The Exile Literature of Memoirs – Debates, Dilemmas, Representative Texts and their Formative-Educative Effects

Globalization and the Modern Non-fiction

“…The texts, where outstanding figures of culture, art, scientists, and sportsmen are represented, are gradually being pushed to the side of civilization, they become marginal. [13] Instead, the dominance of mass culture is brought to the forefront by the cruel dictators, on whose consciences there are millions of human lives, serial killers, organizers of resonant robberies, the godfathers of the mafia, religious fanatics and extremists, representatives of the criminal subculture, people who have serious problems with the law. Here often for commercial writers and publishers purely commercial interests play a leading role.…”

Oneness and Otherness in Florin Manolescu's Romanian-German Diary – Cu ochii pe mine / Watching myself

“…Counterbalancing the identitary-cultural illusions (as the ones defined by Jean-François Bayart in his book, The Illusion of Cultural Identity), the Romanian Victor Neumann (in his study Perspective comparative asupra filozofiei multiculturale / Comparative Perspectives on Multicultural Philosophy, published in 2001) proposes, the concept of multiple identity, perceived as 'a flexible concept regarding the identity of the person and of the groups', suitable to capture the identity disarticulations experienced by those who have two or more cultural roots or by the persons who 'being born while passing from one culture to another are confronted with all kinds of uncertainties, thus, risking to live in a state of psychological discomfort created by the supposedly cultural identities.' (our translation) (Neumann, 2001) This concept can be reshaped when approaching the Romanian memoir writing published after December 1989, as it represents the basic status of the Eastern traveller caught between two worlds (the East and the West) and grasps the inner polymorphous changes of the self as the ex-totalitarian captive begins his identity quest within the larger transcultural frame (see Mary Louise Pratt, 1993, Alina Crihana, 2013and Simona Antofi, 2013. If identity emerges from the process of negotiating the image of self in relation to both the constructed images of others and the mirror-type representation the others have of the individual who defines itself, the diarist autobiographical narrative represents an identity option which reflects both the matters of trans-culturality and restitutive memory (because the reading of the present presupposes an hermeneutical operation whose purpose is to render meaning to History and to make it accessible).…”