15 May 2015 | 15.00 | ISCAP
ABSTRACT
The conference Portuguese-Romanian intercultural connections is a starting point of a imaginary travel starting from literature and books. Since ancient times, travel and maturation represented a literary theme of intercultural revelations. The theoretical knowledge content reveals the fact that literature is first of all a journey beyond the boundaries of what an ordinary people can see and understand traveling. The purpose of learning underlines that through the translations, a foreign unknown literature becomes an imaginary land, representative for the spirit and the culture of the real one. The conference contains information about the first translations from the literature of that real territory, the history of translations, of the translators, of the books translated. Each of these histories is in fact a cultural image, both Romanian and Portuguese.
The conference will contain illustrative information about:
1. Modern Romanian culture and civilization
2. Romania and Portugal: Linguistic Similitude and differences
3. Romanian patrimony in Portugal
4. Bucharest, the charmed city: its history and cultural richness
5. Discovering the richness from the temple of books: a Portuguese Romanian bibliography
Modern Romanian civilization emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. It was with the generation of 1848, however, that Romania was systematically and extensively exposed to Western European ideas. This generation undertook the task of importing and imitating Western institutions and methods. Nevertheless, Eugen Lovinescu further claimed, the imitation was not pursued uncritically, as these intellectuals hoped to achieve a ‘synchronic’ balance between Western ideas and Romanian realities. ‘Imitation’ and ‘synchronism’ are the two principles dominating Lovinescu’s sociology of culture. Imitation, as an explanatory sociological mechanism in the formation of societies, was a very fashionable concept at the time, particularly in France, as illustrated by French sociologist and social psychologist Gabriel Tarde’s Les Lois de l’imitation (1890). Following Tarde, Lovinescu assumed that human psychology was the only modality to grasp social mechanisms whereby society functioned as a cohesive entity. According to Tarde, ‘imitation’ and ‘innovation’ were the two guiding forces of society, controlling and shaping social activities.
The interplay between imitation and innovation not only regulated the functioning of society but also generated a new cultural condition, one which Lovinescu named synchronism. This phenomenon explained the ways in which Western ideas were imitated and appropriated by Romanian intellectual and political elites. Lovinescu subsequently enunciated seven phases of imitation, each governed by its own sociological laws. During the first phase, Romanian elites used imitation as the main means of introducing Western ideas into Romanian culture. This imitation occurred without Romanians questioning the nature of things they adopted, as evidenced by the second phase of cultural development. However, in the third phase a ‘critical spirit’ also emerged, becoming active during the fourth phase. The presence of the critical spirit did not stop the ‘process of imitation’; instead it questioned its validity. According to the law of innovation, a nation’s originality was not the result of spontaneous creativity (as traditionalist authors claimed), but the effect of adaptation and relocation of ideas and cultural models. Any imitation eventually took a specific national form. During the fifth phase, imitation occurred, albeit according to a different mechanism than the one described by Tarde. For Lovinescu, the substance (Romanian culture) imitated the form (the West). In this way, Lovinescu described the sixth phase, when it became clear that imitation was not only confined to the present time; it could be projected into the past as well. In the case of nations without a cultural past (like Romania), traditional ideas were “sociologically impossible” as they were largely the consequence of cultural developments elsewhere. Nevertheless—as the seventh phase demonstrated—the lack of this normative cultural past created, essentially, the propitious conditions for modern Romanian civilization to emerge. In conclusion, Lovinescu believed that due to its synchronic nature (the result of both processes of imitation and innovation) Romanian culture was inevitably moving towards the West, and the Romanians would at some point become ‘true Europeans.’ Generally described as one of the most outspoken of the Romanian modernists, Eugen Lovinescu played a rather atypical role in the debate between the Europeanists and the anti-Western traditionalists during the interwar period. He framed his vision about cultural modernization and the role of the state differently than his contemporaries. In the debate on Romania’s cultural role in Europe, Lovinescu’s suggestion of adopting Western European values in their entirety as well as his unflagging critique of Slavic influences and implicitly of Orthodox Christianity were met with reticence even by some of the pro- Europeanists. Although invoked during the 1980s, when Romanian national communism orchestrated a general appropriation of traditional currents within Romanian culture, it was during the 1990s that Lovinescu and his program of cultural transformation were integrated within a proper framework of discussion about European modernity in Romania.
Bionote
Luiza Marinescu is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Letters, University Spiru Haret, Bucharest, Romania, teaching medieval and modern Romanian literature, comparative literature, Romanian language-practical course, English Language Practical Course, Reaching English as a Foreign Language, English for Specialized Languages (Economics), and E-learning in reaching Romanian Literature and Language. She is the coordinator of a master programme: Romanian Language and Literature: Modernization and Modernity. She is also the author of almost 100 articles regarding Romanian and comparative literature and 12 books.
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Book Launch
Language and Literature: Modernization and Modernity – Limbă şi literatură Modernizare şi modernitate (ed. Luiza Marinescu. Bucharest: Editura Fundatiei Romania de Mâine, 2015)
With chapters by the CEI researchers: Maria João Cameira, Micaela Moura e Clara Sarmento.
Presentation by Professor Gheorghe Duda, coordinator Erasmus & pró-reitor of the University Spiru Haret, Bucareste.