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FROM PARTICIPATORY AND ‘STRIKE ART’ TO THE POSTDIGITAL
The article examines the concept of contemporary community as commoning, at the intersection of action, performance or participatory art, place, site-specific, and (post)digital poetry. This involves a brief review of traditional avant-gardes, 20th century engaged art, and recent political-art movements. In the process of this analysis, the participatory emerges as a subtler, more nuanced, and less predictable phenomenon than usually accepted. Also, performative subjectivity is traced as either the source of anticommunal community (in French theory), or mere Christian-capitalist construct (in communist philosophy). Agamben’s theory of the coming community is therefore examined as possible response to both these stances, with its relevance to contemporary movements, including post-Occupy. Commoning – paralleled to placing in poetry – turns out to be of critical importance in present-day community especially with correlatives such as displacement and undecidablility. Place, space, and map(ping) are therefore radically redefined in the context, and contemporary poetry appears to be indissolubly related to the process: the poem of place is the place, and poetry becomes the site of the com(mon)ing community. Site (and discourse)-specificity in poetry occasions a shift in focus to digital space, its sonic economy, and the communities and floating locations/ sites thereof. Site and discourse fluidity have brought about a paradigm in which the poem and its related apps tend to expand and turn into digital space itself, while in more recent postdigital evolutions, a new political concern for the ‘real’ reshape community, site, and performance/ participatory art or poetry in a continuous interactivity and interdependence.
More...BETWEEN SUBMISSION AND SUBVERSION
The present article is dedicated to the guiding theme of “Collective Authorship” in its diverse contexts and notional meanings. Mapping the intellectual stakes and conceptual propositions of recent scholarship represents one of the main aims of the paper. Focusing on two important junctures, the historical perspective is complemented by a state of the art review covering several disciplinary fields. Finally, I will define two types of authorship: submissive and subversive. Authorship studies are undergoing major changes today, marking the shift from the romantic understanding of the author towards the construction of what I’ve called an authorial ecosystem which, in its turn, can be understood as being part of a larger (and circular) dynamic entity.
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Online literary communities have similar traits to traditional forms of literary sociability, although their characterization with the aid of traditional taxonomy remains problematic. Unlike traditional literary groups, that are defined primarily by a well determined aesthetic and ideological ideal (or purpose), online communities are rather defined by the orientation of their interest and their practice, forming technologically supported platforms in which users can develop conversations around specific interests, or engage in collaborative practices. In the Romanian context, the online literary communities appeared around the early 2000s. The majority of these communities were characterized by open access and a high degree of democratization. The interest for them slowly faded after the apparition of social media (Facebook, Twitter), but some of them are still functioning today. In the short history of Romanian digital communities, www.clubliterar.com occupied a special position, the most important difference from the other communities being that a great part of its members were already involved in the traditional literary circuit. What at first appeared to be just an elitist movement breaking out of the giant platform www.agonia.ro, transformed in short time in a digital platform for the young generation of Romanian writers, called “Generation 2000”.
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Starting from Jean-Luc Nancy’s explanation of literature as both community-making and interrupter of community myths, this paper discusses Kuisma Korhonen’s notion of “textual community”. Textual community refers to the interaction between reader and text as a form of open, virtual cooperation that avoids the essentialism of political or religious communities. Trying to locate historically and culturally the propositions of the two scholars, this paper reads two distant, yet connected authors in Romanian literature, the 19th century classic Ion Luca Caragiale and the contemporary author Radu Cosaşu in their dealings with communities and their unmaking in their respective texts. Caragiale presents how nationalist rhetoric can be divisive rather than unifying when paired with personal pride and stupidity. Cosașu analyses the moral failure of writers’ solidarity in the face of communist totalitarianism. Both are using irony as the overarching technique to dissolve fraudulent communities and forge on their ruins a new, textual community.
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This article aims to question the role that literature plays in the construction of a new, critical image of the nation after 1989. The communist regime was the catalyst for a particular type of interpretive community and also of particular figures of the collectivity and representations of interactions between individual and community. After 1989, these figures seemed to fade out in the public and literary discourse, and community itself, as a concept, met with crisis. However, even if the failure of communism definitively interrupted the myth of community, the idea of community could not simply disappear, and instead generated new representations of its fractured reality. Is there a particular stylistics at work in the Romanian novels after 2000 dealing with communitarian representations? If so, does it have an intrinsically political or ethical dimension? Finally, can literature be considered not only a space for imagi-nation, but also a medium of circulation for collective representations and, consequently, the space for establishing a new community connection?
More...LE RÔLE DES REVUES DANS LA RADICALISATION D’UN IMAGINAIRE POLITIQUE
On the basis of Antonio Gramsci’s praxis philosophy, taken up by André Tosel, and Cornelius Castoriadis’ works on radical imaginary, this article analyses the debate about Marxism, during the year 1946, between two intellectual reviews: Les Temps Modernes and Critique. If the creation of those reviews is deeply related to a social context and an interdiscourse influenced by the political and ideological rise of extreme left – particularly the French Communist Party –, their project consists in a critical questioning of communist discourses, returning to Marx’s and Hegel’s texts. References to these philosophies induce different rhetorical and argumentative particularities that we intend to study in order to understand the complex relations between the rhetoric of a sociohistorical interdiscourse and his ideological substructure.
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What we are aiming for is a comparative analysis of two representations of the political community in the texts of Romanian writers. Ilarie Voronca and Ion Biberi are, in turn, one an avant-garde poet, the other one a novelist, the author of the first Joycean Romanian novel. The community fantasies which they propose do exhibit a strong affinity, although dating from different epochs and developed within different cultural spaces: one in Paris, in the 1930s, the other one in Bucharest during the 1970s. Both have little in common with the representations of the era that produces them. Outlining the political community as a mass that is installed in the street, with an emphasis on body dynamics and the autonomy of individuals in the crowd, they relate better to recent “Occupy”-type manifestations. Instead of functioning as an empathetic environment, where individuals are in sync and all follow the same rhythm, the crowd becomes a revealing element of both the differentiation and of the positive irreductability. On the other hand, this crowd abandons the unique position of discourse (the "we" belonging to a common cause). Instead of slogans, it proffers spontaneous individual speeches, in turn singularized. The political community is illustrated as a community of poets, idealizing a literary life experience.
More...ESQUISSE D’UNE LECTURE ANARCHISTE
Known mostly for its social critique, for its preaching of insurgency or for its so-called utopian imagining of the future stateless communities, anarchism has always been involved in the literary and theoretical discussions of its time. It should be of no surprise then that anarchism has developed with and out of its extremely prolific literary production. Of course, we cannot speak of literary anarchism as of one unitary or coherent body of work. However, we can speak of it in the sense of a deleuzian minor literature. The study tries to illustrate, on one hand, the specific understanding that anarchism has regarding literature as a method and as an ethic engagement; and, also, its understanding of literature in relation to community. The examples are taken mainly from 19th century French anarchist literature and critique. The paper does not aim to an exhaustive presentation, but rather wishes to formulate some possible further research directions. On the other hand, using some of the concepts presented by Jean-Luc Nancy concerning community and literature, we propose a reading of anarchist theory and literature, underlining the possible contact and translation points with Nancy’s perspective and direction of thought.
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Contrary to its origins and areas of applicability, always “very” local and localized, literary theory aimed at reaching the status of a universal discourse on literature, a discourse that would identify and showcase in a display box the invariants beyond the cultural, historical, and geographical variables. As the anthropologist James Clifford ironically acknowledged in his manifesto “Notes on Travel and Theory” (Inscriptions, 5), “Localization undermines a discourse’s claim to ‘theoretical’ status”. The very history of literary theory as a (still) recent human science has incorporated and disguised local heritages while also highlighting in the process their transferable virtue, their mobile and generalizing capacity. The various narratives that accounted for theory’s beginnings, from the organicist ones such as R. Wellek’s History of Modern Criticism to those that value the breaking point as the constitutive motive of evolution (such as the introductions signed by Jonathan Culler, Terry Eagleton, or Antoine Compagnon, to name but a few), they all discreetly unify the variables of theoretical reflection into the apparently glorious perspective of a knowledge that makes its way through accumulating and filtering its data; a knowledge that is dubiously similar to the “hard” scientific one.
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Theory, in the broad field of the Humanities, Literature and the Arts, should be understood as both an intensive examination and a travelling, comparative point of view. It is akin to parody, due to its displaced, ironical and re-creative character, that it shares with interlinguistic and transmedial translation. It cannot and should not be firmly rooted in a particular place or historical moment without dying in the form of doctrine or dogma. But the exercise of theoretical power also depends on the relative stability of its institutions. From the 1980s onwards, the Centre called ‘Paris’ lost this power because it ignored both the de-centred appropriations it unwillingly made possible and the exotic origins of its own emergence. This de-theorization is nevertheless dangerous, because the place it leaves vacant is managed by the brainless and insensitive law of ‘the market’. Theory is not ideology, it is the responsible self-consciousness of the interests involved in comparing and linking. Formerly marginalized cultures, such as those of Eastern Europe, India, China or Latin America have the need and appetite for theory that should allow them to build an alternative network of theoretical shuttles able to re-think the functions of the local in a globalized world.
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The term “thing theory” was coined in 2001 by the American Bill Brown who was trying to speak out in favor of things as a possible alternative to endless abstraction. This essay claims that thing theory not only opens up the possibility of a fresh approach to literature but also to some extent accounts for why literature is attractive. After briefly exploring the roots of thing theory in the work of Viktor Shklovsky and Martin Heidegger, I propose that readers are drawn to literature not just because literary texts are character- or plot-driven but also because they are thing-driven. I claim that Shklovsky’s long-standing emphasis on plot (inextricably intertwined with character) is at odds with the Russian Formalist’s own famous statement about art allowing us to feel the stoniness of the stone, and I suggest a parallel between Shklovsky’s contention that literature makes the stone stoney and Heidegger’s celebration of literature as guarding against the loss of “thingness.” The contention that works of literature provide a platform on which things may be allowed to speak their own “being” is then traced through three works of fiction by Gustave Flaubert, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and José Saramago.
More...MODERNITY AS A TRAVELING SPHERE OF OPTIONS
There are two dominant explanations for the global reach of modernization processes. On the one hand, we have the representation of a vast network of mainly economic interests, centered in the highly developed Western world that gradually covers the whole planet. On the other hand, the global span of modernization is seen as the gradual imitation and internalization by marginal cultures and civilizations of a consistent system of emancipatory values that emerged in Western Europe and North America. Even if severely opposed, these two doctrines share an essential assumption: modernity and modernization derive from a set of positive, non-conflictual beliefs. But modernity can be understood, in complete opposition to „consistency-theories”, as a social and cultural process which essentially expands at a global scale the intellectual contradictions of modernity: liberty versus equality, responsibility versus solidarity, cooperation versus competition, innovation versus conservation, historical teleology versus historical skepticism, moral absolutism versus moral relativism. At the same time, modernity is the process of elaborating ways of coping with structural social and cognitive indetermination, and the virtual sphere that contains all possible patterns of response. Once we re-draw the picture of modernity as a global process along these lines, the distinction center-periphery, at least for intellectual processes, loses much of its grip. My main argument is that irrespective of its place of insertion in a presumed hierarchical network of civilizational influences, the theoretical mind is confronted with, and responsible for, finding plausible, even if vulnerable and transitory answers to essentially the same cognitive and ethical conundrums.
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The paper focuses on several conceptual nuances which I consider that could enter into a hermeneutical dialogue and, thus, they could become complementary modes of reinterpreting certain topics of literary and aesthetic theory. These dynamic concepts are to be analyzed from the viewpoint of certain theoretical narratives, around which they seem to gather and to nourish a few epistemological instruments and perspectives: the secondary (a concept proposed by a “travelling theorist”, situated in-between cultures, Virgil Nemoianu), the political and historical turn in the literary studies (in this respect, New Historicism being a main critical perspective and direction of thought) and, conversely, the “literary turn” in political and social thought. Such comprehensive syntagms, which coagulate around important hermeneutical narratives of the 20th century and of the first decade of the 21st century, might prove relevant for reassessing the social and anthropological influence of literary theory and of aesthetic epistemology. My argument will follow some critical reenactments of the seconday – and the dialogue, either subtle or radically polemical, or the rupture between the secondary and the principal – within the literary turn of the nineties and then within the “digital turn” and the approaches indebted to “distant reading” (Franco Moretti) in the years 2000.
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While reconstructing the history of the socio-psychological and aesthetic theory of social roles, a thing that is striking is the subtle dialectics between continuities and discontinuities of a highly important theoretical canon, one of the most prolific resources of today's human sciences. When we talk about discontinuities, we mean that the explanatory patterns of the Chicago School, the one that endowed this theory with its contemporary magnitude, have been aesthetically intermediated by the reception of the thought tradition represented by Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey – a tradition that, at its turn, descended up to the model of the role plurality of the early Romanticism. These connections between the representatives of the Chicago School and German sociology, between Robert E. Park or H.R. Mead and G. Simmel or W. Dilthey have been obliterated in the proper sociological research. The role theory was reimported and reinvented in Europe thanks to Ralf Dahrendorf and Bernard Lahire, inspired by the literary works of Robert Musil, Ernst Mach and Marcel Proust. The paths to conceptual transformation from the incipient aesthetic role theory and up to the sociological theories of role behavior, partly redeemed by sociology, have, however, been “forgotten” by the field of aesthetics, by the theories of fiction or the theory of the novel. Surprisingly so, the new French and German novel of the 1960s and 1970s seems to independently rediscover the initial meanings of the theoretical concepts of “role” and “social play”. The continuity of the theoretical canon considers this scattered redemption of certain theoretical literary ideas, a phenomenon constantly dealt with by the history of ideas. Therefore, the fall of such patterns from thought systems that are rigorously conceptualized in the public discourse and from here, in literature is not always fatal. This paper follows this parallelism between what is happening with the idea of role and identity in human sciences, fiction and literary theory.
More...THE BOUNDARIES OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
The post-1989 transition of East-Central Europe to capitalist democracy has focused much scholarly attention on the political, economic, social, and cultural trajectories of the countries in the former Soviet bloc and on the fostering of new identities within a wider, European or global, context. Yet the ‘transitologists’ attempts to establish transregional comparisons that would tackle the similarities and differences between postcommunist territories and former colonies were met with deflection and silence among the proponents of postcolonial studies. With very few exceptions, Western scholars were rather reluctant to count the USSR among other, mostly European, “modern empires”. Still, the postcolonial sensibility of people in the Soviet sphere – as documented by oral history, sociological investigation, and cultural analyses – is hard to ignore. In the last few years, the postcolonial- postcommunist connection gained momentum in East-Central European studies, as part of the reflective attempts to translate a specific historical and cultural experience into one of the most widespread theoretical idioms in current academia. In doing so, East-Central European scholars interrogate the limits of an increasingly canonical discipline and join in its critical revaluations by measuring colonialism against other systems of domination.
More...NOTES ON THE ROMANIAN READINGS OF JEAN PAULHAN’S FLOWERS OF TARBES
The metaphor of “Terror” in Literature expresses the obsession with originality, rooted in Romanticism, and matched, in modern times, by the (anti-literary) cult of authenticity. Nevertheless, in an age of multiple radicalisms, Paulhan rehabilitates literary tradition, with all its conventions and clichés, showing how it can be made to assume new functions from a contemporary perspective without falling into conventionalism and routine. This lenient attitude towards cliché (reactivated out of the wish to rediscover a common and intelligible language, rather than out of inertia) reflects here a definitive rejection of any kind of fanaticism, which made the French essayist criticize both the “rightist” political extremism of the inter-war period and the “leftist” extremism of the post-war age. In what follows, I intend to develop these observations and demonstrate that Paulhan’s reflections draw on a humanistic model that prevailed amidst dramatic historical circumstances, which favoured dogmatic thinking, the “terror” in Letters and life alike.
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Starting from a volume of theoretical poetics published in Romania in 1981 (Ioana Em. Petrescu, Configuraţii [Configurations], Cluj-Napoca: Dacia) that we are currently re-editing, we aim at considering the way in which a Romanian literary theorist could, at the time, innovate, discuss, and – eventually – find and articulate their personal and highly iconoclastic voice within a field which was a priori regarded as being remote or even prohibited. Given the present access to the personal library and manuscripts of the author in question, we hope to be able to recreate some reading patterns (of theoretical texts), as well as some ways of putting into practice new ideas. Ioana Em. Petrescu’s volume offered a reading key to the least polemic of the great remaining structuralists, turning as an alternative to the Gestalt theory of the interwar period, in order to set up a new vision of the poetical language, where one can find ideas and inspirational sources from different ages and schools of thought. The close-readings (mainly of Romanian canonical and even school literary texts) also constitute a voluntary “poor” approach of literary theory. Is that a contextual solution of the ivory tower? An indifference to the whims of fashion and to Western patterns? A form of extreme freedom from the part of a theoretician?
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The essay endeavors to apply Edward Said’s remarks on traveling theory by sketching a three-stage model, grounded on the evolution of critical consciousness from locality (specialization and selection of theory), to localization (loan and adaptation of theory) and creative localism (resistance to theory). Our analysis addresses Codrin-Liviu Cuţitaru’s books, from The Depersonalized History (1997) to The Present Discontinuous (2014), which contain pertinent illustrations of traveling theories, mainly localizations of Derrida’s “dissemination”, Fineman’s “historeme”, and Fukuyama’s “post-history”. Cuţitaru’s reflection on the subject’s displacement from history grows into a more nuanced vision, enhanced by a bitter awareness of literature’s role as a discipline within the changing curricula experimented by the Romanian universities after the fall of Communism. Experiencing both the locality of his own specialization (Professor of English/ American Studies), and the localization of foreign theories in a provincialized academic center (“Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iaşi, established in the capital of the former Principality of Moldavia), the Romanian scholar arrives at a very original theory of creative localism. This provides the critic not only with arguments for resisting foreign theory, but also for opening himself towards the tradition of previous schools of criticism from Iaşi.
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