Constructing and De-constructing Cultural Identity in the Contemporary European Paradigm – The Romanian Example and its Eurocentric Dilemmas

Abstract

The active participation of ex-communist literatures and their pro-European pact implies, within this differentiating cultural practice, the conscious acceptance of the communist ideological delay, but also its overcoming by the retrieval of the previous pro-European attitudes, together with the contemporary ones. The tendency towards more fluid geo-spatial frontiers by starting a trans-national dialogue, as well as the cultural diachronic structure specific to each South-eastern collective is what maintains, by accepting the difference, an identity which is constantly dynamic and inter-reflexive and which constantly reinvents itself within the European paradigm. The break with the communist dystopia gives legitimacy, within Eastern European communities, to a tendency towards synchronicity with the European cultural model, while the latter itself is supported by a mixture of differentiating practices, by the blend of identity features in a Europe that promotes not cultural uniformization, but the explosive diagonal inter-relatedness based on supra-ethnic criteria. The Romanian critical discourse, as enhanced by the literary revues, is torn apart between the “autonomist” drive and the “revisionist” one, the latter legitimising sometimes a compensatory auto-fiction mirroring different types of Self-centrism.