Dumitru Tucan

If one examines the critical reception that has been generally given to Bruno Schulz in Romania, one will notice the writer’s position of a ‘classical marginal’. Prior to his first translation into Romanian in 1976, Bruno Schulz had exclusively appeared in the Romanian critical reviews in relation to Max Blecher, a Romanian writer of Jewish origin from the time period between the two world wars. Then, the critics focused on the two writers’ special preoccupation with minute ordinary details, or their particular spiritual and sensorial acuity, and also their common obsessions with ordinary images, such as the presence of ‘the cursed places’. In most of the cases, the literary critics made reference to Kafka for comparative purposes. This paper tries to prove the fact that these two writers have more essential characteristics to share; and this is especially due to their common vision on the literary creation – an essentially modern view on literature. Bruno Schulz and Max Blecher both share a subtle artistic sense for examining the most detailed universe of minute things. Upon entering such a place, the world itself becomes unmanageable matter, growing out of natural proportions. In developing such an approach, both writers center on one common theme – the crisis of the real world – with far-reaching implications for their own narratives. Another common element would be their demystifying manner of perceiving the world. In fact, they both adhere to the poetic principle of ‘defamiliarizing the familiar’, which grows on the soil of radical aesthetical modernity.

Recently, the status of academic writing and writing practices in Romanian academia has been the subject of ongoing debates. This increased attention to academic writing is largely due to attempts made to internationalize Romanian education and research. However, little has been done when it comes to empirically analyzing the specificity and dynamics of writing practices. In other words, a close examination of the main features of what defines good academic writing still needs to be carried out. Investigating common views about writing could offer not only an image of the cultural specificities of Romanian academic writing, but also a basis for re-thinking and re-organizing the teaching of academic writing. This presentation will report on the results of a questionnaire survey conducted in 2012 at the Faculty of Letters, History, and Theology of the West University of Timișoara as part of the LIDHUM project. The purpose of this analysis is twofold. First, we will analyze the responses to what “good writing” means to the students and teachers of the Faculty of Letters. Second, we will look into the teachers’ responses regarding the required competences in academic writing and the students’ self-evaluation of their own competences. Even though an examination of the general assumptions about what “good writing” means shows no significant differences between students and teachers, when it comes to the analysis of the students’ self-evaluating answers and the required competences assumed by the teachers, some important discrepancies occur. In this chapter we will try to explain those differences, which are most likely the result of a lack of explicit instruction in the teaching of academic writing.

Living the Inferno (2). The Romanian Holocaust Diaries of Children and Youngsters In one of my previous articles (Tucan 2020), I showed the great extent of the phenomenon generated by the diaries kept by young children and youngsters during the Holocaust. For these young people experiencing directly the anti-Semite persecutions of the WWII, these diaries were the only way to preserve the direct experience of sufferance in a world haunted by terror. In truth, while most of them did not survive, their written pages made it through history to become authentic papers documenting the horrific universe of the ghettos, of the concentration camps, of the lives spent in hiding and in secrecy. Unlike the genre of memoirs, which encapsulates the story of survival, the diary is the survival itself; they are therefore able to allow us a close introspection into the traumatic experience of the Holocaust and become vital documents for preserving the memory of a historical rupture caused by this great tragedy of the 20th century. In addition to this, the innocence of the diarists, their young age and their wide range of intensely emotional experiences recorded in these personal journals are essential pieces necessary for completing the picture of this collective tragedy, which the present must not forget and must cherish as an antidote against ideological and totalitarian irrationalism. In my article, I will dwell on similar phenomena closely connected with the Romanian Holocaust (Eva Heyman, Zimra Harsá nyi, Miriam Korber-Bercovici, and some others). Such a scholarly enterprise is extremely necessary since, in Romanian culture, the memory of the tragedy inflicted by the Holocaust has been rather obscured and purposely avoided (see Florian, 2018). Keywords: Holocaust literature; children’s diaries; trauma literature, witness literature; Holocaust in Romania.

Over the last two decades, many well-grounded claims have been made as an attempt to reinforce the idea that literary studies have entered their posttheoretical age. This paradoxical statement may have emerged from the fact that, historically speaking, the latter part of the 20th century was clearly dominated by a heavily theoretical discourse on language and, indirectly, on literature itself; during the second half of the 20th century, this theoretical discourse was used extensively not only in literary studies, but in all areas of the humanities (Pavel 1988). If, in the early ’80s, those directly involved in harnessing the vast “theoretical” project of literature were right to acknowledge several remaining islands of “resistance to theory” (De Man 1986), in the late ’80s there were other, more decisive and increasingly louder voices who proclaimed either “the end of theory” (Olsen 1987) or the end of “great theories” and great theorists (Eagleton 2003). Even in the French theoreti...

The present study is a general description of the theoretical project of cognitive poetics and its implications for the study of literature. The main hypothesis is that cognitive poetics is the contemporary continuation of the analytical project of Poetics, with its rich tradition stretching from Aristotle to French Structuralism. As cognitive poetics is principally concerned with the relationship between texts and reading experience, it has contributed significantly to the evolution of literary studies. In this light, the paper identifies the following analytical and theoretical innovations of cognitive poetics: 1) restoring the connection between literary and "natural" languages; 2) removing the politicized dimension of literary studies, influenced by post-structuralism and critical theory (while maintaining, in an exploratory and explanatory sense, a critical perspective on language and literature); 3) elevating the reading experience and the potential variations of &qu...

This paper aims to describe and analyze the references and allusions made by the authors who write about the Soviet Gulag to Dostoevsky and to his text written after his imprisonment in the tsarist prison in Omsk, The House of the Dead (1860- 1862). Starting from the premise that The House of the Dead has a special status as it is a text that makes the transition from the classical and vaguely defined genre of prison literature (i.e. literature written in prison or related – however not always explicitly – to the prison experience) to that of testimonial literature (i.e. literature related to a traumatic experience of a collective nature that is able to testify on behalf of those who remain to suffer in prisons or concentration camps), I will emphasize the testimonial character of Dostoevsky’s writing. Subsequently, I will analyze how the authors who write about their experiences in the Soviet camps (Gustaw Herling-Grudziński, A World Apart, Julius Margolin, Journey into the Land of...

Academic writing in Central and Eastern Europe remains an under-explored area in both teaching and research. While in many Western countries universities have long acknowledged the importance of writing support and research-based teaching implementations, in Eastern and Central Europe student writing has merely been seen as a personal skill that is acquired in school and improved by practice during university studies. Research in academic writing is therefore needed not only to understand this particularly dynamic and varied region, with its changing institutional landscape, but also to understand how to best facilitate or effect positive change. We wish the present collection of studies to be a first step in that direction.

In Romania, writing is the primary means of assessing student knowledge ever since the adoption of the Bologna Process. Often, students are expected to have learned academic, as well as professional writing, in high school, or to learn it intuitively at university. Previous studies indicate that, in Romania, the genres learned in high school only slightly overlap with the genres students are asked to produce at university. In the present paper, we use corpus linguistics methods to analyse and compare the Romanian students’ entrance-level writing, reflecting the high school norms, with their first year examination writing. As our aim is also to capture the diversity of linguistic and educational challenges the students are confronted with when building their written argumentation competence in their mother tongue, we contrast writing processes in Romanian (L1) in the frame of a course in literary theory. The research methodology involves the compilation of two corpora: (a) a corpus o...

Recently, the status of academic writing and writing practices in Romanian academia has been the subject of ongoing debates. This increased attention to academic writing is largely due to attempts made to internationalize Romanian education and research. However, little has been done when it comes to empirically analyzing the specificity and dynamics of writing practices. In other words, a close examination of the main features of what defines good academic writing still needs to be carried out. Investigating common views about writing could offer not only an image of the cultural specificities of Romanian academic writing, but also a basis for re-thinking and re-organizing the teaching of academic writing. This presentation will report on the results of a questionnaire survey conducted in 2012 at the Faculty of Letters, History, and Theology of the West University of Timișoara as part of the LIDHUM project. The purpose of this analysis is twofold. First, we will analyze the respons...

Although the foundations of the Soviet concentration camp system date back to the Bolshevik Revolution and Russian Civil War, the amplitude of human suffering in the Gulag would not be known in detail until after 1962, i.e. the year when A. Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published. But even before the start of World War II, the totalitarian Soviet universe spoke the language of oppression that public opinion in the West constantly refused to acknowledge. This paper tries to recover a neglected corpus of early autobiographical narratives depicting the absurd Soviet concentration system, in the authentic voice of a number of Gulag survivors (G. Kitchin, Tatiana Tchernavin, Vladimir Tchernavin, S. A. Malsagoff, etc.).

Over the past three decades, postcolonial theory has been one of the dominant modes of speculation upon literature and culture. Deeply connected to the strong core of poststructuralist thinking, postcolonialism is still a powerful theoretical approach today, that attracts those who attempt to establish a dialogue with the discursive communities of Western academia. There are multiple explanations for this dominance, which are connected to the geopolitical transformations that occurred on a global scale after World War II. The tensions inherent in this new geopolitical situation urged Western thinking to investigate the cultural rifts produced by the global fragmentation caused by imperial disintegration. The voices that epitomize “subaltern” identity, which up to that point held a marginal position, have begun, since the 1960s, to legitimize themselves as political voices which can channel not only the energies of marginal identities, but also the critical energies of the centre’s e...

Starting with a famously popular case of literary genesis, which is the rewriting of the theatre play English Without a Teacher in the new variant of The Bald Soprano, this paper aims at analysing the complex relationship between textual objects of literary pretension and the literary space. The paper’s assumed perspective derives from the pragmatics of literary discourse (cf. Maingueneau, 2007), while at the same time it is concerned with analysing the processual features of literary phenomena. It seems that these features can only be analysed in relation to the metamorphoses of the social and cultural imaginary. Emphasizing these relational features of the notion of literature across history and also emphasizing the capacity of literature to remain in a process of continual metamorphosis while being in close contact with the textual objects which seek to challenge its stability, and at the same time, emphasizing the status of literature as ‘discursive interstice’ or as ‘self-const...

Pornind de la un caz celebru de geneză literară, mai precis rescrierea piesei Englezește fără profesor în varianta La Cantatrice chauve, lucrarea de față analizează relația complexă dintre obiectele cu pretenție literară și spațiul literar. Perspectiva asumată este derivată din pragmatica discursului literar (cf. Maingueneau, 2007), fiind interesată în a observa caracterul procesual al fenomenului literar, caracter care nu poate fi gîndit în afara relației cu metamorfozele imaginarului socio-cultural. Observînd caracterul relațional al noțiunii de literatură de-a lungul istoriei și capacitatea sa continuă de a se metamorfoza în relație cu obiectele care îi contesta stabilitatea, observînd calitatea literaturii de „interstițiu discursiv” sau pe aceea de „discurs constituent”, analiza își propune să arate faptul că obiectele textuale care tentează intrarea în „cîmpul literaturii” sînt semnalele presiunilor pe care istoria și metamorfozele culturale generate de aceasta le exercită asup...

Living the Inferno (2). The Romanian Holocaust Diaries of Children and Youngsters

In one of my previous articles (Tucan 2020), I showed the great extent of the phenomenon generated by the diaries kept by young children and youngsters during the Holocaust. For these young people experiencing directly the anti-Semite persecutions of the WWII, these diaries were the only way to preserve the direct experience of sufferance in a world haunted by terror. In truth, while most of them did not survive, their written pages made it through history to become authentic papers documenting the horrific universe of the ghettos, of the concentration camps, of the lives spent in hiding and in secrecy. Unlike the genre of memoirs, which encapsulates the story of survival, the diary is the survival itself; they are therefore able to allow us a close introspection into the traumatic experience of the Holocaust and become vital documents for preserving the memory of a historical rupture caused by this great tragedy of the 20th century. In addition to this, the innocence of the diarists, their young age and their wide range of intensely emotional experiences recorded in these personal journals are essential pieces necessary for completing the picture of this collective tragedy, which the present must not forget and must cherish as an antidote against ideological and totalitarian irrationalism. In my article, I will dwell on similar phenomena closely connected with the Romanian Holocaust (Eva Heyman, Zimra Harsá nyi, Miriam Korber-Bercovici, and some others). Such a scholarly enterprise is extremely necessary since, in Romanian culture, the memory of the tragedy inflicted by the Holocaust has been rather obscured and purposely avoided (see Florian, 2018).

Keywords: Holocaust literature; children’s diaries; trauma literature, witness literature; Holocaust in Romania.

This article sets out to examine Elie Bufnea’s memoirs (Crusaders, Tyrants, and Crooks; Cruciați, Tirani și Bandiți – vol. I, In the Soviets Russia; În Rusia sovietelor, vol. II, In Kolchak’s Siberia; „În Siberia lui Kolciak” – 1931) and Voicu Nițescu’s memoirs (Twenty Months in Russia and Siberia; „Douăzeci de luni în Rusia și Siberia”, 3 vol.: 1926, 1928, 1932), resulting from their personal experience in revolutionary Russia, plagued by civil war, at the end of WW I. The two Transylvanian authors were involved in the organization of the Romanian Volunteer Corps in Russia, created from ethnic Romanian prisoners from Austria-Hungary. It is true that these memoirs not only document the historical times, but also give voice to the first authentic exploration of the historical trauma in the Romanian space. However, what is perhaps more important is that they both share an ‘open’ rhetoric that combines a nationalist discourse with critical reflection and an awareness of current social and political tensions. Their rhetorical choice grants more value to their memoirs, i.e. a natural expression of ‘patriotic’ emotions, experienced in the midst of troubled historical times.
Keywords: Romanian Memoirs of the Great War, experiential narrative, travel literature, historical trauma, early Romanian narratives on the Bolshevik Revolution, nationalism, patriotism, Romanian Volunteer Corps.

The memory of the Holocaust in Romania (i.e. the Romanian authorities’ involvement in the atrocious crime of the Holocaust) was ideologically distorted and occulted during the communist dictatorship. This led not only to the impossibility of recovering the historical truth, but also to it acting as a deterrent when it comes to the depiction of the living memory (i.e. journals, memoirs), as well as of the artistic and cultural representations of this tragic moment in our recent history. It was only in the last two decades, more precisely after the discussions initiated by the International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania, chaired by Elie Wiesel, and especially after the publication of the Final Report (2004), that the Romanian authorities’ accountability for the Holocaust timidly penetrated the public discourse. This paper looks into the history of memorial occultation of the Holocaust in Romania by seeking
to explore and explain the difficulties that the Romanian public discourse has had (and continues to have) when integrating this event into its cultural memory. Through a comparative analysis of how the memory of the Holocaust was embedded in the Western and the Romanian public discourse, we could notice that in Romania, in the last decades, these complications may be explained primarily through an absence in the manifestations of a prosthetic memory encompassing cultural representations of the Holocaust. Besides identifying the postmemorial artifact (i.e. the act of cultural and artistic reconstruction of the trauma of the Holocaust) as the main element of the prosthetic memory, this paper also describes a possible corpus of such postmemorial artifacts (film, literature), steadily growing in the Romanian culture in recent years, to be minutely analyzed in the future.

Living in the Inferno. The Holocaust Diaries of Children and Young People

The diaries kept by children and young people during the Holocaust are one of the most intriguing phenomenon. To the young people caught in the concentration inferno, the diary is more than a personal tool of self-reflection but their only chance to fight totalitarian power. During the atrocities of World War II (persecution, deportations, relocations, ghettoization and, in particular, mass executions), the diary is their opportunity to leave a testimony of the suffering caused by the arbitrary and irrational violence of a criminal ideology. In fact, the diary is the only way to preserve the real experiences and emotions they lived in a violent universe that threatened their very existence. Unfortunately, many of them did not survive, but only their pages did, filled with the tension of an uneven struggle. In their pages survived something of their spirit and the authentic story of how the once thriving European Jewry was almost completely destroyed. Unlike the Holocaust written memories, which are stories of survival, the diary is the survival itself. This paper aims to give a general description of this phenomenon to be further explored in an analysis of a number of similar diaries from the Romanian space.

The Witness Literature and the Post-Totalitarian Consciousness.
An increasing interest in the literature generated by the totalitarian concentrationary spaces of Eastern and Central Europe has been shown for the past twenty-five years. Born from the collective traumatic experiences of the 20th century, regarded as a century of institutionalized violence, this phenomenon seems to be the sign of a traumatic type of memory which could find its voice in the public space only after 1989 with the publication of the personal narratives of incarceration in the Eastern and Central European Communist concentrationary system, and therefore it became the new grounding of the post-totalitarian consciousness. In Romania, this particular 'literary' phenomenon is vast, but it has been rarely studied systematically with the emphasis on its function of a catalyst for the post-totalitarian consciousness (Ruxandra Cesereanu's book The Gulag in the Romanian Consciousness is a notable exception). The present paper attempts to discuss the notion of 'witness literature' with its role of configuring the post-totalitarian consciousness.

Rezumat Pornind de la un caz celebru de geneză literară, mai precis rescrierea piesei En-glezește fără profesor în varianta La Cantatrice chauve, lucrarea de față analizează relația complexă dintre obiectele cu pretenție literară și spațiul literar. Perspec-tiva asumată este derivată din pragmatica discursului literar (cf. Maingueneau, 2007), fiind interesată în a observa caracterul procesual al fenomenului literar, caracter care nu poate fi gîndit în afara relației cu metamorfozele imaginarului socio-cultural. Observînd caracterul relațional al noțiunii de literatură de-a lun-gul istoriei și capacitatea sa continuă de a se metamorfoza în relație cu obiectele care îi contesta stabilitatea, observînd calitatea literaturii de " interstițiu discur-siv " sau pe aceea de " discurs constituent " , analiza își propune să arate faptul că obiectele textuale care tentează intrarea în " cîmpul literaturii " sînt semnalele presiunilor pe care istoria și metamorfozele culturale generate de aceasta le exer-cită asupra fenomenului literar, imprimîndu-i acestuia o importantă dimensiune transgresivă.

Starting with a famously popular case of literary genesis, which is the rewriting of the theatre play English Without a Teacher in the new variant of The Bald Soprano , this paper aims at analysing the complex relationship between textual objects of literary pretension and the literary space. The paper's assumed perspective derives from the pragmatics of literary discourse (cf. Maingueneau, 2007), while at the same time it is concerned with analysing the processual features of literary phenomena. It seems that these features can only be analysed in relation to the metamorphoses of the social and cultural imaginary. Emphasizing these relational features of the notion of literature across history and also emphasizing the capacity of literature to remain in a process of continual metamorphosis while being in close contact with the textual objects which seek to challenge its stability, and at the same time, emphasizing the status of literature as 'discursive interstice' or as 'self-constituting discourse' , the paper sets out to show the fact that textual objects which aim at transgressing the 'literary space' are in fact the signals released from the pressure history and the cultural metamorphoses it has generated exercises on the literary phenomenon. This pressure seems to have offered literature a transgressive dimension.

For the last two decades, the postcolonial theory has become one of the most dominant perspectives
in the study of literature and culture in the Western Academia. Together with its increasingly more
authoritarian voice, the postcolonial theory has also become able to influence peripheral scholar
communities, including those coming from cultures with no direct link with the historical
phenomenon of colonialisation. This influence seems to be of two distinct types. The first one is a
mimetic one (i.e. unintermediated by local experiences) which has generated an imitative postcolonial
discourse in local academia, mostly used by members of English language departments. The second
one, which I can call particularizing (i.e. intermediated by local cultural experiences), has tried to
adapt (to various degrees of intensity) the postcolonial perspective to local conditions. This second
type of influence can be seen, for example, in the adaptation of the postcolonial theory to the analysis
of the postcommunist cultural phenomena in Central and Eastern Europe. The same thing has
happened in Romanian literary studies, although at a low degree of intensity. In this paper, I will try
to analyze the impact of postcolonial theoretic speculation on the Romanian literary studies of the last
two decades.

Literary Reception in a Comparatist Context. A Case Study: Bruno Schulz and Max Blecher: If one examines the critical reception that has been generally given to Bruno Schulz in Romania, one will notice the writer’s position of a ‘classical marginal’. Prior to his first translation into Romanian in 1976, Bruno Schulz had exclusively appeared in the Romanian critical reviews in relation to Max Blecher, a Romanian writer of Jewish origin from the time period between the two world wars. Then, the critics focused on the two writers’ special preoccupation with minute ordinary details, or their particular spiritual and sensorial acuity, and also their common obsessions with ordinary images, such as the presence of ‘the cursed places’. In most of the cases, the literary critics made reference to Kafka for comparative purposes. This paper tries to prove the fact that these two writers have more essential characteristics to share; and this is especially due to their common vision on the literary creation – an essentially modern view on literature.  Bruno Schulz and Max Blecher both share a subtle artistic sense for examining the most detailed universe of minute things. Upon entering such a place, the world itself becomes unmanageable matter, growing out of natural proportions. In developing such an approach, both writers center on one common theme – the crisis of the real world – with far-reaching implications for their own narratives. Another common element would be their demystifying manner of perceiving the world. In fact, they both adhere to the poetic principle of ‘defamiliarizing the familiar’, which grows on the soil of radical aesthetical modernity. True, in Schulz’s case the similarities to Kafka come as a direct relationship. However, the similarity between Blecher and Kafka is made possible by his privileged connections to the innovative experiments of the modernity, especially those of the European artistic avant-garde, and its emergent product (the philosophical context around the year 1900), and also inevitably, the tragic character of his personal existence. In the end, both writers have the same ‘horizon of personal expectations’ - a ‘defamiliarizing’ view on a reality that is reshaping anew in myriads of forms and colours.

Terry Eagleton, the author of one of the most influential histories of literary theory in the 20th century, claims in his book from 2003 (After Theory) that literary and cultural studies are now experiencing their post-theoretical age. Since then more and more voices have been replicating, whether directly or rather nostalgically, Eagleton’s
suggestion. In fact, as Jonathan Culler stated as early as the year 2000 (The Literary in Theory), today’s epoch is very much aware of the end of our faith in “the great theory” (see also Eagleton 2003: 2). However, this proves not only the fact that “the theory has not yet died”, but it also means that “the [literary and critical or cultural] theory” lives on implicitly or rather explicitly in the analytical, critical or hermeneutical approaches that are nowadays at the core of the discourse on literature and culture. Starting from these background assumptions, this paper seeks to
portray what we see today as the legacy of the theoretical discourse on literature and culture in the 20th century in three main dimensions: 1. the instrumental and analytical dimension, relevant for pedagogical purposes (in the Western culture from Aristotle’s founding Poetics to the recent cognitive poetics); 2. the speculative dimension,
relevant for interpretation (e.g. the set of multiple, implicit or explicit, conflicting or correlated definitions of the literary and cultural phenomenon which are used for the interpretation of texts and cultural phenomena) and 3. the epistemological dimension (i.e. “the literary theory” as continuous questioning of the nature of literary and cultural
knowledge and its cultural presuppositions. In the end, these  dimensions represent the way in which the critical discourse responds to the procesuality of the cultural phenomena (including literature).

This book explores specific issues related to academic writing provision in the post-communist countries in Eastern, Central and Southern Europe. Although they have different cultures and writing traditions, these countries share common features in what regards the development of higher education and research and encounter challenges different from Western European countries.