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- Title
Rerooting the core: Cold War anticommunism and North American Influence in Romanian postmodernism.
- Authors
Stan, Adriana
- Abstract
This article examines the range of the anticommunist Cold War mindset in Romanian postmodernism and its evolution from the pre-1989 "anti-political" ethos of writers to a public master narrative that led the competition for political, cultural and literary power after 1989. My main argument challenges the readings of East-Central European postmodernism that overstate its oppositional stance against state structures and its post-Cold War drive towards heteroglossia. Instead, I argue that Romanian postmodernism radicalized a Cold War Manichean worldview with a distinctly North American shape and prolonged its life into a public mythology of anticommunism that worked in service of the power structures of post-communism. With this view, I analyze the two historical stages of these literary and political entanglements. On the one hand, Romanian postmodernism emerged in the 1980s as a partially autocolonial iteration of the American postmodern theory and literature, whose anti-totalizing epistemology befitted the antitotalitarian drive of the pre-1989 literary intelligentsia. As such, Romanian postmodernists could channel their frustration with the regime through the metafictional deconstruction of historical truth and representation and through fictional allegories of the private individual. On the other hand, the principles of liberalism weaved into the literary program developed during the 1980s were recast after 1989 in support of the post-communist market capitalism. Consequently, Romanian postmodernists acted upon their aesthetic choices with a sense of political agency, by advocating a fast-track adjustment to Western type neoliberalism, which disabled the leftist arguments that had nurtured Western variants of postmodernism.
- Subjects
POSTMODERNISM (Literature); METANARRATIVES; POSTCOMMUNISM; ROMANIAN literature; NEOLIBERALISM
- Publication
Neohelicon, 2021, Vol 48, Issue 2, p561
- ISSN
0324-4652
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s11059-021-00604-y