Mihaela Ursa

Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

mihaela_ursa@yahoo.com

 

 

Comparative Literature in Romania at the Digital Hour

 

 

Abstract: The paper is a summarizing research on the history of Romanian schools of comparative literature and Romanian comparativists. Its first concern is underlining the local developments that define the discipline, focusing on the synchronicity points, the advancements or the belatedness of various issues involved in the process of turning comparative literature into an academic discipline. The second concern is a matter of recording the readiness of present-day comparative literature of Romanian universities in front of the epi-phenomena engaged by both globalization and digital culture, that is, by the profound alterations in every field of human knowledge.

Keywords: Comparative literature; Cultural studies; Romanian comparativists; Synchronicity; interdisciplinary approach; digital age.

 

 

It is no secret that comparative literature, like most disciplines of literary studies, has undergone major changes during the past two decades. Besides the so-called “attack of the cultural studies”, the stability of the discipline is altered by a series of mutations that have appeared in literary studies, both in theory and praxis. These ultimate alterations follow digital globalization and are in themselves the most visible effect of the new almighty authority of visual culture.

Comparative literature today is faced with the considerable challenge of firstly rethinking an entire body of instruments and approaches in order to assimilate an entirely new field, that of digital culture. Analogue in nature, literature has always subjected itself to sequential reading, being affected by linearity even in exceptional works of art that profess fracture and discontinuity (such as Joyce’s Ulysses or Sterne’s Tristram Shandy). Literary reading asks for a twofold effort: of the author and of the reader, both of them indispensable to the projection of virtual worlds. Unlike it, digital culture relies on the simultaneous reading of the image, on virtuality and interactivity. The appearance of portals of cultural theory, the relocation of literary reviews from paper to the screen, the explosion of web pages and writers’ or readers’ blogs, the emergence of new literary practices demand a new explanatory discourse and adequate hermeneutics. If it should survive through the change, comparative literature has to investigate with its specific means of research this new frontier of knowledge where literature and technology inter-condition each other. New genres (cyberpunk fiction), languages (codewurk poetry) or traits (ergodic literature) are born as if to rend impossible the using of the word “literary”, that has become reductionist and insufficient. The approach of this sensitive cultural area of the last decades is interdisciplinary by definition: on one hand, it necessarily has to comment on the intervention of digital technologies on literature (or the other way around), but on the other, it has to take into account the redefinition and new emergence of specific historical concepts such as “literary” or “literariness”. Where does the practice (and theory, for that matter) of comparative literature in Romania stand? Does it rely on enough “tradition” and methodological rigour to entertain the change without breaking apart? Is it sufficiently connected to global developments to be aware of the recent challenge in front of it?

 

An Excellent Start

 

As far as the development of comparative literature in Romania is concerned, one cannot ignore the remarkable initial synchronicity to Western evolutions. The best example is Hugo Meltzl (eminent scholar of Cluj-Napoca University) founding in Cluj, in 1877, a revue of comparative literature entitled “Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum”, still considered to be the first magazine of comparative literature in the world. Just as well, the study conventionally considered to be the first paper of Romanian comparativism belongs to Pompiliu Eliade and it is published in French, under the title: De l’influence française sur l’esprit public en Roumanie. It appears in 1890, almost simultaneously with the first Western volumes on the issue of comparative literature[1].

After that, a certain decrease can be noticed in the interest of Romanian comparativists for the formulation of a definition of comparative literature as a discipline, even if the praxis of comparative literature as such is very well received and illustrated. Except for a volume edited in 1972 by Alexandru Dima and Ovidiu Papadima, entitled Istoria şi teoria comparativismului în România[2] [The History and Theory of Comparativism in Romania] – completely honourable in its describing intentions, but profoundly affected by communist ideology and by protochronism, leaving aside the history of ideas and practising an oversimplifying determinism, Romanian comparativists seem to have favoured sampling Romanian contributions instead of large national syntheses[3]. Romanian comparativists manifest an undeniable interest for various contents (literary trends, concepts, themes, motifs or symbols and archetypes, from Tudor Vianu or Liviu Rusu to Romul Munteanu, Mircea Muthu or Adriana Babeţi), but also for specific methods or theories (from Alexandru Dima’s typologism or Edgar Papu’s thematism to the history of ideas reconfigured by Adrian Marino or to the research of the imaginary promoted by Corin Braga).

Defining an identity of Romanian comparativism becomes a matter of establishing a professional community. As such, in 1997, through the initiative of the Bucharest school of comparative literature, a Romanian Association of General and Comparative Literature (RAGCL) is founded under the coordination of Paul Cornea, renowned theorist of literature. The intention behind the transformation of the former Romanian Committee for Comparative Literature, of the seventies, into the new RAGCL is to gather a body of specialists but also to outline, if possible to identify, the national peculiarities of Romanian comparativism at the same time with integrating it into the global dialogue. After its remarkable start, however, Romanian comparativism keeps this crucial duty of self-definition as a secondary goal. Instead, different researchers go for different approaches or even distinct understandings of comparative literature: their varying interest for certain symbolic or thematic concepts, as well as for different methodological frames according to individual or school projects overcomes the need to self-definition or self-explanation, even in papers that benefited from a good Western exposure (signed by Romul Munteanu, Adrian Marino, Alexandru Ciorănescu – after the exile).

Of course, there is nothing entirely different in the problematics of Romanian comparativism from other regional schools at the level of appropriating the discipline. A first local characteristic is the recruiting of most of the comparativists from related fields of literary studies. A certain interest for comparativism is shown in Romania as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century (in studies on folklore by B. P. Hasdeu, in Lazăr Şăineanu’s studies on folk tales or in Hugo Meltzl’s programmatic efforts to derive comparative literature from Goethe’s concept of Weltliteratur). Still, a discipline as such will have to wait for the second half of the twentieth century to emerge. In 1948, Tudor Vianu – a specialist in the aesthetics of literature – introduces a class of comparative literature at the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy in Bucharest that will constitute the foundation of his own volume of studies Studii de literatură universală şi comparată [Studies of Comparative and Universal Literature] in 1960. Researchers from different fields of literary studies find seminal ground in comparative literature, regardless if they come from aesthetics (as Tudor Vianu or Liviu Rusu, in his Eseu despre creaţia artistică [Essay on Artistic Creation] published in French in 1935 and in Romanian in 1972), literary history (G. Călinescu, Scriitori străini [Foreign writers] in 1967, Dumitru Popovici, Romantismul românesc [Romanian Romanticism] in 1969, Liviu Petrescu, Romanul condiţiei umane [Novels of the Human Condition] in 1979), sociology (Mihai Ralea, Specific şi frumos [Specific and Beautiful] in 1930), universal literature (Edgar Papu, Barocul ca tip de existenţă [The Baroque As A Type of Existence] in 1977, Vera Călin, Curentele literare şi evocarea istorică [Literary Trends and Historical Evocation] in 1963, Romul Munteanu, Literatura europeană în epoca luminilor [European Literature of the Enlightenment] in 1971) or from literary theory (Paul Cornea, Studii de literatură comparată [Studies of Comparative Literature] in 1968, Adrian Marino, Biografia ideii de literatură [The Biography of the Idea of Literature] published between 1992 and 2003 or Dicţionar de idei literare [Dictionary of Literary Ideas] in 1973).

 

Historical Stages of Romanian Comparativism

 

A possible micro-history of Romanian comparative literature could be described according to three main stages. The first one is the constitutive stage and can be attended to the end of the sixties. It is an epoch of general disciplinary consensus (with few exceptions) around the theory of “binary relations” belonging to Paul Van Tieghem, who establishes its main lines in 1931[4]. During this period of time, comparative literature assimilates reflections from the twenties belonging to Fernand Baldensperger on the relationship between literature and the environment. It is a time of great synchronic enthusiasm mostly consumed at a mimetic level. Influence is understood in terms of mimicry, of faithfully following Western models, as defined by Pompiliu Eliade or Charles Drouhet. The vast majority of the comparative studies of the period are very close to the texts they read, analytic interpretations of international parallels between authors or literary trends, as well as commentaries on the historical value somehow oblivious to the aesthetic one. In a way, the initial stage follows the characteristics of every founding moment: pioneering enthusiasm conquers critical and, even more, metacritical inquiry.

A second stage is opened by the Western affirmation of “the crisis of comparative literature” by René Wellek in 1949[5], followed by Etiemble in 1963[6]. Sensitive to these changes of theoretical attitude, Romanian comparative literature of the seventies and the eighties reaches the self-definition stage, symptomatically at the same time with shifting interest from the emitter to the receiver and underlining the role of local values inside the Western comparison, and not the other way around. The certainty that comparative literature is both a school and a discipline, perfectly distinct from literary history and literary criticism (a science „in itself” – for Marin Bucur[7]) is touched by doubt regarding its property and its limits. Romanian papers on the crisis of the discipline are defined by their intention to give legitimacy to both comparative literature as a general concept and to Romanian comparativism in particular, as proven by papers such as Alexandru Ciorănescu’s Literatură comparată, studii şi schiţe [Comparative Literature, Studies and Notes] in 1945, that will offer the foundations for Principios de literatura comparada, published after his departure from Romania, in 1964, or Alexandru Dima’s Principii de literatură comparată [Principles of Comparative Literature], in 1969. The same topic appears in papers by Paul Cornea (Regula jocului [The Rule of the Game], 1980), Romul Munteanu (Le comparativisme roumain, 1982) or Adrian Marino (Etiemble ou le comparativisme militant, 1982). Synchronicity of the Romanian field with Western comparative literature is still a very important (although implicit rather than explicit) issue in these papers, but the accent seems to be different: instead of imitation (always used for both its simulatory and stimulatory purposes), this new stage of development of Romanian comparative literature favours creation (as a way of turning local, national values into universal, European ones). Comments on the comparative method join comparative analysis as such and the solutions of Romanian scholars to particular issues involved in the “crisis debate” are most remarkable: Paul Cornea suggests the concept of “concordance” instead of “influence”, as a term that integrates both “the dependence” and “the parallelism”, shifting focus from the receiving context (with arguments from reception theories – H. R. Jauss and “the reception horizon” or Wolfgang Iser and “the aesthetics of reception” – or from the sociology of Robert Escarpit). Adrian Marino militantly borrows Etiemble’s suggestions regarding “genre aesthetics” and articulates a “comparative poetics”, detached from historical primacy and guided by theoretic or aesthetic imperatives.

Starting with the nineties, comparative literature departments, where most of the Romanian comparativists work as professors, assimilate trends from cultural studies, integrating them as a plus in their own comparative curricula or individual papers (the stage of cultural studies). Proven extremely attractive to today Romanian comparativists, cultural studies are investigated in various forms: studies of the imaginary and imagology (the school of Cluj, coordinated by Corin Braga), regional studies (the works of the New Europe College, coordinated by Adriana Babeţi and Mircea Mihăieş in Timişoara), gender-studies (the centres of Bucharest, Timişoara, Iassy or Cluj). Also, this third stage of development of Romanian comparative literature should be noted for the appearance of some synthetic papers, preoccupied with conceptual implementation in the context of new discourses “attacking” the never-that-impeccable purity of comparative literature, among which the most prominent is Concepte şi metode în cercetarea imaginarului. Dezbaterile Phantasma [Concepts and methods in the Research of the Imaginary. The Phantasma Debates], edited by Corin Braga in 2007. A few encyclopaedic endeavours such as Dicţionar de literatură comparată [Dictionary of Comparative Literature] (2007), edited by Cătălin Constantinescu, Ioan Constantin Lihaciu and Ana-Maria Ştefan, or the online Dictionary of terms edited by a collective of researchers in Braşov in 2008 have to be saluted for their success in understanding comparability beyond national or disciplinary boundaries.

 

Where Do We Go From Here?

 

A complex and synthetic research on the identity relations between praxis and theory of comparative literature today is still to be expected and awaited for, since the last Romanian attempt is that of Alexandru Dima and Ovidiu Papadima of 1972, with their collective volume Istoria şi teoria comparativismului în România. Although announced as a historical and conceptual synopsis of comparative literature in Romania, the volume is actually a collection of punctual descriptions of different praxes, having little theoretical value and being profoundly affected by the ideological compromise regarding the power of the communist discourse and ideology. In a way, being a comparativist in Romania in the last decades of the previous century seems to have meant two distinct things: practising the so-called “poetics of comparativism”, that is being almost exclusively interested by the conceptual and theoretical framework to sustain a discipline, with little regard for the local specific of comparative literature in Romania, or practising a comparative analysis of literary or cultural phenomena, with little interest for its methodological code of explanation. The first take delight in the universal values of theories and methods, but also in being considered part of the global “republic of letters” and non-discriminated by local peculiarities. They enjoy being meta-critic while at the same time forgetting to also be local and to consciously belong to their own space. The second apply almost the same instruments to authors, trends, national manifestations of trends or cultural phenomena, focusing on context before anything else while slightly ignoring both the semiotic peculiarities of any given medium of artistic manifestation and the metacritical comment upon discourse legitimacy or upon the methodology that makes analysis possible.

Western debates around the crisis of comparativism today as those initiated by Harry Levin[8], Charles Bernheimer[9], Haun Saussy[10] or Claudio Guillen[11] seem to matter more inside academic curricula than outside them, respectively in recent papers of Romanian comparative literature. This is one step Romanian comparativists still have to make in order to reconfigure the discipline to accommodate the consequences of global processes and to readdress the ardent question of the lack of specificity of comparative analysis, in other words the deficit of “disciplinary propriety”.

The same questions are equally essential for redefining the purpose of comparativism in Romania as anywhere else: in reality, they are but revisits of the big inquiries of literary studies of all times. How should literature be defined today? Is there a specific object of comparative literature and, if so, how should we define it? How can researchers distinguish “comparative literature” within the field of literary sciences, but also within the larger context of cultural studies? There is a helpful distinction to be made between theories of comparativism, the practice of comparative literature in analysis and the teaching of comparative literature in universities. Although related, the three parts of comparativism must be distinguished in order not to further complicate the disciplinary crisis. So far, in recent Romanian teaching of comparative literature, there are two visible trends: a historical one, subordinating comparability to the higher principle of historical organization of large bodies of literature according to epochs or historical paradigms. This is justified by the constant reduction of the number of hours allocated to comparative literature in humanistic departments and, as such, by the didactic need to offer a systematic and succinct panoramic view of literary history during the two semesters a student in letters has to complete her comparative literature training in her three years of undergraduate studies. This trend is often accompanied or even substituted by a typological one, with similar justification. The third trend, more visible in postgraduate programmes than in undergraduate ones, is selectively one of replacing comparative literature per se with classes of cultural studies (feminisms, historicisms, imagology, minority studies etc.). This trend seems to be more in tune with the latest developments in the discourse of humanities, but, as it was argued, sacrifices whatever specificity comparative literature might have, mostly its compulsive dependence on literature and literariness.

However, the dispute around the preservation of the defining character of comparative literature could be settled by adapting the intension of the concept to a clear purpose: teaching or disseminating research results among specialists. The historical or even thematic criterion could prove to be more effective in teaching than a formalist one, just as a cultural studies approach could serve the cause of comparative literature in teaching, while questioning its “object and method” in papers of field research. In other words, one can salute the elaboration of an elastic concept of “comparison” that reassesses its historical, theoretical or cultural priority according to the context to which it is applied.

 

Digital Culture: Endings and Beginnings

 

Furthermore, one of the greatest impediments to overcome by comparative literature today, in Romania as anywhere else on the globe, is a principle one. The reactions to the contagious relation between the literary and the digital are strongly antagonistic (regardless if the receptors are readers, internet users, literary critics, visual philosophers). The digital impact is differently evaluated from the “Apocalypse of print” stands[12] that discuss the gloomy future of reading in the electronic age, to actual new theories and philosophies of the human and of humanity, along with their new cognitive preconditions[13]. As it happens in cultural poetics, in the study of literature digital mobility acquires a double value: it represents, on one hand, a technological advantage, since it opens and accelerates communication mobility and gives an unprecedented boost to the entertainment industry and to popular genres. Still, on the other hand it is viewed as a threat to the human self-reflexiveness and, in the very end, to “humanness”. This is why we shall all have to profit from the results of numerous researches of the literary field (most of them from semiotics or narratology) that stress the importance of the creative potential of literature (projection of fictional or possible worlds, accessing alternative spaces through reading rapture, communicating between reader – author – character) in relationship to the creative solutions of the digital virtualities (Virtual Reality-VR, 3D visual technologies, users interaction). This twofold vision on literature in connection with digital media succeeds in rehabilitating the expressive powers of literature in a post-literate epoch[14] and in a post-symbolic time[15].

The digital reader takes part in the creation of the text he is reading in a much more active manner than anticipated by the reception theory of Wolfgang Iser for analogous reading. The reader of a postmodern fiction knows at all times that the fictional world in which she immerses does not exist independently, in autonomy from the semiotic activity that creates it. In exchange, the user of a VR system interacts with a world she perceives as completely autonomous, since she accesses it through her senses and her body. VR and literature do not share the semiotic nature of interactivity, but they do share the need to be “read”, more precisely, the attraction they present to a reader or user. As such, comparative literature can use the offer of cultural studies, but also that of semiotics and formalist investigations in order to comparatively interpret these new forms of “literary” production.

In the Western world, the researches on the possibilities of connecting narratological and comparativist conclusions to those on digital media started around 1990 and are booming since then[16]. In Romania, although not entirely belonging to the field of comparative literature (for already stated reasons), there are a few notable pioneering papers on cultural actuality. Ion Manolescu makes a most remarkable analysis of cyberpunk fiction in his Videologia. O teorie tehno-culturală a imaginii globale, [Videology. A Techno-cultural Theory of the Global Image] published in 2003. Lucia-Simona Dinescu publishes a treatise with anthropological focus on the digital body, entitled Corpul în imaginarul visual [The Body in the Visual Imaginary], 2006). Bogdan Ghiu re-writes human typology in his Evul Media şi Omul terminal [The Media Age and the Terminal Man] from 2002. Simona Popescu and a team of collaborators push the hypertextual limits of poetry in Lucrări în verde sau Pledoaria mea pentru poezie [Preliminary Works or My Plea for Poetry], of 2006. Finally, Alexandru Budac writes a digital epistemology of the soul and of imagination in his brilliant Byron în reţea sau Cum a rămas liberă canapeaua doctorului Freud, [Byron in the Web or How Doctor Freud’s Couch Stayed Vacant] of 2010. All of the above papers are extremely profitable for the future of Romanian comparative literature at this digital hour, since they are preoccupied with both transformations induced by the post-literate epoch and with the processes and methods that make them manageable and interpretable.

 

Being Literary: a Digital Advantage

 

As far as the potential of comparative literature is concerned, one has to admit its interdependence to the future of cultural studies. Decentring tendencies and refusing the establishment characterizes digital culture which, as a consequence, largely and indistinctly disseminates information, discourse and practice. In the field of mass culture, hierarchies of dominance are re-written and permanently negotiated, popular receivers become active consumers and directly participate in the creation of knowledge, as described by Armand Mattelart and Erik Neveu in Introduction aux Cultural Studies (2003). Comparative literature still has much to say for that segment of cultural studies that is preoccupied with identitary practices, with community building or community fluidity in the global context, with re-territorialization, mobility and trans-nationality.

Through their present-day acuteness, the problems of digital culture form a newborn branch of comparative literature and cultural studies, even one of great investigating potential. In 1999, N. Katherine Hayles considers that, after the World War II the informational proliferation forced such a dramatic change of human paradigm that made a critical history urgent. The redefinition of knowledge as mobile information (both transcendent and autonomous in relation to the body) leads to the erasure and disappearance of the body and of important notions from the sphere of the humanistic subject. Or, the completion of this critical investigation of the present-day culture is not only imperative, but also impossible without the contribution of comparative literature. Generally, the dependence on literature has been viewed as the weakest point of endurance in the recent history of this discipline in crisis but, in the context of the entire culture turning into literature (as pointed out by Richard Rorty in several papers), being dependent on literature and having an entire history of literature, comparative interpretation promises to be one of the greatest assets of the discipline. If cultural studies describe the way in which human subjects are influenced by their cultural or social context, than cultural investigation in the absence of comparative literature (as well as in the absence of economics, political sciences, media studies, sociology, pedagogy, anthropology or history) seems incomplete, to say the least.

 

 

This paper has been delivered for the project entitled «Valorificarea identităţilor culturale în procesele globale/ Valorification of cultural identities in global processes», supported by the Sectorial Operational Programme Human Resources Development (SOP HRD), financed from the European Social Fund and by the Romanian Government under the contract number SOP HRD/89/1.5/S/59758.

 

 

Notes