The Aesthetic Dimension of American-Romanian Comparative Literary Studies

THE AESTHETIC DIMENSION OF AMERICAN-ROMANIAN COMPARATIVE LITERARY STUDIES Letitia Guran [. . .] only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world eternally justified. (Nietzsche, BiVfh ofTragedy 33) This essay is part of a larger project on the relevance of the aesthetic model for modern and contemporary Eastern Europe compared with its place in Western European and North American cultures. The first part briefly surveys recent positions on the topic that are symptomatic of the aesthetic debate in all these areas of the world. For the East European perspective I consider the Romanian philosophers Gabriel Liiceanu and Constantin Noica, whose struggle to preserve high standards of education and culture in the 1980s made them symbolic figures of Romanian anticommunist "resistance through the aesthetic." To update this perspective , I later supplement Liiceanu's and Noica's outlook with that of younger critics who after the anticommunist revolution of 1989 placed the concept under serious scrutiny. Their move from an aesthetic-oriented criticism to a more politically committed one is part of the revision of the contemporary Romanian literary canon, and interestingly it parallels what has happened in American criticism over the last decade. To capture this uncanny resemblance I discuss Harold Bloom's, George Levine 's, and J. Hillis Miller's positions, which focus on the implications of the decline of the aesthetic model in contemporary American criticism. Their "reclaiming ofthe aesthetic," combined with Liiceanu's and Noica's position, makes a compelling case about the virtues and weaknesses of this model since it appeared in the eighteenth century. Part two of my essay focuses on yet another group involved with the theoretical meanderings ofthe aesthetic. Matei Calinescu, Virgil Nemoianu , and Mihai Spariosu are three Romanian-American comparatists who have studied the relevance of the aesthetic model both in Romania and then in the United States during the 1980s. Consequently, they have had a unique opportunity to compare the advantages and the shortcomings of the formalist readings and Utopian potentialities associated with the aesthetic model at a moment when it was in full swing in both places. My analysis focuses ultimately on the precise ways that Calinescu , Nemoianu, and Spariosu manage to bridge the gap between the Utopian East European aesthetic model of social improvement and the text-oriented analysis dominant in the U.S. By closely investigating the former's blind spots, their approaches explore the intrinsic connections between literary texts and society with a newly devised set of concepts such as liminality, the principle ofthe secondary, and the creative potential of fictional worlds. All these ideas ultimately amount to strategies VcH. 27 (2003): 94 THE COMPAKATIST for "reclaiming the aesthetic" (Levine) as a valid model of interpretation today. By including Calinescu, Nemoianu, and Spariosu with the voices that defend the necessity of further exploring the aesthetic tradition of reading, the debate over its usefulness gains new dimensions. Since some American as well as many Romanian critics make a case for the potentialities of the aesthetic interpretation, while remaining fully aware of the increased interest in ideological issues fostered by postcolonial, feminist, and muticultural studies in the U.S. and by the politically and morally committed model of literary interpretation developed in the aftermath of the Romanian Revolution, these new perspectives on the topic cannot be but salutary. My essay attempts to draw the attention of contemporary scholars precisely to these alternatives. My premise in discussing the aesthetic dimension ofAmerican-Romanian comparative studies is that during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, a great many Romanian intellectuals lived their lives according to a radical logic of creation. Very much in the Nietzschean vein (though one cannot speak of any direct influence), they considered creation to be one of the few meaningful activities in communist Romania—both in terms of self-salvation and of undermining the repressive, official logic of life. In 1983, Liiceanu published the groundbreaking Paltinis Diary. This text is an extensive narrative composed of illuminating philosophical dialogues and passionate confrontations of ideas that Liiceanu and a small group of young Romanian intellectuals experienced with the renowned inter-war philosopher, Constantin Noica, who decided to be their intellectual mentor. The spiritual adventure that they undertook with Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel...