Studies and Essays on Romance Literatures: A Labyrinth of Interpretations (fragment)

„These splendid essays by Rodica Grigore – that restore Romanian literature to a place of honour alongside Latin American literature – appear to emerge, if you will, from the ruminations and wisdom of several lifetimes, such is their passion, erudition, and sweep.” (Ali Shehzad Zaidi)

Adopting the challenging perspective of Comparative Literature with respect to some important books of the 20^th century, this collection of essays embodies a symbolic journey trying to find some new and unexplored meanings of certain famous novels, short stories or poems, decoding images, characters and plots in a particular way. Covering a wide range of writers, from the Romanian poet Lucian Blaga to the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa, or from the rather unknown Romanian representative of the avant-garde, Urmuz, to the great Latin American novelists Clarice Lispector, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez or Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the studies included in this volume re-read some masterpieces of Romance literatures in the attempt to highlight the deep and often hidden truth of these authors’ great books. This quest also tries to metaphorically cover the distance between the two sides of the Atlantic, encompassing the initiatory experience often lived both by the above-mentioned writers and their characters.

Preface

Jay Corwin (University of Cape Town)

The essays contained in this collection may be generally subsumed under a few large themes: internal and external exile, real or perceived, a broad 20^th century European aesthetics of poetry and prose, and bridging the understanding of masterful works of literature from either side of the Atlantic that follow particular patterns of expression. The endeavour to find commonality in these pieces is the work of comparativist Rodica Grigore, professor of literature at „Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Romania. […]

There are, to my knowledge, analyses of individual works of Latin American fiction based on ideas taken from Mircea Eliade’s idea of eternal return, but to date no there are no such works encompassing Romance Literature taken in consideration of Lucian Blaga’s visions that I am aware of, neither in English nor in any other language. And it is very likely that there are very few comparativists in Romania who are specialized in and have as deep an understanding of major novelists of the Romance Languages as Rodica Grigore.

Chapter One:

Lucian Blaga Between Words and Silence

Blaga is somehow paradoxical within Romanian culture: very keen on penetrating deep into the essence of his native land and, at the same time, being eager to resonate with the modern ideas of his own time, the poet carried the resources of the Romanian spirit to a culminating convergence; he made up his own inner horizon and connected with the spiritual profile of his people in order to find all specific reflexes of the great horizons of this particular circuit. Unamuno surprised an “essence” of Spain and established its place in the world and Blaga did exactly the same for Romania. Besides, Blaga is the first to include the search for final traits in the philosophic register, by applying concepts and categories of the philosophy of culture especially to the Romanian “sub-history”, to the unrecorded strata of the visible known history. […]

With exceptionally subtle intuition, Blaga applies to the Romanians an original philosophy of culture, as Unamuno did to the Spanish people, Okakura Kakuzo to the Japanese and Martínez Estrada to the Argentine land and the gaucho type. But he would certainly not have reached, such intuitive keenness, if he had not been, at the same time, a poet. Although his philosophy and poetry convey a sense of mystery, poetry is where the author proved that his adherence to Expressionism can transform a somehow “foreign” phenomenon into a Romanian one, also applying its traits to the philosophy of culture. Modernity acquired very different definitions during the last decades. Nevertheless, one of the subtlest critics on the subject, Octavio Paz, convincingly demonstrated that modernity is a polemical tradition which displaces the tradition of the moment, being never itself, but always the other. The modern is characterized not only by novelty but by otherness. And while Blaga’s early poems express the spirit of a transformed type of Expressionism, his later ones illustrate a more sceptical attitude towards reality. All these texts illuminate and are illuminated by different sides of the author’s philosophy; and at the same time, they render the conceptual aspects of his work problematic, submitting them to a poetic interrogation.

Rodica Grigore, „Studies and Essays on Romance Literatures: A Labyrinth of Interpretations” (Cambridge Scholars, 2025: https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-0364-4768-7)

Rodica Grigore, Ph.D.: Associate Professor at „Lucian Blaga” University of Sibiu, Romania, where she teaches Comparative Literature. Author of several volumes published in Romania, such as: Of Books and Other Demons (2002), The Rhetoric of Masks in Romanian Modern Fiction (2005), In the Mirror of Literature (2011), Magical Realism in Latin American Fiction of the 20^th Century (2015), Journeys in the Library (2016), The Tiger and the Star: Violence and Exile in Latin American Fiction of the 20^th Century (2021). She translated into Romanian the essays of Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire (2017), the poems of the Colombian writer Manuel Cortés Castañeda, The Mirrored Other (2006) and a collection of short stories of the American writer Andrei Codrescu, A Bar in Brooklyn (2006). She has published numerous academic articles and critical studies especially on modern literature in Romania and abroad; Senior Editor of „Theory in Action” (New York), an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal.