|
The author offers the very first monograph on the widely acclaimed writer Norman Manea, multiple Nobel Prize nominee. It follows two main objectives: an aesthetic interpretation of his literature and a contextualization of his ethical discourse Cover -- Contents -- Argument -- Introduction. The Odyssey of Augustus the Skeptic -- 1. The Hallmarks of Manea's Creation -- 2. The Complementarity of the Ethical and the Aesthetic -- 3. Non-Narrative Reality -- 4. The Morphology of Subversiveness -- 5. The Thread of History -- 6. Becoming Jewish -- Part One: Aesthetics -- Chapter I. Happenings in Ruined Reality -- 1. The Long Side of Initiation (Night on the Long Side, 1969) -- 2. The Subversiveness of Obscurity (Captives, 1970) -- 3. The Subversiveness of Failure (Atrium, 1974) 4. The Subversiveness of the Burlesque (The Book of the Son, 1976) -- 5. The Interlude of Normality (The Days and the Game, 1977) -- 6. Red October, Black October (October, Eight O'Clock, 1981) -- 6.1. The Atrophy of the Human -- 6.2. Just a Sweater -- 6.3. Proust in Transnistria -- 6.4. The Project of Solitude -- 6.5. Alterocentrism -- Chapter II. Socialist Reality outside Socialist Realism -- 1. The Antinovel of the "Obsessive Decade" (The Apprenticeship Years of Augustus the Fool, 1979) -- 1.1. Augustus the Fool - The Inconspicuous Eccentric -- 1.2. The Farces of Apprenticeship 2. A Society without Narrative Impetus (The Black Envelope, 1986) -- 2.1. The Messengers' Voices -- 2.2. Neurasthenia, Defiance, Derision -- 2.3. The Communities of the Underworld -- 2.4. Suspicion, Surveillance, Terror -- 2.5. The Faces of Seclusion -- Chapter III. The (Un)reality of Exile -- 1. The (Im)possible Return (The Hooligan's Return, 2003) -- 1.1. A Foreign Soil -- 1.2. The Testimonial Pact -- 1.3. The Hooligan avant la lettre -- 1.4. A Symptomatologist of Memory -- 1.5. The Ghosts of Posterity -- 2. Turning Fiction into Biography (The Lair, 2009) 3. The Other Genealogy (On the Edge, 1984 & Envelopes and Portraits, 2004) -- 3.1. An Ethical Way of Conceiving Literature -- 3.2. Empathetic Epitaphs -- Part Two: East Ethics -- Chapter I. The Inopportune Archive -- 1. One Interview, Two Identitarian Guilts -- 1.1. The Regime of Near Normality -- 1.2. Diversion as a Method -- 1.3. The Lovinescian Adrian Păunescu -- 1.4. The Discernment of Corneliu Vadim Tudor -- 2. The Failure of a Crucial Debate -- 2.1. The Hierarchy of Guilt -- 2.2. Manea the "Dilettante" and Eliade the "Pro-Semite" -- 2.3. Point - Counterpoint 2.4. The Generation of the Past -- 3. An Ignored Cause -- 3.1. The Dissolution of Solidarity -- 3.2. Some Incompatibilities -- 3.3. "Rhinos" and "Honorable People" -- Chapter II. The Separation from Totalitarianism (On Clowns: The Dictator and the Artist, 1992) -- 1. Masks. Substitutes -- 2. The Ghost -- 3. The Carnivalization of Blasphemy -- Conclusions -- Works Cited -- Index
|
