of identity formation</i> are more resilient then the economic and political contexts or the social and institutional frameworks commonly investigated by nationalism scholars.</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 0cm;"><br />
</div><br />
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;"><br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /><div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="RO"> This work was supported by the strategic grant POSDRU/89/1.5/S/62259, Project </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">“Applied social, human and political sciences. Postdoctoral training and postdoctoral fellowships in social, human and political sciences” confinaced by the European Social Fund within the Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development 2007-2013.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="RO"> </span><span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt; mso-ansi-language: EN;">La Cîmpulung a fost găsit în cameră,</span></i></span><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"> <span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">îmbrăcat în palton,</span></i></span><span class="ib1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></i></span><span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">cu şoşoni şi cu căciulă, citind Augustin; apa din ligheanul care se</span></i></span> <span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">afla în mijlocul camerei îngheţase. „Dumnezeul culturii“,</span></i></span><span class="ib1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></i></span><span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">singurul în care credea şi la</span></i></span> <span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">judecata căruia era încredinţat că</span></i></span><span class="ib1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></i></span><span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">va fi chemat, laolaltă cu toţi trebnicii şi netrebnicii</span></i></span> <span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">acestei culturi,</span></i></span><span class="ib1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></i></span><span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">îl orbise, desigur, făcînd din el nu un om, ci un mediu, care dobîndise</span></i></span> <span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">dreptul — asemenea tuturor celor ce şi-au intrigat contemporanii,</span></i></span><span class="ib1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;"> </span></i></span><span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">împingînd o</span></i></span> <span class="nw1"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;">comunitate înainte — de a fi măsurat cu o altă măsură.</span></i><span style="color: black; letter-spacing: -0.1pt;"> (The English translation is mine as with all other quotes from Romanian editions.)</span></span></span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[3]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="RO"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Nu noi suntem st</span><span lang="RO">ăpâni limbei, ci limba e stăpâna noastră.</span></i><span lang="RO"> (MS 2275B)</span></span></div></div><div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="Citatepoezie" style="margin: 6pt 0cm 6pt 1cm;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[4]</span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 8pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 9pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">O să plouă/Își zice Dumnezeu, căscând,/Și privind la cerul fără pic de nor,/Mă cam incearcă reumatismul/De vreo patruzeci de zile și patruzeci de nopți./Ehe, se strică vremea!//Noe, mă Noe,/Ia vino până la gard să-ți spun o vorbă. <o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div></div><div id="ftn5" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn5;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[5]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="RO"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Critica poeziei - poezia fiind socotita dupa parerea noastra, ca o noua frontiera a sufletului uman - noi nu o facem din punct de vedere al vedetelor producatoare de fraze geniale, ci din punctul de vedere al moasei de tara, care, ajutand taranca pe cimp sa nasca, nu da loc confuziei de merit intre meseria moasei si miracolul nasterii. Noi credem ca nu exista poeti, ci moase ale poeziei si ca este o trista confuzie aceea care s-ar putea face sperand in meritul poetului iar nu in miracolul poeziei.</i></span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn6" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn6;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[6]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="RO"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">One of them is called “Table of Silence” (yet another kind of void in Romanian culture, the void of vocality - one more way in which absence becomes positive, creative.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn7" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref7" name="_ftn7" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn7;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[7]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="RO"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO" style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Românii, ca şi vecinii din sud-estul Europei, şi-au regăsit în acest mit central al „morţii creatoare" propriul lor destin. Nu este deloc întîmplător că cele două creaţii de seamă ale spiritualităţii populare româneşti—Mioriţa şi Balada Meşterului Manole — îşi au temeiul într-o valorificare a morţii. [...] Prezenţa morţii în centrul spiritualităţii populare româneşti nu înseamnă însă o viziune pesimistă a lumii, o rarefiere a debitului vital, o deficienţă psihică. Un contact direct cu viaţa ţărăneasca infirmă hotărît aceste supoziţii; românul în genere nu cunoaşte nici teama de viaţă, nici beţia mistagogică (de structură slavă), nici pesimismul religios, nici atracţia către asceză (de tip oriental). Şi, cu toate acestea, cele două creaţii capitale ale spiritualităţii populare româneşti poartă în miezul lor o valorificare a morţii. Dar prezenţa morţii nu este, aici, negativă. Moartea din Mioriţa este o calmă reîntoarcere „lîngă ai săi". Moartea din MeşterulManole este creatoare, ca orice moarte rituală.</span></i><span lang="RO" style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn8" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref8" name="_ftn8" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn8;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[8]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="RO"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO" style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Nu credeam sã 'nvãț a muri vr'odatã;/Pururi tânãr, înfãșurat în manta-mi,/Ochii mei 'nãlțam visãtori la steaua/Singurãtãții.//Când de-odatã tu rãsãriși în cale-mi,/Suferințã tu, dureros de dulce .../Pân' în fund bãui voluptatea morții/Ne 'ndurãtoare.//</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[…]</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="RO" style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Piarã-mi ochii turburãtori din cale,/Vino iar în sân, nepãsare tristã/Ca sã pot muri liniștit, pe mine/Mie redã-mã!</span></i><span lang="RO" style="mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><br />
</div></div><div id="ftn9" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref9" name="_ftn9" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn9;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[9]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="RO"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Nu am nevoie, nu am ce face cu lumea care este. Nu se poate trăi decât în lumea care ar putea fi.</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn10" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref10" name="_ftn10" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn10;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[10]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="RO"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Miracolul ahoretiei, ca al oricărei maladii spirituale dealtfel, este că a obținut pozitivul chiar în forma extremă a negativului, sau acțiunea eficace prin totală pasivitate.</i></span></span></div></div><div id="ftn11" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref11" name="_ftn11" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn11;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[11]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="RO"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">[Ahoretia] este maladia […] duc</span><span lang="RO">înd la o bruscă iluminare sau luciditate de conștiință, ce face pe subiect să își interzică participația, să-și domine determinațiile, să vadă pozitivul non-actului și al negativului, acceptînd înfrîngerea, asimilînd-o și intrînd în indiferență, iubind tot ce se desprinde de lume ca atare, de la asceză și poezie pînă la matematici și sepctacolul revoluției tehnico-științifice, punînd viața și istoria sub ordinea rațiunii, care desființează noul și proclamă rodnicia non-călătoriei.</span></i></span></div></div><div id="ftn12" style="mso-element: footnote;"><div class="FootnotePJ" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref12" name="_ftn12" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn12;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="RO" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 9pt; mso-ansi-language: RO; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: RO;">[12]</span></span></span></span></span></a><span lang="RO"><span style="font-size: x-small;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">În lumea spiritului, crima – dorită de ambele părți și prevăzută ca act obligatoriu în orice scenariu paideic – devine cea mai înaltă formă a afirmației, conferind victimei un moment de supremă beatitudine și acordîndu-i, prin această nouă întrupare, prilejul unei alte vieți.</i></span></span></div></div></div>Bogdan Stefanescuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15820818392812450434noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7925337623505539869.post-15024951997407093652011-06-28T06:33:00.001+03:002013-03-27T09:03:53.479+02:00WHY COMPARE? WHAT’S TO COMPARE? A POSTCOMUNIST/POSTCOLONIAL RESPONSE TO DAVID DAMROSCH<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Published in <em>University of Bucharest Review</em> XIII. 1 (2011): 21-28. </span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Bogdan Ștefănescu<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Associate Professor and SOP HRD researcher<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">University</span></st1:placetype><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:placename></span></st1:place><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: right;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">WHY COMPARE? WHAT’S TO COMPARE?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: center;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">A POSTCOMUNIST/POSTCOLONIAL RESPONSE TO DAVID DAMROSCH</span></b><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[1]</span></span></b></span></span></span></b></span></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: right; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">If you compare yourself with others, <br />
you may become vain or bitter, <br />
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br />
<div align="right" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-align: right; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 10pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">(Max Ehrmann, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Desiderata</i>, 1927)<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Professor Damrosch’s provocative talk has incited a host of questions and has opened many avenues for reflection. For the sake of brevity and clarity of focus I’m going to raise just the two questions in my title. Of course, I’m going to cleverly employ rhetoric to suggest my favorite answers while appearing to simply ask those questions. You will probably see me drifting away from Prof. Damrosch’s text into ruminations that have nevertheless been inspired by our guest speaker’s key presentation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Why compare?<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Since literature is something that I teach to undergraduates, I’ve grown used to asking simple yet basic questions whose answers are meant to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">precede</i> any effort to interpret or evaluate literary texts. These questions help them (and myself) understand where critical efforts are coming from and where they are going, since I am convinced that literary studies, like anything else in human practice, are caused by something and aim to have a certain effect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">So whenever students propose to write a comparative essay, I will only give them the go signal if they manage to answer the question “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><u>why do you need to compare</u></i> these works/authors/contexts/paradigms?” Hence my first question here: why compare?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Since to most of my students the question is baffling, here is how I help them find an answer. Comparing is no more than a tool, never an end in itself. True, it is a sophisticated and demanding tool that only the highly trained and widely read scholars are able to use with some degree of precision, but it is still no more than a tool. It is never enough to compare. The reason one compares is that one wants to make a point based on an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ulterior motive</i>. By that I simply mean a motive that is “not immediately apparent” (I’m not implying that it is necessarily disreputable). I like the phrase because it implies at one and the same time a plan that precedes or preconditions the comparison, and a point that succeeds the comparison, something that is derived from it and is served by it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">In other words (really in the words of the other), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Comparaison n’est pas (assez) raison</i>, comparing is not sufficient reason in and by itself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">As an instrument, comparative literary research may be and has been wielded as part of diverse critical approaches. It can equally be employed by synchronic or diachronic investigations, it may serve to better understand styles, movements, cultural traditions, to highlight transhistorical and transcultural paradigms or archetypes, to discover sources and influences or to trace the reception process, to find generic structures and common significance or to emphasize cultural differences, to name just a few of the possible motives for comparison. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">With this in mind, I turn to Prof. Damrosch’s invitation to focus on the transnational flow of literary texts and ideas from one national cultural market to another, a claim that is rich in implications and that he has backed up with a beautiful set of illustrations. What I would like to better understand is the ulterior motive for this concern. What are the critical premises and the theoretical axioms supporting such an interpretive effort and what is the proposed outcome for this kind of inquiry? What is the larger explanatory framework that accommodates the study of transnational processes in the context of correlations between the national and the global? Is Prof. Damrosch interested in foreign influences or in foreign reception or, more likely, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">both</i> since he seems to suggest that a foreign text may fuel up or even initiate a national tradition?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">And, since context is introduced to us as a significant explanation, I wonder if we can compare such remote historical contexts for the circulation of literature as seventeenth-century or eighteenth-century <st1:country-region w:st="on">England</st1:country-region> and twenty-first-century <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>? Which is the overarching explanatory framework wherein they can be treated as similar? Also, what can we hope to demonstrate by comparing them? That the “transnational” processes we are witnessing in the globalized post-industrial civilization are the same as those occasioned by the rise of modernity, that there is some universal template for all transnational processes? Or, perhaps, that transnational flows occur before, during, after the age of nations/nation-states?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I also think some critics may display reserve to qualifiers such as “international” or “transnational” for the fact that Ionescu’s plays were first staged outside <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region>. The presence of some individual writers in cultural milieus abroad may not always amount to a “transnational” process. One has to consider the direction of the transfer, the actual magnitude of the impact, the difference between who the writer was (what his market rate was) at that time and later/now etc. </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The value and impact of works change over time, they were not then what they would later become. In 1959, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rhinoceros</i> was the work of a still relatively unknown playwright who could only hope to be put up on small fringe stages. If I remember correctly, it was only in the sixties that bigger mainstream theatres started performing Ionesco’s plays. Then (that is, in the beginning) he must have sounded quirky, irreverent, and, no doubt, off-beat; it was a bit later that he became a fashion, only to eventually turn into the respectable classic that he is today. Given that his was still a feeble voice of limited circulation at the time of the first performances outside France, one may wonder if the use of the words “international” might not illicitly encourage us to think that the impact of such events was not just nation-wide, but also global, meaning that it literally affected the cultures of more than one country. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">One has to wonder if Ionescu became an influential factor for a non-French (or non-Romanian) national culture as a result of the fringe show in that culture or because the larger theatres in France started playing him successfully and that critics and reviewers in France warmed up to his art.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Not least of all, one can ask if there really is a good reason to compare literary markets or the market presence of certain authors. This is where the second question I will be addressing today might show how insightful it is of Prof. Damrosch to be talking of markets in the context of comparative literature. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">What’s to compare?<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">I was hoping to convey the ambiguity of this question which may read both as “What does it mean to compare?” and also as “Is there really any comparison?” and even as “Is comparison really possible?”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Comparing implies that two different things may be alike or equal when in fact they are not. They remain irreducibly different and disproportionate. Ranking one over the other is always a simple choice, really. Moreover, the very act of comparing is itself always already not the same depending on who is making the comparison, for instance a Western intellectual or an Eastern European one. Take us, here, today. We are here to prove that enlightened scholars from such different parts of the globe can sit together and exchange ideas as peers in a global environment. But, of course, we are not peers, we are not equal, we can’t be compared, especially when comparing East and West is conditioned by Western standards. On the one side there’s an American scholar with a well established and long standing reputation, the chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard, on the other side there is—some guy from <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Romania</st1:place></st1:country-region>. The Western scholar is being courteous and generous by simply acknowledging a Romanian writer in his talk and accepting an invitation to a conference in <st1:city w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:city>, that is, in a remote and marginal nation like <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Romania</st1:place></st1:country-region>. Such gestures leave me on the receiving end with the option of being either compliant if I acknowledge his kindness or brazen and ungrateful should I decide to critique some of his ideas. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Now, I am not trying to be rude and I am definitely not questioning Prof. Damrosch’s motives and his genuine openness, I am merely pointing to the unavoidable situation in which we are both trapped. What I am trying to illustrate is that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">different, unequal contexts work to make the comparison implausible if not impossible</i>. That is why I particularly enjoyed Prof. Damrosch’s comments on the way in which John Phillips’ translation functions differently in the English political context than the original by Las Casas against a Spanish background. <span style="color: red;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">In response to Hirakawa’s objection that comparative literature is an exclusive Euro-American club meant to entertain Western nationalism, Prof. Damrosch proposes that “this situation has changed dramatically in recent years, and both the globe and the map of <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place> itself have opened up.” While this is no doubt a verifiable assertion, I wonder if opening the EU door for less developed, former communist countries or opening the cultural market for marginal and exotic literatures or arts (take, for instance, the “new wave in Romanian cinema”) automatically generates the conditions needed for genuine even-handed comparisons. I am afraid that any parallels, juxtapositions or analogies between major or established Western literatures and minor non-Western ones are always going to be <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">asymmetrical</i>. They are just as asymmetrical as the political balance of European and world power. Think of the discretionary (for some even discriminatory) opposition from <st1:country-region w:st="on">Germany</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region w:st="on">France</st1:country-region> to <st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Bulgaria</st1:place></st1:country-region> accessing the visa-free Schengen space. Or think of the discourteous way in which French president Chirac admonished Eastern European states (Donald Rumsfeld’s “New Europe”) for supporting the <st1:country-region w:st="on">US</st1:country-region> intervention in <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Iraq</st1:place></st1:country-region>: “They missed a great opportunity to shut up.” Then, referring particularly to <st1:country-region w:st="on">Romania</st1:country-region> and <st1:country-region w:st="on">Bulgaria</st1:country-region>, who were still just aspiring to join the EU at the time, added like a regular bully: “If they wanted to diminish their chances of joining <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place> they could not have found a better way.” (<a href="http://articles.cnn.com/2003-02-18/world/sprj.irq.chirac_1_french-president-jacques-chirac-eu-leaders-romania-and-bulgaria?_s=PM:WORLD"><span style="color: blue;">http://articles.cnn.com/2003-02-18/world/sprj.irq.chirac_1_french-president-jacques-chirac-eu-leaders-romania-and-bulgaria?_s=PM:WORLD</span></a>) <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">At this point, before I turn from politics proper to the politics of culture, it may be helpful to invoke the etymological relative of the word “comparison”. Prof. Damrosch is no doubt well aware of it, as he is conversant with so many foreign languages. Long before the founding of comparative literature as a discipline, the Latin root (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">comparare</i>) yielded in Romanian <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a cumpăra</i> (“to buy”). In this we are comparable to other Southern offshoots of Latin (see Ital. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">comprare</i>, Span. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">comprar</i>, Port. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">comprar</i>). Interestingly, Latin had the same word (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">comparator</i>) for both comparers and buyers. In that sense, when Prof. Damrosch invites us to compare how texts and authors perform in different cultural markets he obviously strikes—<st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Rome</st1:place></st1:city>. He is implicitly validating the ancient ken that comparing is intimately connected with commerce and market value.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Sadly, in this post- or neo-colonial age, we can no longer be seduced by the metaphor of a “free” global market being driven by an “invisible hand”. The hand is only invisible because the puppeteer is cautious enough to disguise it. The recognition of exotic cultural products such as Romanian cinema or fiction is just temporary and is only tolerated when it may serve the interests of the main market players. The new wave in Romanian cinema is no more than a fling as was the presence of Romanian writers in the edition dedicated to them by the French annual festival <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Les Belles Etrangeres</i>. (Consider the title of the festival itself, which institutionalizes the stereotypical assimilation of the exotic and the feminine that Said and other postcolonial critics have talked about.) Romanian art (the minion of the day) is no more than a momentary thrill and like all non-Western cultural products is already condemned to ephemeral consumerism. Such fleeting pleasures are usually the subject of pornography. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">By contrast, Western cultural products remain something permanent, the stable ground for the Western life style and worldview. And not just for the West. They are exported and many marginal cultures “buy” them, taking Western standards and models to be universal yardsticks. The West will occasionally open to Romanian or other exotic cultural products in order to either validate its own established values or justify their revision, but never in order to embrace the values of that exotic other. Hence, such works will remain evanescent, brief encounters. The transient function of their strangeness is either sensual or comic (as the Russians in Wodehouse’s fiction). The received work of Brâncuși, Cioran, or Ionescu, who are now considered French artists, is almost entirely purged of any native or pidgin accent, which may very well be a condition for their assimilation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">An implicit <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">hierarchy</i> attends all comparisons, as well as the dramatic story of success and failure. And comparers are part of this story. To be an Eastern European comparer is to be doomed to an ineluctable sense of failure. This has been convincingly argued by the Bulgarian cultural historian Alexander Kiossev. Allow me to quote him more abundantly, since he may not be that broadly known in comparative circles:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="CitateMLA" style="margin: 0cm -15.1pt 0pt 36pt;">
The hypothesis of this text is, therefore, the following: the birth of these nations is connected with a very specific symbolic economy. It seems that the self-colonizing cultures import alien values and civilizational models by themselves and that they lovingly colonize their own authenticity through these foreign models.</div>
<br />
<div class="CitateMLA" style="margin: 0cm -15.1pt 0pt 36pt;">
Yet which are, in fact, the cultures that we call, using a strange metaphor, "self-colonizing" cultures?</div>
<br />
<div class="CitateMLA" style="margin: 0cm -15.1pt 0pt 36pt;">
From the point of view of the modern globalization of the world, there are cultures<span style="background: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> </span>which are not central enough, not timely and big enough <u>in comparison to the "Great<span style="background: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> </span>Nations".</u> At the same time they are insufficiently alien, insufficiently distant and insufficiently backward, in contrast to the African tribes, for example. That's why, in their own troubled embryo, somewhere in the periphery of Civilization, they arise in the space of a generative doubt: <b><i>We are European, although perhaps not to a real extent</i></b> . . . .</div>
<br />
<div class="CitateMLA" style="margin: 0cm -15.1pt 0pt 36pt;">
Aren't we then forced to describe the historical rhythm of such traumatic, self-colonizing cultures as a constant repetition and return? Maybe the constitutive traumas can not be overcome and they will occur over and over again in the form of various historical symptoms - as a <b><i>Wiederkehr des Verdrängten </i></b>- a recurrence of the suppressed?</div>
<br />
<div class="CitateMLA" style="margin: 0cm -15.1pt 0pt 36pt;">
Or maybe this is just a reminder that the history of Modernity could not be written as a composite history consisting of the histories of many separate nations (that means as<span style="background: rgb(255, 153, 0);"> </span>histories of the Native and the Alien), but should be written (described, analyzed, criticized, etc.) globally, as a history of the entire process of asymmetrical modernization, transgressing the boundaries of the established historiographical narratives about states, cultures and ideologies? (Kiossev 115, 118)</div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The consequence of all this is that we, marginal, in-between nations, are like the poor Achiles in Zeno’s paradox, it doesn’t matter how swift-footed such latecomers might be in the chase, we are never going to catch up with the smart Western turtle, much less overtake it. And just as in Zeno’s paradox, the reason is not to be found in anything palpable or de<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mon</i></b>strable in the “real world”, but in the manner in which we compare the two contenders’ performance. The premises and the method for analyzing the two contrastively are “poisoned”. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Comparison, by which we might hope to assert ourselves in relation to the greater cultures, is the Trojan horse. Maria Todorova denounced historians, anthropologists, economists, and political scientists for working with a “rigged” comparative concept, that of an origin of ideas or models (always Western) which can only be “pirated” and “copied” by sluggish Central and East European nations (Todorova 145 and passim). She also notices a commercial metaphoric imagination at work in comparisons between Western and Eastern accounts of nation-building (150). This comparative framework condemns such nations to an eternal life in the past, in a different time, constantly lagging behind and hopelessly aspiring towards modern models. The metaphor of the race is constitutive of modernity which is a temporal construct. One’s modernity consists in leaving the others behind: the primitive and the obsolete, the tardy and underdeveloped nations etc. In this cultural race, those who get there first become the origin, the source, the genuine article, whereas the others are left to copy and mimic. Todorova proposes that within a Braudelian perspective of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">long duree</i> one ought to abandon the obsession of genealogies and adopt the notion of relative synchronicity in spite of chronological precedence. This is predicated upon the anthropological observation that similarities exist even when cultures are not in immediate contact (149).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The way things still stand today, comparisons between Western and Eastern literatures, cultures or societies are posited in the mind of most comparatists as putting side by side the original and its various copies or derivatives. Under the circumstances, attributing value and ranking the Western original over an Eastern copy is the prearranged and unavoidable market outcome. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">This brings me to the conclusion of Prof. Damrosch’s paper: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="CitateMLA" style="margin: 0cm -15.1pt 0pt 36pt;">
The national and the global are by no means opposed spheres . . . . “European literature” is best understood as the product of a dynamic interplay of the international within the national, and the national within the regional. Seen in its transnational and global dimensions, European literature gains a new kind of distributed coherence, and becomes a newly vital force field of study . . . </div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">“The national and the global are by no means opposed spheres.” I would add “for some”. Indeed, the global works miraculously <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">for some nations</i>, not for others. Let us see how this works in the context of translations, an issue that is so germane to Prof. Damrosch’s presentation today. <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">US</st1:place></st1:country-region> readership seems to be chronically averse to foreign literature translations which, according to The New York Times, are known as the “three percent problem” (<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/books/08translate.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&src=me"><span style="color: blue;">http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/08/books/08translate.html?_r=4&pagewanted=1&src=me</span></a>). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">To return to <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place>, here are some figures colle</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">cted in 2007 by <span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Rüdiger Wischenbart, a cultural policy consultant who worked as director of communication for the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2001.</span></span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> In <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">France</st1:place></st1:country-region>, 60% of all translations into French come from English as opposed to 7% from German and 0.2% from Polish. In <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Germany</st1:place></st1:country-region>, 62% of all translations into German come from English, 9% from French, and less than 3% from Italian, Spanish, or Dutch. East </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">European literatures put together can never hope to reach 1% of the number of books translated in a Western country. Western books are almost all that is being translated, especially in Eastern European countries, with English literature counting for more than a half (the count can go as high as 70% in East European countries like <st1:country-region w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Serbia</st1:place></st1:country-region>). Under the circumstances, perhaps Prof. Damrosch’s closing statement “Seen in its transnational and global dimensions, European literature gains a new kind of distributed coherence . . .” might be better phrased as “European literature finds a new distribution for its old asymmetrical coherence”. This is, of course, because the Western comparer remains a reluctant buyer of non-Western literary products even in a global environment.</span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">To conclude, I salute the renewed comparative framework proposed by Prof. Damrosch and I admire his astute identification of markets as a critical site for the explanation of literary and cultural processes. His pressing towards a more open and flexible comparative perspective, one that may shake off the traditional West-centric bias, are both commendable and heartwarming. I only hope that he and other Western scholars will cast an equally sympathetic eye on East Europeans such as myself who cannot help being painfully aware of the traumatic disproportions in the comparative perception of East and West. Such asymmetries are replicated and sometimes augmented in the global environment by the metaphorical arsenal that attends the comparative imagination.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Works Cited</span></b><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; text-indent: 42pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 54pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; text-align: left; text-indent: -54pt;">
<span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: Georgia;">Alexander Kiossev. ‘Notes on Self-colonising Cultures’. <i>Art and Culture in Post-communist <st1:place w:st="on">Europe</st1:place></i>. Eds. Pejic, B. & D. Elliott. <st1:city w:st="on"><st1:place w:st="on">Stockholm</st1:place></st1:city>: Moderna Museet, 1999.</span><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt 54pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; text-align: left; text-indent: -54pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Todorova, Maria. ‘</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">The Trap of Backwardness: Modernity, Temporality, and the Study of Eastern European Nationalism</span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">’. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slavic Review</i>, </span><span style="font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Vol. 64, No. 1. (Spring, 2005), 140-164.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div align="left" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; text-align: left;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[1]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This text was presented as a response to Prof. David Damrosch’s ‘Europe between the Nation and the Globe’ at the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Literary Studies Facing European Literature</i> conference hosted by the <st1:place w:st="on"><st1:placetype w:st="on">University</st1:placetype> of <st1:placename w:st="on">Bucharest</st1:placename></st1:place> on 15-16 April 2011.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin: 0cm 0cm 0pt;">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=7925337623505539869#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-size: 11pt; line-height: 150%; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;"><span style="color: blue;">[2]</span></span></span></span></span></span></a><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span lang="EN-GB"> The Romanian etymological pun is lost in translation: </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Comparativistul vestic rămîne un cumpărător reținut.</span></i><span style="mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
</div>
</div>
Bogdan Stefanescuhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15820818392812450434noreply@blogger.com0