PEDAGOGICAL MERITS OF LITERARY TESTIMONIES: RADU CIUCEANU’S PRISON MEMOIRS
PEDAGOGICAL MERITS OF LITERARY TESTIMONIES: RADU CIUCEANU’S PRISON MEMOIRS

Summary/Abstract: What pedagogical virtues can literary testimonies of repression reveal? What specific contribution may they bring to our knowledge of historical events? This paper attempts to find possible answers through exploring a memoir of Romanian political detention written by historian Radu Ciuceanu. His comprehensive work conveys truth-oriented pedagogical merits that facilitate the reader’s understanding of how a significant category of people went through political detention, including the so-called ‘reeducation’ process. A hermeneutic approach allows insight into the memoirs’ means of conveying objectives of knowledge mostly related to the context of the human condition besieged by systematic ill-treatment. The deep and surface structures converge to outline a broader picture of lived history, whose written expression bears essential qualities of an inherently pedagogical project.

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