2/10/2020 Matei Calinescu: The Adventure and Drama of Modernity

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Matei Calinescu: The Adventure and Drama of Modernity

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Article in symploke 17(1):255-260 · January 2009 with 28
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DOI: 10.1353/sym.2009.0016
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Marcel Cornis-Pope

Abstract
5 ways UK academic institutions can continue
attracting researchers despite the uncertainty… Read M
Modernity, then, can be defined as the paradoxical
possibility of going beyond the flow of history through
the consciousness of historicity in its most concrete
immediacy, in its presentness.… Separated from
tradition (in the sense of a body of works and
procedures to be imitated), artistic creation becomes
an adventure and a drama in which the artist has no
ally except his imagination. When his 1987 book, Five
Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, was published,
readers familiar with Calinescu’s work recognized in it
a movement of imaginative “revision,” amplifying an
earlier version of the book, Faces of Modernity (1977).
In turn, this earlier book drew on his Romanian
publications, before his emigration to the US: Eseuri
despre literatura modernă (Essays on Modern
Literature, 1970) and Conceptul modern de poezie: de
la romantism la avangardă (The Modern Concept of
Poetry: From Romanticism to the Avant-Garde, 1972).
By adding a section on postmodernism, which
rereads, in a retroactive movement of revision (1987,
292), the previous sections on modernism,
decadence, avant-garde and kitsch, Calinescu
produced in 1987 a new book. I would argue that
much of his work, both creative and critical, followed a
similar movement of revision and amplification. The
same impulse underlies Calinescu’s own intellectual
career as a Romanian expatriate who had to reinvent
himself successively as an analyst of modernity, a
literary and cultural comparatist, a theorist of
rereading, a political essayist, and a creative writer. In
his “adventure” and “drama” of reinvention, his faithful
ally was his own prodigious imagination.
Chronologically, the first facet of Calinescu’s
reinventing impulse can be found in his literary
criticism published in his native Romania, in 1960s
and early 1970s. Calinescu played a significant role in
the process of cultural de-Stalinization and the
emergence of a new literature by setting mythopoetic

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2/10/2020 Matei Calinescu: The Adventure and Drama of Modernity

fantasy and experiential subjectivity against the

outworn doctrine of “socialist realism.” Building on the
model of the interwar aesthetic criticism (especially
Eugen Lovinescu’s emphasis on the recreative role of
literary imagination), Calinescu’s essays and reviews
advocated innovation and norm-breaking, perfecting a
type of critical rereading that would become one of his
trademarks. In addition to the two seminal books on
modern literature and the modern concept of poetry,
mentioned above, Calinescu’s Romanian criticism
included an earlier study of Romania’s premier
romantic poet, Titanul şi geniul în poezia lui Eminescu
(The Figure of the Titan and the Genius in Eminescu’s
Poetry, 1964), a book-length study of European
classicism (Clasicismul european, 1971), and several
collections of critical reviews that supported the
emerging new writers. His critical columns—like those
of several other colleagues of generation—were an
important locus of revision and reformulation. The
critic’s self-assumed role was to redraw cultural maps,
fill in gaps, discover models for the new course of
Romanian literature, not in Soviet but in Romanian
and Western traditions. At their best, Calinescu’s
creative rereadings performed the combined functions
of applied aesthetics and revisionistic literary history.
His effort was not only evaluative, but also partisan,
using new works as cornerstones in a broader
argument for aesthetic and ideological restructuring.
Calinescu contributed to the Romanian literary revival
of the 1960s his own work as a modernist poet and
fiction writer. His philosophic-symbolic volumes of
poetry, especially Semn (Sign, 1968) and Umbre de
apă (Water Shadows, 1972), and even more so his
short novel Viaţa şi opiniile lui Zacharias Lichter (The
Life and Opinions of Zacharias Lichter, 1969), winner
of the Romanian Writers’ Award for fiction, introduced
significant innovations in theme and form. Calinescu’s
novel used a raisonneur from the spiritual family of the
Biblical prophets and eccentric thinkers to question the
conventions of rationality and of totalitarian thought.
After his transplantation to the US in 1973, Calinescu
became a reference point for an entire group of
Romanian expatriates (Virgil Nemoianu, Andrei
Codrescu, Thomas Pavel, Mihai Spariosu, Christian
Moraru) engaged in rethinking the boundaries of their
own Romanian culture, fractured between an internal,
often-underground production, and the output of
émigrés to the West. My own transplantation to the
new continent benefited...

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