Post-Socialist Realism. Authenticity and Political Conscience in the Romanian Literature of the 2000s

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the realist paradigm emerged in Romanian literature around the year 2000 as an index of the post-communist adherence to neoliberal myths of the self. The cultural particularities of the analyzed case allow me to bring new perspectives to the joined debates recently held in literary studies on the topic of realism. They concern: a) the limited critical functions of realist discourses forged within the confines of global capitalism, and b) the marginality of realist trends within the (post)Cold War world literary system, which was sometimes justified by the superior ability of (post)modernist modes to register the (semi)peripheral order of experience. The cultural peculiarities of the case I analyze relate both to the (semi)peripheral status acquired by post-communist Romania within global capitalism, and to the peripheral position acquired in local literature by the realist esthetics in the aftermath of the state-enforced socialist realism. Within these coordinates, I argue that, despite having a critical scope restricted by its indebtment to mainstream ideologemes of neoliberalism, millennial post-socialist realism could not only channel a political imaginary that was more complex than the one assigned to the so-called “capitalist realism”, but also give artistic voice to a communitarian experience of post-communist peripherality.