Resistance ou culture?: le postmodernisme comme option culturelle dans la Roumanie des annees '80

Abstract

The article analyzes the issue of the resistance "through" culture, applied to the phenomenon of the generation of the 80s (especially young poets and writers active between 1977 and 1986 in the university literary circles or in the wider landscape of the Romanian culture of the time). The study focuses on three levels of analysis: even though the intentions of these authors were mainly aesthetic, the complex assembly constituted by their literary productions combined with the context of their social activity was in formal contradiction with the politics of the regime; but, in itself, this contradiction could not have a considerable impact on the broader categories of Romanian readers; anyway, it was not supported by a coherent group choice. Nevertheless, on a third and deeper stratum, this led to a specific type of resistance: a resistance "inside" the totalitarian culture, situated at the level of the published text, as well as at that of the attitudes it transmitted. A text of this type would not contain a discourse that might be identified as "alternative" by the regime; instead, it concealed -embedded in its internal architecture- an exercise of the thought which simply precluded the installation of the "wooden" language and the fixation of the thought.