Poetics and politics of remembering childhood in Romanian post-communist fiction

Mironescu, Andreea; Mitroiu, Simona

doi:10.1080/00085006.2020.1742562

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…1 But this absence did not mean nobody had tried writing one. Novels documenting or fictionalizing political repression, persecution by the secret police, and allegories of oppression had been and are still being published, and after 2000 there has been a significant increase in autofictional works that focused on life stories from late socialism and the post-1989 transitional period (Mironescu and Mitroiu 2020), most of them falling short of achieving the canonical status Mihăilescu and other critics expected of them. However, one author, Mircea Cărtărescu (b.…”

Section: Rezumatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maximalist Autofiction, Surrealism and Late Socialism in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid

Mironescu

2021

EJLW

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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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Section: Rezumatmentioning

confidence: 99%

Maximalist Autofiction, Surrealism and Late Socialism in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid

Mironescu

2021

EJLW

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“…These materials, which are indispensable for analysis of the specificity of the epoch, are also a tool of communication within and between various social and age groups. Particularly valuable in this regard are not only autobiographical texts, but also autofictional ones, which feed on stories of life under socialism and process them in various ways (e.g Vassileva-Karagyozova 2015;Tippner 2019;Mironescu and Mitroiu 2020)…”

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confidence: 99%

Remembering Late Socialism in Autobiographical Novels and Autofictions from Central and Eastern Europe: Introduction

Mrozik

Tippner

2021

EJLW

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Since the fall of communism in 1989 and 1990/91 literature has dealt with this epochal societal change, trying to come to terms with the past and assessing its influence on the present. In the last years the focus has turned towards the era of late socialism, that is the 1970s and 1980s. Many writers who attempt to present and reevaluate these decades and their ongoing influence on biographies and societies today grew up or came of age in this era. Our main contention is that different forms of life-writing, especially autofictions and autobiographical novels, have become the dominant narrative device for addressing and narrating the socialist past. Accordingly, the contributions to this cluster explore the era of late socialism, examining its different and often contested meanings not only from the perspective of the past but also from the perspective of today. Thus, we explore the role of autobiographical writing in commemorating the past as well as in demonstrating the demise of socialism, as represented in contemporary literatures in Czech, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.

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Westalgia as the infantilization of the East: narrating communist childhood in post-1989 Romania and the administration of the recent past

Borza,

Turcuş

2024

Stud East Eur Thought

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Poetics and politics of remembering childhood in Romanian post-communist fiction

Cited by 3 publications

References 16 publications

Maximalist Autofiction, Surrealism and Late Socialism in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid

Maximalist Autofiction, Surrealism and Late Socialism in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid

Remembering Late Socialism in Autobiographical Novels and Autofictions from Central and Eastern Europe: Introduction

Westalgia as the infantilization of the East: narrating communist childhood in post-1989 Romania and the administration of the recent past

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