”Authenticity”and National Identity in the Interwar Romanian Culture: From Meaningful to Meaningless Discourses
An insightful debate of the interwar period, in the Romanian as well as in the cultural European space, took place around the many-sided concept of ”authenticity”. Literary criticism has generally taken into account its psychological and narrative dimensions, emphasizing on such notions as intuition, involuntary memory, unconscious, stream of consciousness, interior monologue. This paper is focused on the non-, or more-than-literary aspects, such as the cultural, the ethnological, and the political, also massively present in the interwar cultural journalism. „Authenticity” seems more and more rooted in the issue of collective, i.e. national, identity, which gives rise to a large spectrum of discourses, from the philosophically informed to the theoretically naive or politically aggressive, from Mircea Eliade and Lucian Blaga to Emil Cioran or Constantin Noica. The hollow space within this ”auratic” concept was unveiled by such critics as the young N. Steinhardt or Eugen Ionescu, in its very heyday.
Keywords: identity, authenticity, nationalism, deconstructionism
