Literatură, lingvistică și jurnalism

In addition to social, political and economic traumas that are inherent to democratization and that are common to all postcommunist societies from Central and Eastern Europe, the Romanian society has confronted, since the 90s, the effects of some “cultural traumas” (J. C. Alexander), in particular resulting from the intellectual conflicts of memory related to the communist past. By disturbing the main cultural and historical identity “referents” that provide the basis of the “cultural identification” process (A. Mucchielli), as well as social cohesion, cultural traumas constructed by the Romanian elites after 1989 have compromised their own purposes and gave birth to a series of social, cultural and identity crises responsible for the nostalgia of the communist “golden age” and the social anomie.
Keywords: cultural trauma, cultural memory, conflicts of memory, collective identity, democratization

En exploitant un theme tabou pendant la dictature communiste – la deportation des Allemands, des 1945, dans les camps sovietiques – La bascule du souffle est une demonstration poetique d'une force rare. Concu comme un livre ecrit « a deux mains », en collaboration avec le poete Oskar Pastior, dont l'experience concentrationnaire inspire l'histoire du protagoniste, le roman porte les empreintes stylistiques des deux auteurs, bien que, suite a la mort du poete, le projet initial n'ait pas pu etre finalise. Critique pour la pretendue illegitimite de la reconstitution – a la premiere personne – d'une histoire qui n'aurait pas affaire a l'experience personnelle de la romanciere, tout comme pour son style « artificiel », juge inadequat au sujet traite, le roman superpose deux fictions identitaires, en ayant un enjeu cathartique par rapport a l'experience traumatique de Herta Muller (fille d'une ancienne deportee) et un autre ethique, en tant qu'hommage rendu a Pastior et a toutes les victimes de l'enfer concentrationnaire. Construit comme une fiction « allo-autobiographique », dans l'absence, donc, de l'appropriation (impossible) du « pacte autobiographique », le roman garantit l'authenticite de l'evocation justement par la « presentification » poematique d'une experience « indicible », doublee de celle de l'ecriture en tant que modalite de survivance1.

"After the horrific experiences of ex-Yugoslavia, the tragedy of Ukraine reveals the terrible consequences of the memory conflicts radicalization. Anticipated by a constant mnemonic war led by the Russia particularly against its Eastern neighbors, it proves “what happens when memory wars turn into real wars”. Since the end of Cold War, in the context of the re-nationalization of ideologies, the remythologization of national histories, and the reshaping of memory politics, the European memory games, as part of the struggle for recognition, have often became memory wars. This article provides some relevant insights about the political instrumentation of the “restorative nostalgia”/“retrotopia” in the (post-)Cold War illiberal memory games/wars, against the background of the growing crises connected to the rise of neo-nationalism. Keywords: memory wars, memory games, (re)mythologization of history, restorative nostalgia, populist neo-nationalism."

Abstract: Having been seen, at first, as the foundation of a “rebirth”, both European and global, the “refolutions” of 1989 left a highly controversial legacy which is still subject of political memory clashes and a source of “cultural bipolarities”, but also of disillusionment and polarizations within multiple mnemonic communities. These contradictions, anchored in the ”traumatogenic changes” of the democratic transitions that engendered, at the end of the 90s, post-socialist nostalgia, are also related to a crisis of utopian thinking which characterized the moment 1989 itself and became a main feature of post–Cold War political-cultural paradigms, including the mnemonic ones, dominated by the traumatic legacy of the ”century of extremes”.

Keywords: revolutions of 1989, political memory, social memory, utopia, post-socialist nostalgia

The article provides some relevant insights about the dynamics of the European politics of history and memory against the background of the third wave of European integration, which is the so called "cultural Europeanization." These dynamics, originated in Western European both cultural turn of the 1970s and memory boom of the 1980s, is inscribed in the complex geopolitical landscape configured after the end of Cold War, within the context of European enlargement and the struggles for recognition of the "new Europe". The competition of "Europe's Europes" memorial narratives about the "painful pasts" of West and East, which is also a competition between two mnemonic paradigms (cosmopolitan vs. national(ist)-antagonist), is followed against the background of both the transnational turn in memory studies and memory politics and the re-nationalization of European politics and ideologies, tightly connected to the post-Cold War developments.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly during the hard transition of the 90s, the highly polarized Russian society revealed two main forms of remembering and coping with recent past. This past was either idealized as a time of imperial glory, national pride, and relative welfare, even if it also included periods of anomie (the late Stalin era) or stagnation (the Brejnev era), either treated as a period of significant traumas that necessitated persistent recognition and working through. As for the official memory regimes, if the first post-Soviet decade was dominated by the totalitarian anticommunist (and antinostalgic) paradigm, the 2000s brought a radical turn, with the rise of victimhood nationalism and “redemptive” authoritarianism of the Putin era. The new mnemonic regime is shaped by an official, “patriotic” restorative nostalgia that is also placed in the centre of the presidential cultural programe designed to legitimize the authoritarian system and to support the restoration of a great, mythical Russia. Against this background, new forms of counter-memory and counter-nostalgia began to manifest within both the social and cultural field. One of the most remarkable exemples is offered within the “new realities” created by the young photographer Danila Tkachenko, who’s compositions marked by a “second-hand nostalgia” challenge both the Soviet utopia and its official nostalgic-populist recostructions. By means of a special nostalgic technique based on reframing the remnants and the “trukhliashechkas” of the Soviet past – (re)interpreted as the symbols of “the perfect technocratic future that never came” –, the young artist also deconstruct the imagined “sovietness” embedded in the cultural-political products shaped by the statist patriotic nostalgia. His representations of the post-Soviet landscape are those of “a ghost of utopia”, a land of ruins, of abandoned cities, of ecological disasters, and of millions unburied deads of the GULAG.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, particularly during the hard transition of the 90s, the highly polarized Russian society revealed two main forms of remembering and coping with recent past. This past was either idealized as a time of imperial glory, national pride, and relative welfare, even if it also included periods of anomie (the late Stalin era) or stagnation (the Brejnev era), either treated as a period of significant traumas that necessitated persistent recognition and working through. As for the official memory regimes, if the first post-Soviet decade was dominated by the totalitarian anticommunist (and antinostalgic) paradigm, the 2000s brought a radical turn, with the rise of victimhood nationalism and “redemptive” authoritarianism of the Putin era. The new mnemonic regime is shaped by an official, “patriotic” restorative nostalgia that is also placed in the centre of the presidential cultural programe designed to legitimize the authoritarian system and to support t...

Less than a decade after the proclamation of "the end of history", the anxieties about "the end of utopia" are gaining ground in the intellectual field all over the world, in the context of both "the crisis of the future" and the haunting of the present by the painful pasts. The latter two are the main consequences of the fracture in the contemporary temporal orderoccurred in the '70s and deepened after the fall of the Iron Curtain-which defines the "presentist regime of historicity". These dynamics are counterbalanced, in the same period, by a "global epidemic of nostalgia", including the commodified forms of "retromania", that reveals the presentist "faces of utopianism", from the non-instrumental "retrospective utopias"-as poles of "existential" types of reflective nostalgic practices-to the instrumental "retrotopias" based on the "restorative nostalgia", which were mobillized in the contemporary memory wars, starting from the '80s. Reflecting the tensions between the fixation on the traumatic legacy of the "age of extremes" and the apprehensions about "the future of nostalgia", the presentist dynamics of multidirectional memory discloses conflictual landscapes (social, cultural, and political), from the mnemonic turn of the '70s and the '80s-which has arisen against the background of the decline of both welfare state and the nation-states, and of the global economic crisis-to the post-Cold War contests around "the divised memories" of "Europe's Europes", coexisting with the clashes of contradictory "faces" of nostalgia and utopia.

Despite its impact on the education, research and health system, Romanian brain drain is still neglected in both the political agendas and cultural debates. Furthermore, the theme is almost absent within contemporary literature starting with the writings anchored in the transition period, which is precisely that of the first significant waves of labor and high-skilled emigration, but also that of some major social and cultural traumas. In this context, Avalon: The Secrets of the Happy Émigrés (2018) by Bogdan Suceavă fill up a main cultural gap as far as it individualize the social-historical traumatic experience of brain exodus by means of an autobiographical narrative which offers at the same time a realistic image of the so called “happiness” of émigré scholars, comprising their big efforts for achieving the highest performances in their field of research. Revealing the differences between the American and Romanian academic systems, which are condensed in the illustrative story of the hero-narrator, Avalon… incorporates, as Bildungsroman, a “cultural pedagogy” shaped especially under the guiding of one of the leading mathematicians on the world, Professor Bang Yen-Chen, but which is also grounded into the significant previous formative experience. In the same time, Avalon… offers a lesson of cosmopolitanism, which integrates, by means of literary memory, the cultural values of the post-communist East, especially those of Romanian recent pasts. Our analysis of the novel is focused on the “cultural-pedagogical” dimension of its multilayered architecture, in which the intertwined autobiographical, historical, and sociological levels are mobilized for converting the personal and collective traumas in a project of identity revision and rebuilding.

The article provides some relevant insights about the dynamics of the European politics of history and memory against the background of the third wave of European integration, which is the so called “cultural Europeanization.” These dynamics, originated in Western European both cultural turn of the 1970s and memory boom of the 1980s, is inscribed in the complex geopolitical landscape configured after the end of Cold War, within the context of European enlargement and the struggles for recognition of the “new Europe”. The competition of “Europe’s Europes” memorial narratives about the “painful pasts” of West and East, which is also a competition between two mnemonic paradigms (cosmopolitan vs. national(ist)-antagonist), is followed against the background of both the transnational turn in memory studies and memory politics and the re-nationalization of European politics and ideologies, tightly connected to the post–Cold War developments.

EUrope : cultures, mémoires, identités est une revue semestrielle multidisciplinaire consacrée notamment à l'étude de la dynamique des mémoires et des représentations culturelles-identitaires qui ont façonné les espaces d'expérience, les horizons d'attente et les imaginaires socioculturels dans les « Europes de l'Europe » aux XX e-XXI e siècles. En accordant un espace particulier aux approches tributaires des Cultural Memory Studies, et surtout des théories actuelles de la « mémoire agonistique », en tant que « troisième voie », celle de la recherche d'un équilibre entre les contraires représentés par les deux paradigmes compétitifs qui se disputent l'hégémonie dans l'espace européen notamment depuis la fin de la guerre froide-cosmopolite/ transnationale et national(ist)e/ antagoniste-, la revue reste ouverte à toute contribution, de préférence transdisciplinaire, sur la problématique générale susmentionnée. Les propositions d'articles peuvent être ancrées dans tout champ disciplinaire des sciences socio-humaines : les études sur la mémoire et sur la nostalgie, l'historiographie, la philosophie de l'histoire et la mnémohistoire, les sciences sociales et politiques, les études sur les diasporas et les migrations, les études sur les médias, l'anthropologie, les études culturelles et littéraires, les études sur le théâtre et le film, les études de genre etc. Structurés autour des dossiers thématiques, mais incluant également des sections varia, des comptes rendus et des recensions d'ouvrages, les deux numéros publiés chaque année vont accueillir des contributions originales rédigées en français et en anglais, dont la pertinence et la rigueur scientifiques seront évaluées par au moins deux référents indépendants anonymes, spécialistes dans les domaines envisagés (double blind peer review).
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EUrope : cultures, mémoires, identités is a semiannual multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal devoted especially to the study of the dynamics of memories and of cultural identity representations which have shaped the spaces of experience, the horizons of expectation, and the sociocultural imaginaries in “Europe’s Europes” in the 20th and 21st centuries. EUrope… provides a special outlet to the analysis grounded in cultural memory studies, and particularly in contemporary theories of “agonistic memory”, considered as a “third way”, that of the research of an equilibrium between the contraries embodied in the two competitive paradigms which have disputed their hegemony in the European area, particularly since the end of the Cold War: the cosmopolitan/ transnational one, and the national(ist)/ antagonistic one. Though, the journal encourages submissions, if possible transdisciplinary, from a wide range of disciplines based in social sciences and humanities, concerning the general issues mentioned above: memory studies, nostalgia studies, historiography, philosophy of history and mnemohistory, social and political sciences, diaspora & migration studies, media studies, anthropology, cultural studies, literary studies, film, theater and performance studies, gender studies etc. Structured around thematic dossiers, but also including sections dedicated to varia and reviews, the two issues published per year will host original contributions in French and English, whose relevance and scientific accuracy will be evaluated by at least two independent anonymous referees, experts in the respective domains (double blind peer review).

https://calenda.org/1164698

https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org/call-for-papers-divided-memories-and-political-cultural-imaginaries-in-post-cold-war-europe/

At the end of the Cold War, the geopolitical struggle for the shaping of reunified Europe, the rise of populism, and the reemergence of neo-nationalism on both sides of the old Iron Curtain created the premises for a competition between the new master narratives associated to the two dominant paradigms of the politics of the past: the cosmopolitan / transnational and the antagonistic / national(istic) one. Against the background of the persistent crises following the transition processes in Eastern Europe, the Great Recession, the new geopolitical challenges, and the subsequent waves of neo-nationalism, the “memory games” intensified on both national and European institutional arenas. These games had a significant impact, detectable especially at the level of the institutionalized memory formats (the political and the cultural memory focused on the “founding traumas”, including the revisionist national historical politics), which encompassed the deepening of the ideological, political, and cultural cleavages within and beyond the nation states. In the same time, the mnemonic and cultural struggles over the conflicting “painful pasts” allowed the preservation of the old fault line which has divided “Europe’s Europes” during the Cold War. Against this mnemonic background, the new paradigm of the “agonistic memory” seems to offer a “decent” and “realistic” third way for dealing with the contested pasts, by means of a multiperspectivist approach which also allows the overcoming of the impasses revealed by the two other competitive memory models.

By counterbalancing the instrumentalization of the ethno-nationalist restorative nostalgia-which was not only the affective and imaginary fuel of the mnemonic wars fought, starting from the 80s, on the territory of "the country that no longer exists", but also that of both the subsequent tragedies and cultural-political polarizations-, Yugonostalgia emerged in the painful 90s as a privileged form of post-Yugoslav mnemonic imagination. Against the background of the persistent mnemonic conflicts within the region, the multidirectional/ agonistic Yugonostalgic memory appears nowadays as a catalyst of the emotional and ethical commitment with the recent past, particularly able to inspire "visions of a better future".

Proba metaficțiunii istorigrafice reprezintă o modalitate de rescriere a discursului despre trecut prin care romancierii postmoderni își exersează atât disponibilitățile intertextuale cât și vocația re-citirii, exhibându-și, totodată, fronda în raport cu formele instituționalizate, anchilozate ale literaturii pe temă istorică.

Indecizia criticii de specialitate în ceea ce privește apartenența – sau nonapartenența – prozatorului Ștefan Agopian la o generație de creație sau direcție literară reprezintă o formă indirectă de validare a specificității ireductibile a scriiturii pe care Agopian o practică dezinvolt și dezinhibat, în raport cu modele și modelele literare. Din această perspectivă, demersul nostru reunește și comentează opinii critice autorizate, diferite ca miză și inegale ca impact, care, analizând particularitățile scriiturii în discuție, formează un cadru necesar oricărei abordări specializate a prozei literare a lui Ștefan Agopian.