Monstruozitate, extincție și alienare în poezia recentă română și basarabeană
Rezumat
Monstrosity, Extinction, and Capitalism in Contemporary Romanian and Bessarabian Poetry
Abstract: This essay proposes to map the inter-peripheral relation between recent Romanian and Bessarabian poetry based on similar tropes involved in the circuit of literary themes of monstrosity and apocalypse. Hence, starting from monstrous appearances and unimaginable futures, the aim is to question what happens to the poetry of a peripheral culture (the Bessarabian one) when it evolves in conjunction with and occurs within another (the Romanian one). The case study discusses the poetry of Romanian writers Ștefan Manasia and Mircea Andrei Florea, and Bessarabian writers Ion Buzu and Dumitru Fanfarov. It highlights a materialist reading of tropes of monstrosity which are (slightly differently) approached and shared by Romanian and Bessarabian authors, making it possible to assess their inter-peripheral entanglement. Although the dystopian scenario has been generally claimed to be representative of sci-fi literature, I argue that the ethos of dystopia has spread “epidemically” across the literary discourses, including the discourse of poetry. Moreover, I intend to trace the relation of these (semi)peripheral cultures to the capitalist world-system, so to capture the common front in which they affirm themselves in relation to the monstrous system.
Keywords: Romanian and Bessarabian poetry, inter-peripheral relation, monstrosity, apocalypse, dystopia, polycrisis
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