This article studies the fictionalization of late Eastern-European socialism in contemporary Romania, namely the literary projection of the 1980s in Mircea Cărtărescu’s autofictional novel Solenoid (2015). The novel is an ample, paranoid, metaphysical, and counterfactual autobiography that uses a late-communist backdrop to create a metaphorically skewed representation of the self and the world. In order to describe this narrative structure as an emergent subgenre of the postmodern maximalist novel, we coined the term ‘maximalist autofiction.’ We then discussed Cărtărescu’s option for maximalist autofiction and the effects this literary choice has had on his representation of Romanian late socialism. This option is influenced by the author’s biography, as well as by his own relationship with the memory burden of socialism in today’s post-Cold War world. Cărtărescu uses hyperbole, metaphysical parody, and a maximalist surrealist imagination to propel the discussion of socialism and cultural peripherality beyond the dated parameters of the East/West dichotomies.
"Generations, Contemporaneity, and Intersectionality in Literary History. While several traditional concepts of literary history, including literary periods, periodization itself, and genre, have been recently put into question and reframed in transnational, cross-temporal, and transdisciplinary ways, the notion of generation has received much less attention. At the same time, in various branches of cultural studies, and even more prominently in sociology, the problem of generations has taken center stage once again. In this article, the critic takes as her departure point Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 to discuss how the generational operator could be employed in post-Cold War literary history. Mironescu argues that a transversal and intersectional integration of generation into contemporary literary criticism could ensure a better understanding of intra- and transgenerational dynamics in terms of self-representations and group narratives, inclusions and exclusions, as well as gender and literary affiliations. Keywords: generation, generationality, literary history, postcommunism, intersectionality"
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.