Writers, Intellectuals, Politics: The Transformation of the Cultural Field in Post-Communist Romania

Abstract

The article aims to illustrate the mutual dependencies and transfers between different segments of the cultural field and areas of civic or political activities, together with the function these changes fulfil in redrawing individual trajectories and then the balance of forces. The leading idea is that, in relation with the literary field, the intellectual field is most sensitive to political changes and functions as a regulatory and legitimizing space for writers’ everyday practices, via its power to produce the criteria for public recognition and thus for symbolic inclusion and exclusion. This casts a different look on the claims for creative autonomy within the cultural field and its multiple dependencies on media, politics, the civic and the academic field, and the understanding of the inner logic of these domains through the lens of their complex interrelationship.

Keywords

• intellectuals
• writers
• cultural field
• social networks
• postsocialist transformations