Cuvinte critice: Aproprieri și reaproprieri ale poeticii argheziene în critica românească
Critical Words: Appropriations and Reappropriations of Arghezi’s Poetics in Romanian Criticism

Summary/Abstract: By instrumentalizing the concept of a “regime of relevance,” proposed by Galin Tihanov in his volume The Birth and Death of Literary Theory: Regimes of Relevance in Russia and Beyond, this research focuses on the figure of a canonical author, examined through the evolution of literary criticism’s perspective on him. More specifically, the present study traces the ways in which Romanian critical discourse has appropriated and re-appropriated the poetics of Tudor Arghezi as a formative canonical model, both during the period immediately contemporary to the author and in the period following his death. From the interwar period, the critics G. Călinescu and E. Lovinescu will be considered, in order to highlight the relationship they establish between the poet and modernism. As for the postwar period, the reception of Arghezi’s work will be examined in two stages that are paradigmatic for the evolution of Romanian literary criticism. The first is represented by Nicolae Manolescu and Nicolae Balotă, as exponents of the 1960s generation, while the second corresponds to Romanian postmodernism, represented by Mircea Cărtărescu and Gheorghe Crăciun. The aim of the research is to shed light on how Arghezi’s poetics has been valued, assessed, reassessed, or even reconfigured by the critical discourse of these two periods. On the one hand, this type of discourse is constructed according to the sensibilities and artistic beliefs of literary critics; on the other, it is shaped by the cultural dominants of each historical period. The case study of Tudor Arghezi constitutes the object of this metacritical exercise, as the central position he occupies in the history of Romanian literature grants him the status of a reference point both for literary posterity and for his own critical posterity.

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