Romanian Literature as World Literature ed. by Mircea Martin, Christian Moraru, and Andrei Terian (review)

Over the past two decades, Romanian literary critics, literary theorists, and scholars in comparative literature have been more assiduously engaged in uncovering Romanian literature's pungent flavor of cosmopolitanism, mostly of a European kind. I say "more assiduously" because such an undertaking was augured by Mircea Martin's 1981 groundbreaking study on "George Călinescu and the Complexes of Romanian literature," which, at a larger scale, scrutinizes the handicaps of Romanian identity (marginality, provincialism, isolation, imitation, non-synchronization with Western Europe) fuelled by the communist discourse cleansed of any cultural imports. By deconstructing major cultural complexes fabricated by Călinescu in his History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present (1941), Martin's study, republished in 2002, interrogates Romanian cultural identity as a whole and highlights the current crucial need for both literary and critical-theoretical revisionism and, most significantly, the dismissal of an organicist model of literary historiography predicated on chronology and the autonomy of the aesthetic. This line of thought and critical action has prompted the 2000-generation of critics, many of whom have contributed to the present volume, to unshackle Romanian literature from other complexes which have continued to haunt it after 1989: the "exceptionalism" of Romanian literature unadulterated by foreign theory and transnational dialogue, the exclusion of minor literatures, translations, exiled Romanian writers and Romanian-born authors writing in a foreign language.

Romanian Literature as World Literature has a salutary effect, for it succeeds in providing a set of well-documented and pertinent answers meant to cure Romanian literature of the symptoms of nationalism generated and endorsed by the above-mentioned complexes. The volume published in the prestigious Bloomsbury Academic's series "Literature as World Literature" edited by Thomas O. Beebee comprises a theoretically dense Introduction and 15 articles that demythologize the "national reading" of literature, proposing a paradigmatic and epistemological shift that integrates Romanian literature into a nodal qua cosmopolitan and multi-faceted ethno-linguistic context in which centers, hierarchies, and hegemonic claims are blurred. It is an "anti-exceptionalist" manifesto (xv) whose mission is to depart from the obsolete way of practicing "nationalist and sometimes imperialist comparatism" which fails to identify networks of ideas with a global ontology and to see literature "in the world and as world" (20).

RLWL consistently operates with a transnational and cultural studies-inflected terminological arsenal through which Romanian literature and culture should be integrated into what Pascale Casanova has labeled as "the world republic of letters" (1). The book refutes "methodological nationalism" rooted in the Herderian idea of nation-state in favor of a "world-minded approach" to literatures and cultures seen as "networks and geoaesthetic nodes" (13). Thus, Franco Moretti's world-systems theory, Wai Chee Dimock's "deep space" and "deep time," Stephen Green-blatt's "cultural mobility" or Deleuze and Guattari's "re-territorialization" and "de-territorialization" are serviceable instruments for examining Romanian literature as part of a rhizomatic, cosmopolitan "cultural poiesis" (13).

Part 1 metacritically questions methodological nationalism. Andrei Terian shows how Mihai Eminescu's discovery of Hindu mythology and philosophy enables him to read world literature as Romanian literature and to write Romanian literature as world literature. Bogdan Creţu reads Nicolae Milescu and Dimitrie Cantemir as early and pre-modern cosmopolitan authors who "orientalized" modern Romanian literature. Caius Dobrescu carries out a seductive analysis of "originality" stemming not from "autarchic self-contemplation" (23), but from various encounters with remote empires. Alex Goldiş uses the polysystems theory to speak about a dynamic model able to interpret Romanian literature from a transcultural and intertextual perspective whereas Carmen Muşat insists that the synchronization with the West theorized by Eugen Lovinescu has led to the modernization and creative power of Romanian literature.

Part 2 considers a few ethnic-linguistic case studies, such as the relationship between ethnicity and microliteratures written in the Republic of Moldova, Ukraine, and Serbia (Mircea A. Diaconu), Hungarian literature written in Romania (Jószef Imre...