Overcoming Centre-Periphery Approaches in Intercultural Communication. Mythological Commitments and Aspirational Identities in Three Romanian Narratives for Western Audiences

Abstract

The cultural journeys of Romanian thinking are recurrent meditations on the relationship between the Enlightened West and this island of Latinity in the Slav sea. While confirming the mythological allegiances of Romanian historiography, this metaphor carries another inherent constant in its aspirational identity, the relationship of a peripheral culture with the locus of the centrality of the world-system (cf. Dussel, 2004). The antonymic vein in Romanian reflexive consciousness, fed by permanent self-critical measurement against Europe, is constantly amended by a relativist conjunctive paradigm attempting to structurally integrate ruptures in meaning (cf. Alexandrescu, 2000). Our analysis of three such attempts to present Romanian culture to an Academic Western audience will follow the construction of a narrative about Romanian identity which employs various degrees of reflexivity in order to define a relational paradigm. We are going to illustrate this mythological commitment in relation with the centre-periphery paradigm and its subsequent influence on identity construction by treating this type of narrative as a rhetorical genre in its own right, governed by a typical exigence (cf. Bitzer, 1968) and generic constraints (cf. Jamieson, 1973). We will show that although dichotomic concepts for discussing identities can hardly be avoided (as is the case of myth in historiography), an evolution from a disjunctive to a conjunctive paradigm is possible through reflexivity.

Keywords

• foundation myths
• centre-periphery paradigm
• conjunctive paradigm
• aspirational identity
• reflexivity