Competing Memories and Space in Contemporary Romanian Fiction Written by Women

Abstract

This study is a research suggested by the contemporary man’s experience; the contemporary man is at risk of losing the essential points of reference of the cultural, social, political being, and even the position of belonging to humanity, while the mapping of a national literary space, by closely following an algorithm required from the very beginning, becomes a compass in the process of literary/cultural/ mind-set paradigm redefinition. The nature of most of the definitions of the relationship established between space and literature is metaphorical and they fail to clarify the exact meaning of the terms. In contemporary society, the definition of space, and its derivative products: frontier, limit – become mutations of the nations’ identity consciousness, and literature is their witness. These topological under layers, substrata made and remade identities, and they are making and remaking the contemporary ones, while the novel records coherently their cultural flows. The dated binomial of tradition and modernity, under which the Romanian novel developed from the beginning, also included an opposition that cannot be ignored in the contemporary Romanian space. We do not seek to approach a poetics of space, as put by Bachelard, nor do we intend to analyze “the soul of the place”/anima locus, as defined by Butor; what we do seek is to redefine the feminine contemporary Romanian Fiction of the 21st century, when knowledge emanates from literature, history and memory wherein the Romanian space defines a specific manner of writing.