A BRIEF HISTORY OF INTELLECTUALISM IN ROMANIAN PROSE ( I )
A BRIEF HISTORY OF INTELLECTUALISM IN ROMANIAN PROSE ( I )

Summary/Abstract: The present study contains a historical analysis of intellectualism in Romanian literature, captured in the evolution of prose, especially in that of the novel. The roots of intellectual prose spread out beyond modernism, when this type of perspective had its greatest expansion. It was sporadically present in the work of several isolated artistic personalities, then it manifested itself fully during the interwar modernism. Intellectualism became a key component in the prose of postwar neomodernism and then become dominant in the postmodern novel. In all these three periods of explosive manifestation, intellectualism became a literary perspective, but also a form of knowledge, having in each epoch the specific peculiarities of "age", as we will discover in the present study. As a literary perspective, intellectualism tends to replace both metaphysics and socialism, creating its own determinism. The first part of the study, the present one, will consider the manifestations of intellectualism in the pre-modern period and in the interwar modernism. The implications of intellectualism in post-war neomodernism and postmodernism will become the subject of a future study.

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