TEXT PRINT CULTURE丨The Reception of Aesthetics

This lecture will be co-hosted by the Literature Team of the School of Foreign Studies and the SUFE Centre for the Study of Text and Print Culture

 讲座信息 / Information 

Time: 16 September 2021, 14:00-16:00

Location: Red Tile Building, Room 408

* For those who cannot join us in the Red Tile Building, you can join us through zoom.

Zoom ID: 846 065 90827

Zoom PW: 206904

 讲座摘要 / Abstract 

In the interwar period, Romania was a Francophone and Francophile country. Whatever was reported in the French literary and cultural magazines was immediately mirrored into the Romanian ones. And since, in Paris in the early twenties, as Jean Giraudoux ironically remarked in his novel Juliette au pays des hommes that ‘what intrigued Paris […] certainly wasn’t death, it was the interior monologue’, French and English creators’ innovations in literary techniques became a credo that critics advised Romanian prose writers to subscribe to. 

One of the French literary journals any Bucharest intellectual would pride himself on having a subscription to was La Nouvelle Revue Française, that had hailed Marcel Proust as one of the best modernists via its Editor-in-chief between 1919 and 1925, Jacques Rivière. Hence, in Romania many articles praising Proust were published and writers started to imitate his style. When NRF finally accommodated a review of James Joyce’s Ulysses written by Valery Larbaud in April 1922, where the Irish writer was placed among the naturalists Flaubert and Maupassant and the symbolists Lautréamont and Rimbaud, for having given his country an intellectual identity, as Ibsen did for Norway, Strindberg for Sweden and Nietzsche for Germany, three Romanian literary journals (Viaţa Românească, Cugetul Românesc and Flacăra) simultaneously translated it in May. It was about time the English modernists’ stream of consciousness technique, with Joyce’s interior monologue and Woolf’s free indirect style became known into Romania, although before becoming also relevant for Romanian critics it had a whole history of hostile reception. 

This talk will look into the way in which Romanian intellectuals came to terms with the modernist narrative innovations of English literature, giving examples on how several writers adapted them into the national literature during the interwar period, thus convincing critics that they represented a major step into searching characters’ inner lives. 

 主讲人简介 / CV 

Arleen Ionescu is Tenured Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her major research and teaching interests are in the fields of Modernist prose and in Critical Theory, Memory Studies, Holocaust Studies and Trauma Studies. She has published widely on James Joyce and related aspects of modernism, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, Samuel Beckett as well as on trauma in journals such as James Joyce Quarterly, Memory Studies, Oxford Literary Review, Parallax, Partial Answers, Papers on Joyce, Joyce Studies Annual, Scientia Traductionis, Slovo, Style. She is joint-editor-in-chief (with Laurent Milesi) of Word and Text – A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics. Her books include Concordanţe româno-britanice (2004), Romanian Joyce: From Hostility to Hospitality (2014), The Memorial Ethics of Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum (2017). She co-edited, with Maria Margaroni, Arts of Healing: Cultural Narratives of Trauma (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2020). At present she is working on a book project on the Shanghai Ghetto.

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