Matei Calinescu: An Independent Intellectual

Abstract

Matei Calinescu was a courageous man. Perhaps everyone is who decides to leave his or her country of origin and become an expatriate, but I wish to refer here to his intellectual work in which he displayed a rare independence. In the early 1980s, I came into contact with Calinescu through his Faces of Modernity (1977), which I admired. In those days, I was writing a book on modernism in collaboration with my wife, Elrud Ibsch, published in English as Modernist Conjectures (1990). But my later cooperation with Calinescu was motivated by our mutual interest in the enigmatic concept of postmodernism rather than in the well-known contours of modernism. When Hans Bertens and I organized a workshop on postmodernism at Utrecht University in September 1984, Calinescu was invited as one of the main foreign speakers. In his essay “Postmodernism and Some Paradoxes of Periodization,” he used his enviable erudition and stylistic cunning to save the idea of literary period from the garbage can of history. Analyzing the views of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on literary history, he observed that they avoided the familiar period terms such as romantic, realist, and symbolist, but instead resorted to “an oversimplified model of literary evolution” (1986, 241). It was certainly courageous in those days to criticize these avatars of literary theory. More specifically, Calinescu argued that Foucault’s “discursive determinism is unable to devise any model of change” (243), a view also held by the German theorist Claus Uhlig in a paper read at the 10th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in New York in 1982 (Uhlig 1985), but elaborated more patiently and more convincingly by Calinescu. His criticism of the nonexistent relation between Foucault’s epistemes cleared the way for asking the question of how change in literary production and reception is brought about, or which factors can be held responsible for such change. Calinescu emphasized that period terms are constructs (1986, 247), thus implying the possibility of devising a metalanguage. However, the idea of a metalanguage was anathema to the Foucault of Les Mots et les choses (1966) and L’Archeologie du savoir (1969) as well as to most poststructuralists, although in the practice of their analyses they could not avoid to design their own critical vocabulary.