Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, Dec 17, 2021
The paper investigates the cultural transfers and translations of the term "theory", as instrumen... more The paper investigates the cultural transfers and translations of the term "theory", as instrumented in some of the most influential anthologies of the past decades. It puts forward the argument that while in literature per se a widening of the canon has been produced, "theory" remains a term charged with high hegemonical presumptions. Therefore, it pleads for a non-hierarchical and practical conception of theory, that can account for the large variety of non-Western literary phenomena.
Drawing from recent developments in the field of World Literature, but also earlier attempts at m... more Drawing from recent developments in the field of World Literature, but also earlier attempts at mapping local cultural traditions, contexts, and affinities, our proposal attempts to investigate the dominant patterns of cultural criticism within the literary publications active during the interwar period. Using an exhaustive resource of metadata related to the relations between Romanian literature and foreign literatures developed over the span of twenty years, we plot a network abstraction focused on revealing patterns and trends of reception within Romanian cultural magazines. This process of “topic modeling” cultural criticism will serve to illustrate the dominant subject matters present in the Romanian cultural press. Following our data analysis, we will attempt to provide an explanatory model of “theory production” in Romanian literary culture that accounts for the seemingly “ahistorical” nature of autochthonous localizations.
The following study employs a quantitative analysis of the Romanian novelistic production from th... more The following study employs a quantitative analysis of the Romanian novelistic production from the period 1901-1932. By using the literary corpus developed by the research project ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932, implemented by ASTRA National Museum Complex, this paper focuses on the secondary canonical writers (with their “b-sides and rarities”), the novelists’ origins, the abundance and the geographical nodes of production, in order to investigate the dynamic relation between national cultural centers and their respective editorial networks, as well as the mechanisms of canonization within the Romanian novel of the period.
This paper is concerned with the conditions and strategies contributing to the myth of the tradit... more This paper is concerned with the conditions and strategies contributing to the myth of the traditional literary critic as a savior of Culture itself. Originating in the Romantic idea of genius, this representation became pervasive, in Romanian literature, in the second half of the 20 th century due to the political context. In Iluziile literaturii române/ The Illusions of Romanian Literature (2008), Eugen Negrici takes note of the various representations of the literary critic, seen often as a guiding principle, a founding father, a providential figure. Yet, Negrici fails to analyze on the one hand the amplitude of this rhetoric and on the other hand, the ideological conditions of its expansion. One of the premises of my paper is that this process of mystification is specific to Eastern semi-peripheric literatures under the control of totalitarian political regimes. A process of compensation – seen in complexes of cultural superiority or inferiority – can be detected through the sci...
The article discusses the confrontation of the poetics of mimesis, directed towards nonlinguistic... more The article discusses the confrontation of the poetics of mimesis, directed towards nonlinguistic events, with that of semiosis, concerned with the production of signs, in literature under censorship. The case of Romanian fiction in the 1980s is representative of the “textual resistance” specific to East European Postmodernism.
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 39.2 (2016) The title of this study could appear oxymoronic o... more Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 39.2 (2016) The title of this study could appear oxymoronic on the surface.1 The notion of semiosis as a free activity of producing meaning disagrees with the content of the term communism, which has become synonymous with the attempt to reduce content to Party propaganda. It is no secret that between 1948 and 1990, in most of the Eastern and central European cultures under Soviet in fluence, literature was used as means of indoctrination. In prose writing, this aspect decidedly favored realistic ways of representation, the best vehicles for political autarchy. More than a poetics among others, mimesis became an ideology that signaled the attempt by totalitarian forces to control literary representation. A different ideological statement can be retrieved, neverthe less, in the literary strategies that discard the mimetic poetics. The study explores the political undertones of metafiction—with a focus on antireal ist and pluralistic devices—star...
The breakdown of the epic wholeness specific to the Thaw novel enables writers to undermine the p... more The breakdown of the epic wholeness specific to the Thaw novel enables writers to undermine the politics of Stalinism. Influenced by Vincent Jouveʼs analysis of the mise-en-texte of values, the paper emphasizes on undermining rhetorical strategies such as ellipsis, narrative focus or sympathy towards certain characters. One of the first occurrences of the ephemeral genre known as “the novel of the obsessive decade”, Marin Predaʼs Risipitorii (1962) is used as a case study for defending a poetics of subversion.
One of the most credible of the systemic alternatives to the guidelines of the French New Critici... more One of the most credible of the systemic alternatives to the guidelines of the French New Criticism – which, through all of its metamorphoses, has authoritatively dominated the literary studies of the last half-century – is the possible worlds theory. This theory was established in opposition to the paradoxical assortment of formalism and ideology represented by the French New Criticism. Its singularity within the context of current literary studies has a dual character: first of all, it rejects strictly formal approaches to literary interpretation by constantly pleading for the revalidation of semantic studies. However, the aspect that distinguishes it among the literary approaches that focus on the message of the texts rather than on their formal structures – quite a few, in the last decades, from New Historicism to gender studies and postcolonial studies – is its scepticism towards ideological approaches to the literary. Starting from the foundational studies of two theorists of ...
The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Roman... more The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms.
The present article follows the relationship of the Romanian novelistic output between 1901 and 1... more The present article follows the relationship of the Romanian novelistic output between 1901 and 1932 with time and temporal distribution. Its emphasis falls on the degree of correlation between the time of publication and the time during which the events unfold for each corresponding novel, expressed through a variable coined “distance”. By making use of this variable, the temporal distribution of the novelistic corpus in the article clearly shows that the novelists’ focus gradually shifts towards contemporary events; while during the period between 1900 up until the outbreak of World War One, novelists were inclined to place the events of their works in the past, the War seems to have triggered an acute preoccupation with the immediate present. Lastly, the text touches upon two distinct subgenres of the novel, arisen out of their relationship to time, namely the historical novel and the so-called ‘contemporary novel’.
Când am fost cooptați, în urmă cu doi ani, în echipa însărcinată cu pregătirea unei noi ediții a ... more Când am fost cooptați, în urmă cu doi ani, în echipa însărcinată cu pregătirea unei noi ediții a Dicționarului cronologic al romanului românesc de la origini până în 2000, partea cea mai provocatoare ni s-a părut, de la început, revizia definițiilor tipologice ale romanelor. Adică să refacem "etichetarea" generică a tuturor titlurilor înregistrate în dicționar: să raționalizăm și să sistematizăm seria de "romane sentimentale", "de senzație", "de aventuri", "de moravuri" etc.. Sigur că erau multe alte lucruri de făcut, unele care au impus intervenții pe suprafețe largi și completări masive. S-au adăugat titluri, s-au rescris caracterizări, s-au adus la zi bibliografii. Dar între toate operațiunile, această scurtă sintagmă "roman de", plasată la începutul descrierii istorico-literare, implica cele mai multe resurse teoretice, cele mai multe discuții, cele mai grele decizii și -aș spuneantrena cele mai serioase consecințe. Dacă evaluăm dicționarul publicat în 2004 într-un orizont actual al studiilor literare, ceea ce se vede e tensiunea care îl străbate, între programul exhaustiv, de cuprindere integrală a producției culturale a unui gen, și valorizarea implicită a acestei producții. Ca să o spun mai simplu, autorii dicționarului nu credeau în semnificația celei mai mari părți a materialului pe care îl tratau. Cam în aceeași epocă în care se demarau lucrările la dicționar, echipa care urma să îl redacteze a fost implicată, între 1975 și 1978, într-un proiect de sociologie a romanului românesc. Publicat sub forma unei antologii de studii câțiva ani mai târziu, în 1982, cu o introducere a lui Paul Cornea, volumul nu conține decât analize ale unor autori de primă mărime:
Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, Dec 17, 2021
The paper investigates the cultural transfers and translations of the term "theory", as instrumen... more The paper investigates the cultural transfers and translations of the term "theory", as instrumented in some of the most influential anthologies of the past decades. It puts forward the argument that while in literature per se a widening of the canon has been produced, "theory" remains a term charged with high hegemonical presumptions. Therefore, it pleads for a non-hierarchical and practical conception of theory, that can account for the large variety of non-Western literary phenomena.
Drawing from recent developments in the field of World Literature, but also earlier attempts at m... more Drawing from recent developments in the field of World Literature, but also earlier attempts at mapping local cultural traditions, contexts, and affinities, our proposal attempts to investigate the dominant patterns of cultural criticism within the literary publications active during the interwar period. Using an exhaustive resource of metadata related to the relations between Romanian literature and foreign literatures developed over the span of twenty years, we plot a network abstraction focused on revealing patterns and trends of reception within Romanian cultural magazines. This process of “topic modeling” cultural criticism will serve to illustrate the dominant subject matters present in the Romanian cultural press. Following our data analysis, we will attempt to provide an explanatory model of “theory production” in Romanian literary culture that accounts for the seemingly “ahistorical” nature of autochthonous localizations.
The following study employs a quantitative analysis of the Romanian novelistic production from th... more The following study employs a quantitative analysis of the Romanian novelistic production from the period 1901-1932. By using the literary corpus developed by the research project ASTRA Data Mining. The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel 1901-1932, implemented by ASTRA National Museum Complex, this paper focuses on the secondary canonical writers (with their “b-sides and rarities”), the novelists’ origins, the abundance and the geographical nodes of production, in order to investigate the dynamic relation between national cultural centers and their respective editorial networks, as well as the mechanisms of canonization within the Romanian novel of the period.
This paper is concerned with the conditions and strategies contributing to the myth of the tradit... more This paper is concerned with the conditions and strategies contributing to the myth of the traditional literary critic as a savior of Culture itself. Originating in the Romantic idea of genius, this representation became pervasive, in Romanian literature, in the second half of the 20 th century due to the political context. In Iluziile literaturii române/ The Illusions of Romanian Literature (2008), Eugen Negrici takes note of the various representations of the literary critic, seen often as a guiding principle, a founding father, a providential figure. Yet, Negrici fails to analyze on the one hand the amplitude of this rhetoric and on the other hand, the ideological conditions of its expansion. One of the premises of my paper is that this process of mystification is specific to Eastern semi-peripheric literatures under the control of totalitarian political regimes. A process of compensation – seen in complexes of cultural superiority or inferiority – can be detected through the sci...
The article discusses the confrontation of the poetics of mimesis, directed towards nonlinguistic... more The article discusses the confrontation of the poetics of mimesis, directed towards nonlinguistic events, with that of semiosis, concerned with the production of signs, in literature under censorship. The case of Romanian fiction in the 1980s is representative of the “textual resistance” specific to East European Postmodernism.
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 39.2 (2016) The title of this study could appear oxymoronic o... more Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 39.2 (2016) The title of this study could appear oxymoronic on the surface.1 The notion of semiosis as a free activity of producing meaning disagrees with the content of the term communism, which has become synonymous with the attempt to reduce content to Party propaganda. It is no secret that between 1948 and 1990, in most of the Eastern and central European cultures under Soviet in fluence, literature was used as means of indoctrination. In prose writing, this aspect decidedly favored realistic ways of representation, the best vehicles for political autarchy. More than a poetics among others, mimesis became an ideology that signaled the attempt by totalitarian forces to control literary representation. A different ideological statement can be retrieved, neverthe less, in the literary strategies that discard the mimetic poetics. The study explores the political undertones of metafiction—with a focus on antireal ist and pluralistic devices—star...
The breakdown of the epic wholeness specific to the Thaw novel enables writers to undermine the p... more The breakdown of the epic wholeness specific to the Thaw novel enables writers to undermine the politics of Stalinism. Influenced by Vincent Jouveʼs analysis of the mise-en-texte of values, the paper emphasizes on undermining rhetorical strategies such as ellipsis, narrative focus or sympathy towards certain characters. One of the first occurrences of the ephemeral genre known as “the novel of the obsessive decade”, Marin Predaʼs Risipitorii (1962) is used as a case study for defending a poetics of subversion.
One of the most credible of the systemic alternatives to the guidelines of the French New Critici... more One of the most credible of the systemic alternatives to the guidelines of the French New Criticism – which, through all of its metamorphoses, has authoritatively dominated the literary studies of the last half-century – is the possible worlds theory. This theory was established in opposition to the paradoxical assortment of formalism and ideology represented by the French New Criticism. Its singularity within the context of current literary studies has a dual character: first of all, it rejects strictly formal approaches to literary interpretation by constantly pleading for the revalidation of semantic studies. However, the aspect that distinguishes it among the literary approaches that focus on the message of the texts rather than on their formal structures – quite a few, in the last decades, from New Historicism to gender studies and postcolonial studies – is its scepticism towards ideological approaches to the literary. Starting from the foundational studies of two theorists of ...
The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Roman... more The paper looks at the Romanian relationship between modernism and rural imagination in the Romanian 20th century debates. As in other cases of semi-peripheral or emergent literatures (the general framework builds on contributions from Frederic Jameson, Pascale Casanova and Wai Chee Dimock), the hegemonical pressure of the Eurochronology has put an embargo on rural prose, excluding it from the projects of modernist literature. The study asserts that far from being a collateral symptom of modernity, rural imaginary is essential for understanding its contradictory mechanisms.
The present article follows the relationship of the Romanian novelistic output between 1901 and 1... more The present article follows the relationship of the Romanian novelistic output between 1901 and 1932 with time and temporal distribution. Its emphasis falls on the degree of correlation between the time of publication and the time during which the events unfold for each corresponding novel, expressed through a variable coined “distance”. By making use of this variable, the temporal distribution of the novelistic corpus in the article clearly shows that the novelists’ focus gradually shifts towards contemporary events; while during the period between 1900 up until the outbreak of World War One, novelists were inclined to place the events of their works in the past, the War seems to have triggered an acute preoccupation with the immediate present. Lastly, the text touches upon two distinct subgenres of the novel, arisen out of their relationship to time, namely the historical novel and the so-called ‘contemporary novel’.
Când am fost cooptați, în urmă cu doi ani, în echipa însărcinată cu pregătirea unei noi ediții a ... more Când am fost cooptați, în urmă cu doi ani, în echipa însărcinată cu pregătirea unei noi ediții a Dicționarului cronologic al romanului românesc de la origini până în 2000, partea cea mai provocatoare ni s-a părut, de la început, revizia definițiilor tipologice ale romanelor. Adică să refacem "etichetarea" generică a tuturor titlurilor înregistrate în dicționar: să raționalizăm și să sistematizăm seria de "romane sentimentale", "de senzație", "de aventuri", "de moravuri" etc.. Sigur că erau multe alte lucruri de făcut, unele care au impus intervenții pe suprafețe largi și completări masive. S-au adăugat titluri, s-au rescris caracterizări, s-au adus la zi bibliografii. Dar între toate operațiunile, această scurtă sintagmă "roman de", plasată la începutul descrierii istorico-literare, implica cele mai multe resurse teoretice, cele mai multe discuții, cele mai grele decizii și -aș spuneantrena cele mai serioase consecințe. Dacă evaluăm dicționarul publicat în 2004 într-un orizont actual al studiilor literare, ceea ce se vede e tensiunea care îl străbate, între programul exhaustiv, de cuprindere integrală a producției culturale a unui gen, și valorizarea implicită a acestei producții. Ca să o spun mai simplu, autorii dicționarului nu credeau în semnificația celei mai mari părți a materialului pe care îl tratau. Cam în aceeași epocă în care se demarau lucrările la dicționar, echipa care urma să îl redacteze a fost implicată, între 1975 și 1978, într-un proiect de sociologie a romanului românesc. Publicat sub forma unei antologii de studii câțiva ani mai târziu, în 1982, cu o introducere a lui Paul Cornea, volumul nu conține decât analize ale unor autori de primă mărime:
Uploads
Papers by Alex Goldis