The article discusses the condition of literary history at a time of disciplinary crisis, when literary studies appear, globally, to renegotiate their connection to the social and to social sciences. In trying to articulate ways for literary history to incorporate more socially aware concepts in its practice, I turn to two recent proposals by Galin Tihanov (“regimes of relevance”) and Mihai Iovănel (“resistance points”). Finally, the article applies the finds of both concepts to postcommunist Romanian literature in an attempt to reach a more supple and at the same time comprehensive angle.
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.
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