Genre Practice in Literary Historiography: A Romanian Case

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 45-51
Author(s):  
Ana Țăranu
Keyword(s):  
Theoretical Approach ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Genre Criticism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

Premised on the pervasiveness of generic categories within literary historiography, the present analysis attempts to delineate the generic idioms present within three histories of Romanian literature (authored by G. Călinescu, Nicolae Manolescu and Mihai Iovănel, respectively). Engaging a descriptively historical, rather than theoretical, approach to genre and its metadiscourses, the paper begins with an abridged version of the cardinal disputes of genre criticism. Subsequently, it comparatively addresses the presence of genre within the three volumes, aiming to locate them within recognizable frameworks of genericity and to establish the overlapping territories of their generic landscapes. Thus, it distinguishes G. Călinescu as a practitioner of post-Romantic genre theory, further showcasing how some of his central aestheticist positions survive in Nicolae Manolescu’s moderately formalist account of the issue. Against the backdrop of their more conservative, teleological historiographical projects, Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 Istoria Literaturii Române Contemporane 1990-2020 [The History of Contemporary Romanian Literature 1990-2020] displays a distinct methodological apparatus, predicated on the author’s rejection of the paradigmatic autonomy of the aesthetic. His employment of materialist theories of art is corelative to a conception of genre as a contingent, empirically determined instrument of analysis, which, far from being a rhetorically stable, abstract category, actively mediates the relationship between social and aesthetic history. This shift engenders substantial amendments to the physiognomy of literary history as genre, enabling it to encompass extra-literary (and noncanonical) phenomena. Keywords: literary genres, literary history, Romanian literature, Mihai Iovănel.

The Challenges of Writing a National Literary History in the Era of Transnationalism: Insights from a Peripheral Literary Space

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Snejana Ung
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Literary History ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Asymmetry ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
Literary System

It goes without saying that during the nineteenth and twentieth century literary historiography tries to define national identities. However, a methodological and paradigm shift occur at the beginning of the twenty-first century when, under the auspices of globalization and the emergence of world literature and transnational literary studies, literary historiography is re-thought as a collective and transnational project. Yet, the asymmetry of the world literary system affects literary historiography too. When it comes to this scholarly genre, the asymmetry is most visible in the fact that in the era of transnationalism, national histories are still written at the periphery. Given the aforementioned observation, this paper a) looks into the challenges of writing literary history in Romania in the age of world literature and transnational studies, and b) tries to explain why a national literary history is still needed and how it can change the way we think about Romanian literature. The starting point of this inquiry is represented by the publication of Mihai Iovănel’s Istoria literaturii române contemporane: 1990-2020 [History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020]. In the context of the ‘transnational turn’ in literary studies, the attempt to write relevant national histories in a peripheral literary space such as Romania is faced, in my view, with two major challenges: 1) the fact that transnationalism manifests itself differently at the periphery and 2) the tradition of Romanian literary criticism and history. The former refers to the fact that unlike central literatures, where transnationalism is shaped to a large extent by migrant writers (those who enter these literatures), in Romanian literature it comprises exiled or migrant writers (those who left Romania and not vice versa) and, to a lesser extent, the literatures written by ethnic minorities. A comparative approach can cast light on this difference. For example, while the thirteenth volume of The Oxford English Literary History is dedicated entirely to migrant and bicultural writers, transnational histories concerning the peripheries, such as History of the Literary Cultures of East-Central Europe, focus on multiple literary spaces and therefore have a different approach to dealing with transnationalism. The latter challenge is represented, as shown by Iovănel, by the long-lasting tradition of the “principle of aesthetic autonomism”, which persists even in post-communist Romania. In this regard, this paper aims to show that Iovănel’s History… overcomes the above-mentioned hindrances of literary criticism and succeeds in offering an image of Romanian literature not as confined to its national boundaries but as part of the world literary system. Along with other significant scholarly works on Romanian literature as and in world literature, this project is a significant step towards re-thinking Romanian literature as a “literature of the world” (Terian 2015).

The Genres of the Pentateuch and Their Social Settings

2021 ◽  
pp. 361-378
Author(s):  
Angela Roskop Erisman
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Genre Theory ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
History Of ◽  
Classic Form ◽  
Stable Forms ◽  
Generic Complexity

The ability to recognize genres has been central to modern critical study of the Pentateuch since the work of Hermann Gunkel at the turn of the twentieth century. This essay surveys the legal, administrative, and literary genres used in the Pentateuch, offering a sense of its generic complexity. Genres are defined not as the fixed and stable forms used to classify texts, as understood by classic form-critical method, but as idealized cognitive models employed as tools for writing and interpreting texts, an understanding drawn from modern genre theory. Because genres are situated in social contexts, Gunkel saw genre as central to writing a history of Israel’s literature. This essay surveys the limitations of Gunkel’s vision yet identifies a way to reconnect with it and write a more organic literary history, one that may intersect with but also at times challenge the results of source- and redaction-critical methods.

The Arabic Novel and History

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Allen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
History Of The Novel ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
History Of ◽  
Arabic Speaking ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter examines the relationship between the Arabic novel and history within the context of the Arabic-speaking world, and in particular the process of producing a literary history of the novel genre written in Arabic. It first considers the early development of the novel genre in Arabic as part of a cultural movement that gained impetus in the nineteenth century, with particular emphasis on the interplay of two cultural forces: the importation of Western ideas (including literary genres) and the role of the premodern Arab-Islamic cultural heritage in each subregion. It then discusses examples of narrative from the premodern heritage of Arabic literature before turning to the history of the Arabic novel. The chapter also presents examples of the Arabic historical novel, one of which is Sālim Ḥimmīsh’s Al-‘Allāma (2001, The Polymath).

Who’s afraid of Mihai Iovănel? Regimes of Relevance and New Literary Historiography

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 32-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ovio Olaru
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eastern European ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Production Study ◽  
The Social ◽  
Aesthetic Autonomy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
The One

The present article addresses Mihai Iovănel’s recently published History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020 while pursuing a series of similarities with other contributions to postcommunist national literatures in the Central and Eastern European cultural space, on the one hand, and with previous ways of understanding the concept of literary history, on the other. The article argues that Iovănel’s History is one of the first to assess the importance of the social in the production, study, and national, as well as transnational dissemination of Romanian literature, an emphasis without which the study of literary phenomena risks falling into the blindness of aesthetic autonomy, whose shortcomings are well documented in the book. Lastly, I will argue that Iovănel unwillingly describes several of the most notable shifts in the “regimes of relevance” (Galin Tihanov) that literature has undergone from the communist period to contemporary times.

Systemic Reading in Literary Historiography: Politicisation and Instrumentalization of the Autonomy of the Aesthetic as a Strategy of Repositioning During the 90s

Transilvania ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 52-60
Author(s):  
Ioana Moroșan
Keyword(s):  
Field Theory ◽  
Special Focus ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Implicit Biases ◽  
History Of ◽  
Romanian Literature ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Project History

The present paper proposes to follow the evolution of the principle of the autonomy of the aesthetic during the 90’s, with a special focus on the discrepancy between its discourse and its practice, in contrast to its instantiation as a systemically challenging discourse before ’89. Starting from Mihai Iovănel’s recent landmark literary historiographical project History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020, put in conjunction with Gisèle Sapiro’s research on the relative nature of the autonomy in the field theory, the present study aims to show how inside of the Romanian literary field, the concept of autonomy was always instrumentalised towards certain political and ideological interests. These implicit biases are revealed as the actual function of the autonomist discourse via the contextualizing and sociological analyses performed by Iovănel which makes manifest the extra-literary facts surrounding the events within the field. Such an understanding of the autonomy of the aesthetic is also informed by Gisele Sapiro’s theoretical contributions, thus revealing the relative nature of the autonomy and its political and ideological function within the local literary field.

Migration and Modernities

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Study ◽  
Racial Categories ◽  
Geographic Boundaries ◽  
The Us ◽  
Technological Developments ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries

Migration and Modernities recovers a comparative literary history of migration by bringing together scholars from the US and Europe to explore the connections between migrant experiences and the uneven emergence of modernity. The collection initiates transnational, transcultural and interdisciplinary conversations about migration in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, demonstrating how mobility unsettles the geographic boundaries, temporal periodization, and racial categories we often use to organize literary and historical study. Migrants are by definition liminal, and many have existed historically in the spaces between nations, regions or ethnicities. In exploring these spaces, Migration and Modernities also investigates the origins of current debates about belonging, rights, and citizenship. Its chapters traverse the globe, revealing the experiences — real or imagined — of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century migrants, from dispossessed Native Americans to soldiers in South America, Turkish refugees to Scottish settlers. They explore the aesthetic and rhetorical frameworks used to represent migrant experiences during a time when imperial expansion and technological developments made the fortunes of some migrants and made exiles out of others. These frameworks continue to influence the narratives we tell ourselves about migration today and were crucial in producing a distinctively modern subjectivity in which mobility and rootlessness have become normative.

Idleness and Freedom in Michel de Montaigne’s “Essays”

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-202
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
Spiritual Quest ◽  
Guiding Principle ◽  
Sextus Empiricus ◽  
History Of ◽  
Self Knowledge ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Relationship

The article advances a hypothesis about the composition of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Specialists in the intellectual history of the Renaissance have long considered the relationship among Montaigne’s thematically heterogeneous thoughts, which unfold unpredictably and often seen to contradict each other. The waywardness of those reflections over the years was a way for Montaigne to construct a self-portrait. Spontaneity of thought is the essence of the person depicted and an experimental literary technique that was unprecedented in its time and has still not been surpassed. Montaigne often writes about freedom of reflection and regards it as an extremely important topic. There have been many attempts to interpret the haphazardness of the Essays as the guiding principle in their composition. According to one such interpretation, the spontaneous digressions and readiness to take up very different philosophical notions is a form of of varietas and distinguo, which Montaigne understood in the context of Renaissance philosophy. Another interpretation argues that the Essays employ the rhetorical techniques of Renaissance legal commentary. A third opinion regards the Essays as an example of sprezzatura, a calculated negligence that calls attention to the aesthetic character of Montaigne’s writing. The author of the article argues for a different interpretation that is based on the concept of idleness to which Montaigne assigned great significance. He had a keen appreciation of the role of otium in the culture of ancient Rome and regarded leisure as an inner spiritual quest for self-knowledge. According to Montaigne, idleness permits self-directedness, and it is an ideal form in which to practice the freedom of thought that brings about consistency in writing, living and reality, in all of which Montaigne finds one general property - complete inconstancy. Socratic self-knowledge, a skepticism derived from Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus, and a rejection of the conventions of traditional rhetoric that was similar to Seneca’s critique of it were all brought to bear on the concept of idleness and made Montaigne’s intellectual and literary experimentation in the Essays possible.

The Subaltern Critique of Dominant Historiography and a Case for Retrieving a Historiography of Dalit Literary Traditions in India

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-15
Author(s):  
Vandana
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
History Writing ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
History Of ◽  
Longue Duree ◽  
Longue Durée ◽  
And Shifts ◽  
The Third World

In order to retrieve literary history in India, teleology operates on three levels: ancient, medieval and modern. As per the longue duree approach to the study of history, history is not an event or an object, but like the concept of time, is a configuration and a process. The history of the longue duree gives priority to long-term monumental historic patterns, moments and shifts in society, that is, the slow-paced structural processes which tend to have strong historical consequences. Similarly, languages and literatures, too, marked by historical catastrophes, undergo a process of sedimentation. For this reason, instead of a single literary history of South Asia, Sheldon Pollock proposes the concept of ‘literary cultures’ which allows room for ‘historical individuation’ of each culture rather than homogenising them merely for the sake of historical analysis. The basic questions that I have tried to look into through this study include: Why is it problematic to retrieve literary history in India? Why is it essential to have an alternative literary historiography of Dalit literature? How does Dalit subalternity differ from colonial subalternity? How the Dalit voice is disintegrated from within because of the prevalence of graded inequality? What constitutes the politics of history writing and canon formation in the third world countries like India where retrieving subaltern literary trends remain a problematic discourse?

The Politics and Poetics of Cicero's Brutus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. van den Berg
Keyword(s):  
Roman Republic ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Political History ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Literary Historiography ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
History Of

Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day.

Dante's New Life of the Book

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Eisner
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
Printed Books ◽  
The World ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Over Time

This study uses the material transmission history of Dante’s innovative first book, the Vita nuova (New Life), to intervene in recent debates about literary history, reconceiving the relationship between the work and its reception, and investigating how different material manifestations and transformations in manuscripts, printed books, translations, and adaptations participate in the work. Just as Dante frames his collection of thirty-one poems surrounded by prose narrative and commentary as an attempt to understand his own experiences through the experimental form of the book, so later scribes, editors, and translators use different material forms to embody their own interpretations of it. Traveling from Boccaccio’s Florence to contemporary Hollywood with stops in Emerson’s Cambridge, Rossetti’s London, Nerval’s Paris, Mandelstam’s Russia, De Campos’s Brazil, and Pamuk’s Istanbul, this study builds on extensive archival research to show how Dante’s strange poetic forms continue to challenge readers. In contrast to a conventional reception history’s chronological march, each chapter analyzes how one of these distinctive features has been treated over time, offering new perspectives on topics such as Dante’s love of Beatrice, his relationship with Guido Cavalcanti, and his attraction to another woman, while highlighting Dante’s concern with the future, as he experiments with new ways to keep Beatrice alive for later readers. Deploying numerous illustrations to show the entanglement of the work’s poetic form and its material survival, Dante’s New Life of the Book offers a fresh reading of Dante’s innovations, demonstrating the value of this philological analysis of the work’s survival in the world.

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