Call for papers
Dacoromania litteraria, 8/2021

Literary postures and the writer’s social image within Romanian culture

Among the many attempts to negotiate the tension between the individual and the group (a founding problem of literary sociology), studies on literary posture play an important role as they bring together descriptive tools which have to be flexible and mobile enough while maintaining their generic interdisciplinarity. Since at least the launching of the concept of literary posture by J. Meizoz (2007), this theoretical tool has proved its relevance and efficiency in analyzing the complex mediations between the literary work and its socio-historical context. It had initially been defined by Meizoz, following Alain Viala’s homonymous concept (1993), as a duality of discourse and behavior, and it was quick to enter a theoretical field centered around the same interest toward authorial (self)representation, inside and outside the text. This field includes Ruth Amossy’s ethos, José-Luis Diaz’s authorial scenography, as well as authorial figuration and authorial style. By reuniting definitions and a set of practices that are relegated, in different yet similar ways, to textual analysis (considered in its stylistic and discursive dimensions) and to behavior analysis (the study of collective social representations), postural reading specifically attempts to integrate the order of discourse and that of behavior in a fertile and accommodating manner.

The same stake informs the thematic dossier that we are proposing in this issue of Dacoromanialitteraria. The dossier highlights the plural and relational character of postural images. That is because a literary posture is never singular, nor invariable. While keeping its aspect of an individually designed course, it brings to the fore intra-textual representations and behavioral public identities out of postural repertoires that are already present within the memory of the literary space where a particular author is active. In order to reveal these features we are proposing two topics to reflect upon:

1.   Authorial postures that are selected from diverse historical contexts. What interests us is to consider the declarative and institutional acts through which an author figure defines their place and become recognizable within the literary field while activating a cultural memory of available subject positions and social representations:

a) postural representations in nonfictional texts(staging the self in the paratexts, correspondence, interviews, etc.), and also fictional ones (figures of writers/authors that feature in their literary works). From the writer-prophet of literary Romanticism, to the contemporary engaged writer (who chooses to reprehend political, economic, gender constraints in their view on literature);from the rendering of individual behavior and character (the bohemian and the dandy, but also the marginal, the nomad, the offender, the outlaw), to the embodiment of personal traumas into recent authorial representations, the writer’s identity construct have developed in a variety of ways, engaging into a constant dialogue between discourses and manners;

b) literary strategies associated with the various positions that are occupied within the literary field, be they advantageous or not, proper or improper (the marginal writer, the canonical writer, the go-betweens for one position and another – including the cases that involve radical changes in the authorial script, triggered by changes in the political environment, as for instance the passing from Avant-garde to socialist realism): play-acting, coquetry, conscious artifice, promotional acts, Romanian writer’s postural adaptation to recognition and consecration.

c) collective postures – and group scenographies associated with these: defining certain collective “choreographic” patterns that could be noticed in proxemics, in the ritual gestures of the group, in the recurrent key moments of a literary society meeting (the beginning, reading aloud, the dialogism of the comments after the reading), but also in the various ways to represent intratextually the members and the mentors. Starting from here one can imagine a whole repertoire of assumed postures:the tragedian at the Sburătorul, the rock-star of Cenaclul de Luni, the jester at the Junimea, the voyager of Viața românească, the nightwalker of the Sibiu Literary Circle, to give examples solely from the Romanian literary milieu. Their functions as triggers of individual and collective legitimation is also apparent.

2.    We would also like to draw special attention tothe significance of a writer’s posture within contemporary Romanian culture. After the change of political regime brought about by the events of 1989, given the revaluation of the intellectuals’ role and mission in former communist East-Central European countries, writers have acquired a new public visibility. Those writers that were also political figures, representatives of civil society, or leaders of social movements have entered public conscience and were pressed tobuild and control their social image. This situation was fostered by the mediatic complexity of the last 30 years that provided the writers with the tools of a new image economy (from interviews, TV or radio shows, to blogging and other diverse social media formats). From the engaged writer to the star- or gourmet writer, what we intend to sketch here is the range of possible social representations of authorial posture within the larger context of political and cultural dislocations that define the East-Central European space.

Please submit your paper proposals (150-200 words) until 15 November 2020. Notifications of acceptance will be sent by 15 December 2020. The paper submission deadline is 15 March 2021. The editorial norms can be found at: http://www.dacoromanialitteraria.inst-puscariu.ro/en/nr.php

Contacts:
     Magda Răduță – magda.raduta@gmail.com
     LigiaTudurachi – ligia.tudurachi@gmail.com