Research Project Description

My project is to research Romanian-language life-narratives from the period 1880-1945; to analyse their contribution to regimes of historical consciousness in Romanian culture; and to place them in the broader comparative context of global research into life narratives and personal identity.

Research in the broader field of Southeast European Studies has mainly considered collective identities - notably class, ethnicity and religion. In this context, much has been said about the role of historiographical narratives in constructing such identities. Less attention has been paid, however, to historical narratives, which present individual life stories or personal experiences of identity; despite the fact that individual motivations may lie behind the creation of many of the important written sources which historians use to talk about collective identities or alterities. Nor has this apparently ‘literary' problem been much attended to by literary historians. Although such narratives exist in vast numbers in most East European literary cultures, analysis of them is absent from nearly all standard literary histories, which focus heavily on the novel, poetry and drama. My key aim is to theorise life narratives as a ‘public identity interface', a site where an individual's multiple identities and allegiances both result from encounters with the wider world, and at the same time produce a portrait of that world - ‘the world through which I have passed'. Individual narratives therefore both reflect some engagement with wider social realities, and constitute themselves as a site from which judgement is passed on those realities. This autobiographical process has been seen as foundational to historical understanding.

My framework of interpretation will draw on ideas from the classic theorists of ‘historicity regimes' (Koselleck, Rüsen, White, Hartog). It is proposed to place these ideas - principally about temporality, emplotment and orientation - in a broader context of ideas about narrative, as developed principally by literary theorists and narratologists. A special focus will be placed on the relationship between temporal and spatial regimes, in an attempt to rectify the so-called ‘devaluation of place in social science' and ‘the neglect of space in the study of narrative'. Specifically within the framework of the project, I plan to execute two foundational studies. I am less attempting a global survey of the field than investigating a series of emblematic sites from which it may usefully be viewed.

First, a baseline of ‘life-narrative' construction in modern Romanian culture will be established by analysing two ‘canonical' texts in Romanian literature and paradigmatic spatial-temporal representations of personal life experience in Ion Ghica's Letters to Vasile Alecsandri and Ion Creangă's Memories from Childhood. Their personal contribution to the consolidation of national memory, in the form of semi-‘official' autobiographies in the decade following national independence will be of particular interest to my work. Viewed as world-building narratives, Ghica and Creangă's texts can shed critical light on the tradition-modernity dichotomy so frequently invoked in the interpretation of Romanian culture.

Second, I propose a new analysis of the concepts of temporal and spatial experience in the writings of the young Mircea Eliade, who displayed in early youth a pronounced obsession both with space and ‘spiritual itineraries' in a variety of literary modes. This was related to an explicitly proclaimed project to move beyond the national in Romania's post-1918 period and concentrate at once on personal experience and themes of universal significance. So far, Eliade's work has both been interpreted positively as ‘having discovered a wavelength on which spirit of place can communicate with the spirit of the wider world', but also denounced as symptomatic of an egocentric nationalism. My more specific interest here is in considering how this theorist and historian of religions, who in his classic 1957 work on The Sacred and the Profane placed sacred space on a prior plane to that of time, represented his experience of formative encounter with the wider world to his narrower linguistic community, through the medium of life narrative, thus producing a portrait of all three objects: self, community, world. My working thesis is that the third of these objects is narrated to the second through the medium (and interests) of the first.