Acasă Articole RTR Ideologiile tragediei: regimul politic de relevanța al tragediei istorice românești
Ideologiile tragediei: regimul politic de relevanța al tragediei istorice românești
Rezumat
The Ideologies of Tragedy: The Political Regime of Relevance in Romanian Historical Tragedy
Abstract: This article seeks to reconstruct, from a materialist perspective, the evolution of the ideologies of Romanian tragedy during the “long nineteenth century,” a period marked by the transition from feudal structures to peripheral capitalism. Contrary to the dominant perception that marginalizes tragedy in the history of Romanian literature, the study argues that this genre played a central role in codifying the political discourses of the period. The analysis focuses on the hegemony of historical tragedy and on the role it played in articulating identity-based national narratives associated with the process of modern state formation. Although its themes are deeply connected to the political transformations of modernity, the article argues that the dramaturgical form remains largely pre-modern, drawing on the models of classical, Renaissance, and neoclassical tragedy. In this sense, Romanian tragedy emerges as a space in which canonical dramatic forms are re-signified in order to express the tensions specific to semi-peripheral modernity. The study thus highlights a structural contradiction: historical tragedy is eminently political, yet it remains largely deaf to the representation of social conflict, and therefore to the formal innovations of modern drama. Finally, a brief comparative analysis with Argentine tragedy from the period of independence suggests that these texts can be read as forms of national allegory. Despite emerging in a colonial context, Argentina occupied a similar position within the world-system, which makes the comparison particularly relevant. In both cases, literature participates in the construction of the political imaginary of states undergoing processes of modernization.
Keywords: tragedy, ideology, nation-building, semi-peripheral modernity, historical tragedy, literary form, national allegory.
Bibliografie
Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania – Pillar III-C9-I8, managed by the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitalization, within the project entitled Measuring Tragedy: Geographical Diffusion, Comparative Morphology, and Computational Analysis of European Tragic Form (METRA), contract no. 760249/28.12.2023, code CF 163/31.07.2023.
Bibliography
Alterescu, Simion, ed. Istoria teatrului în România. [History of Theatre in Romania] vol. 2: 1849–1918. Bucharest: Editura Academiei R.S.R., 1971.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Verso, 2006.
Berlogea, Ileana. Istoria teatrului universal [History of Universal Theatre] vol. 1. Bucharest: Editura Didactică și Pedagogică, 1981.
Călinescu, G. Istoria literaturii române de la origini până în prezent [History of Romanian Literature from Its Origins to the Present]. Bucharest: Minerva, 1985.
Carter, D. M. The Politics of Greek Tragedy. Bristol: Phoenix Press, 2007.
Eagleton, Terry. Tragedy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020.
Jameson, Fredric. “Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism.” New Political Science no. 15 (1986): 65–88.
Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious. Narrative as a socially symbolic act. London and New York: Routledge, 1981.
Lukács, Georg. Romanul istoric [The Historical Novel] vol. 1. Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1979.
Lukács, Georg, și Lee Baxandall. “The Sociology of Modern Drama.” Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 4 (1965): 146–170.
Manolescu, Nicolae. Istoria critică a literaturii române [The Critical History of Romanian Literature]. Bucharest: Editura Paralela 45, 2008.
Maiorescu, Titu. “În contra direcției de azi în cultura română” [Against the Current Direction in Romanian Culture]. Convorbiri literare, 2, no. 1–2 (1868–69): 301–307.
Mîndra, Vicu. Istoria literaturii dramatice românești. vol. 1. [The History of Romanian Dramatic Literature] Bucharest: Editura Minerva, 1985.
Moretti, Franco. “Network Semantics. A Beginning.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024): 5–18.
Moretti, Franco. “The Great Eclipse: Tragic Form as the Deconsecration of Sovereignty.” In Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Translated by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller, 43–66. London and New York: Verso, 1997.
Moretti, Franco. “The ‘Moment of Truth’.” In Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Translated by Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller, 245–266. London and New York: Verso, 1997.
Moretti, Franco, and Andrei Terian. “Measuring Tragedy—And Drawing Its Borders.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024): 1–4.
Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos P. “From Epic to Tragedy: Theatre and Politics in Juan Cruz Varela’s Dido.” In Greeks and Romans on the Latin American Stage, edited by Rosa Andújar and Konstantinos P. Nikoloutsos, 15–36. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020.
Olaru, Ovio. “Satire Meets Critical Realism in the European Semiperiphery: A Study on Ibsen and Caragiale.” Transilvania, no. 05 (2024): 32–41.
Rogozanu, Costi. Naratorul cel rău. Un studiu despre realismul românesc: Rebreanu, Preda, Dumitriu [The Ruthless Narrator: A Study of Romanian Realism—Rebreanu, Preda, Dumitriu]. Tact, 2024.
Terian, Andrei. “Tragedy in Romanian Literature: Some Conceptual Delimitations.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024): 12–22.
Tihanov, Galin. The Birth and Death of Literary Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
Ung, Snejana. “Importing and Writing Tragedy in Nineteenth-Century Romanian Principalities.” Transilvania, no. 5 (2024): 23–31.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System. 4 vols. [1974–1989]. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
