Mnemonic mimesis against mnemonic coercion: communist Romania and European multiculturalism, in the work of Viorel Marineasa

Caius Dobrescu

doi:10.35219/cil.2018.1.02

Abstract

In his article “Mnemonic Mimesis against Mnemonic Coercion: Communist Romania and European Multiculturalism, in the Work of Viorel Marineasa” Caius Dobrescu discusses the manner in which the literary mimesis of personal memory projected at a trans-personal communitarian scale can gather, under the circumstances of a totalitarian regime, an accrued civic-political meaning. Tacitly subverting the dominant combination of ultranationalism and neo-Stalinism of the Ceauşescu regime, a whole school of Timişoara authors of fiction, literary scholars, and social historians attempted to preserve a cultural heritage empathetically shared by the ethnic cultures of the province (Romanian, Hungarian, German, Serbian). The emergence of personal, family, community histories was meant as a tacit overtake of the allegorical official history, as an expression of the re-privatization of social memory. This strategy will be exposed through an analysis of the fiction published by the Timişoara author Viorel Marineasa (b. 1944) at the end of the 1980s.

Highlights

In his article “Mnemonic Mimesis against Mnemonic Coercion: Communist Romania and European Multiculturalism, in the Work of Viorel Marineasa” Caius Dobrescu discusses the manner in which the literary mimesis of personal memory projected at a trans-personal communitarian scale can gather, under the circumstances of a totalitarian regime, an accrued civic-political meaning
Much of the thinking and research on counteracting teleological, power-based, institutionalized collective memory was focused on the moral imperative of reconstructing the perspective of historically repressed social groups and categories
In Benjamin’s view, historical memory is clearly dependent on relations of class power, which translate into the systemic violence of suppressing the sense of historical continuity and distinct identity of the oppressed

Summary

Introduction

In his article “Mnemonic Mimesis against Mnemonic Coercion: Communist Romania and European Multiculturalism, in the Work of Viorel Marineasa” Caius Dobrescu discusses the manner in which the literary mimesis of personal memory projected at a trans-personal communitarian scale can gather, under the circumstances of a totalitarian regime, an accrued civic-political meaning. In the post-WWII era it became the lot of literature to reconstruct public-collective self-representations along the sinuous lines of personal memory, within a cultural understanding of social order that gradually accommodated polycentrism, diversity, value-pluralism and a certain amount of an-archy, in the classical sense of eliminating allegedly “natural” forms of domination and privilege.

Results

Conclusion