Systemic Reading in Literary Historiography: Politicisation and Instrumentalization of the Autonomy of the Aesthetic as a Strategy of Repositioning During the 90s

Abstract

The present paper proposes to follow the evolution of the principle of the autonomy of the aesthetic during the 90’s, with a special focus on the discrepancy between its discourse and its practice, in contrast to its instantiation as a systemically challenging discourse before ’89. Starting from Mihai Iovănel’s recent landmark literary historiographical project History of Contemporary Romanian Literature: 1990-2020, put in conjunction with Gisèle Sapiro’s research on the relative nature of the autonomy in the field theory, the present study aims to show how inside of the Romanian literary field, the concept of autonomy was always instrumentalised towards certain political and ideological interests. These implicit biases are revealed as the actual function of the autonomist discourse via the contextualizing and sociological analyses performed by Iovănel which makes manifest the extra-literary facts surrounding the events within the field. Such an understanding of the autonomy of the aesthetic is also informed by Gisele Sapiro’s theoretical contributions, thus revealing the relative nature of the autonomy and its political and ideological function within the local literary field.