WRITING ON THE THRESHOLD: LIMINAL IDENTITY AND THE TRANSFIGURATION OF EXPERIENCE IN ROMANIAN DIARIES
WRITING ON THE THRESHOLD: LIMINAL IDENTITY AND THE TRANSFIGURATION OF EXPERIENCE IN ROMANIAN DIARIES

Summary/Abstract: This article develops a theoretical framework for reading Romanian diary writing as a liminal space structured by tensions between identity and alterity. It introduces the concept of diaristic transfiguration to describe the process through which lived experience—affect, embodiment, crisis, and historical pressure—is converted into discourse and reconfigured as identity. Drawing on theories of life writing, narrative identity, performativity, and liminality, the study argues that the diary does not merely record the self but actively produces it. Positioned between confession and construction, document and interpretation, the diary functions as a threshold form in which subjectivity emerges through continuous textual negotiation. The case of Max Blecher exemplifies this dynamic: his writing transforms bodily suffering, spatial isolation, and perceptual instability into a discourse of ontological survival. Ultimately, the article contends that Romanian diary writing offers a privileged site for examining modern subjectivity as a process of transfiguration enacted at the threshold of the self.

• Details
• Contents