Romania Continua, Romania Submersa, and the Field of Romance Studies

Abstract

Understanding future of Romance studies would be an act of prophecy, rather than a forecasting. Since I am completely unable to become suddenly a prophet, mine will be some sort of Augustinian-driven consideration of past and future of present things. I received my formation as a very canonical Romanist. It was a very intense, almost skill-based training in history of literatures and languages, in textual scholarship, paleography, classical languages, and other strict disciplines: hard core of philology. For better or for worse, rest, I had to do it by myself. I spent ten years of my life teaching Romance literatures of Middle Ages in Salamanca and at some other European institutions. Looking back to that period after seven years in American academia requires a sort of a critical archaeology of that formation and its conditions of possibility. The field of Romance studies could be perceived as a sort of academic battlefield in form of a jigsaw puzzle. Different pieces have to be fit together to form original, historical picture of a mythical Romania, a picture that includes not only current Romance languages and cultures, Romania continua, but also different expressions of Romania submersa, that is Romance expressions of those other languages (of Celtic, Germanic or Berber origin, for instance) that, although located at outskirts of Romania, still claim their historical and underlying romanization as one of signs of their being higher cultures. The field became a battle from moment that jigsaw was puzzled by nineteenth-century national borderlines and by classification of Romance languages within those borderlines. All this could not be more obvious, but, at same time, it bas very evident consequences as well: Occitan cultures are studied, if at all, within French departments, as if Occitan were a part of monde de la francophonie; Catalan language is studied, if at all, in Spanish departments and has even become a part of Hispanic studies; we could go on ad nauseam trying to fit pieces of what Walther von Wartburg certified as La Fragmentation linguistique de la Romania within disciplinary boundaries of academic departments as they have been constituted in last decades as a result of complex interplay between linguistic geography, linguistic politics, and political geography. It does not come as a surprise that program in Romance philology at Columbia University is owned, as it were, by French department, and, in fact, it would not be a surprise either, if it were owned by department of Germanic studies, since they established foundation for Romance studies in Romania continua as well as concept of Romania submersa, to which nowadays they refer as die verlorene Romanitat, the lost Romanity. By same token, but from a completely different perspective, it is not a surprise either that same program at UC Berkeley is co-owned by several departments, sort of floating among or on top of them and resistant to change despite fact that those departments have changed their undergraduate and graduate programs radically over course of last few years. In other places I am aware of, such a program does not even exist, or it is result of a process of exhumation and resuscitation, as at University of Salamanca or University of Alcala de Henares, both in Spain. To primitive jigsaw puzzle formed by archetypal picture of Romania, it is necessary to add another one formed by ways in which we conceive relationships between disciplines and academic programs. Romance studies and Romance philology are an exceptional academic space, and it is because of this exceptionality that it is uncomfortably located. In many instances, it is only a name used by university to bring together colleagues from various smaller fields into a bigger structure in order to ease administrative work. …