Gheorghe Crăciun. The Experiment and its chronotopical values

This study debates the idea of literary experiment in the first two novels of Gheorghe Crăciun, Acteoriginale/ copiilegalizate and Compunere cu paraleleinegale. The experiment practiced by Gheorghe Crăciun is mostly based on the reinterpretation of the Greek novel and also on the perpetuation of the love theme in the literary space and time. These two components, space and time, define what M. M. Bakhtin called “chronotope”. This study deals also with the fact that the chronotope is interconnected as being in a direct relationship with the experiment which is specific to Gheorghe Crăciun’s works. The experiment implies also a dialogic relation between instances as narrator, character or author.

Keywords: chronotope, dialogic imagination, surfiction, experiment, Gheorghe Crăciun.

• Bakhtin, M. M., “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” înThe Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2011.
• Bahtin, M. M., Probleme de literatură şi estetică / Problems of Literature and Aesthetics, Editura Univers, București, 1982.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, Acte originale/copii legalizate / Original Documents/Legalized Copies, București, Cartea Românească, 1982.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, Compunere cu paralele inegale / Composition with Unequal parallels, roman urmat de o addenda la pastișa „Epură pentru Longos”, ed. a II-a, revăzută, București, EdituraAllfa, 1999.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, Dintr-un „caiet de teze”, în „Interval” serie nouă, nr. 4 (12), 1998, Brașov.
• Federman, Raymond,Surfiction: Fiction Now… And Tomorrow / Supraficţiunea: Ficţiunea Acum… Şi Mâine, Chicago, The Swallow Press, 1975
• Holban, Ioan,O lume de citate / A World of Quotes, revista „România literară”, 2007, nr 28, http://www.romlit. ro/o_lume_de_citate
• Lăcătuș, Adrian, Experimentul literar în proza românească postbelică şi contemporană. O perspectivă cognitivă şi comparată, București, Editura Muzeului Naţional al Literaturii Române, Colecţia AULA MAGNA, 2013.
• Ursa, Mihaela,Trupul unui scriitor – Gheorghe Crăciun / The Body of a Writer – Gheorghe Crăciun, http:// www.academia.edu/4902312/Trupul_unui_scriitor__ Gheorghe_Cr%C4%83ciun

Gheorghe Crăciun and the Prose of the Controlled Negative Experiment. Searching the Virtue

This paper will try an argumentative approach to the idea that, beyond the experimental part of Gheorghe Craciun’s writings, there may be another valuable dimension to its prose: that of an implied morality that includes a desire to (re) define and (re)order some moral concepts that were lost due to/ in the communist period.

Keywords: virtue, ethics, conservative purpose of liberal education, Russell Kirk.

• Gheorghe Crăciun, Viciile lumii postmoderne / The Vices of the Postmodern World, Tracus Arte, București, 2009.
• Caius Dobrescu, ,,Tradiția plăcerii (de a gândi): Gheorghe Crăciun și continuitatea intelectuală dintre critica literară a generației ‘60 și creația literară a generației ‘80” / „The Tradition of the Pleasure (of Thinking): Gheorghe Crăciun and the Intellectual Continuity Between the Literary Criticism of the Generation 60 and the Literary Creation of Generation 80”, in Trupul şi litera. Explorări critice în biografia şi opera lui Gheorghe Crăciun / The Body and the Letter. Critical Explorations in the Biography and the Work of Gheorghe Crăciun, coordonat de Andrei Bodiu și Georgeta Moarcăs, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca, 2012.
• Rodica Ilie, „Gheorghe Crăciun, vocația scrisului și limitele teoriei literaturii” / „Gheorghe Crăciun. The Vocation of Writing and the Limits of Literary Theory”, in Trupul şi litera. Explorări critice în biografia şi opera lui Gheorghe Crăciun / The Body and the Letter. Critical Explorations in the Biography and the Work of Gheorghe Crăciun, coordonat de Andrei Bodiu și Georgeta Moarcăs, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca, 2012.
• Adrian Lăcătuș, „Sensul experimentului în literatura lui Gheorghe Crăciun” / „The Meaning of the Experiment in the Literature of Gheorghe Crăciun”, in Trupul şi litera. Explorări critice în biografia şi opera lui Gheorghe Crăciun / The Body and the Letter. Critical Explorations in the Biography and the Work of Gheorghe Crăciun, coordonat de Andrei Bodiu și Georgeta Moarcăs, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca, 2012.
• Russell Kirk, Imaginația morală / Moral Imagination, Baroque Books and Arts, București, 2014.
• Andrei Bodiu, Rodica Ilie, Adrian Lăcătuș (coord.), Dilemele identității. Forme de legitimare a literaturii în discursul cultural european al secolului XX / The Dilemmas of Identity. Forms of Legitimating the Literature in the European Cultural Discourse of the 20th Century, Editura Universităţii Transilvania, Brașov, 2011.

Gheorghe Crăciun – The Separation from Flaubert

Gheorghe Crăciun, the prose writer who was enhanced by the genuine skills of aliterary theorist and the literary critic who was redoubled by the demands of the academic,designed and then elaborated his novels using a series of interactive determinations whichwould both engage and prepare the reader by granting him/her a reception/creation stance.The literature that the eighties generation writer metabolized allows itself to be unveiled intogenerative matrices. In his utopia of encompassing the world through writing, Crăciun isprofoundly and visibly influenced by Flaubert and his art. The deflection from Flaubert occurson two levels: first, the level of the author’s openly declared agenda to accomplish a change ofstyle (in Blue Women), and second, the one of the unmitigated love for his characters. Theexplanation may be that Crăciun’s writing-reading imperatively requires the extraction of thecharacters (sought, created, reconfigured) from the very self as well as the inclusion ofcorporality which is considered referential for his entire work. Crăciun is incorporated in thebody of the text. Even the harmony of the whole, reiterated by androgyny through thesuccessive exploration of the animus/ anima conglomerate, pursues this direction ofconsistency with the self. It is Crăciun’s manner of solving the Flaubertian authenticitydilemma.

Keywords: bovarysm, authenticity, androgyny, sensorial, body, style.

• Armăsar, Ioana-Paula, Gustave Flaubert în spațiul literar românesc / Gustave Flaubert in the Romanian Literary Landscape, Editura Universității Transilvania, Brașov, 2005.
• Armăsar Ioana-Paula, Flaubertianul Gheorghe Crăciun / The Flaubertian Gheorghe Crăciun, VATRA nr. 3; 2008.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, Doi într-o carte (fără a-l mai socoti pe autorul ei)… / Two in a Book (Without Counting Its Author)…, Cluj-Napoca, Editura Grinta, 2003.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, Pupa russa / Pupa russa, București, Editura Humanitas, 2004.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, Trupul ştie mai mult. Fals jurnal la Pupa russa (1993-2000) / The Body Knows More. Fake Journal On Pup russa (1993-2000), Editura Paralela 45, Pitești, 2006.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, Femei albastre / Blue Women, Iași, Editura Polirom, 2013.
• Flaubert, Gustave, Doamna Bovary / Madam Bovary, Iași, Editura Moldova, 1991.
• Ionică, Naomi, „Celălalt corp în ficțiunea lui Gheorghe Crăciun” / „The Other Body in the Fiction of Gheorghe Crăciun”, în Trupul şi litera, , explorări critice în biografia şi opera lui Gheorghe Crăciun, coord. A. Bodiu, G. Moarcăs, Editura Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca, 2012.

Gheorghe Crăciun – An Art Faithful to Life and Writing

Gh. Crăciun is one of the well-known authors who were born in Stalinist period, he had the chance to read foreign literature and this fact had a major influence on his entire literary activity. He promoted and wrote a literature which was free of the official control of the authorities. Trough his literary work he succeded to oppose the realism controlled by the totalitarism to an alternative world which has two main sources of inspiration, firstly it is inspired by the daily life, by simple events from our existence and secondly, it is a world created with the help of intertextuality or other postmodern techniques. His work reconsiderates the relationship between the text and the reader who has the possibility to create and to enrich the literature with his own worldview.

Keywords: postmodernism, intertextuality, authenticity, writing, reader.

• Texte literare

Crăciun Gh. (1982): Acte originale / Copii legalizate / Original Documents / Legalized Copies,, București, Ed. Cartea Românească. Crăciun Gh. (1988): Compunere cu paralele inegale / Composition with Uneven Parallels, București, Ed. Cartea Românească.

• Texte critice și teoretice

Analele universității din Craiova (2006): Seria Științe filologice Limbi și literature clasice, Anul III, Nr. 1-2, Ed. Universitară.

Ilie R., Lăcătuș A., Bodiu A., (2010): Legitimarea literaturii în secolul XX European / The Legitimation of Literature in the European 20th Century, Brașov, Ed. Universității Transilvania.

Lăcătuș A. (2012): “Sensul experimentului în literatura lui Gheorghe Crăciun” / „The Meaning of the Experiment in the Literature of Gheorghe Crăciun”, in Trupul şi litera. Explorări critice în biografia şi opera lui Gheorghe Crăciun / The Body and the Letter. Critical Explorations in the Biography and the Work of Gheorghe Crăciun, coordonat de Andrei Bodiu și Georgeta Moarcăs, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca, 2012.

Lefter I.B. (2000): Postmodernism, București, Ed. Paralela 45.

Manolescu, N. (2008): Istoria critică a literaturii române / The Critical History of Romanian Literature, Pitești, Ed. Paralela 45.

Mușat C. (2006): „Cerebralitatea senzorială a unui scriitor de cursă lungă” / „The Sensorialist Cerebrality of a Long-Running Writer”, in Observator cultural, 2006, 13 iulie, Nr. 329.

Mușina, Al. (2012) „Șase cuvinte-cheie pentru proza lui Gheorghe Crăciun” / „Six Keywords for the Prose of Gheorghe Crăciun”, in A. Bodiu, G. Moarcăș: Trupul şi litera, explorări critice în biografia şi opera lui Gheorghe Crăciun / The Body and the Letter. Critical Explorations in the Biography and the Work of Gheorghe Crăciun, coordonat de Andrei Bodiu și Georgeta Moarcăs, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca, 2012.

Oțoiu A. (2000): Trafic de frontieră. Proza generației ’80 / Frontier Traffic. The Prose of Generation 80, București, Ed. Paralela 45.

Gheorghe Crăciun and the Experience of the Sensuous

The present paper attempts to emphasize the prominent figure of Gheorghe Craciun within the Romanian literary field by discussing a recurrent theme in his works, namely the conflict between body and letter. His famous works such as A Composition with Unequal Parallels, Blue Women, The Beauty without a Body or Pupa Russa will be analysed in order to develop a clear view on intimacy and the close connection between life and sensations.

Keywords: metadiscourse, the conflict between body and letter, love, sensation.

• Crăciun, Gheorghe – Compunere cu paralele inegale/ A Composition with Unequal Parallels, București, 1988, Editura Cartea Românească.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe – Femei albastre/ Blue Women, Iași, 2013, Editura Polirom
• Crăciun, Gheorghe – Mecanica fluidului/ The Mechanics of the Fluid, Chișinău, 2003, Editura Cartier.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe – Trupul ştie mai mult. Fals jurnal la Pupa Russa(1993 – 2000)/ The body knows more… A pseudo-journal of Pupa Russa, Pitești, 2006, Editura Paralela 45.
• Podoabă, Virgil – Metamorfozele punctului. În jurul experienței revelatoare/ The metamorphoses of the point. Around the experience of revelation, Pitești, 2004, Editura Paralela 45.

The Teacher Mission

Providing a report on the state of literary theory today, Gheorghe Crăciun’s book is an authoritative, informed and stimulating overview of contemporary critical concepts. This reference guide is designed for the students who need to know what a particular concept means and how it is applied to their interpretive investigations.

Keywords: theory of literature; Gheorghe Crăciun; concepts; critical intertextuality; metaliterature.

“Aisbergul poeziei moderne” or moving towards the continent of modern poetry from five different directions

Aisbergul poeziei moderne is one of the most consistent Romanian studies that have been written about modern poetry. The dominant dimension particularly emphasized throughout the book is the transitive characteristic of the new poetry (the proposal for the concepts of transitive/reflexive poetry belongs to the author). There are also references to what Gheorghe Crăciun calles reflexive poetry and to the linguistic poetry so as to complete the picture of all modern poetry. A nuanced perspective, ontological, poetic, and chronological, but also geographical, morphological supports the main thesis of the work: transitive poetry is worth entering the canon. As such, transitive poetry is not only valuable, but should be definetely read and known bya all those who really want to understand the phenomenon of modern poetry in its essential data.

Keywords: modern poetry, poets, poetic language, transitive, reflexive, linguistics, ontology, sense

• Bousoño, Carlos, Teoria expresiei poetice / The Theory of Poetic Expression, Univers, București, 1975
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, Aisbergul poeziei moderne / The Iceberg of Modern Poetry, Editura Paralela 45, Pitești, 2002
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, În căutarea referinţei / Searching the Reference, Editura Paralela 45, Pitești, 1998
• Martin, Mircea, Recurs în procesul poeziei moderne / Appeal in the Trial of Modern Poetry, in Gheorghe Crăciun, Aisbergul poeziei moderne, Editura Paralela 45, Pitești, 2002
• Negrici, Eugen, Introducere în poezia contemporană / Introduction in Contemporary Poetry, Editura Cartea Românească, București, 1985

Gheorghe Crăciun, Neuro-Somatic Realism, and the Visual Adventure of the Renaissance

The paper draws a parallel between the advances in perceptual illusionism in Renaissance painting and the evolution of the techniques of rendering the primordial contact with the world in the post-WWII Romanian literature. The two lines of artistic evolution have in common the paradox of expressing a pristine experience, religious in the first case, secular in the second, with ever-growing mimetic precision. The focus is on the Romanian experience and, while discerning the conceptual imbroglio that presided over the emergence of a poetry of onthological exuberance in the 1960s, the analysis concentrates on the culmination of the process of representing it through an accurate neuro-somatic realism, in the work of Gheorghe Crăciun, a major author and theoretician representative of the so-called Generation of the 1980s.

Keywords: Realism – neural – somatic –mimesis – body poetics – Renaissance

Daily consumerism of the postmodern world

The following study is focused on Gheorghe Crăciun’s perspective regarding the causalities and also interactions between the postmodern thinking and consumerism. More then capturing the remain coherence of the postmodern world, consumerism being a key concept in this affair, the main goal of Crăciun’s argumentative discourse is to observe the various ways of manifestation of consumerism in Romania, a post-communism consumer society.

Keywords: Gheorghe Crăciun, postmodernism, consumerism, publicity, mass media, consumer society.

• Adorno, Theodore, The Culture Industry, London and New York Routledge, 1991.
• Adorno, Theodore; Horkheimer, Max, Dialectica Luminilor / Dialectic of Enlightenment, București, Editura Polirom, 2012.
• Crăciun, Gheorghe, Viciile lumii postmoderne / The Vices of the Postmodern World, București, Editura Tracus Arte, 2011.
• Dobrescu, Caius, Modernitatea Ultimă / The Final Modernity, București, Editura Univers, 1998.
• Frank, Thomas, The Conquest of Cool. Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1997.
• Mușina, Alexandru, Poezia, teze, ipoteze, explorări / Poetry: Theses, hypotheses, explorations, Brașov, Editura Aula, 2008.
• Roszak, Theodore, The Making of a Counter Culture. Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition, New York, Doubleday&Company, Inc., 1969.

“Mecanica fluidului” or About the Voices of the Writing

This paper outlines a phenomenology of voice underpinned by Gheorghe Crăciun’s notes in ”Mecanica fluidului”. I have thus argued for his constant preoccupation with the visual scrutiny/voice dialectic. Despite the fact that in this volume visual perception is reflected upon extensively, it is my our belief that the present remarks on the person-voice relationship may stimulate a reconsideration of the critical reception of Gheorghe Crăciun’s work.

Keywords: phenomenology, philosophy of perception, person, ecriture, postmodernism.

Bodiu A., Moarcăs (coord.), Trupul şi Litera. Explorări critice în biografia şi opera lui Gheorghe Crăciun / The Body and the Letter. Critical Explorations in the Biography and the Work of Gheorghe Crăciun, Casa Cărții de Știință, Cluj-Napoca, 2012.

Crăciun, Gheorghe, Mecanica fluidului / The Mechanics of the Fluid, ed. Cartea Românească, București, 2014

Cléro, Jean-Pierre, Théorie de la perception: de l`espace à l’émotion / A Theory of Perception: From Space to Emotion, ed. P.U.F, Paris, 2000

Le Breton, David, La saveur du monde / The Savour of the World, ed. Métailé, Paris, 2006.

Concepts of Modern Thought II. Crăciun, Wittgenstein, and the Possibility of a Private Language

Through his constant preoccupation with the relationship between language and world and by his searching for modes of expression that would evade the conventions of the ‘common language’, several of Gheorghe Crăciun theoretical observations delve upon the possibility of a private language, one that would grasp what is unique and virtually incommunicable about subjective experience. By appealing to Wittgenstein’s famous ‘private language argument’, the article is an attempt to understand and explain the errors and confusion that lie behind the notion of a private language, but not without acknowledging the impetus that might drive a modernist writer towards such a conception. The final pages of the article provide a brief description of the weaker concept of a ‘personal language’ by putting together some of Crăciun’s own insights into the matter with observations derived from the works of George Steiner and Roman Jakobson.

Keywords: private language, meaning, subjective experience, spheres of association

Baker, G. P., Hacker, P. M. S., Skepticism, Rules and Language, Billing and Sons Ltd, Worcester, 1986

Crăciun, Gheorghe, În căutarea referinței / Searching the Reference, Paralela 45, Pitești, 1998 Crăciun, Gheorghe, Aisbergul poeziei modern / The Iceberg of Modern Poetry, Paralela 45, Pitești, 2002

Crăciun, Gheorghe, Mecanica fluidului / The Mechanics of the Fluid, Cartier, Chișinău, 2003

Crăciun, Gheorghe, Trupul ştie mai mult / The Body Knows More, Paralela 45, Pitești, 2006

Crăciun, Gheorghe, Frumoasa fără corp / The Beauty Without a Body, ed. a II-a revăzută, Art, București, 2007

Hacker, P. M. S., Insight and Illusion. Themes in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, rev. ed., Clarendon Press & Oxford University Press, New York, 1986

Kenny, Anthony, Wittgenstein, rev. ed., Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Cornwall, 2006 Saussure, Ferdinand de, Curs de lingvistică generală / Course in General Linguistics, trad. Irina Izverna Tarabac, Polirom, Iași, 1998

Steiner, George, După Babel / After Babel, trad. Valentin Negoiţă și Ștefan Avădanei, Univers, București, 1983

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Cercetări filozofice / Philosophical Remarks, ed. a II-a, trad. Mircea Dumitru, Mircea Flonta, Adrian Paul Iliescu, Humanitas, București, 2013

The Nostalgia of the Primordial Continuity and Mortal Identification in Epură pentru Longos (fragment from the essay Revelațiile trupului erotizat)

The essay analyzes the erotic experience from Gheorghe Crăciun’s rewriting of Longus’s Daphnis and Chloe, by comparing it with Sappho’s poetic insight into the relationship between eros and thanatos and Georges Bataille’s later development of the same theme in his Erotism. What the three authors have in common is not only the intuition of the deep-seated connection between death and erotic fulfillment, but also of what it expresses, a longing for continuity and a craving for alterity that is most famously described by Aristophanes’ speech from Plato’s Symposium. Crăciun’s retelling of the love story between the two teenage shepherds makes several unmistakable references to the myth of the androgynous, underscoring the possibility of transcending one’s individuality through a deadly identification with the Other.

Keywords: eroticism, eros and thanatos, otherness, androgynous.

Bataille, Georges, Erotismul / Eroticism, trad. Dan Petrescu, București, Ed. Nemira, 1998.

Crăciun, Gheorghe, Compunere cu paralele inegale / Composition with Uneven Parallels, București, Ed. Cartea Românească, 1988.