Romanul douămiist între istoric și sociografic: refuncționalizări ale politicului, comodificarea memoriei și reconfigurări formale
Iulia-Maria Vîrban
Descriere autor:
Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, Faculty of Letters
E-mail:
E-mail personal autor:
iulia.maria.virban@gmail.com
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Rubrica:
Studii culturale
The Post-2000 Romanian Novel between Historiography and Sociography: Refunctionalising the Political, the Commodification of Memory, and Formal Reconfigurations
Abstract: This article proposes a formalist account of the Romanian two-thousands novel (2000–2022) that treats narrative technique as a privileged site where postcommunist transformations become readable. Using Galin Tihanov’s notion of a “regime of relevance,” I conceptualize contemporary entertainment and market logics not as forces that neutralize politics, but as conditions that reorganize how political meaning is produced, framed, and circulated. The argument combines a Jamesonian approach to the political unconscious with form-as-mediation perspectives, focusing on voice, focalization, and tonal strategies as points where social pressures enter the text. Through a comparative discussion of Radu Pavel Gheo, Dan Lungu, Iulian Ciocan, Alina Nelega, and Sașa Zare, the article maps a shift in the dominant formal solutions by which the novel negotiates transition. Earlier texts rely on confessional intensity, comic dialogization, or multi-voiced orchestration to render memory and ideological dispute both intelligible and shareable. Later texts increasingly foreground institutions, precarious lives, and embodied vulnerability, frequently mobilizing authenticity effects (autofiction, therapeutic writing, stylistic proximity to consciousness) as narrative leverage. Rather than positing multiple competing regimes, the study argues for a single political regime of relevance whose coordinates are redefined over time: what counts as “political” expands from anti-communist dispute and nostalgia toward classed, gendered, and queer forms of marginality, reshaping the novel’s formal repertoire accordingly.
Keywords: regime of relevance, Romanian two-thousands novel (2000-2022), postcommunist transformations, form-as-mediation, autofiction, therapeutic writing, nostalgic discourse.
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