Mihai Iovănel’s History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 is the first leftist major narrative of Romanian literature – and the shockwaves it generated were due even more to this firm ideological option (the first such one in the history of major Romanian literary histories) than to its literary content proper. The present article aims at asserting the main three accomplishments and shortcomings generated by this ideological option – namely that: i) it succeeds in coalescing the first coherent narrative of the last three decades of Romanian literature; ii) it sometimes turns from an ideological option into an ideological bias – and modifies the factuality of Romanian literature, eliminating important writers, exaggerating the qualities of some other ones, searching to distribute merits (to leftist writers) and punishments (to right-wing ones) according with their political option, and not with their literary qualifications; iii) it is an impressive stylistic achievement in itself, even though quite ironically its author disregards the virtues of aestheticism.
This article studies the production of the Romanian novel published between 1933 and 1947 by deploying instruments of quantitative analysis. More precisely, based on the corpus resulted from the project The Digital Museum of the Romanian Novel: 1933-1947 (more than 700 digitized novels), our analysis focuses on the canonical writers and their “rivals”, the authors and their novels bypassed by the literary canon, the geographical networks of production and the origin of the authors. The relevance of such a study lies not only in recording the evolution of the Romanian production centers, but also in mapping the formula, the mechanisms and, taking into account the article that analyzes the period 1901-1932, the process of canonization of the Romanian novel published in the first half of the 20th century.
The article examines some cases of violence against writers in Turkey, in Saudi Arabia, and in the United States. Using as starting point Salman Rushdie’s essays from Languages of Truth, as well as his atrocious experience of the attack against him in August 2022, the article moves on to examine the examples of other writers abused not by attackers, but by governments, whose violence is more often than that of the isolated agressors. The article also documents the instrumental assistance offered to these abused writers by PEN International and its branches.
This academic interview with contemporary poet Andrei Codrescu (dating July 2022) examines several contemporary meanings of 21st-century poetry and poetics, the relevance of American poetry schools that dominated the latter half of the 20th century, effects of this post-humanistic turn on the poetic discourse(s). It also whether the public condemnation of Russian culture in general is justified or not in the aftermath of the Russian aggression against Ukraine.
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