THE CASE FOR ROMANIAN AUTOFICTION. LOVE & ANXIETY IN THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD IN RADU VANCU’S AND SAȘA ZARE’S NOVELS
THE CASE FOR ROMANIAN AUTOFICTION. LOVE & ANXIETY IN THE NEOLIBERAL WORLD IN RADU VANCU’S AND SAȘA ZARE’S NOVELS

Summary/Abstract: The Case for Romanian Autofiction. Love & Anxiety in the Neoliberal World in Radu Vancu’s and Sașa Zare’s Novels. The origins of autofiction encapsulate this literary species in a postmodernist ethos. Nevertheless, the 2000s generation of Romanian writers developed an appetency for autofiction that exposed the questioning potentialities of self-narration towards the contemporary neoliberal status-quo. Being called a hybridization between metarealism and miserable realism (Mihai Iovănel) or an extension of the neoliberal novel (Adriana Stan), theories highlight its ambiguous, volatile, almost non-specific character. However, in the case of Romanian contemporary literature, two post-2000s novels engage in polemics regarding the way in which individuality, memory and trauma are revisited through autofiction, using metadiscourse, biography, and fictive discourse. Radu Vancu’s Transparența (Transparency) and Sașa Zare’s Dezrădăcinare (Uprooting) are exponential in understanding autofiction’s main strategies of narration. This paper examines how autofiction evolved after the 2000s generation of self-narrators, trying to question how this literary species fits or challenges the neoliberal political context. Being easy to portray a relative cause for autofiction’s focus on individual or social motifs, this paper will dwell into how the self and the interhuman erotic relationships are exposed in the prior mentioned novels. In the second part of the study, an in-depth analysis of Transparența will examine how sensibility, eroticism, and anxiety are handled in an introvert autofictional way (Florina Pîrjol), where the decentralisation of self is dealt with maximalist strategies. Finally, Sașa Zare’s autofictional innovations will portray how the extrovert side evolved in the neoliberal context, proposing a new form of authenticity, where the self and queer eroticism are expressed towards an integrated communitarian audience.

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