Unde reîncepe literatura română?

Unde reîncepe literatura română? Istoria literară națională după Istoria lui Mihai Iovănel

Prelegere prezentată de Prof. Christian Moraru urmată de un dialog moderat de Prof.univ.dr.habil. Andrei Terian – eveniment organizat în cadrul proiectului Connecting the World through International Academic Cooperation – CNFIS-FDI-2021-0097

Abstract: In his lecture, Moraru contends that Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 is a breakthrough in Romanian literary historiography and criticism overall. According to Moraru, the History revisits radically the terms of the Romantic contract that, in Romania and elsewhere, has typically been underwriting modern criticism. A form of critical realism and an exemplar of postmillennial Romanian literary and cultural studies, Iovănel’s book is, in Moraru’s view, not only provocative but also effectively transformative. To gauge the scope and nature of the changes advocated and enacted in the History, Moraru’s presentation examines how Iovănel has put together what he calls the “system” of contemporary Romanian literature. Thus, Moraru is less concerned with which writers are included in the book and which are left out, seeking, instead, answers to a series of questions concerning primarily Iovănel’s cultural-materialist and transnational studies-informed methodology.
Along the same theoretical, historical, and political lines, Moraru discusses the project’s makeup as well as the strength of the case the History makes for the need to have another look at a range of pre- and post-1990 literary movements, directions, styles, and authors, principally at postmodernism and its competition and successors in the twenty-first century.

Prof. Christian Moraru – Class of 1949 Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Professor of English at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He specializes in contemporary American literature, critical theory as well as comparative literature with emphasis on history of ideas, narrative, postmodernism, and the relations between globalism, culture, and planetary studies. Some of his recent books include: Reading for the Planet: Toward a Geomethodology (2015), The Planetary Turn: Relationality and Geoaesthetics in the Twenty-First Century (2015), and co-editor of Romanian Literature as World Literature (2017), Francophone Literature as World Literature (2020), Theory in the “Post” Era: A Vocabulary for the 21 st Century Conceptual Commons (2021).