PARADIGMS OF THE “SPIRITUAL MASTER” IN THE ROMANIAN MODERN LITERATURE (THE SCHOOL OF TÂRGOVISTE, THE SCHOOL OF PĂLTINIS)
PARADIGMS OF THE “SPIRITUAL MASTER” IN THE ROMANIAN MODERN LITERATURE (THE SCHOOL OF TÂRGOVISTE, THE SCHOOL OF PĂLTINIS)

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to circumscribe the theme of the master-disciple relationship during the 20th century as configured by the Romanian cultural background, as one of the processes of preserving and transmitting its “spiritual and material specificity” from one generation to the other – the education or the formation as paideia, being the very principle of every human society, according to Werner Jaeger. The case-studies we will consider are The School of Târgoviste and The School of Păltinis, and our approach will partly focus on three major works concerned with the problem of paideia: Maestri si discipoli by George Steiner, Michel Foucault’s Hermeneutica subiectului and Joachim Wach’s “Master and Disciple, Two Religio-Sociological Studies”, the latter being a well-known historian of religions whose essay proves to be an advantageous source even for other cultural contexts such as philosophy or literature. (However, it is possible to ask if these authors are essential to a mainly literary investigation. An argument to sustain our frequent reference to their works would be the interdisciplinary quality of the theme of “discipleship”, manifesting an almost ubiquitous character). Thus, our object is to observe these modern paideic experiences by starting with a general view on the master-disciple relationship as a recurrent pattern. We believe that the comparison between two phenomena belonging to different categories such as The School of Păltinis, where the problem of education has been explicitly posed, and The School of Târgoviste, where the problem of formation is not necessarily more diffuse but present in a rather atypical formulation, might bring new analytical dimensions.

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