Olga Bartosiewicz-Nikolaev

New Perspective on Romanian Post-Communist Literature. Mihai Iovănel, History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990–2020 The article addresses Mihai Iovănel’s 2021 History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990–2020, the first history of Romanian literature that presents the development of Romanian post-communist prose and poetry. Iovănel’s book sparked a heated debate among literary critics, historians and writers, because it discusses and redefines prevalent concepts in Romanian literary theory and criticism, focusing on the extraliterary (political, social, economic) conditioning of literary production and inscribing Romanian literature into the system of transnational literary interactions. The paper shows thus the most important assumptions of Iovănel’s work and discusses the critical reception of the volume among Romanian intellectuals.

The main objective of the article is to answer the following questions: why did Apollinaire choose for the main character of his most famous pornographic novel a Romanian prince, what is the imaginary potential of the space evoked in this work and by what means and methods of writing this controversial text becomes a common platform for poetic creativity and the Apollinarian modernist subversion. Following the spatial and topographic turn in literary studies, the article focuses on the importance of imaginary space and of spatial imagination in Apollinaire’s text, pointing out the presence of 19th century Romania as one of the most significant vectors for the fictional world created in the novel

The first part of the article proposes a general overview of the notion of “capitalist realism,” introduced by Mihai Iovănel in his History of Romanian Contemporary Literature 1990‒2020 as one of the paradigms which help to read and classify post-Communist Romanian literature taking into consideration the political, social and economic conditioning of literary production. The second part of the paper aims to investigate the individual trajectory of Adrian Schiop (b. 1973) ‒ one of the authors classified by Iovănel as representatives of “capitalist realism,” whose literary and artistic work is defined by a high degree of social relevance. By deconstructing collective narratives and cliches, Schiop proposes a polemical point of view on post-Communist society, occupying at the same time the position of a very self-conscious agent within the Romanian literary field.