Literature as Cultural Memory: the Romanian Postcommunist Novel

This paper aims to investigate the Romanian literature in the postcommunist period, in the context of cultural memory studies, as developed in the past two decades. Given that the connection between literature and cultural memory is now being widely discussed, I shall focus on the relation between literary fiction and the many-sided process of remembering communism in today's Romania. The first part of the paper briefly presents literature as a medium of cultural memory, following the ideas of Aleida Assmann and Astrid Erll. The second part of the paper deals with the hardships of remembering in a postcommunist society, with a very strenuous relation toward the past, and in its literature. My thesis is that Romanian literature in the years 2000 participates in the construction of a unitary, although not univocal, memory of communism. In the novels of Dan Lungu (I'm an Old Communist Hag!, 2007), Filip Florian (Little Fingers, 2005), Doru Pop (A Socialist Soap Opera, 2013), individual and collective memories are put to trial and, in the process, reveal to the reader how the complicated works of memory are embodied in literary texts.