Spații, exiluri și cartografii afective. Arca lui Goma din perspectivă geocritică
Spaces, Exiles, and Affective Cartographies: A Geocritical Reading of Goma’s Ark

Summary/Abstract: Starting from the premises of contemporary geocriticism and drawing on the theoretical contributions of Bertrand Westphal, Edward Soja, Yi-Fu Tuan, and Robert T. Tally Jr., my study proposes a reading of Aliona Grati’s Goma’s Ark through the lens of the relationships between space, memory, and identity. Its central hypothesis is that the volume transcends the status of a mere intellectual biography and may be interpreted as a genuine affective cartography of Paul Goma’s destiny. The analysis explores the ways in which the major spaces of the writer’s existence – his native Bessarabia, the territories of refuge, the universe of political imprisonment, the Paris of exile, and the library imagined during the final stage of his earthly life – contribute to the configuration of a complex existential geography. Special attention is paid to the relationship between topophilia and the experience of uprootedness, to the mechanisms through which place is transformed into memory, and to the symbolic function of exile as a form of deterritorialization. At the same time, the study examines the significance of the ark metaphor as a device of mnemonic and identitarian preservation, demonstrating that Aliona Grati reconstructs not only the biography of a writer, but also the affective map of a consciousness shaped by loss, exclusion, and continuous spatial reconfiguration. Ultimately, Goma’s Ark emerges as an existential atlas in which geography and memory overlap to the point of indistinction, transforming the experience of exile into a privileged form of cultural and identitarian survival.

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