Books Translated by Carla Baricz
Yale University Press, 2023
A virtuoso collage novel about narrative, identity, and exile, from international literary sensat... more A virtuoso collage novel about narrative, identity, and exile, from international literary sensation Norman Manea
In this vibrant mosaic of voices, sources, and stories, the protagonist, known only as the Nomadic Misanthrope, leaves communist Romania and is reunited with his friend Gunther, an unrepentant Marxist exiled in Berlin. Their meeting sparks a spirited dialogue that endures throughout the Nomadic Misanthrope’s subsequent decades in the United States. At the center of the plot is the figure of the shadow—the insubstantial shape of the exile, the wandering Jew, the death camp survivor, the individual under totalitarianism, the dark side of the Jungian personality—a figure that calls into question the boundaries of the human condition.
Recalling the beloved nineteenth-century German tale of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow for a bag of gold, this is Norman Manea’s most daring work yet: an intimate record of alienation and endurance.
Assistant editor and translator; Editor: Norman Manea; Series Editor: Edward Hirsch; , 2011
Vanity doubled by vitality, vulnerability mixed in with force, and the fear of dissolution intima... more Vanity doubled by vitality, vulnerability mixed in with force, and the fear of dissolution intimately linked with the desperate pride of defeating historical time confer upon Romanian literature a special tension, born from wandering and threat. The eighty-one writers gathered in Romanian Writers on Writing explore this unsettling tension and exemplify the powerful, polyphonic voice of their country’s complex literature.
Peer Reviewed Articles by Carla Baricz
Shakespeare Jahrbuch 160, 2024
Sixteenth Century Journal, 51:2, 2020
Uncorrected proofs. Do not distribute without permission.
Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 2018
This essay reconstructs the performance context of Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres in order to... more This essay reconstructs the performance context of Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres in order to show how the formal features of Medwall’s entertainment might have signified in and been shaped by performance. The piece demonstrates that Fulgens and Lucres was organized around a private feast at Lambeth Palace and explains how the occasion itself became part of the play's formal structure. It argues that by turning to the work’s performance history, and to the private circumstances in which it was produced, in order to clarify itsformal and generic concerns, we can better understand Tudor great hall drama written for specific occasions and unique playing spaces in the homes of aristocratic patrons.
Joyce Studies Annual, 2008
This short article attempts to explain the diagram on page 293 of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake,... more This short article attempts to explain the diagram on page 293 of James Joyce's "Finnegans Wake," which Joyce based on Giordano Bruno's geometric design and Nicolaus Copernicus' "De Revolutionibus." It notes that Joyce's diagram can be read as a summation and a joining of seemingly contrary philosophies and modes of thought. It further suggests that the diagram depicts the formation of patterns of cyclical continuation that unite the empirical and the ideal universes.
Articles in Collections by Carla Baricz
Shakespeare and Seriality: Page, Stage, Screen (Bloomsbury), 2024
Rumba Under Fire: The Arts of Survival from West Point to Delhi, ed. Irina Dumnistrescu (Punctum Books), 2016
This essay examines the journals of Lena Constante, a Romanian playwright, set designer, and pupp... more This essay examines the journals of Lena Constante, a Romanian playwright, set designer, and puppeteer, who was tried and imprisoned as a political dissident in the Socialist Republic of Romania in 1953. It asks broad questions about the status of dissident literature in a repressive political regime and argues that, in certain totalitarian regimes, like Ceausescu's, the term “dissenting literature” functions, at least in practice, as an oxymoron, since such literature did not participate in what Bordieu calls “the literary field,” even in secret or samizdat form. However, the essay also suggests that private literature – in the form of journals, diaries, notes, etc. – can offer a form of silent escape to those who make use of it, helping individuals to establish and uphold values that differ from those of a repressive system.
Academic Book Reviews by Carla Baricz
Renaissance Quarterly 68, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 1477-1478.
Ploughshares Critical Essays by Carla Baricz
Ploughshares (online), 2020
There is deep breathing and the seriousness of living things at the heart of James Salter's prose... more There is deep breathing and the seriousness of living things at the heart of James Salter's prose, as if his words were made of same matter as the world they conjure up, reproving those who, like many of his characters, believe that the true things, the complicated things, the painful things belong to the realm of the ineffable. The almost incantatory rhythms of his language have been called elegant and ornate, decadent, exultant, and, in an infamous 1975 New York Times review of what is perhaps his best novel, Light Years (1975), the "mandarin" medium of an "overwritten, chi-chi, and rather silly novel." It is for the luminosity of his language, however, that one reads James Salter, since in his novels style is a form of truth, or at least one of the more direct means of apprehending truths. Salter's characters are forever in search of some version of the truth, his narrators fumble about trying to elucidate it, and his plots fruitlessly promise it over and over again, but it is in the rhythms of his descriptive passages, with their curious resemblance to film stills (in the sixties Salter was a briefly a screenwriter and film producer) or, occasionally, to still life paintings, that one at last gets a sense that Salter has said something important, conveying a sense of the world as it really is, perhaps despite his own intentions.
Ploughshares (online), 2020
Ploughshares (online), 2020
Literary myths are often born at the seemingly incongruous intersection of biographical fact and ... more Literary myths are often born at the seemingly incongruous intersection of biographical fact and literary achievement. They fascinate because they suggest that lived experience-and the creative capacities that draw on that experience-does not always correspond to our expectations of how a life may be inscribed and circumscribed by its circumstances. The myth of Max (Marcel) Blecher fascinates in this way because it is a myth based on the question of how a young man, who spent most of his short, agonized life bedridden, and who died at the age of twenty-nine from Pott's Disease, or spinal tuberculosis, in a small,
Ploughshares (online), 2020
In Summer, the last installment of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, the world is revealed to be the ... more In Summer, the last installment of Ali Smith's seasonal quartet, the world is revealed to be the function and result of interdependence. Everything is relational and therefore relative. Nothing exists on its own terms, or, if it does, the terms are always temporal and framed by the intersection of multiple pasts-ecological, historical, and personal-and multiple selves. "Nothing's not connected," states Iris, a character the reader meets in Winter, and who returns, improbably, in Summer, the same and not the same, changed in the interval. In the warm season, she is a minor character in someone else's story, appearing much as the mythological figure of Iris, the goddess of the rainbow, does-briefly, as her summer intersects with others' summers-to demonstrate one of the larger points of the quartet: the world is itself the invention or, perhaps, intervention of our provisional selves experiencing, just as provisionally, the passing of the seasons. "Time is nothing," says one character's father. Another character, Robert Greenlaw, a young boy who is at once himself and the Robert of others' imaginations (and exists, in one extreme case, both as Hannah, the long-
Ploughshares (online), 2020
Ploughshares (online), 2020
We say it to others as we say it to ourselves. We say it when it seems impossible: "So now get up... more We say it to others as we say it to ourselves. We say it when it seems impossible: "So now get up." It is an expression of will that reflects back upon its speaker. In it there is anguish, determination, hope, wishfulfillment, glee, self-satisfaction, relief. Sometimes, in speaking, we try to make our words become truth, while at other times, our speech verifies a truth. The phrase underscores a prerequisite rather than a choice.
Plougshares (online), 2020
desire is full / of endless distances." Flat broke and finding it impossible to return to Stalini... more desire is full / of endless distances." Flat broke and finding it impossible to return to Stalinist Russia, the thirty-four-year-old Marina Tsvetayeva was living in France with her husband and two children, getting by on a Czech fellowship that would soon be withdrawn. Attempting to recover from a spiritual and creative crisis, the thirty-six-year-old Boris Pasternak languished behind in Moscow, with his own family, trying to prove to himself and to others that he was a real poet. Disaffected and suffering from a mysterious illness wrongly selfdiagnosed as loneliness, the fifty-one-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke was preparing to leave his roses and empty thirteenth-century stone tower near the town of Veyras, Switzerland, in order to seek relief and company in a nearby sanatorium. Borders, censors, illness, foreign languages, and delayed post stood between them. And
Ploughshares (online), 2020
Devastatingly, the memoir suggests that acquiring a room of one’s own and becoming a successful w... more Devastatingly, the memoir suggests that acquiring a room of one’s own and becoming a successful writer does not preclude sharing the fate of one’s mother.
Ploughshares (online), 2020
"As in other instances of verbatim theater, Alexievich replaces monolithic history with individua... more "As in other instances of verbatim theater, Alexievich replaces monolithic history with individual thoughts and conversations, gossip and jealousies, friendship and love, and all the things, big and small, that make up the collective world of human social relations."
Literary Essays by Carla Baricz
Los Angeles Review of Books, 2020
Observator Cultural , 2020
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Books Translated by Carla Baricz
In this vibrant mosaic of voices, sources, and stories, the protagonist, known only as the Nomadic Misanthrope, leaves communist Romania and is reunited with his friend Gunther, an unrepentant Marxist exiled in Berlin. Their meeting sparks a spirited dialogue that endures throughout the Nomadic Misanthrope’s subsequent decades in the United States. At the center of the plot is the figure of the shadow—the insubstantial shape of the exile, the wandering Jew, the death camp survivor, the individual under totalitarianism, the dark side of the Jungian personality—a figure that calls into question the boundaries of the human condition.
Recalling the beloved nineteenth-century German tale of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow for a bag of gold, this is Norman Manea’s most daring work yet: an intimate record of alienation and endurance.
Peer Reviewed Articles by Carla Baricz
Articles in Collections by Carla Baricz
Academic Book Reviews by Carla Baricz
Ploughshares Critical Essays by Carla Baricz
Literary Essays by Carla Baricz
In this vibrant mosaic of voices, sources, and stories, the protagonist, known only as the Nomadic Misanthrope, leaves communist Romania and is reunited with his friend Gunther, an unrepentant Marxist exiled in Berlin. Their meeting sparks a spirited dialogue that endures throughout the Nomadic Misanthrope’s subsequent decades in the United States. At the center of the plot is the figure of the shadow—the insubstantial shape of the exile, the wandering Jew, the death camp survivor, the individual under totalitarianism, the dark side of the Jungian personality—a figure that calls into question the boundaries of the human condition.
Recalling the beloved nineteenth-century German tale of Peter Schlemihl, the man who sold his shadow for a bag of gold, this is Norman Manea’s most daring work yet: an intimate record of alienation and endurance.
Among pieces on the cultural-political landscape of Eastern Europe and on the North America of today, there are astute critiques of fellow Romanian and American writers. Manea answers essential questions on censorship and on linguistic roots. He unravels the relationship of the mother tongue to the difficulties of translation. Above all, he describes what homelessness means for the writer.
These essays—many translated here for the first time—are passionate, lucid, and enriching, conveying a profound perspective on our troubled society.
NORMAN MANEA: I didn’t want to write this book. I didn’t want to write a memoir, in any case. I didn’t like the idea of a memoir, but that’s what I ended up with. I happened to visit an editor, and I told him a few stories about Romania. He was very interested, that’s how people are sometimes, when you tell them stories about that other world, the Old World with its scandals and exoticism.
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