Christian Moraru

Mircea Martin

Andrei Terian

Approaching Romanian literature as world literature, this book is a critical-theoretical manifesto that places its object at the crossroads of empires, regions, and influences and draws conclusions whose relevance extends beyond the Romanian, Romance, and East European cultural systems. This “intersectional” revisiting of Romanian literature is organized into three parts. Opening with a fresh look at the literary ideology of Romania's “national poet,” Mihai Eminescu, part I dwells primarily on literary-cultural history as process and discipline. Here, the focus is on cross-cultural mimesis, the role of strategic imitation in the production of a distinct literature in modern Romania, and the shortcomings marking traditional literary historiography's handling of these issues. Part II examines the ethno-linguistic and territorial complexity of Romanian literatures or “Romanian literature in the plural.” Part III takes up the trans-systemic rise of Romanian, Jewish Romanian, and Romanian-European avant-garde and modernism, Socialist Realism, exile and émigré literature, and translation.

Romanian Literature as World Literature

Thomas Oliver Beebee

Approaching Romanian literature as world literature, this book is a critical-theoretical manifesto that places its object at the crossroads of empires, regions, and influences and draws conclusions whose relevance extends beyond the Romanian, Romance, and East European cultural systems. This "intersectional" revisiting of Romanian literature is organized into three parts. Opening with a fresh look at the literary ideology of Romania's "national poet," Mihai Eminescu, part I dwells primarily on literary-cultural history as process and discipline. Here, the focus is on cross-cultural mimesis, the role of strategic imitation in the production of a distinct literature in modern Romania, and the shortcomings marking traditional literary historiography's handling of these issues. Part II examines the ethno-linguistic and territorial complexity of Romanian literatures or "Romanian literature in the plural." Part III takes up the trans-systemic rise of Romanian, Jewish Romanian, and Romanian-European avant-garde and modernism, Socialist Realism, exile and �migr� literature, and translation.

Alexandru Matei

Theory in the "Post" Era brings together the work and perspectives of a group of Romanian theorists who discuss the morphings of contemporary theory in what the editors call the post era. Since the Cold War's end and especially in the third millennium, theorists have been exploring the aftermath - and sometimes just the after - of whole paradigms, the crisis or passing of anthropocentrism, the twilight of an entire ontological and cultural condition, as well as the corresponding rise of an antagonist model, of an anti, meta, or neo alternative, with examples ranging from posthumanism and post-postmodernism to post-aesthetics, postanalog interpretation or digicriticism, post-presentism, post-memory, post- or neo-critique, and so forth. It is no coincidence, the contributors to this volume argue, that this post moment is also a time when theory is practiced as a world genre. If theory has always been a worlded enterprise, a quintessentially communal, cross-cultural and international project, this is truer at present than ever. Perhaps more than other humanist constituencies, today's theorists work and belong in a theory commons that is transnational if still uneven economically, politically, and otherwise. Theory in the "Post" Era reports the results of Romanian theory experiments that join efforts made in other places to foster a theory for the post age.

Andrei Terian

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