This article illustrates a relatively less charted form of exilic dislocation which I have dubbed paraexile. Unlike Claudio Guillén, who claims that exiled writers can triumph over their native attachments and create a literature of “counter-exile”, I propose, alongside critics like Lamming, Rushdie, or Said, that the trauma of displacement can never be entirely left behind and is constantly part of exilic writing. In addition, I make the claim that paraexilic literature is a peculiar form of internalizing...   ⇨ Read more

Analysing two recent books in which prominent Romanian writers (Ana Blandiana and Gabriel Liiceanu) recount their lives during communism, we intend to reflect on how literary memoirs (written in very different forms) deal with the (recent) communist past and its troublesome heritage – not only for Romanian culture in general, but also for surviving individuals. Both authors under discussion attempt to come to terms with an evil they confronted daily in their regular lives; the questions they pose focus not only...   ⇨ Read more

This paper aims at retracing Ana Blandianaʼs ban from publishing, between 1988 and 1989; it also looks at the way in which the writer managed to elude censorship. Ana Blandiana was banned from publishing during the one and a half year before the end of the communist regime in Romania. The reviews of her last poetry anthology were banned, but not the anthology itself, which was published shortly after the author’s ban from publishing. Ana Blandianaʼs name was allowed to appear in literary studies about...   ⇨ Read more

Having as a theoretical premise the idea that “essential personal identities” do not always synchronise with the essential identity of the group they are supposed to belong to, and that this de-synchronisation can have an ethical opposition at its core, the paper focuses on the way in which Mircea Nedelciu’s typical protagonists – nomads, socially marginal individuals with confusing, “unaccomplished identities” – attempt to (culturally and morally) reconstruct their damaged personal identities by disengaging...   ⇨ Read more

My paper will discuss the critical grounds that preceded the translation of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy‟s diaries into Romanian, published by Univers Publishing House in 1974 and 1975-1976 respectively, focusing on the Prefaces written by Ion Ianoși. Relying on both historical studies and relevant documents of the 1947-1989 period, I will start by generally describing, on the one hand, the process of the Russian and Soviet translations into post-War Romania and, on the other hand, the Communist regime‟s views and...   ⇨ Read more

Although contemporary Romanian filmmaking is recognized today as an important part of the global cinema and the young Romanian filmmakers have created a cinematic culture accepted as a model in Europe and internationally, there has been much criticism about the role of the “New Wave” in Romanian culture. The most common critiques describe the productions of this new generation of filmmakers as promoting a negative image, clearly “denigrating” the Romanians, Romanian education or medical systems, suggesting that...   ⇨ Read more

Liliana COROBCA, Book Control - Literary Censorship during the Communist Regime in Romania [Controlul cărții: cenzura literaturii în regimul comunist din România], Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 376 pp., ISBN 9789732330647, 2014