Teoria istoriei literare contemporane românești în context european

While most literary genre structures still seem to survive in the discourse of literary history, literary canons have been challenged during the last several decades and contemporary literary forms have transgressed traditional patterns, undergoing a process of hybridization through the constant interaction with other artistic codes. Is the literary canon merely an aesthetic institution or has it become, due to the emergence of new means of writing and promoting literature (online journals, blogs etc.), an alternative, complementary one? The practice of literary history has already proven that the transformations of literary forms and discourses must be studied polyphonically, both from an aesthetic perspective, as well as through cultural perspectives open to the dialogue with other disciplines (the sociology of literature, the history of aesthetic taste, reception theories, the history of ideas etc.). Nevertheless, the literary historian or theorist is constantly faced with a dilemma: are the traditional metaliterary instruments still adequate and representative? Are they still up-to-date? Or has the demand for a self-reflexive analysis and critique become unavoidable?

Therefore, this project intends to scrutinize the metanarratives and the metadiscourse of literary history, its essential and marginal concepts, its actual practice, in an attempt to re-discuss the various models and frameworks of literary history that share certain similarities, but may also differ in regard to their scope, intentions or hermeneutical praxis. We also aim to redefine the theoretical concepts employed by literary history, starting from Reinhart Koselleck’s idea of a conceptual history, understood as an array of dynamic concepts, i.e. temporalized, localized and marked by certain epiphenomena ensuing from contextualizations that particularize the field’s theoretical and methodological instruments. This is why the reassessment of these concepts has to start with the thorough and professional examination of several alternative forms of literary history that have introduced flexible perspectives to the field, able to compete with canonical and academically formalized standpoints. Therefore, our main goal is to theoretically address the scope of literary history, not only from an aesthetical or formal viewpoint, but from a perspective drawing from a diverse and composite background (philosophical, cultural, sociological etc.).

Another argument in favour of our proposal would consist in the unique possibility to relocate literature within the larger field of cultural production. Literature could be reassessed especially as a form of a symbolic patrimony that should be carefully studied and retrieved, not only in the sense of the simple accumulation and protection of its valuable contributions, but of a recovery approached from a dynamic-interactional perspective, a recovery whose purpose is that of rewriting and reassessing past values rather than exhibit them. This could reopen arguments on a variety of topics such as alternative or complementary canons, or repositioning national literatures in the context of European dialogue.