About the new methods of thinking and composing literary history

Abstract

The dialogue between Aliona Grati, chief editor of the Dialogica publication, and Ion Simuț, professor at the University of Oradea, history and literary critic, which reaches the edge of literary history and new ways of thinking and describing literary history. The author of two recent books Literaturile române postbelice (2017) (Post-war Romanian Literatures) and Cum se scrie istoria literară (2022) (How literary history is written like) in which he presents his theory on literary history and its practical application, Ion Simuț believes that combining the aesthetic criterion (with tradition and important results in the post-war period) with the political one will not only renew the methodology of presenting literary history, but will provide an authentic, unadorned image of what happened in post-war Romanian literature. The revolted or dissident man/writer, struggling with political or aesthetic constraints, must be portrayed alongside the passive or creative idealist man/writer. The reactions of the writers to their own era are very different, ultimately reducible, according to Ion Simuț, to four typical attitudes, which are reflected in four literatures (opportunist, evasive, subversive and dissident). In a totalizing history of Romanian literature, the literature of Bessarabia after 1945 must have separate chapters for poetry, prose, theater, criticism, because it had a different evolution, audience, alphabet, censorship, references and even other aspirations.

Keywords

• ion simuț
• the history of romanian literature
• literary history
• aesthetic criterium
• political criterium