Mnemonic mimesis against mnemonic coercion: communist Romania and European multiculturalism, in the work of Viorel Marineasa

Abstract

In his article “Mnemonic Mimesis against Mnemonic Coercion: Communist Romania and European Multiculturalism, in the Work of Viorel Marineasa” Caius Dobrescu discusses the manner in which the literary mimesis of personal memory projected at a trans-personal communitarian scale can gather, under the circumstances of a totalitarian regime, an accrued civic-political meaning. Tacitly subverting the dominant combination of ultranationalism and neo-Stalinism of the Ceauşescu regime, a whole school of Timişoara authors of fiction, literary scholars, and social historians attempted to preserve a cultural heritage empathetically shared by the ethnic cultures of the province (Romanian, Hungarian, German, Serbian). The emergence of personal, family, community histories was meant as a tacit overtake of the allegorical official history, as an expression of the re-privatization of social memory. This strategy will be exposed through an analysis of the fiction published by the Timişoara author Viorel Marineasa (b. 1944) at the end of the 1980s.