THE IRONIC SPIRIT IN THE CRITICISM OF THE ROMANIAN ’70S GENERATION
THE IRONIC SPIRIT IN THE CRITICISM OF THE ROMANIAN ’70S GENERATION

Summary/Abstract: The premise that this article is built upon is that, following the political liberation of the 1968–1971 period in Romania and the placing of literature under the sign of political dogmatism after 1971, the literary criticism of 1970s generation defined itself as a space of refuge for the liberal spirit. The form that this spirit took was that of irony, not in the typical sense of the term, that of expressing force, but in that in which Rorty uses it, meaning disbelief in the force. The analysis that I propose uses as a starting point the perspective proposed by Laurențiu Ulici, the most active figure in the public space created by the literary critics of his generation and also the most representative figure of that liberal spirit and of its relation to the sense of irony. Thus, my study tries to identify the most important traits of the ironic spirit of 1970s criticism and illustrates them by discussing the vision of the main literary critics of Ulici’s generation after having defined this ironic spirit through Richard Rorty’s theory.

• Details
• Contents